Forget the Oscars. Pound for pound, the Cannes Film Festival is the most glamorous massing of movie stars in the world. Come mid-May each year, the Croisette hosts not only Hollywood’s A-list but also the biggest stars from Western Europe, Asia, and Latin America. But even with all the glitz surrounding the 11-day fest, no small number of important movies make their world premiere at Cannes, from The Artist and Midnight in Paris to The Tree of Life in 2011 alone. And though director Paul Thomas Anderson has decided not to unveil his controversial quasi-biopic The Master, said to have been inspired by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, a host of smart, eagerly anticipated movies—featuring Brad Pitt (Killing Them Softly), Shia LaBoeuf, and Tom Hardy (Lawless), Kristen Stewart (On the Road), Robert Pattinson (Cosmopolis), Nicole Kidman (The Paperboy), and Reese Witherspoon (Mud), among others—are set to bow with the festival’s Wednesday kick-off. See our top picks.
Canadian director David Cronenberg’s flashy adaptation of the polarizing 2003 Don DeLillo novel features Robert Pattinson as a 28-year-old billionaire asset manager on an odyssey across Manhattan in a stretch limo. Along the way he encounters no small amount of cheap sex, brutal violence, and even rampaging dinosaurs. A top-notch supporting cast including Juliette Binoche, Samantha Morton, and Paul Giamatti was apparently gathered to help RPattz graduate from Twi-hard heartthrob-dom to sophisticated art-house fare.
Caitlin Cronenberg
Jack Kerouac’s sprawling Beat Generation travelogue of drugs, jazz, and poetry gets the big-screen blow-up by Brazilian director Walter Salles (2004’s The Motorcycle Diaries). With a heavyweight ensemble cast including the likes of Kristen Stewart, Viggo Mortensen, Amy Adams, Terrence Howard, Kirsten Dunst, and Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss (with British indie star Sam Riley inhabiting the Kerouac stand-in Sal Paradise role), the adventure-drama’s vintage Americana arrives at Cannes thanks to a U.S.-U.K.-French-Brazilian coproduction.
Described as a more sinister Ocean’s Eleven, this crime caper installs Brad Pitt in the role of a mafia enforcer investigating a pair of junkies who’ve ripped off a mob poker game. Which would sound like so much straight-to-DVD dross if the film didn’t also represent the high-profile reunion of Tree of Life star Pitt with Andrew Dominik, who directed him in 2008’s elegaic The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford. Ray Liotta, Sam Shepard, Bella Heathcote, and James Gandolfini round out the killer supporting cast.
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Aussie director John Hillcoat and alterna-rock icon-turned-screenwriter Nick Cave reteam for a third go-round (on the heels of their 2005 Western The Proposition and adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road in 2009) with an indie thriller following Prohibition-era bootlegger brothers. Transformers top-liner Shia LaBeouf and Tom Hardy (Inception, Warrior) star as hillbilly antiheroes of the Deep South battling heavyweight gangster and law-enforcement strongmen played, respectively, by Gary Oldman and Guy Pearce.
Richard Foreman, Jr. / The Weinstein Company
Matthew McConaughey continues to put distance between himself and the paycheck/rom-com himbo roles that have kept him steadfastly B-list for most of the last decade with a dramatic turn in the indie thriller Mud. The film follows the unlikely friendship between a fugitive (McConaughey) on the run from bounty hunters and the teenage boy (Tye Sheridan, a child star from last year’s Cannes entry The Tree of Life) who helps him escape from an island in Mississippi to reunite with his love interest, played by Reese Witherspoon.
So how does Oscar-nominated director Lee Daniels follow up his gritty urban feature debut Precious? By going 180 degrees in the opposite genre direction with an offbeat ’60s erotic thriller starring John Cusack as a backwoods alligator hunter, Zac Efron as a central Florida college dropout, and Nicole Kidman as an enigmatic beauty who falls in love with killers on death row via pen-pal letters.
The campy, quirky, and eternally sepia-toned Moonrise Kingdom features director Wes Anderson’s seasoned regulars Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman. Adding to the predictable lineup is a salt-and-pepper cast of all-stars: Bruce Willis, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, and Frances McDormand, to name a few. The story centers around two young people in love who decide to flee their small island and seek a life together elsewhere. A trademark of Anderson films, his retro and almost awkward style is entirely his own, but this flick is actually a period piece set in a small New England town in the 1960s.
Courtesy of Focus Features
Perhaps the odd one out for its complete bankability and animation, the Paramount and DreamWorks animated film Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted will premiere at Cannes as the first major-studio title to emerge at the festival. Tailor-made for an international audience, the threequel finds its animal protagonists jet-setting across the globe, all in spectacular and trendy 3-D.
Making a highly publicized leap from Harry Potter witch Hermione Granger to a velour-sweatsuit-wearing robber, Emma Watson stars alongside Leslie Mann and Taissa Farmiga in Sofia Coppola’s Bling Ring. Based on true events (which inspired a 2011 Lifetime movie with the same name), Coppola’s film is about a group of celebrity-obsessed teenagers who use their stalking skills and the Internet to track down stars’ homes and rob them of their valuables.
Temple Hill Entertainment’s in-production parkour action flick stars Twilight’s resident werewolf Taylor Lautner showing off his extensive background in martial arts. Directed by Daniel Benmayor, Tracers centers around a New York City bicycle messenger (Lautner) who is in debt to an organized-crime gang. Romance and conflict strike when he crashes into a sexy stranger and is seduced by her thrilling world of parkour.
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Director Jacques Audiard’s French film makes Oscar-winning Inception and upcoming Dark Knight Rises star Marion Cotillard an easy favorite for best Cannes actress. Here she stars as a crippled whale trainer who falls for a bare-knuckled boxer played by Matthias Schoenaerts, an impressively muscled actor who costarred in last year’s Oscar-nominated Bullhead. Adapted from a short story collection by Canadian writer Craig Davidson, the tone of the film is noticeably different from Audiard’s usual man’s man flicks, such as A Prophet and A Self-Made Hero.
Sony Pictures Classics
