The best movies of Cannes 2018, plus a serious Palme D’Or threat at the end of the festival

Apologies to anyone hoping for a first impression on the closing night film of Cannes, Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. It’s premiering right now, as I type this, but I’m on a flight to New York instead, ready to return to real life after 11 days in the bubble. I’ve missed or am missing a few other films, too: Shoplifters, the latest gentle family drama from Japan’s Hirokazu Koreeda, which earned some of the best reviews of the festival; The Wild Pear Tree from Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who won the top prize, the Palme D’Or, last time he was in Cannes; various acclaimed titles from the Un Certain Regard sidebar, as well as Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week. Of course, it’s impossible to see everything at a film festival, and hard to complain about what I didn’t, because 2018 was such a generally strong year for Cannes. There were way more gems than duds, and quite a few great or near-great movies.

Judging from the 15-minute standing ovation it inspired after its premiere, plenty might place the new film from Lebanese actor-turned-director Nadine Labaki in the “great” category. But while definitely a big leap forward in ambition and craft for Labaki, whose previous films, Caramel and Where Do We Go Now?, were gently middlebrow comedies, Capernaum (Grade: C+) is the kind of social-issue sadness pile that confuses nonstop hardship for drama, begging for our tears at every moment. The film’s framing device is absurd: Zain (Zain Al Rafeea), a hardened, streetwise 12-year-old behind bars in Beirut for stabbing someone, has sued his parents for giving birth to him, the idea being that it was wrong to bring another child—one of many struggling under a single roof—into a cruel, uncaring world. It’s hard to find fault in Zain’s logic, given what the flashbacks show of his hardscrabble life and that of his younger sister (Haita Izam), married off at the age of only 11 to the landlord’s son.

Capernaum works best in its middle stretch, as a kind of latchkey-youth movie, following Zain through the hustle and bustle of Beirut in search of work or a solid meal, pairing him off with an Ethiopian single mother (Yordanos Shiferaw) and her toddler-age son (Boluwatife Treasure Bankole). The nonprofessional child actors are terrific, and Labaki adopts a ground-level, handheld vantage that suits the film’s vision of a big, indifferent city, looming large over its boy hero. (Who needs the new Koreeda when I have this facsimile of one of his best films, Nobody Knows?) But Capernaum’s neorealist spirit is smothered by its sentimentality and endless string of indignities; it’s as if the film is operating as Zain’s trial defense, every moment making his case that it probably would have been better if he’d never been born. What a strange MO (nihilistic humanism?), and a stranger thing to heartily cheer on.

Will the jury go for Capernaum? It has a real shot. If I were to select the movie with the worst chances of winning the Palme, I might go with Yann Gonzalez’s queer genre curiosity Knife + Heart (Grade: B-), the most legitimately underground of the main competition selections, though certainly not the worst or the least interesting. Set against the Paris gay porn industry of 1979, the film follows a blue-movie producer (an excellent Vanessa Paradis) pining for her editor/ex-lover (Kate Moran), all while a squealing masked killer—a kind of leather-daddy Leatherface—knocks off her regular troupe of actors with a dildo switchblade. Gonzalez directs the murder set pieces like excerpts from a lost Italian giallo—the music swelling with synth grandeur, eyes peaking through holes, blades spectacularly gleaming. But the tone of the film is warmer, celebrating a makeshift family of pornographers, like a DIY Boogie Nights. Knife + Heart sometimes feels as rough around the edges and inelegantly plotted as its pornos-within-the-movie, but maybe that’s just conceptual consistency: It’s the kind of film you could more readily imagine spooled up on the screen of a dingy, rundown red light district theater than in Cannes’ lavish Lumiere Theatre. It’s all part of its scrappy charm.

As in years past, I’m going to wrap up my coverage of Cannes with some predictions and preferences for the major jury prizes handed out tomorrow. Chances are that I’ll do even worse than usual at the former, as I’ve missed more competition titles than usual. Four total, in fact: Shoplifters, The Wild Pear Tree, Stéphane Brizé labor-dispute drama At War, and something called Akya, by Tulpan director Sergei Dvortsevoy. Then again, even having a comprehensive grasp of the lineup wouldn’t help me get inside the heads of the nine jurors, whose decisions could make as much sense as choosing The Tree Of Life in 2011, or as little sense as going with I, Daniel Blake over Toni Erdmann, Paterson, or The Handmaiden two years ago.

Palme D’Or

Will win: Capernaum

Last Saturday, jury president Cate Blanchett led a Women’s March up the red-carpeted steps of the Palais, partially to call attention to the fact that only 82 women have ever been eligible to win the Palme at Cannes, with Jane Campion the lone female winner (and she even had to split the award with Chen Kaige). Is it reductive to assume that Blanchett’s jury, which includes more women than men, will use the power it’s been granted to give top honors to a female filmmaker for once? Politics and principle have decided this competition before—just ask Michael Moore. Capernaum, while already critically divisive, went over like gangbusters at its big premiere last night, and social-realist seriousness is often a recipe for success at Cannes. The jury could also go with Alice Rohrwacher’s very well-received Happy As Lazzaro, but I have a hunch Labaki has the edge.

Should win: Burning

South Korean director Lee Chang-dong’s mysterious drama about class, privilege, and unrequited affection casts a spell that’s hard to shake. No movie at Cannes this year put its runtime to better use, and nothing built—quietly, carefully, masterfully—to a more satisfying endpoint. If it’s the movie itself that matters most, Burning deserves this.