Puncturing through the noise of endless movies playing throughout the world with our selection of underseen 2024 festival favourites worth checking out.
Underseen Festival Favourites 2024
Tag: Cannes
Plastic Guns. A Perfect Shitpost.
Jean-Christophe Meurisse’s Plastic Guns doubles down on the provocations of Bloody Oranges in an off-kilter, hilarious and deeply nasty farce.
Baby Works His Way Out of a Corner
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 Does It Again with Anora
Sean Baker continues his deeply humanist exploration of sex workers’ complex inner lives with the touching and charming Russian-American fairytale Anora.
Oh No, Canada
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.
The Substance Has Never Met a Real Woman
Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance boasts impressive technical sound design and monster work but suffers from a lack of compelling female characters.
The Other Way Around Is Repetitive. Meaningful. Beautiful. Repetitive.
There is beauty and meaning littered throughout the repetitive actions of Jonás Trueba’s endlessly playful Directors’ Fortnight romcom The Other Way Around.
Block Pass. A Tyred Vintage.
Antoine Chevrollier’s Block Pass captures its working-class milieu well but suffers due to its tired secondhand framing of queer suffering.
Sauna Day. Intimate Masculinity on Display.
Sauna Day, Anna Hints follow-up to Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, trades female intimacy for male suppression, to eroticised and compelling results.
The Story of Souleymane. Cycling Through Limbo.
The Story of Souleymane is a tightly-focussed, Dardenne-esque tale of an immigrant delivery driver trying to make ends meet that brims with heartfelt emotions.