The 20 Best Cannes Premieres

The 77th Cannes Film Festival just wrapped up its final presentations, announcing Sean Baker’s Anora as its Palme d’Or recipient. Baker, known for his lo-fi filmography that focalizes sex workers and working-class characters, was the first American filmmaker to receive the honor since Terrence Malick for his humanist epic The Tree of Life in 2011. There’s an irony here: Just days before the opening ceremony, festival workers at Cannes called for a general strike, with the Broke Behind the Screens collective calling attention to the unreliable, hazardous nature of festival work. Through its choice prize, the festival postures toward empathy but accompanies this with little tangible change. And yet one must traverse these complications when considering the festival’s long-running catalog of movies since 1946, as a festival that has held the premieres of some of the greatest films of all time. With many of the films this year on their way to us soon (or not, if you’re Megalopolis), we compiled a retrospective list of 20 of the best films to have premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival.

Here are the 20 best Cannes premieres:

1. Pather Panchali

Year: 1955
Director: Satyajit Ray
Stars: Subir Banerjee, Kanu Banerjee, Karuna Banerjee
Rating: NR

Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali is, depending on who you ask, either the saddest movie ever made or one of the saddest, and if you don’t believe the former then you likely believe the latter (unless you are made of stone, but aside from rock golems and Republicans, people tend to be made of flesh and blood). But whether the film makes you weep more or less is, perhaps, besides the point. When we talk about the classics of cinema, we talk about influence, and one note worth making about influence is that it comes in all shapes and sizes: Some movies have impact on a micro scale, others on a macro scale. Pather Panchali’s influence may be best evinced on a micro scale, in specific relation to Indian cinema, presenting a watershed moment that sparked the Parallel Cinema movement and altered the texture of the country’s films forevermore. This, again, isn’t proof of Pather Panchali’s actual substance, though let’s be realistic here: Ray’s masterpiece doesn’t need to prove anything to anyone. It’s extraordinary on its authentic artistic merits, an aching, vital movie crafted to transmute the harshest rigors of a childhood lived in rural India into narrative. Maybe it’s presumptuous for an American critic with no frame of reference for Pather Panchali’s cultural context to describe the film as “true to life,” but Ray is so good at capturing life with his camera that we come to know, to understand, the life of young Apu, regardless of who we are or where we come from, and isn’t that just the absolute definition of cinema’s transporting power? —Andy Crump

2. The 400 Blows

Year: 1959
Director: François Truffaut
Stars: Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claire Maurier, Albert Rémy
Rating: NR

Sometimes a movie can be boiled down to its final shot. The Long Goodbye has Philip Marlowe, unhurriedly strolling down a road in Mexico, playing his harmonica after killing his best friend. 8 1/2 has young Guido, bringing down the lights as he marches along with his flute, sending the audience out of the theater wondering whether his presence affirms life or nods to death. The 400 Blows has Antoine Doinel gamboling about on the coast before François Truffaut’s camera zooms in on the boy’s face, freezing the frame just as his eyes meet with the lens. For anyone who saw Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, that description probably sounds familiar, but this shot has been long-copied since The 400 Blows became a part of the cinematic canon after its 1959 release. (For example: Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl, or even George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which both use a similar effect to achieve altogether different ends.) In Truffaut’s film, the shot is meant as a capstone, or, if you prefer, the closing of a book: It’s the climax of one chapter in Doinel’s life, though Truffaut probably didn’t have any thought of making sequels to the film to begin with. Questions linger as the credits roll, and of course they should. When one comes of age, their next age begins, and so The 400 Blows leaves itself open at the last, leaving us to consider what fate may befall Antoine from here. —Andy Crump

3. Hiroshima Mon Amour

Year: 1959
Director: Alain Resnais
Stars: Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada
Rating: NR

