Cannes Winners 2019

With the 72nd Cannes Film Festival wrapped up in the beautiful south of France, it's time to see what the jury selected. Their winners were as such...

PALME D'OR

Bong Joon-ho receiving his Palme from Catherine Deneuve

PARASITE (Bong Joon-Ho, South Korea)
Bong Joon-Ho already has major fans all over the world given the success of his Korean pictures like Memories of a Murder, The Host, and his internationally minded films Okja and Snowpiercer. Our favourite by him is definitely the mesmerizing Mother (2009). Can't wait to see this one! More on Parasite...

GRAND PRIX

ATLANTIQUE (Mati Diop, France/Senegal)
Diop, is as we've noted, the first black female director ever selected for the Cannes competition and her film walks away with the Grand Prix. That's quite a debut film experience...

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Cannes winds down. What's winning the Palme?

by Nathaniel R

Margot Robbie at Cannes for "Once Upon a Time in..."There are 21 titles competing for the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year. We've already talked about seven titles. Pedro Almodovar's Pain & Glory (Spain) is a potential prize winner (and a legit Oscar hopeful) and Mati Diop's Atlantique (France/Senegal), and Celine Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire (France) could be the key films in ensuring prizes to female directors (something Cannes has historically been bad at) since they were both extremely well-received.

In addition to those three potential Palme d'Or or Best Director winners (Cannes most important prizes), Ladj Ly's contemporary French drama Les Misérables and Kleber Mendonça Filho's Brazilian oddity Bacurau are also threats for jury love.  Diao Yinan's The Wild Goose Lake and Jim Jarmusch's The Dead Don't Die got decent notices but we don't expect prizes there.  

With Cannes ending this weekend we've run out of time so here are quick notes on responses to the other 14 Competition titles and our predictions after the jump...

COMPETITION TITLES

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Mike Leigh at 75: "Secrets & Lies"

By Salim Garami

What's good?

Timothy Spall's character Maurice Purley in Mike Leigh's 1996 Palme d'Or winner Secrets & Lies is a photographer and every scene we see him at work involves his usually-successful, sometimes-not-as-much attempts to amiably convince his clients to take a big smile before he takes the photo. Sometimes it's a direct appeal and sometimes it's just by making an off-hand joke that catches them. Usually it's preceeded by a very slight window of sadness implying a long and exhaustive story on the subject's part. It feels like a very reflexive move on Mike Leigh's part: Secrets & Lies, like most of Leigh's works, is a humanist tale of some very messy and sometimes sad parts of a large story but Leigh imbues it with a sense of delicate compassion, sometimes injecting a sense of humor about the situations, but always wanting the best for its characters.

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Cannes Awards & Closing Ceremony

We've reached la fin.

The 70th annual Cannes Film Festival opened 11 days ago and today the jurors and a smattering of the leading lights of this year's edition of the prestigious festival are walking the red carpet one last time in the South of France to name the winners of the Palme d'Or, Best Actress, Camera d'Or (for new directors) and more. If you've fallen behind in Cannes-watching, here's our surely inaccurate predictions to one of the world's most unpredictable awards, the first round of awardage including the Palme Dog, reasons to be excited about the Queer Palme winner and of course a few rounds of fashion (with one massive fashiongasm to follow).

Opening ceremony highlights, Oscar hints, and a winners list after the jump...

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Cannes Look-back: "The Class"

As we await the Cannes closing ceremony with all its awards glamour, let's take a look back at a previous Palme winner which has connections to a competition entry this year.  Here's John Guerin...

The Class, Laurent Cantet’s 2008 Palme d’Or winner, left me both exhausted and inspired. An autobiographical chronicle of François Bégaudeau’s first year of teaching French language and literature at an inner-city high school in Paris, The Class is an entirely self-contained glimpse into the daily challenges, joys, dead-ends, nuisances, amusements, and tensions in one especially spirited classroom. Although The Class is spatially confined to the school building, the currents of the outside world frequently wash ashore and brush up against Bégaudeau’s attempts to lead a discussion of the imperfect tense or find meaning in The Diary of Anne Frank or do just about anything constructive.

Cantet and Bégaudeau, with the assistance of co-writer and editor Robin Campillo (director of the underrated 2013 Eastern Boys and this year's Queer Palme winner 120 Beats per Minute), smartly avoid clichés of the Exasperated Teacher genre and opts instead for ambivalence over didacticism; there is no breakthrough in Bégaudeau’s attitude from frustration to satisfaction, there is seldom a transformation of student rancor into exuberance, there is no “saving” exactly, but the film doesn’t descend into cheap cynicism either... 

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