Top Ten Cannes Festival films

This year Cannes has gone back to its roots as a showcase for arthouse films. Our correspondents pick the best so far

Martina Gusman is an imprisoned mother in Leonera, a powerful indictment of jails in Argentina

From The Times, May 22, 2008

James Christopher and Wendy Ide

It’s clear that the great films this year are migrating from the Middle East and South America, James Christopher writes. The cartoon thriller Waltz with Bashir is a stunning first: an animated documentary about the Lebanese blitz, narrated by Israeli soldiers, which is presented and painted like Scooby Doo. A film called Leonera, by Pablo Trapero, wonderfully charts the story of a young mother banged up in an Argentine hell-hole prison.

If there’s one thing this festival proves, it’s the huge folly of not funding directors like these, who actually teach us to see. The Cannes film market may be luxuriating in growth – there are 1,600 screenings this year, almost double the number in 2007 – but competition for funding and distribution is keener than ever, and many films aren’t selling. Buyers, anxious in the face of rising costs, are reluctant to take risks on less conventional fare. Yet away from the glitter of Indiana Jones and Kung Fu Panda, the gems of Cannes are, as ever, the independent films. As this year’s selection shows, the artistry behind them is as strong as ever.

• Eldorado

This off-beat tragicomic road movie from Belgium is one of the sleeper hits of the festival. Screening in the Director’s Fortnight sidebar, it’s a far cry from the dour, grey perception of Belgian cinema fostered by the work of people like the Dardenne brothers. Its writer, director and star, Bouli Lanners, saturates the film with colour and infuses it with a deadpan humour. Lanners plays a used-car salesman who surprises an incompetent burglar in his house. Rather than call the police, he takes pity on the kid. The pair take an incident-prone road trip across Belgium’s rural heartland. The landscapes and soundtrack choices evoke American road movies of a bygone era; the sensibility is definitely European. (Wendy Ide)

• Gomorrah

The best received film in the main competition so far, this Italian Mafia drama is strongly tipped to take home one of the big prizes. Favourable comparisons with The Godfather have been made; despite its disorientating structure and long running time, this unsentimental Neapolitan saga has become one of the festival’s hottest tickets. Adapted from a book by Roberto Saviano, the film looks likely to be a commercial success as well as a critical one. The excellent Tony Servillo stars, and, since he also takes the lead in Paolo Sorrentino’s film Il Divo in the festival, looks like a contender for a prize. (Wendy Ide)

• Hunger

This is a stunning debut feature, and one of the very few British films represented at this year’s Cannes festival. The director Steve McQueen is a former Turner prizewinner. His immaculately old-school thriller about the IRA, and trying to survive the brutality of Long Kesh, is just wonderful. There are few words. No music. Bobby Sands, played by Michael Fassbender, is the star. In a prison cell decorated by his own faeces he foments one of the most potent challenges to Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as Prime Minister. He decides to starve himself to death. I can’t describe what this actor goes through. His 24-minute, single-shot debate in a prison visiting room with a parish priest is pure Oscar. The starvation is an unspeakable horror. The formality of the film is totally unsettling. In fact it’s poetry. (James Christopher)

• Leonera (The Lion’s Den)

Pablo Trapero’s powerful blast about jails in Argentina is actually a great and gritty Cell Block H soap about being young, pregnant and in dire need of help after burying the bread knife in your husband’s neck. An understandable offence, clearly. But in Argentina they throw away the keys. Martina Gusman is just brilliant as the confused and conflicted Julia who gives birth to a baby boy in prison, and then has to rely on her pals to ring-fence the crèche while her mum tries all sorts of ghastly methods to intercede. As far as Official Competition issues go, this is numero uno. (James Christopher)

• Of Time and the City

A lump comes to the throat when this film is mentioned anywhere on the Croisette. It is a modest, low-budget sensation. It is a film poem about Terence Davies’s life and the city he grew up in – Liverpool – that will make you howl with laughter, and then cry. Narrated by Davies himself, the film is a montage of thoughts and terraced streets. We see new slums being built before our eyes. The camera crawls up the Corinthian columns of City House like someone lifting the hem of a dress. This is film-making of the first order. (James Christopher)

• Three Monkeys

I have a sneaking suspicion that this wonderful film will walk off with the Palme d’Or. Why is a good question. The film is Turkish, and I’ve yet to meet a critic who can pronounce the director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s name. The story is a mess. But it is a thing of mental, sonic and visual beauty. Forget Crystal Skulls; this is the real business of Cannes. The story is simple, but brilliantly told. A thrusting politician smacks into a man on a country road in the middle of the night. He asks his humble driver – who is nowhere near the crash – to take responsibility for a fat fee. Nine months in jail is chicken feed. The exquisite twist is the money, the horny wife and the angry grown-up son. The sweltering heat is in marvellous counterpoint to the tension. This is a must. (James Christopher)

• Tony Manero

It’s such a wonderfully bizarre premise: a film about a dead-eyed sociopath whose obsession with disco, specifically with John Travolta’s role in Saturday Night Fever, leads him to commit brutal murders. All this is set against the backdrop of the Pinochet regime in Chile. Despite being made on a micro-budget, the film has a distinctive aesthetic: jump cuts are enthusiastically employed, some shots are completely out of focus. The characters are defiantly unsympathetic; the sex scenes are utterly grim. It’s not an overtly political commentary but the seedy, down-at-heel sensibility speaks volumes about this period in Chile’s history. (Wendy Ide)

• Tyson

Let me paint the picture. Mike Tyson gripped my hand walking up the middle aisle of the Festival Palais. For reasons that still escape me, he is a local hero. And he can’t speak a word of French. James Toback’s documentary tale is the story of his troubled life, as hero and villain. Mike has knocked out countless pretenders. In fact he has absolutely no idea just how famous he is. But this wonderfully graphic biopic is electric, simply because Toback shoots it as a 35mm chunk of art. The remembered fights have an unholy ring about them. The anger and flailing fists are captured quite beautifully. This is one of the genuine surprises of the festival. (James Christopher)

• Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Sex and Woody Allen do not usually end up in the same sentence. But this is Cannes. Woody is beloved by this festival for all the right reasons. Well, two: a) this flirtatious comedy will make serious money; and b) thank God he’s not in it. This comedy about chalk-and-cheese girls who fall in love with Javier Bardem’s splashy artist is a total joy. They are bits of Woody of course. Hippy chick Scarlett Johansson and her prickly best friend, Rebecca Hall, are two beautiful female students who arrive for a summer in Barcelona. They end up sleeping with Javier – and his nutty ex-wife Penélope Cruz. It’s glorious. (James Christopher)

• Waltz with Bashir

The first feature-length animated documentary is a deeply personal piece of work from the Israeli director Ari Folman. A friend is plagued by nightmares that he attributes to a period in the 1980s when both men were teenage soldiers in the Israeli Army; Folman realises that large chunks of his memory of the time are missing. He sets about tracking friends and fellow soldiers, hoping to piece together what happened during a massacre he knows he witnessed but can no longer remember. It’s a savagely beautiful antiwar film. (Wendy Ide)

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