Alain Resnais’s 1959 masterpiece begins like a documentary, one reminiscent of his harrowing 1955 nonfiction short Night and Fog, except focused on the aftermath of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima during World War II. Instead of an omniscient voiceover narrator, however, we hear what we eventually discover are two lovers: a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) who, in the present day, have met in Hiroshima are both carrying on extramarital affairs with each other, even as they realize it can’t last. It sounds like pure Casablanca-like forbidden romance, but under Resnais and screenwriter Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima Mon Amour touches on broader ideas: chiefly, the potential impossibility of art to measure up to personal experience and memory. The man’s repeated incantations to the woman that “You saw nothing in Hiroshima” suggests a level of perspective on the horrific event that even she, starring in a well-meaning “movie about peace,” can’t possibly access. She can only try to identify through her own experience as a tormented outsider in the village in which she grew up—but really, how can even that possibly measure up to the devastation of such a horrific event? Even Hiroshima itself, as captured in black-and-white by cinematographers Sacha Vierny and Michio Takahashi, seems to want to try to forget its past, by covering it up in a preponderance of neon lights. Resnais aids Duras’s reflections on history and memory with a then-groundbreaking editing style that fluidly goes back and forth between past and present. The enduring miracle of Hiroshima Mon Amour, though, is that all its formal and philosophical ambition doesn’t obscure the poignance of its central romance, especially with Emmanuelle Riva’s indelible expressions of passion, anguish and regret. —Kenji Fujishima

4. Cléo from 5 to 7

Year: 1962
Director: Agnès Varda
Stars: Corinne Marchand, Antoine Bourseiller, Dominique Davray
Rating: NR

Halfway through Agnès Varda’s sophomore film, the titular Cléo (Corinne Marchand), a pop singer awaiting the potentially devastating results of some sort of medical test, looks directly into the camera, weeping as she sings a song during an otherwise typical practice session. It’s a revelatory moment: Varda addresses her audience directly through her character addressing her audience directly, all while on the precipice of total dissolution. Cléo, a beautiful, burgeoning celebrity, seems to understand that she may be empty without her looks, just as she rails against the forces that put her in such an untenable position. In other words, realizing in that moment of melodrama, of the heightened emotion she knows all too well is the stuff of pop music at its most marketably patronizing, that her attractiveness may be soon over, she’s driven to tears, unable to reconcile her talent with her face, or her fragility with her livelihood, leaving it to the audience to decide whether she deserves our sympathy or not. If not, Varda wonders, then why not? Shot practically in real time, Cléo from 5 to 7 waits along with our character as she waits for life-changing news, floating from coffee shop to home to park to wherever, not doing much of anything with the life she has, the life she may find out she’s losing soon enough. She watches a silent film featuring cameos by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina, meets a soldier on leave from the Algerian front (Antoine Bourseiller) who confesses he believes people are dying for nothing, drives past a murder scene and senses that the universe maybe has misdirected her bad luck towards another soul. One of the defining films of the Left Bank branch of the French New Wave (as opposed to those of the “Right Bank,” the more famous films of Truffaut and Godard, the movement’s more commercial, cosmopolitan cinephiles), Cléo from 5 to 7 is a fever dream of the ordinary, a meditation on the nothingness of everyday living, as existential as it is blissfully bereft of purpose. —Dom Sinacola

5. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Year: 1964
Director: Jacques Demy
Stars: Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo
Rating: NR

Jacques Demy’s masterpiece is a soaring, vibrant, innately bittersweet story of love lost, found and forever disbanded, another wartime casualty in a country scarred by military conflict. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is lived-in, a story derived from Demy’s life experience, and that keyword—“experience”—is essential to making the film click. Take away its musical cues, and you’re left with a narrative about a young man (Nino Castelnuovo) and a young woman (Catherine Deneuve) who fall deeply in love with one another, only to be torn apart when he’s drafted to fight overseas. The story remains rooted in Demy’s pathos, and pathos gives Umbrellas’ gravity. The music, of course, is a critical part of its character, a dose of magic Demy uses to buttress the rigors of life in wartime with grandeur and meaning. It’s a film about people in love falling out of love, and then falling in love all over again with new partners and altered sentiments, a beautiful picture as likely to make you swoon as to crush your heart. —Andy Crump

6. Solyaris

Year: 1972
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Stars: Donatas Banionis, Natalya Bondarchuk, Jüri Järvet
Rating: PG

