I’ve returned from my first-ever Cannes Film Festival, and I have no choice but to determine that I am the reason everybody said the vibes were off this year. How else to explain that mere hours after I left, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur screened for the press and became the festival’s first true consensus hit in competition, a full week after it began. (As L.A. Times film editor Josh Rothkopf put it, ”not a moment too soon.”)
I’ve learned from friends who are Cannes regulars that it’s basically a requirement that you wind up missing at least one of the festival’s big hits. Given what an odd year it was for the competition, it may be harder than ever to predict what the jury, led this year by Park Chan-wook, might pick for the Palme d’Or. But it’s a little easier to guess which titles are likely to get attention when they play more festivals this fall, as is the usual path for the biggest Cannes hits.
So, before I get into today’s interview with Sarah Snook — who used her post-Succession power to both get the Peacock limited series All Her Fault made, and make it the kind of set she’d be proud to work on — a look at the seven titles that I actually managed to see that are worth keeping an eye on. No guarantees that any of these will be Oscar contenders on the scale of Sentimental Value or The Secret Agent from last year — again, weird year! But given how important Cannes has become in shaping the Oscar race, I’d be shocked if at least several of these aren’t part of the conversation for the year ahead.
1. Club Kid, dir. Jordan Firstman
With all due respect to Minotaur — which does not currently have U.S. distribution but will probably have it before too long — there was one undeniable hit of the festival: Club Kid, from writer, director and star Jordan Firstman. Not so long ago, the I Love LA and English Teacher supporting player was rankling Heated Rivalry fans with his comments about the hit show. (“It’s not how gay people fuck.”) Now, he’s the toast of the Cannes ball, with a splashy $17 million deal from A24 for his debut film. (Not that it was a total shocker: Reps for Club Kid were high enough on the movie before Cannes to have screened it for press ahead of the fest.)
Though it’s set within the druggy, transgressive world of New York’s queer club scene, Club Kid is at heart a fairly conventional coming-of-age story; as the film’s co-star Diego Calva told me during his visit to our studio (watch above!), it’s a movie even his grandmother could love. Starring Firstman as a party boy whose life is transformed by the arrival of a 10-year-old son he didn’t know he had, Club Kid has some of the same spiky exterior covering a heart of gold as Anora — and shares a producer, Alex Coco — as well as the comic setpieces that veer flawlessly into genuine emotion. I’m told A24 intends to release Club Kid in October or November — smack in the Oscar window, of course, and right when Neon premiered Anora after it won the Palme d’Or. It feels like an easy play for a best original screenplay nomination for Firstman, but if the weird vibes at Cannes continue to some of the other major contenders expected later this year, who knows how far Club Kid might be able to go?
2. Paper Tiger, dir. James Gray
You could almost feel the relief in the room at the beachside after party for Paper Tiger on Saturday, as I ran into fellow Oscar pundits who were gleefully speculating about how Scarlett Johansson could run the table for best supporting actress, how Miles Teller could secure his first nomination, or at minimum how the buzz around Adam Driver’s career-best performance might allow director James Gray to break through at the Oscars. Finally, some true awards buzz at Cannes! But as a fan of Gray’s work for nearly 20 years, Paper Tiger very much included, I also worry we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Backed by Neon and in a good position to win one of the jury prizes announced this weekend, Paper Tiger absolutely has what it needs to be a heavy-hitter. A New York-set crime drama in the vein of Gray’s previous films The Yards and We Own the Night, the film takes a somewhat familiar crime premise — two brothers (Teller and Driver) get mixed up with terrifying gangsters — and spins a larger story about American ambition, family ties and all the misguided ways we humans try to protect each other. It’s small but mighty, with one of Gray’s signature wallops of a final shot. But if Gray couldn’t get the Oscars on board with a gorgeous historical epic (Lost City of Z), starry space epic (Ad Astra) or 2022’s heavily campaigned Armageddon Time, is the quieter Paper Tiger going to be treated any differently? I’ll be banging the drum for it as hard as anyone, but I also think it will be, like many James Gray characters, an underdog.
3. Coward, dir. Lukas Dhont
I technically can’t say much about this, since it premieres at the festival today and everyone who saw it early, myself included, is under embargo. But you can watch my video interview with writer-director Lukas Dhont above for more on how his emotional World War I drama came together, and also just keep some historical data in mind. Dhont’s directorial debut, Girl, which premiered at Cannes when he was just 26 years old, won the festival’s Camera d’Or for best first feature as well as the Queer Palm. His second film, Close, premiered at Cannes in 2022 and won the Grand Prix, essentially the runner-up for the Palme d’Or. Coward has worldwide distribution from Mubi and no U.S. distribution just yet, but any movie with that kind of pedigree is bound to be a major awards player unless it’s a total disaster — and I’m here to tell you, it is not! Watch this space!
4. In Waves, dir. Phuong Mai Nguyen
One of the few high-profile pickups from Cannes thus far, this emotional animated memoir was acquired by Netflix amid a reportedly “highly competitive” bidding war. Riding high off its Oscar win for KPop Demon Hunters, Netflix is clearly looking for its own version of Flow, the indie animated film that debuted at Cannes and became the surprise underdog winner of the best animated feature Oscar nearly a year later. Between In Waves, the animated film Iron Boy (picked up at Cannes by Sony Pictures Classics) and Tangles (from director Leah Nelson and produced by Lauren Miller Rogen and Seth Rogen), it was a good Cannes for indie animation. That could all lend an interesting shape to the upcoming animated feature Oscar race.
