Cannes: David Rooney’s Top 5 Most Anticipated Titles

STARS AT NOON

Fresh from winning best director honors at the Berlin Film Festival with Both Sides of the Blade, French auteur Claire Denis returns with another combustible romance, this time based on a 1986 novel by Denis Johnson. Joe Alwyn stars as an English businessman and Margaret Qualley as an American journalist; they meet in Nicaragua under Sandinista rule and form a relationship shaped by revolution, which is put to the test as they try to escape the country.

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ARMAGEDDON TIME

After venturing into the Amazon jungle in The Lost City of Z and deep space in Ad Astra, Cannes favorite James Gray returns to the home turf of his childhood in what appears to be his most personal work to date. A coming-of-age story set in Queens, New York, on the cusp of the Reagan years, it stars Anthony Hopkins, Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway, with potential breakout roles for newcomers Michael Banks Repeta and Jaylin Webb.

DECISION TO LEAVE

It’s been six years since South Korean maestro Park Chan-wook turned from the violent heart of humanity — the theme of his reputation-making Vengeance trilogy — to sex in 2016’s painterly erotic thriller The Handmaiden. Desire again courses through his work in his enigmatic new film, in which a man falls to his death from a mountain peak, and the detective heading the investigation becomes drawn to the victim’s widow, whose seeming detachment makes her a suspect.

SHOWING UP

Two of the most fruitful artistic collaborations in Kelly Reichardt’s body of work — with actor Michelle Williams and writer Jonathan Raymond — continue in this character study of a sculptor in Portland, Oregon, who’s juggling personal and professional concerns as she prepares for a show that could be a career-changer. The cast includes Hong Chau, Maryann Plunkett, Judd Hirsch, André Benjamin and John Magaro, the latter so memorable in Reichardt’s First Cow.

MEN

Alex Garland artfully blended sci-fi with modern horror in Ex Machina and Annihilation; his third film as writer-director appears to go a more traditional ghost-story route, with an unsettling take on gender dynamics. Jessie Buckley stars as a recently widowed woman looking to regain her strength at a cottage retreat in the English countryside that turns out to be anything but restful as judgmental male eyes settle on her, adding paranoia to her grief.

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