In 2002, Steven Soderbergh adapted Stanislaw Lem’s classic science fiction novel into a perfectly fine and handsome movie. It’s the one time that the story of a Tarkovsky film has been duplicated, sharing source material, and it illustrates an important truth: Andrei Tarkovsky’s vision is singular, inimitable; it towers over all others. Where an accomplished director like Soderbergh made a serviceable sci-fi flick, Tarkovsky made visual poetry of the highest order. Tarkovsky’s artistic instincts rarely failed him, and even though it was a big budget genre picture, Solyaris takes risks with the same confidence of expression and the same depth of resonance as any other Tarkovsky film. The science fiction concept of the titular planet-entity allows Tarkovsky a new angle at the same themes pondered in many of his works: the pivotal roles of history and memory in our present and future; the fraught responsibility of the individual in responding to the calls of the sublime; the struggle to know truth. Tarkovsky’s long-take, free-associative aesthetic was predicated on his philosophy of filmmaking as “sculpting in time,” and in Solyaris there is a fascinating confluence between the way time and perception is manipulated by Tarkovsky, and the way those things are manipulated by Solyaris itself. Solyaris gives back the protagonist, astronaut psychologist Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis), his dead wife Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk), for what purpose is unclear. But Tarkovsky’s films work in a similar fashion; difficult to say exactly why they do what they do, yet they pull at the deepest roots of ourselves. They elicit emotional, meditative realities unlike any other. Like Kelvin’s resurrected Hari, the stimuli are simulacrums, symbols mined from a collective dream, but this does not diminish the worth of experiencing them. Sometimes they lead you to a place like Solyaris leads Kelvin: an island of lost memory—or perhaps of an impossible future, awash in the waters of some Spirit. That makes the unreal real; that gives the dream life. —Chad Betz

7. Taxi Driver

Year: 1976
Director: Martin Scorsese
Stars: Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Albert Brooks, Harvey Keitel
Rating: R

Taxi Driver was Scorsese’s breakthrough: a seething condemnation of alienation—not to mention New York’s descent in the 1970s into a crime-ridden hellscape—delivered with such clinical coldness that when Scorsese’s star (and longtime collaborator) Robert De Niro finally explodes, it’s unspeakably upsetting. If Taxi Driver now feels slightly overrated, it’s only because the movie’s DNA has crept into so many subsequent filmmakers’ efforts. Scorsese grew up loving Westerns, and Taxi Driver could be his version of The Searchers—except his man-out-of-time finds no redemption. —Tim Grierson

8. 3 Women

Year: 1977
Director: Robert Altman
Stars: Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Janice Rule
Rating: PG

Robert Altman’s post-Persona surrealist psychological drama, 3 Women similarly plays like a languid dream, though it tells the story of three women versus two. Shelley Duvall (who won Best Actress at the film’s Cannes premiere in 1977), Sissy Spacek and Janice Rule portray the three women, who live in an apartment together in the California desert. Each woman embodies the shifting intergenerational responses to the patriarchal order they’re subjected to, although they merge into one by the film’s end. Duvall is Millie, an eager consumer of women’s magazines and meal recipes, through which she forms her entire selfhood—a specter of the American consumer nightmare, and a progenitor of the corporate feminist hellscape we currently find ourselves in. Spacek plays the baby-brained Pinky, who follows Millie around in juvenile adulation, sticks out her tongue and sips on Cokes. Rule is the pregnant Wife, whose sadness is the most obviously palpable, only to be seen in the mythic scenes she paints at the bottom of the resort’s pool. Gerald Busby’s haunting score accompanies the women’s quotidian happenings, lending them a dramatic heft. Bolstered by the scenes’ attention to minute details—Millie’s yellow dresses getting caught in a car door, for instance—3 Women concocts a feeling singular to only the best (or worst) recurring dreams. Each time you’re in them, you feel like you’re experiencing them again for the first time. All you’re left with is the hint of psychosocial observation, though each time you experience them, a new complication is added. In other words: a resigned unresolve.—Hafsah Abbasi

9. Paris, Texas

Year: 1984
Director: Wim Wenders
Stars: Harry Dean Stanton, Dean Stockwell, Nastassja Kinski
Rating: R

In a career-redefining performance by Harry Dean Stanton, 1984’s epochal Palme d’Or-winning Paris, Texas also placed West German director Wim Wenders at the fore of the decade’s art-house cinema, a position later cemented by Wings of Desire. Harrowing yet nuanced, breath-catching and heart-rending, infused with a humanity rarely captured on celluloid, none of the film’s emotional power has dimmed in the last quarter-century. No wonder it was reportedly a favorite of everyone from Kurt Cobain to Elliott Smith, and an artistic touchstone for U2’s The Joshua Tree. Wenders’ bleak, unique vision of an emotionally estranged America is a cinematic masterpiece.—Andy Beta

10. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

Year: 1985
Director: Paul Schrader
Stars: Ken Ogata, Kenji Sawada, Toshiyuki Nagashima, Yasosuke Bando
Rating: R

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, which premiered at Cannes in 1985, is Paul Schrader’s magnum opus. It’s a film that fits into Schrader’s Tortured Man catalog but it’s more than that: It’s a complicated, penetrating portrait of an artist—particularly of the personal pains that inform one’s work, but more importantly of the intricate ways in which life and art-making continually interweave. Each of the film’s narrative choices, for instance, mimic the subject’s own. Similar to the real Yukio Mishima’s novels and short stories, Mishima is reliant on melodrama, frame narratives and periodic flashbacks. Interspersed throughout the film’s biographical narrative are vignettes detailing scenes from his novels, all embedded at points that allow insight into Mishima’s own psychological and emotional state. These literary scenes are lush and theatrical, making the severance between the literary and the quotidian a central motif. Most notably, perhaps, Mishima adopts a frame narrative, bookended by the author’s seppuku. In Mishima’s 1969 novel Runaway Horses, a group of young nationalists fail to overthrow the Japanese government; the film dramatizes this in a terse vignette before its own final scene, where Mishima and his own followers attempt to capture one of the generals of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces only to be met by ridicule. A Hegelian reading of Mishima might see these final moments as the culmination of a key paradox. In a twisted sense, the writer’s inability to find harmony between art, life and politics is resolved by him killing himself by seppuku—a scene that inflects his novels, which reflect his ideological impulses and his tortured interiority. A unity in style is found too: The moment breaks from the austerity of its biographical scenes, embracing the painterly, stylized imagery of its literary ones. Mishima’s morbid, intricate resolve has left the film with an enduring legacy, its metaphysical questions still resonating today.—Hafsah Abbasi

11. Barton Fink

Year: 1991
Director: Joel Coen
Stars: John Turturro, John Goodman, Judy Davis
Rating: R

While hung up with the intricate plotting of Miller’s Crossing, the Coen Brothers took a break to write a script about a blocked screenwriter (Jon Turturro). Reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch at their most darkly satirical, Barton Fink depicts a self-important New York playwright who struggles to write a Hollywood wrestling picture while residing in a rotting hotel. A jaundiced metaphor for the compromised creative process of show business, Barton Fink delivers the deadpan comedy and quirky performances of the Coen’s trademark, including Oscar-nominee Michael Lerner as a bombastic studio chief, John Mahoney as a boozing, Faulkner-esque novelist, and John Goodman as a cheerful salesman with a dark secret. Audiences can obsess over the meaning of lines like Goodman’s “I’ll show you the life of the mind!” but any answers the film holds are unlikely to be reassuring. —Curt Holman

12. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

Year: 1992
Director: David Lynch
Stars: Kyle MacLachlan, Sheryl Lee, Ray Wise, Moira Kelly, David Bowie, Kiefer Sutherland, Chris Isaac
Rating: R

In retrospect, in light of The Return, David Lynch’s prequel to the Twin Peaks series emerges as an extraordinarily compassionate prayer in the midst of the director’s canon. If 25 years ago Fire Walk with Me bore a reputation for unnecessary brutality, nihilism even—booed at its Cannes premiere and a box office failure—today its brutality seems more necessary than ever, the depths of its bleakness matched only by just how deeply felt Lynch’s characters develop on screen. Everything, of course, feels weird, and somehow unsafe, though the horror we witness Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) survive and then succumb to is both rendered in all of its terrible boldness and tempered by Lynch’s inability to exploit the tragedy he unfolds. This last week in Laura Palmer’s life, before she’s killed and bound within plastic, an image which still seems strange making it onto network TV then—this last week in Laura’s life passes with ever creeping intensity, malignant energies converging upon a poor girl’s soul. We learn the identity of her killer, though we probably should have known all along, because this is a David Lynch film, and the graphic, upsetting shitty absurdity of reality is always hiding in plain sight. Kiefer Sutherland and Chris Isaac are there too, playing FBI agents just as quirky and inevitably lovable as Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan); Agent Phillip Jeffries (David Bowie) emerges from nowhere at a Philadelphia FBI building, then disappears as if ripped from our reality into another. Fire Walk with Mepretty much works that way: People—especially “women in trouble,” a Lynch favorite—cross over into the film from different worlds regularly, usually carried by pain and trauma, two powerful forces that Lynch uses against women at the hands of men, who are all pretty much vessels for evil, except for those in the FBI, who are damn good folks. Is it misogyny? Maybe, though Lynch seems to really hate men more than anyone else. —Dom Sinacola

