Cannes 2014: Highlights and best reviewed

Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Turkish drama 'Winter Sleep' took the Palme d'Or. It had been the bookies' favourite coming in to the festival, yet it encountered somewhat mixed reviews when screened. For some it was a revelation for others an endurance test. 

In fact, this year, there was no blazing standout film, no ‘no brainer’. 

Of the big Palme d’Or contenders, listed below, most were male and over fifty: the familiar pantheon of Cannes veterans. This was predictable, given the line-up, but, under Jane Campion, it would have been encouraging to see a woman among the alpha-males. (It is a pity, for example that Naomi Kawase , the Japanese, director who gave us the meditative ' Still the Water' did nor fare better in the competition and that Alice Rohrwacher ’s The Wonders has been somewhat overlooked).

So here’s our pick of the movies you should look forward to seeing in the coming months.   

Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne – Two Days, One Night

Another humanist masterpiece from the Belgian brothers.

First Rosetta won it, then L’Enfant: now, the Dardenne Brothers could be on track to win their third Palme d’Or with ‘Deux jours, une nuit’. Their latest film is another piece of blue-collar social realism, characteristic of the auteurs known for their naturalistic representation of working class life.

The film follows a downtrodden mother of two who has been made redundant, as she tries to convince her fellow factory workers  -one by one, over a weekend - to save her job over their own €1,000 bonuses. Given her fame, Marion Cotillard was an unlikely choice of lead by the siblings who eschew Tinseltown glitz at all costs. Yet Cotillard’s performance has been universally praised and, despite megastardom, she manages to occupy industrial Belgian paucity as though it were her natural habitat. No fancy heroism here: an austere and affecting account of struggle, that has moved critics across the board.

Bennett Miller – Foxcatcher: 

Tense, gritty and brilliantly-cast sports drama.

This bruising true-crime drama from Bennett Miller, director of Moneyball and Capote, is a macho, psychologised critique of zealous American patriotism, taking as its subject the murder of wrestler Dave Schulz. Mark Ruffalo delivers a rock-solid portrayal of the unfortunate Olympian and the perennially muscle-bound Channing Tatum plays his grunting, frowning brother brilliantly: this brilliant turn should not be overlooked. The true knockout performance, however, is from Steve Carell. The former gross-out funnyman of Anchorman and 40 Year Old Virgin fame has astounded critics with his role as Du Pont, the psychopathic plutocrat who forges a relationship with the vulnerable athlete. Carell has proved that he really can act, as well as entertain: a genius piece of casting, as when Miller cast Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Capote. 

Mike Leigh - Mr Turner

Tender, fleshy biopic from a true master

Mike Leigh OBE, master auteur and proponent of warts and all naturalism, is the Palme d’Or favourite this year. He won the prize in 1996 for Secrets and Lies, but the film under consideration this year is his tender, Timothy Spall-led biopic of Britain’s most treasured artist, J. M. W. Turner. Mr Turner focuses on the last twenty-five years of the artist’s life, exploring his fractious relationship with the public, as well as the moral lapses that accompanied his genius. The fullness of character and richness of verisimilitude that Leigh achieves is down to his well-tested method: he embarks upon his project scriptless; preferring to research meticulously and then develop a character through improvisation with his actors.  The resulting films are fully realised and, here, with Spall in the part he was born to play: faultless. 

Jean-Luc Godard – Goodbye to Language

Experimental cine-collage from legendary New Wave director

Goodbye to Language is the 39th feature film from cinema’s first enfant terrible, the mythical 83 year old Jean-Luc Godard. The director rose to prominence in the 1960s as part of the Nouvelle Vague: an experimental heterodoxy that favoured untutored documentary-style, amateurish film-making, rejecting the cultivated, careful decorum of mainstream cinema. As the years advance, Godard loses none of his playfulness, nor his experimental proclivities. Goodbye to Language is as avant-garde as ever, yet Godard's radicalism somehow feels new and not at all hackneyed. (Roughly) telling the tale of “a married woman and a single man” the film uses multiple video formats, animation, snatches of literature, 3D, collaged film-fragments and is presented, mostly, through the eyes of a dog, Roxy. Chaotic and satisfyingly baffling, only Godard could have made this singular film.

Andrey Zvagintsev: Leviathan

Grand, hard-hitting opus from Russian arthouse master.

In Leviathan, Russian arthouse director Andrey Zvagintsev reshapes the book of Job, replacing faith with the Russian State, as the beast to be wrestled with. In a small fishing community in Russia’s northwest, the struggles of one impoverished household against a rotten government are played out in desolate, wide-screen panorama. A civic dispute with the mayor comes to reveal modern Russia’s darkest forces: bribery, gangster-politicians, heartless lawyers, bent priests; and the drugs that poison the state: religion, politics, money guns and alcohol. This grand, meaty film is bleak, but full of humour Dostoyevsky is felt in the film’s weightiness and opacity. Andrei Tarkovksy, Zvagintsev's irrepressible forebear, is tangible in the leisure of pace. In Zvagintsev, we have a real Palme d’Or contender: and, his magnificent Elena having been overlooked in 2011, it’s high time this modern master was recognised by the Cannes jury. 

The Palme d'Or announcement will be made this evening.

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