Cannes is supposed to be a festival that supports auteur cinema. So why does the festival often give its most long-standing guests the cold shoulder?
Hard Pass: The Quixotic Politics of Cannes Rejections

Exploring the Outer Edge of Film
The biggest film festival in the world, you can’t talk about film without talking about Cannes.
Cannes is supposed to be a festival that supports auteur cinema. So why does the festival often give its most long-standing guests the cold shoulder?
Jean-Christophe Meurisse’s Plastic Guns doubles down on the provocations of Bloody Oranges in an off-kilter, hilarious and deeply nasty farce.
Marcelo Caetano’s Baby might combine reliable and clichéd tropes, but Caetano’s sex work study succeeds thanks to its keen observation of queer communities.
Sean Baker continues his deeply humanist exploration of sex workers’ complex inner lives with the touching and charming Russian-American fairytale Anora.
Paul Schrader’s latest Oh, Canada is a self-reflexive work that fails to combine its various threads into a satisfying treatise on life’s regrets.
Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance boasts impressive technical sound design and monster work but suffers from a lack of compelling female characters.
With alacrity and charm, Daphné Hérétakis’ short What we ask of a statue is that it doesn’t move takes aim at one of Greece’s most enduring national symbols.
There is beauty and meaning littered throughout the repetitive actions of Jonás Trueba’s endlessly playful Directors’ Fortnight romcom The Other Way Around.
Antoine Chevrollier’s Block Pass captures its working-class milieu well but suffers due to its tired secondhand framing of queer suffering.
Sauna Day, Anna Hints follow-up to Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, trades female intimacy for male suppression, to eroticised and compelling results.