13. Taste of Cherry

Year: 1997
Director: Abbas Kiarostami
Stars: Homayoun Ershadi
Rating: PG

An existential tone poem of exasperating pace and deliberation, Taste of Cherry takes the long way in almost every conceivable fashion. Kiarostami stages a bare minimum of plot in his favorite setting—a moving vehicle—his middle-aged protagonist driving around the dusty roads of the Northern Iranian village of Koker. Mr. Badii (Homayoun Ershadi), a Range Rover-driving stoic, surveys stranger after stranger, inviting a few into his car to discuss a low-effort, high-paying job. He needs help committing suicide. The ensuing conversations are uncomfortable, philosophical, layered, sometimes labored. When Kiarostami isn’t taking viewers on a physical journey of unflinching confrontation, he’s likewise keeping us at a literal distance—behind windows and from wide, curiously flat shots, the isolation of the car contrasted with expansive landscapes of industrial machinery. Mr. Badii’s voice is at times obscured behind glass; we strain to see him through semi-sheer curtains or a ticket booth—we don’t even get a first name. We are denied the slightest of intimacy, determinacy or logic. In turn, there’s something transient and yet immemorial to Taste of Cherry, a confounding, transcendental bridge between extremes and experiences, cultures and politics, passenger and driver, viewer and Kiarostami himself, between our respective unknowns. —Amanda Schurr

14. In the Mood for Love

Year: 2000
Director: Wong Kar-wai
Stars: Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Maggie Cheung Man-yuk
Rating: PG

Wong’s most acclaimed movie, In the Mood for Love, details the forbidden romance between jilted individuals. In 1962, Chow Mo-wan (Leung) moved into an apartment complex with his wife. Meanwhile, Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung) has moved into an adjacent apartment with her husband. They spend their nights alone as both have spouses who work late and are often out. Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan come to the conclusion that their spouses have been cheating on them. In the Mood for Love then focuses on the budding friendship between Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan which began as a perverse game to discover how their spouses began their entanglement. The charade of make-believe entertains the couple for a while, but soon they begin falling for each other. There is an understanding between the two of them from the start, the idea that if they were to fall in love with each other, they would be no better than the spouses that have caused them so much pain and anguish. That sacred oath of marriage ties their hands. Had they met at some other time or with different circumstances, perhaps their love story would’ve been complete. There’s moments of weakness, where our protagonists are ready to follow through with their own desires of infidelity, only to miss each other due to some unfortunate happenstance. Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan often passed each other on a set of stairs leading down to their favorite noodle shop. Before their relationship would begin in earnest, they would be like two ships passing in the night. While these moments seem to exist only for a brief second, Wong extends the sequence far beyond reason, perfecting his technique of step printing. Step printing is the process of shooting the movie in fast motion with a slow shutter speed and then slowing it down in post-process. Wong experiments with motion to make everyday life seem extraordinary.—Max Covill

15. Yi Yi

Year: 2000
Director: Edward Yang
Stars: Wu Nien-jen, Elaine Jin, Issey Ogata, Kelly Lee, Jonathan Chang, Hsi-Sheng Chen, Su-Yun Ko, Lawrence Ko
Rating: NR

The opening frames of Yi Yi, overlaid by a maudlin score, are suggestive of an overwrought melodrama to come, though this is far from the case. The film may be bookended by a wedding and a funeral—stuffed with everything in between—and details a long-running, intergenerational record, but it also has the light touch of a humanistic dramedy. Its first scene focuses on a raucous, farcical wedding; think of the iconic line “Where is that pregnant bitch?” from the groom’s ex-girlfriend. Compare this to its final scene, which pivots toward earnest grief. Yang-Yang’s (Jonathan Chang) funeral address to his grandmother culminates in a brief moment of intergenerational harmony, even as he rejects the film’s earlier exploration of cyclicality. His father, NJ, for instance, is the focal point of the film, and it is his subjectivity that informs sweeping imagery that positions vignettes of his children’s lives in continuance with his own—his children’s lives as a kind of rebirth, a stage of possibility. Yi Yi’s bookends illustrate its skill in composing a soap opera of quietly epic proportions, one that’s rooted in balance between love and disillusion, farce and tragedy, and the intricate interstices of difference between generations.—Hafsah Abbasi

