2024 was an unforgettable year for Cannes. The 77th edition of the illustrious festival arrived with surprises and discoveries from all around the globe. As the summer sun glows over the French Riviera, we are rolling out the red carpet for the stars of last year’s lineup.

Feted with the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes, Coralie Fargeat’s Oscar®-winning body horror The Substance (2024) pairs Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley in a cautionary tale about the price of Hollywood fame. Genre convention and arthouse subversion likewise entwine in Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with the Needle (2024), which follows two women bound by desperate circumstances in early 20th-century Denmark. Told through expressionistic black-and-white compositions, this searing character study lends a dose of horror to a historical true crime case.

Works from Cannes regulars also experimented freely with form last year. Selected to open the festival, Quentin Dupieux’s deliriously meta The Second Act (2024) satirizes the future—or perhaps the death—of cinema with outrageous glee. Meanwhile, documentary and fiction meet in Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour (2024), a mesmerizing travelogue that combines footage of contemporary Asia with a fabulated 1930s romance. The spirit of screwball comedy runs through this film as well as Tsui Hark’s Shanghai Blues (1984), which celebrated its 40th anniversary at Cannes. Now available in a glorious restoration, this frenetic farce of love and mistaken identity has lost none of its zany charm. With the film world flocking to the Croisette once more, these indelible gems are prime for a revisit.