The 2024 Cannes Film Festival is when I finally decided it's not worth debating whether a particular edition was "good" or "bad." Truth is, every Cannes is filled with triumphs, misfires, disappointments, underappreciated gems, surprises, and movies you liked a lot more (or a lot less) than your colleagues did. And because the festival doesn't necessarily front-load its strongest offerings, you really have no idea where the annual ebbs and flows will land. You have to take Cannes in its entirety, judging it not by one day but by the whole two-week experience. There's no festival like it because it's longer and, therefore, harder to process as it's happening. Only distance will tell you for sure -- and even then, you may be shocked to catch up with a few films you missed (or revisit ones you saw) and discover what a great year it had actually been. There's no such thing as a "bad" Cannes, just degrees of good.
That said, do I think I found a film this year that could match 2023's twin stunners in The Zone of Interest and Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell? No, but looking over my rankings, I'm pleased by how many strong films I saw, with the possibility of more bangers to come. (I wish I'd had time for The Balconettes, The Kingdom, Armand, Black Dog, Flow, Santosh, Viet and Nam and others. And I wish my screening of Universal Language had had English subtitles like it claimed it would.)
Here's a list of everything I saw at Cannes, from worst to best, with links leading to individual reviews. And please note that I'm not including the first half of the restoration of Abel Nance's extraordinary Napoleon, which I saw and was completely blown away by.
34. Megalopolis
33. The Surfer
32. The Second Act
31. The Apprentice
30. Oh, Canada
29. Beating Hearts
28. Emilia Perez
27. Wild Diamond
26. Rumours
25. The Shrouds
24. Visiting Hours
23. Misericordia
22. Being Maria
21. I, the Executioner
20. Motel Destino
19. The Substance
18. It's Not Me
17. Christmas Eve in Miller's Point
16. Elementary
15. The Girl With the Needle
14. Bird
13. Three Kilometers to the End of the World
12. Blue Sun Palace
11. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
10. Eephus
9. Good One
8. The Invasion
7. All We Imagine as Light
6. Anora
5. Grand Tour
4. Caught by the Tides
3. Kinds of Kindness
2. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
1. September Says
A few words about my No. 1 film. I went into Ariane Labed's directorial debut basically blind. (I knew the plot description, plus who had worked on the movie.) And basically from the first moment, I was enraptured, its spell never breaking. September Says (pictured above) was part of Un Certain Regard, but it crushed me more completely than anything in the Competition, although Mohammad Rasoulof's The Seed of the Sacred Fig got awfully close. When I review movies at a festival, I go home straight from the screening and write -- I don't talk to anyone or check online reactions. So I'm basically in a bubble, unaware of how others feel, and what I quickly discovered was that I was higher on September Says than, basically, anyone else. (As one colleague, who hadn't seen it, put it derisively, "It sounds like a Toronto film.") Maybe a second viewing will diminish the film in my estimation -- maybe revisits of The Seed of the Sacred Fig or Caught by the Tides or Anora or All We Imagine as Light will vault them up the rankings. But for now, this tale of two peculiar sisters -- too delicate and strange for this world -- earns the top spot.
Because I am historically awful at predicting the Palme d'Or winner, my guess is worth nothing. Nonetheless, I'm with the consensus that it's going to be either All We Imagine as Light or The Seed of the Sacred Fig. It's impossible to know what a Cannes jury will go for, but my gut tells me that All We Imagine as Light's gentle beauty will win out over The Seed of the Sacred Fig's darker, more challenging tone -- although filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof's emotional appearance at the latter's premiere may be too much for the jury to resist. Could Anora pull off the upset? Emilia Perez? Absolutely. But I'm going with All We Imagine as Light, which premiered late this year and has all the momentum going into the weekend. Not that you should bet your mortgage on my hunch.