16. The Piano Teacher

Year: 2001
Director: Michael Haneke
Stars: Isabelle Huppert, Annie Girardot, Benoît Magimel
Rating: R

Michael Haneke’s confrontational filmmaking does not take sides in its portrayal of the apparently unbalanced lead character. Isabelle Huppert stars as masochistic piano teacher who strikes up an affair with a much younger student. As Erika, Huppert plays a woman with a hard-edge, immensely talented and proud but trapped by an overbearing mother and an inability to unwind. As explored in the film, masochism is not about giving up power, but rather exercising it—it is Erika who dictates very concisely exactly what kind of sex and violence she wants. Huppert’s intense and powerful performance showcase how the physical pain and humiliations connect with an otherwise mysterious inner world. Haneke’s filmmaking, always blistering with the mysteries that lie behind the eyes is at its height here, in one of his most difficult and mysterious cinematic experiences. As always, Haneke challenges the viewer to look away knowing very well there is a dark pleasure in seeing something that is not meant to be seen. In many ways, Haneke’s work which pushes and pulls between pleasure and pain mirrors the very subject at hand. —Justine Smith

17. Marie Antoinette

Year: 2006
Director: Sofia Coppola
Stars: Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Judy Davis, Rip Torn, Rose Byrne, Asia Argento, Molly Shannon, Shirley Henderson, Danny Huston, Steve Coogan
Rating: PG-13

In his article “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” critic ​​André Bazin delineates the image as the object itself; it is through the artmaking process of photography that this object is freed from the temporal and spatial aspects that govern it. If there’s any filmmaker whose oeuvre embodies this idea, it’s Sofia Coppola. Her work is singularly affecting because her visual lens is indicative of empathetic observation: She sees both the thing and the overlay of myth around it—how milieus and individuals dress and undress themselves in the eyes of others, and in their own eyes too. Her work is centered around the deconstruction of myth, and her focus on aesthetics is essential to this. With Marie Antoinette, Coppola uses the enshrined historical figure Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) as a conduit for exploring women’s subjectivity. It’s not a film that’s interested in explaining the political or material realities of the period. As a picture that takes place entirely in Marie’s inner world, it’s not one of her—or the film’s—primary concerns insofar as it can be delegated to others within her circle. This lack of a focus on material dynamics is not a fault of the film, though. Marie Antoinette is a picture that’s fixed within the walls of Versailles, just as Marie is. Versailles itself is of course a marker of spectacle, luxury and Marie’s exorbitant power and wealth, but it’s also an emblem of artifice, and of the reality that the very structures that elevate Marie are also the ones that entomb her. Setting—and its suffocation—is a key motif in Coppola’s filmography (see: the Chateau Marmont in Somewhere, Grosse Pointe in The Virgin Suicides), and Marie Antoinette details this with the filmmaker’s characteristic observational eye. When Marie’s room is destroyed by rioters at the end of the film, it may not be such a tragedy. By the end of Marie Antoinette, Marie has grown up with the knowledge that such fixtures of beauty aren’t erected without suppression. The tragedy is Marie being forced to leave and sacrifice her comforts, her realization of this coming full circle.—Hafsah Abbasi

18. Carol

Year: 2015
Director: Todd Haynes
Stars: Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Sarah Paulson
Rating: R

In Todd Haynes’ Carol, Therese’s (Rooney Mara) heart is encased and inaccessible—as if only to be glimpsed through the glass of a telephone booth or through the lens of her camera—until one day a woman named Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett), who, from across the room, transforms Therese’s way of seeing with a little gesture of her head and a flirtatious, “I like the hat,” finally unearths it. Soon, Carol and Therese begin to dissolve into one another, to the music of “You Belong to Me,” no less. Bookended by a hand on shoulder, Therese continues to conceive of what her desire means, and the two dizzyingly create their own language of connection, fueled by Haynes’ acute eye, Ed Lachman’s grainy, Saul Leiter-reminiscent cinematography and the sounds of Carter Burwell’s propulsive score. —Kyle Turner

19. Good Time

Year: 2017
Directors: Josh and Benny Safdie
Stars: Robert Pattinson, Benny Safdie, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Buddy Duress, Peter Verby, Barkhad Abdi, Taliah Webster
Rating: R

