Unlike last year, there's no cloud of volcanic ash hovering over Europe and delaying flights to the Cannes Film Festival. Unlike last year, there's not much doubt about the depth of a lineup that Peter Knegt calls "a cinephile’s dream of a program." And unlike last year, Terrence Malick finished "The Tree of Life" in time, and his long-awaited and long-delayed opus will screen at the festival.
Which means that as the international film community arrives in the South of France for a festival that kicks off with a Wednesday night screening of Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris," there's a celebratory air on the Croisette. Kenneth Turan summed it up in the first sentence of his pre-Cannes report in the Los Angeles Times: "Cannes is always the film festival that critics have to go to, but this year it's shaping up as a place you actually might want to be."
Also read: Cannes Logic: Who Needs Hits When You've Got Auteurs?
Turan's picks for the festival's must-see films start with three English-language entries: "The Tree of Life," Paolo Sorrentino's "This Must Be the Place" (with a very glam-looking Sean Penn) and Lynne Ramsay's "We Need to Talk About Kevin."
But the ads that cover the front of the Carlton Hotel, he points out, offer equal time for big American summer films: "Cars 2," "Super 8" and "Transformers: The Dark of the Moon."
At indieWIRE, Eric Kohn offers 20 films he can't wait to see in Cannes – at which, he says, "a relatively unknown film can become a frontrunner for the Palme d’Or after its premiere and a few boos at a morning press screening can kill a movie’s prospects by afternoon." His list includes the Malick and the Almodovar and the von Trier and the Dardenne brothers and a lot more of the usual suspects, along with a handful of riskier offerings, including the black comedy "Habemus Papum," the presumably subversive "Hors Satan" and the festival's single 3D entry, "Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai" (if you don't count the out-of-competition screening of the new 3D "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie).
And indieWIRE also has a guide to every film in the festival – though at this point, that guide mostly consists of each film's title and director, and the date of its first screening. The site's criticWIRE score, which averages letter grades from a variety of critics, is full of TBDs at this point: the only Cannes films that have enough reviews are Jodie Foster's out-of-competition "The Beaver" (B-) and two Sundance favorites, Sean Durkin's "Martha Marcy May Marlene" (B+) and Jeff Nichols' "Take Shelter" (B+). The grades will start to come in soon – and for the most part, the indieWIRE critics are a tough group to please.
At In Contention, Guy Lodge has been posting more elaborate guides to many of the Cannes films.
