Illustrations by Maddie Fischer.
As part of our Cannes 2024 coverage, we invited critics and programmers to share their thoughts on one moment from a film they've seen at the festival so far.
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Miriam Bale
(contributor, W Magazine)
Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes by Nanette Burstein (co-director of The Kid Stays in the Picture) is in some ways a straightforward chronological documentary of the movie star's fascinating, tabloid-centric life. What makes the film formally interesting, though, is the separation of voice and image. Burstein’s reliance on audio recordings of Taylor made in 1964 and 1985 foregrounds her remarkable voice over her blinding beauty, seen in stills and film clips. Taylor's voice, even at ages 32 and 53, can range from girlish and flirtatious to bawdy and shrill, sometimes within the same statement. When she describes how the AIDS crisis led her to form AMFAR (The Foundation for AIDS Research) she says she chided herself, “Bitch, why don't you do something?!” “Bitch” from her perfect lips is a three-syllable word, and the highlight of my festival.
Daniel Kasman
(editor-in-chief, Notebook)
Tsui Hark proves that the screwball spirit is not confined to 1930s and ’40s Hollywood in a pivotal, uproarious scene in his Shanghai Blues (1984), presented in a new restoration and Shanghainese dub in Cannes Classics. There’s trouble in paradise: one rooftop studio with hijinks-friendly closet, shower stall, flimsy door, and window-to-crawl-through + one hidden thief + one dramatic woman in love (Sylvia Chang), scandalously clothed in her beloved’s shirt + one comedic woman in love (Sally Yeh) + the one man they’re in love with (Kenny Bee). All three are friends in this gender inversion of Design for Living—the kinetic dilemma is romcom at its highest form.
Caitlin Quinlan
(contributor, ArtReview)
I found David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds to be strangely convoluted, though incredibly moving, but a moment of satisfying efficiency and humor was its opening scene. Vincent Cassel’s Karsh dreams of a computer animation of his deceased wife’s decaying body, hovering in a liminal technological space while he watches on, screaming. But when he wakes, he’s at the dentist. Cronenberg understands that true body horror, both waking and oneiric, is having your teeth scraped with a metal instrument by a dental hygienist—all the more visceral for its proximity to real-life experience.
Nicolas Rapold
(host, The Last Thing I Saw)
Sometimes it’s not a moment of excellence that sticks with you from a festival but a moment that inflames white-hot aggravation. It's tough to single out any one lowlight in The Apprentice, so maybe I’ll go with the first (or second, or third, or fourth) generic New York montage gluing together chapters in the professional rise of its subject, Donald Trump. The movie is lazy, profoundly idiotic, and years too late to get a pass for any of that.
Hannah Strong
(digital editor, Little White Lies)
Among many poignant moments in Taylor Taormina's holiday confection, Christmas Eve in Miller's Point, there is one in which Cousin Bruce (Chris Lazzaro), a daffy jokester / volunteer firefighter, gets up to deliver a speech at dinner. In front of the large, noisy table, heaving with food, he gives a heartfelt explanation of what celebrating the holidays with his extended family means to him. He then returns to his seat, at the small plastic table set up for the kids in the kitchen, from which he stares wistfully into the dining room, where all the other adults are eating. The moment plays as a gag, but as the film continues, there's the sense that Cousin Bruce has never found his true place in the world. He reflects both the giddiness and undercurrent of melancholy that surround the festive season and the feeling that even among family, it's hard to be seen for who we are.
Adam Piron
(programmer, Sundance Film Festival)
My mind keeps orbiting the moment in Megalopolis in which a man, an actual audience member, got up and walked on stage to ask Adam Driver’s character on-screen a question. I had read about this occurrence before my screening, but there was something about being there and seeing it happen in real time. My thoughts on that instance and the film overall still haven’t sorted themselves out, and most likely won’t for a good while, but it’s one of Coppola’s many go-for-broke experiments that make this epic something I suspect we’ll be reevaluating for years to come.
Jon Dieringer
(editor-in-chief, Screen Slate)
Near the end of Megalopolis, an aging Jon Voight, as Hamilton Crassus III, announces that he has a boner. The ailing banking tycoon’s conniving grandson and gold-digging wife gloat over Crassus’s presumed deathbed as a tent-like pitch rises above his crotch, filling the screen. A minute later Crassus whips off his blanket to reveal a crossbow, attacking his traitorous kin. It is violent, shocking, and funny. And there was something sublime about the moment between the setup and payoff, during which everyone in the audience seemed to accept, maybe with some haughty condescension, that Megalopolis is simply a movie where Jon Voight proclaims his erection as a non sequitur. The joke was on us: with Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola introduces Chekhov’s hard-on to the dramatic lexicon. There is no going back.
Illyse Singer
(programmer, Roxy Cinema, New York)
Getting to see Megalopolis at the festival felt really special for me. I had been waiting for this for so long and getting a chance to see in Cannes was surreal. While I know the reception is mixed I absolutely loved it, especially Jon Voight's boner scene.
Mark Asch
(contributor, InsideHook)
The first movie I ever saw at Cannes was the 2021 opener, Annette, so I was naturally delighted to see Baby Annette in attendance at this year’s premiere of Leos Carax’s C’est Pas Moi—the wooden puppet from his last fiction feature was among the filmmaking team who filed into their reserved seats after Thierry's introduction, and soaked up the ovation afterward alongside her director. The 40-minute autobiographical stream-of-consciousness essay film—composed of archival clips from his films and others, with rapid-fire prankish and provocative voiceover—ends with a post-credits stinger as self-referential and kinetically poppy as anything in his filmography: Baby Annette, on a treadmill and manipulated by three black-clad bunraku-style puppeteers, dancing to David Bowie’s “Modern Love,” in a reprisal of Denis Lavant’s running and pirouetting in Carax's Mauvais Sang. Following Opening Night's tribute to jury president Greta Gerwig, with a performance of “Modern Love” in homage to the sequence Frances Ha lifted from Mauvais Sang, it felt like France forcibly repatriating its cultural treasures.