The hero of Good Time is one of the canniest individuals in recent cinema, which might seem like an odd thing to say about a scummy lowlife who screws up a bank heist in the film’s opening reels. But don’t underestimate Connie: Several of the people who cross his path make that mistake, and he gets the better of them every time. Connie is played by Robert Pattinson in a performance so locked-in from the first second that it shoots off an electric spark from the actor to the audience: Just sit back, he seems to be telling us. I’ve got this under control. The financially strapped character lives in Queens, unhappy that his mentally challenged brother Nick (Benny Safdie) is cooped up in a facility that, Connie believes, doesn’t do enough to help him. Impulsively, Connie strong-arms Nick into helping him rob a bank. They make off with thousands of dollars, but what they don’t realize is that they live in the real world, not a movie. A paint bomb goes off in their bag, staining the money and the criminals’ clothes. Shaken and trying not to panic, Connie and Nick abandon their getaway car, quickly raising the suspicion of some nearby cops, who chase down Nick. Connie escapes, determined to get his brother out of jail—either through bail money or other means. As Connie, Pattinson is shockingly vital and present, unabashedly throwing himself into any situation. Following their star’s lead, the filmmakers deliver a jet-fueled variation on their usual intricate exploration of New York’s marginalized citizens. Good Time features no shootouts or car chases—there isn’t a single explosion in the whole film. The Safdies and Pattinson don’t need any of that. Like Connie, they thrive on their wits and endless inventiveness—the thrill comes in marveling at how far it can take them. —Tim Grierson

20. Decision to Leave

Year: 2022
Director: Park Chan-wook
Stars: Tang Wei, Park Hae-il
Rating: R

A detective finds himself falling for his murder suspect, who is fingered for killing her husband. If that sounds like a plot ripped straight from an Alfred Hitchcock film, that’s because it’s textbook Park Chan-wook. The Korean director has been taking inspiration from Hitchcock for much of his career, one defined by twisty mysteries and perverse thrillers that the Master of Suspense likely could never have fathomed. Park’s latest is perhaps the director’s most Hitchcockian in the most crucial aspects, though also more subdued compared to his track record. Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) is an overworked detective who is—in true clichéd, noir form—married to his job more than to his actual wife. The latter lives in quiet, foggy Iso while the “youngest detective in the country’s history” works weeks in Busan, where the crime and murder that sustains him runs rampant. The couple tends to talk about how to keep their marriage lively instead of actually acting upon it. Hae-jun’s wife (Lee Jung-hyun) relays helpful facts about the health benefits of having regular sex, suggesting that they commit to “doing it” once a week. Still, Hae-jun spends more time on stake-outs than in his own bed due to insomnia, which plagues him as a symptom of his pile of unresolved cases. Concurrently with another active case, Hae-jun finds himself adding another crime to his growing folder: A mountain-climber who fell tragically to his demise. Though by all appearances an accident (despite the late climber’s proficiency), the mountaineer’s much younger Chinese wife, Seo-rae (Tang Wei), quickly elicits suspicion from Hae-jun and his hot-head partner Soo-wan (Go Kyung-Pyo). Park introduces the film’s femme fatale in the most unassuming way: Camera on Hae-jun, with her measured voice off-screen as she enters the morgue to identify her deceased husband. Hyper-stylized, surprisingly funny and a little convoluted, at its heart, Decision to Leave is a tragic story about love, trust and, of course, murder. Arguably, Decision to Leave is more of a romance than anything else; the crime/mystery aspect of the narrative is the least interesting part, though one could assume that’s entirely intentional. While not negligible, the crime is more of a conduit through which the real meat of the story, the relationship between Hae-jun and Seo-rae, is catalyzed and slowly evolves. Their romance is dependent upon requited longing and looming, unresolved threat—the kind of threat that fuels Hae-jun’s sleepless life, the kind that he can’t live without. From the string-centric score to the noir archetypes, to the themes of romance, betrayal, obsession and voyeurism, Decision to Leave is Park’s most clear evocation of Hitchcock to date. Because of this, it becomes somewhat evident where the story will go, even when things take a turn. But the familiarity of the crime narrative reads as intentionally superficial, a vehicle for a more unconventional exploration of the standard detective/femme fatale romance which has laid the foundation for Park’s own sumptuous spin. While not Park’s best work, nor a masterpiece, Decision to Leave is an extravagant and hopelessly romantic thriller that weaves past and present into something entirely its own.–Brianna Zigler