Big Releases Debut At Cannes Film Festival 2023

The Cannes Film Festival is the posh dame of European film festivals. This is where awards season campaigns start and movie stars cement their status within the industry. This year’s 76th festival has a line-up combining blockbusters and indie films.

Films in and out of competition will premier. This means only a few films have a shot at winning the Palme d’Or. The festival’s highest honour.

Asteroid City

This film is done in typical Wes Anderson-style quirkiness, along with a star-studded cast featuring Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Steve Carell and Tilda Swinton. “It’s a Wes Anderson film, full stop,” says Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux. It’s about as Wes Anderson as it can get. It’s a tale of attendees as a junior space cadet convention in a 50s desert town, whose lives are turned upside down by the arrival of an alien. An immediate lockdown is put in place and soon thoughts of existential dread sets in.

The Festival was once criticised for not highlighting women in its lineup. Cannes has, thus, broken its own record with six films from female directors. It includes Jessica Hausner’s Club Zero, Breillat’s Last Summer, Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s Banel et Adama and Kaouther Ben Hania’s documentary’s Four Daughters. Sy and Ben Hania are competition newcomers.

Club Zero

This psychological thriller takes place at an elite boarding school, where an influential teacher introduces a new subject called ‘conscious eating’. Director Jessica Hausner enrolled the talented Mia Wasikowska to lead the eerie film. The story continues where the teacher then encourages the teens to drastically reduce their food intake and withdraw from their parents. The other teachers in the film – played by Sidse Babett Knudsen and Amir El-Masry – realise a little too late. The Austrian director previously put her sci-fi feature Little Jo up in the Cannes competition in 2019.

Monster

Japanese director, Hirokazu Kore-eda is a Cannes regular and received the Palme d’Or in 2018 for his film Shoplifters. Not many details have been revealed about this story, but this film has been described as a ‘Rashomon-esque nail-biter’. It is told from three perspectives: a teacher, a young boy and a mother all involved in a violent incident at school. It stars the talented Ando Sakura and Nagayama Eita along a hair-raising score by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Believe it or not, this is the fifth and final installment of the Harrison Ford-led adventure franchise. ‘Dial of Destiny’ features Mads Mikkelsen as the villain, Phoebe Waller-Bridge as the double-crossing goddaughter of Indiana Jones and the legendary Antonio Banderas. The story goes, the titular hero is now on the brink of retirement, not before setting out on a mission to locate a mysterious dial with the power to change history. Director James Mangold makes Harrison Ford drive tuk tuks off rooftops and jump off planes.

Four Daughters

An intimate story of hope, violence, rebellion and sisterhood. Oscar-nominated Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania premiers at the Cannes Film Festival. This comes after her uber-successful film, The Man Who Sold His Skin. Four Daughters, also known as Les Filles D’Olfa, follows the tale of a Tunisian mother to four daughters. Suddenly, two of her older daughters disappear. Ben Hania invites professional actresses to fill in their absence and create a unique movie experience. It stars Egyptian-Tunisian actress Hend Sabry, who plays mother Olfa.