Peter Bradshaw picks his top ten from this year’s Cannes film festival.
The Man Who Wasn’t There (Joel Coen)
Last year, the Coens were the unofficial ”Choice of the Croisette” with their sunny comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou? Their new film will almost certainly be the hottest Cannes ticket, but something about this year’s cast – Frances McDormand, Billy Bob Thornton and James Gandolfini – suggests a return to the Coens’ more familiar astringency, and darker themes. The brothers have been notable, perhaps unique, in preserving their auteur signature on every movie they’ve made, and this one can’t be missed.
L’Eloge de L’Amour (Jean-Luc Godard)
Of all the big names in world cinema turning out for the festival this year – and there are many, including Imamura, Olmi and Makhmalbaf – 70-year-old Godard has to be Cannes’ capo di tutti capi and a new film from him is a must-see. Last year Godard was commissioned to begin the festival with a short, The Origin of the 20th Century; this is rumoured to be a markedly accessible and substantial feature, characterised according to the organisers by its ”melancholy”, and featuring the narrative voice of Juliette Binoche.
Distance (Hirokazu Kore-eda)
Kore-eda’s fantasy of happiness beyond the grave, After Life, won golden opinions on the festival circuit and this movie’s appearance in competition this year signals his promotion to the A-list of Asian cinema. Alternatively titled When I Grow Up, it is about the relatives of dead terrorists, and promises to amplify and develop the savoury, bittersweet tone of his previous work.
ABC Africa (Abbas Kiarostami)
This is the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s 29th feature, a documentary commissioned by the UN about Aids in Uganda being shown in ”special session”, alongside factual work by Martin Scorsese and Claude Lanzmann. A former Palme d’Or winner with his Taste of Cherry, and widely regarded as the most authentic proponent of art cinema anywhere in the world, Kiarostami commands attention in whatever genre.
Shrek (Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson)
A DreamWorks cartoon, and the first animated feature to be selected for competition since Dumbo almost 50 years ago. Its appearance, along with this year’s opener, Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, indicates that Hollywood studios can sometimes be prevailed upon to risk launching summer movies in Cannes. Shrek features the voices of Cameron Diaz as a beautiful princess, Mike Myers as the big-hearted green monster Shrek, and Eddie Murphy playing a motormouth donkey (thus perhaps reprising his work in Disney’s Mulan).
Millennium Mambo (Hou Hsiao-Hsien)
The Chinese-born Taiwanese director has been a Cannes regular, winning the Jury prize in 1993 for The Puppetmaster, and his work has been the touchstone for the new Taiwanese cinema, in which the disparate successes of Ang Lee and Edward Yang have occasioned yet more interest. This film, whose title has been changed from The Story of Rose, stars Taiwanese sex kitten Shu Qi. Hou is another of the big names at Cannes whose work suggests that Asian cinema is where the new age of the arthouse resides.
Center of the World ((Wayne Wang)
Often at Cannes, there is a self-consciously sensational film which breeds excitable behaviour outside over-subscribed screenings – occasionally cunningly held at deliberately small venues. Sometimes there is a bit of pushing and shoving as critics scramble for seats. There were ripped clothes outside a showing of Larry Clark’s controversial Kids, and last year the police were called to subdue disorder at Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark. This year, I predict, it will all kick off mightily for Wayne Wang’s erotic drama on video, Center of the World, shown out of competition, which is promoted by the interactive porn website.
Storytelling (Todd Solondz)
Last year, Neil LaBute went soft with his oddly sentimental satire Nurse Betty, and the year before that David Lynch (in competition again this year with Mulholland Drive) went soft with The Straight Story, a heart-warming tale of oldsters. So our last hope for something truly shocking is Todd Solondz, showing this year in the Un Certain Regard section, whose last film, the magnificent Happiness, was an audacious black comedy about child abuse. Will he try to top that, or retreat into the mainstream?
Apocalypse Now Redux (Francis Ford Coppola)
You’ll have to go to this, for old times’ sake. Coppola’s new, even longer cut of his 1979 classic and Palme d’Or winner now weighs in at a buttock-annihilating three hours, 23 minutes – the new stuff largely, it is understood, made up of the footage of Martin Sheen’s encounters with French-speaking Indo-Chinese characters, most of which has actually been shown on television anyway. Is it a masterpiece or a voyage into the heart of turgid, middlebrow darkness?
Taurus (Alexander Sokurov)
Could this be the 2001 Palme d’Or winner? Sokurov’s Moloch, his 1999 entry for Cannes about Hitler, was a brilliant and acerbic feat of historical mimicry. This promises to do the same with Lenin, a notable act of irreverence for Russian cinema.
The Guardian