Cannes Film Festival: Live From Closing Ceremony - The New York Times

CANNES, France — On Saturday evening, on its 12th day, the exhilarating, exhausting Cannes Film Festival will end with the awards ceremony and a new Palme d’Or winner.

After two uncertain years (the event was canceled in 2020 and operated at reduced capacity last year), the festival came roaring back with art films and blockbusters, “les stars hollywoodiennes” and tens of thousands of other participants, the vast majority unmasked. The pandemic wasn’t over, but attendees at the most important film festival in the world were definitely over it.

The festival, which celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, fiercely maintains a sense of both historical continuity and its centrality in the global film world. Movies come and go, but Cannes remains eternal — or that’s the idea, at any rate. To that end, despite some logistical hiccups, the event looked and operated much as it has in the past. For many, that meant trooping in and out of theaters and screening rooms from morning until past midnight amid working, complaining, gossiping and arguing about the quality of the movies. The consensus among critics is that it’s been a great, good, blah, so-so year.

To judge from hallway chatter and the trades, French critics are most enthusiastic about “Armageddon Time,” a nuanced, autobiographical coming-of-age story from the American director James Gray. The critics sampled by Screen magazine are more passionate about “Decision to Leave,” a sly, formally ingenious thriller from the South Korean director Park Chan-wook. My favorite movie so far (I have one more to watch) is “EO,” a devastating tale of an abused donkey from the octogenarian Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, whose compassion is as profound as his commitment to cinema’s plasticity.

But critics don’t hand out the Palme. That job belongs to the nine men and women serving on the feature films jury, which this year is presided over by the French actor Vincent Lindon (“Titane”). Whether jury members read Screen is anyone’s guess (I doubt it!), but given that most of them are directors — including Joachim Trier, Ladj Ly, Rebecca Hall and Asghar Farhadi — I am hopeful that they will make the right decision, honor the art and award the Palme to Skolimowski’s heartbreaker. That’s unlikely, but I can dream. I’ll be back later to report on the winners of this year’s fest.

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