Did an Oscar Winner Premiere at Cannes?

That’s a wrap on the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, but which of its many films will we be talking about later this year and into 2024? Triangle of Sadness, Top Gun: Maverick and Elvis all went from Cannes to the Oscars last year, but it’s usually difficult to predict exactly which ones will remain in the conversation.

The festival’s awards sometimes give us a clue—Parasite and Triangle of Sadness both won the Palme d’Or. But other years, the jury’s taste doesn’t align with the Academy’s in any way. This year’s winner —Justine Trier’s courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall — was the talk of the festival after its premiere and was swiftly acquired by Neon for release in the U.S. It’s likely Neon will give it an awards season run, and it could most likely play in the international feature category (while the film is in French, there are also scenes in English, so it would only qualify if at least 51% of the dialogue is in a foreign language). With critical acclaim and a Palme, Anatomy of a Fall will be one to keep an eye on later this year.

But what of the rest of the films that premiered during the fest? With the awards now given out and the Palais’ glamorous red carpet wrapped up for another year, Rebecca Ford and Richard Lawson reveal six of the films they enjoyed the most — and weigh in on their chances for Oscar season. 

The Zone of Interest

Jonathan Glazer’s mesmerizingly grim film was one of the best reviewed, most buzzed about competition entries at the festival. (Many were surprised when it did not win the Palme, instead garnering the Grand Prix, or second place prize.) Zone of Interest will no doubt land on many top ten lists at the end of the year, and will almost certainly be well honored by various critics groups. The Oscars could be a different matter, though. While Ben Kingsley was nominated in supporting actor for Sexy Beast, Glazer’s debut feature, his more than deserving followup films, Birth and Under the Skin, didn’t get any kind of Academy attention. And yet, Zone of Interest seems, at this point anyway, to be one of the defining movies of the year, formally daring and topically urgent. We’d hope that, at the very least, the German-language film will end up in the international feature category. We could also see Glazer getting into best director, as that branch sometimes ventures further into the foreign arthouse than do most other groups within the Academy. A movie like The Zone of Interest was certainly not made to win Academy Awards, and its legacy will not suffer should it be blanked. But a new and improving Academy would do well to keep Glazer’s film in mind, a singular work of art that seized Cannes in a mighty death grip. —Richard Lawson

Killers of the Flower Moon

Martin Scorsese’s out of competition feature is an ambitious film that spans three and a half hours, full of incredible visuals and strong performances from Scorsese regulars Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro. The film, based on David Grann’s book, chronicles the murders of Osage people in 1920 Oklahoma. DiCaprio and DeNiro play two white men who move into Osage territory hoping to glean off the wealth the Native American tribe has amassed due to the oil on their land. What’s really exciting about the film is the performance of Lily Gladstone, who plays Mollie, one of the Osage women whose family and friends are murdered. A confident and charismatic performance left me hopeful that perhaps Gladstone — known for starring in Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women — could be a part of the acting Oscar conversation along with DiCaprio and DeNiro. With the film’s long runtime, most people are able to find something to gripe about, but overall, it’s an epic tale told with Scorsese’s confident abilities. I imagine that Apple will make it a priority for awards season, where it could compete both above and below the line, along with for picture. Time will tell if it fares better than his last film The Irishman (which earned 10 nominations but zero wins), but Killers of the Flower Moon is arguably a story that feels more impactful and significant, especially for a community so rarely represented in Hollywood. —Rebecca Ford