It was the best of Cannes, it was...
well, not exactly the worst of Cannes, though the consensus throughout the first half of the festival was that it was a bit of a slow-burning edition this year. Unlike the 2023 fest — which dropped Anatomy of a Fall , May December and The Zone of Interest before the halfway point — the competition took its time getting warmed up. “Divisive” didn’t begin to describe the reaction to films as varied as Francis Ford Coppola’s sprawling, apocalypse-already-in-progress epic Megalopolis and Jacques Audiard’s transgender-druglord musical Emilia Pérez .
And while plenty of talent under the age of 70 showed up, the 2024 fest could be characterized as The Year of Old Masters Refusing to Go Gently Into the Night. Coppola’s riff on the Roman Empire was arguably his most ambitious work to date; George Miller gave us a Fury Road prequel, Furiosa, that matched the original in terms of demolition-derby destruction; both David Cronenberg ( The Shrouds ) and Paul Schrader ( Oh, Canada ) premiered late works rife with philosophical handwringing and filmmaking chops. Even Kevin Costner showed up with his own personal Megalopolis , i.
e. the first installment of the multi-part Horizon: An American Saga , a partially self-funded, trad-grandad Western opus he’s been trying to make since the 1990s. Once things begun to warm up in the festival’s second half, however, Cannes soon became a bounty of riches — the odds for what might walk away wi.