5. Fatherland, dir. Pawel Pawlikowski
Just 80 minutes long and telling a slim story about a father-daughter road trip between German author Thomas Mann (played by Hanns Zischler) and his daughter (Sandra Hüller), Fatherland fits right in with Pawel Pawlikowski’s two previous films, Ida and Cold War, both of which went from Cannes acclaim to multiple Oscar nominations. I was a little less bullish on Fatherland than some of my colleagues, and think it might mostly be ballast for Hüller as she navigates Oscar campaigns for her larger starring role in Rose, a potential supporting part in Alejandro González Iñárritu‘s Digger and maybe even her scene-stealing work in Project Hail Mary. But who knows, maybe Hüller wins the festival’s best actress prize, and Fatherland becomes her big contender. Hüller has an enviable number of options to choose from this year!
6. Clarissa, dir. Arie and Chuko Esiri
An inventive, emotional retelling of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway set in modern-day, upper-class Nigeria, Clarissa has been a sneaky favorite among those who saw it in the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight section. With Neon releasing it, and its twin directors, Arie and Chuko Esiri, very good at explaining their vision and process for making movies in their native Nigeria (see evidence above!), I can imagine this being a slow-growing film as it plays other festivals later in the year. Star Sophie Okonedo hasn’t been Oscar-nominated since her first, for Hotel Rwanda in 2005; what if this is the chance to bring her back?
7. The Man I Love, dir. Ira Sachs
Told in Sachs’ typically unadorned style, but with a barnburner Rami Malek performance at the center, The Man I Love could potentially break out on the level of Sachs’ 2023 film, Passages, which won the best actor prize from the New York Film Critics Circle for star Franz Rogowski. In their visit to our studio, Sachs and his co-writer Mauricio Zacharias talked about their goal to make a film set during the AIDS crisis that was still suffused with joy, and you feel it in so many sections of the movie, as Malek’s downtown New York artist works to mount a new production even as his body is failing. As someone who’s spent years waiting for more people to discover Sachs’ work, I think this really could be the one to get there.
Now, onto my conversation with the great Sarah Snook, about All Her Fault and trying to figure out an answer to the eternally challenging question: What’s next?
Her Time
When I spoke to Matthew Macfadyen a few weeks ago, he told me about the strange feeling of ending Succession after so many years of playing Tom Wambsgans. “You think, ‘God, what do I do now?’”
But his co-star and former onscreen wife, Sarah Snook, tells me that moment for her is only just happening now.
As Succession was winding down, she was pregnant with her first child. Soon after, she dove into ambitious, one-woman productions of The Picture of Dorian Gray on both the West End and Broadway. Unbelievably, it was between those two productions that she both executive-produced and starred in the Peacock limited series All Her Fault. And it’s only now, as she talks about All Her Fault from her home in Australia, that she’s even got the time to wonder what’s next.
“It feels like Succession only just finished, in a really weird way,” Snook tells me, in a conversation you can also watch on video on The Ankler’s YouTube. “Now is sort of the space of, ‘What do I do next?’” Her decision to jump directly into both live theater and All Her Fault was, she admits, “not necessarily the obvious choice for anyone else. But I was like, there’s no way I’m not taking this opportunity.”
Adapted from the 2021 novel by Andrea Mara, set in Chicago but filmed in Snook’s hometown of Melbourne, All Her Fault is a thoughtful spin on the glossy mystery format that’s been so ubiquitous on TV in recent years. Snook plays Marissa, a high-powered corporate executive but also a mother, whose efforts to – you guessed it— have it all end in terrifying fashion when her son is kidnapped. The show is a bit of a whodunit but also a deep dive into the lives of Marissa and her family and friends, including a surprisingly lovely friendship that blossoms between Marissa and another mom, played by Dakota Fanning.
Snook says Marissa is closer to her real personality than Succession‘s Shiv Roy, but one of the real draws of All Her Fault was the opportunity as an actor to dig into the enormous emotions Marissa experiences throughout the show’s eight episodes.
“I mean, I’d love to do a comedy or something a little more lighthearted in the future,” Snook says with a laugh, acknowledging how much heavy-duty material she’s taken on. “But what is it like for a person who is a parent to go through this? I am a new parent, so much of my research involved diving into my own emotional history and background. The best thing about this kind of thriller is that it’s about what’s being presented to you in the moment. You’re in a constant state of reactivity, which is great to play as an actor.”
Behind the scenes, though, Snook got to be in charge in a way she’s never really experienced, working as an executive producer on things as big as story decisions and as small as asking everyone to bring reusable water bottles to the set. (“I’ve always been a person to bring a coffee cup and bring my water bottle to set. It’s just really easy.”) More than anything else, Snook says, she seized the opportunity to help shape the set’s culture.
“Everybody’s there doing their job,” she explains. “It’s really fucking hard sometimes. So if people are away from their families for the day and they’re doing a job that they love and they’re going to a set that’s tense or angry — what kind of work environment is that? That’s one built on fear, and it’s not supportive, it’s not respectful.”
Snook credits Succession creator Jesse Armstrong for demonstrating a better way to do it, a model she clearly carried over to All Her Fault. “He would work so hard, and he would put in so much effort that everybody around him wanted to do their job really well as well. That’s how you should lead. Make people feel valued, and make them want to do the work.”
Now that All Her Fault is out in the world and a bona fide hit, Snook is figuring out what comes next, with a few potential options she calls a lot of “big maybes.” She’s not sure what’s next — but at least she knows she’s not the only one.
“In my head, I’m like, ‘Oh, surely Emma Stone or Jennifer Lawrence, like A-list ladies of awesomeness, they know what they’re doing.’ But what’s their day-to-day look like? Probably a lot of the same sitting around and going, ‘Wait, what am I going to do today?’” she says. “This kind of creative job doesn’t always have a schedule attached. I have been thinking about that a lot recently— like, I think no one else knows what they’re doing either.”
