Cannes Film Festival 2024: the 11 films set to cause a splash on the French Riviera from Furiosa to Bird

Cannes, the impossibly glamorous film festival on the French Riviera, opens today, bringing glitz and glamour – and a line-up of hugely anticipated films – from around the world.

The 77th edition of the festival promises dozens of illuminating and thought-provoking films, including sci-fi, thrillers, dark comedies, meditations on womanhood, explorations of marginalised lives, and various love stories.

Disappointingly, there are just four films directed by women competing for the Palme d’Or, against 18 by men, down from six last year. Those hoping to cause an upset in 2024 are Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (starring Dennis Quaid, Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley), Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light, Andrea Arnold’s Bird and Agathe Riedinger’s Wild Diamond.

Still, women’s voices are expected to make noise: French actor and author Judith Godrèche, one of the most outspoken advocates for #MeToo in France (where the campaign didn’t make as much impact as it did elsewhere) will be sharing Moi Aussi (Me Too), a short film documenting hundreds of women’s stories of sexual abuse. It will be screened during the opening ceremony of Un Certain Regard.

Also sparking interest is Yolande Zauberman’s documentary The Belle from Gaza, which was written and filmed before the war and tells the story of a trans woman who chose to move from Gaza to Tel Aviv. There’s the extraordinarily well-timed The Apprentice, a biopic about Donald Trump, starring Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong, and directed by Ali Abbasi – the director behind the phenomenal 2022 thriller Holy Spider.

This year’s jury of nine includes actors Lily Gladstone and Eva Green, director Nadine Labaki and script writer Ebru Ceylan. It is being led by Barbie director Greta Gerwig.

To celebrate the advent of the festival, here are 11 of this year’s most exciting films – one for each day of the competition.

Following hot on the heels of Oscar-winning Frankenstein comedy Poor Things, Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos is releasing another thought-provoking and challenging project – one that’s also starring Emma Stone, Margaret Qualley and Willem Dafoe. This time the film is a "triptych fable" set in the modern day, which promises, like all Lanthimos’s projects, to disturb and delight. The trailer alone, with shots of the starry cast cackling, licking, dancing, slapping and kissing to Eurythmics’s Sweet Dreams, sets the tone for the three chapters which are titled The Death of R.M.F, R.M.F. is Flying and R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich.

Paolo Sorrentino hit gold in 2013 with The Great Beauty, his opulent, cynical, Oscar-winning meditation on ambition and beauty. Ever since, fans of the Italian director have embraced his subsequent films, even if none have managed to hit those exalted heights. Perhaps Parthenope, a “feminine epic” set in Naples, following the life of a girl from 1950 till today, will mark that return to form.

All four of British director Andrea Arnold’s feature-length films have told stories of women; three specifically of young women. Now she once again applies her glorious, vivid filmmaking style to the story of 12-year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams) who is squatting with her single dad Bug (Barry Keoghan) and brother Hunter (Jason Buda) in Kent. The one British representative in competition this year.

It’s been 13 years since Francis Ford Coppola released a film, 27 since The Rainmaker, his last celebrated release and 50 since The Godfather Part II. It means all eyes are on Megalopolis, a five-decade-long passion project written and directed by the 85-year-old legendary filmmaker (who, reportedly, spent $120 million of his own money making it happen). Adam Driver is Cesar, an architect with the power to control time, who is rebuilding a destroyed metropolis. He stars alongside Aubrey Plaza, Dustin Hoffman, Talia Shire, Jon Voight and Jason Schwartzman.

Cronenberg, the master of body horror, brings another spine-tingling thriller to Cannes, this time telling the story of widower Karsh (a silver-haired Vincent Cassel) whose technology allows the dead to be monitored by their loved ones. Things go from sinister to truly dark when several graves on his land – including that of his wife – are desecrated, and he sets out to find the perpetrators.

Starring Selena Gomez and billed as a musical-crime-comedy about a Mexican cartel leader who undergoes sex reassignment surgery, Jacques Audiard’s latest certainly has a strong hook. The French director’s record precedes him; his stellar CV which includes The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005), A Prophet (2009), Rust and Bone (2012) and Dheepan (2015), have won numerous César Awards, the Palme d'Or and the Grand Prix at Cannes.

The acclaimed American Gigolo director, who also wrote Taxi Driver and co-wrote Raging Bull, presents Oh, Canada, an adaptation of a Russell Banks novel. Schrader’s first film in two years, it stars Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, Michael Imperioli and Jacob Elordi, and tells the story of a celebrated Canadian documentary filmmaker giving a confessional interview on camera to one of his students.

Installation artist, director and screenwriter Guy Maddin, one of Canada’s most celebrated filmmakers, and his frequent collaborators Galen and Evan Johnson, present a bit of light relief. Set during a G7 summit, world leaders get lost in a wood together while preparing a joint statement. Cate Blanchett, Alicia Vikander and Charles Dance star.

George Miller’s fifth Mad Max instalment is a revenge tale. The Queen’s Gambit star Anya Taylor Joy is Furiosa, a girl snatched from her verdant childhood home by some biker warlords, who then spends the following years in the desert wasteland both plotting her escape and planning retribution. Also starring Chris Hemsworth, this is a much-anticipated return to Miller’s world for the origin story of the character played by Charlize Theron in Fury Road: fans will be thrilled to see more of the same aesthetic – orange sand, steampunk vehicles, shouty bald people, eccentric make-up, and lots and lots of explosions. 

Simply say the words Louis Garrel and Lea Seydoux and the crowds will come running. The fact that the director is Quentin Dupieux, the director of the strange Deerskin (2019) and the joyfully silly Incredible but True (2022), still perhaps best known for his massive contribution to electronic music as Mr. Oizo, is the icing on the cake. Le Deuxième Acte is a screwball-esque scene: a girlfriend, a boyfriend, a spanner-in-the-works friend, and a dad and all go for dinner.

Leos Carax’s films are a blast of ideas and emotions; nearly always a thesis on love, nearly always bonkers. His last film, rock opera Annette, won Carax Best Director at Cannes in 2021; his 2012 film, Holy Motors, was described as “a lunatic odyssey” and “pure pleasure”. It means that this 40-minute self-reflective film, in which Carax looks over his oeuvre and reflects on key moments in his stellar career, has piqued a lot of interest.

Cannes Film Festival, May 14-May 25; festival-cannes.com