By Miranda Murray and Michaela Cabrera
BERLIN/PARIS (Reuters) -This year’s Cannes Film Festival will see a raft of veteran attendees such as Wes Anderson go toe to toe with art-house cinema darlings like Ari Aster on a red carpet that is set to be particularly action-packed this year thanks to one Tom Cruise.
The film industry keeps close tabs on the glamour-filled festival, where top contenders often go on to pick up Oscars later in the year. The 2024 winner of the festival’s highest honor, “Anora,” took home five Academy Awards including Best Picture, while “Emilia Perez” and “The Substance” were also lauded.
“What happened to ‘The Substance’ was incredible. And that is maybe what you can mention as the power of Cannes. And we know that we have some power and we give this power to the artist,” festival president Thierry Fremaux told Reuters after announcing the official selection on Thursday.
The 19-strong competition features returning faces including Anderson, who is bringing “The Phoenician Scheme” two years after “Asteroid City,” as well as French director and previous Palme d’Or winner Julia Ducournau with her latest, “Alpha.”
Richard Linklater with “New Wave,” Joachim Trier with “Sentimental Value” and the well-established Dardenne brothers of Belgium with “Young Mothers” are also on the list of competitors.
Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov is back, one year after his feature about Russian writer and poet Eduard Limonov, with a new film about notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, while award-winning Iranian director Jafar Panahi is competing with “A Simple Accident.”
On the art-house side, master of off-putting horror Ari Aster is in Cannes for the first time with “Eddington,” a reflection on the state of the United States, while Kelly Reichardt, known for “First Cow,” is showing “The Mastermind,” a heist film starring up-and-coming British actor Josh O’Connor, who won an Emmy for “The Crown.”
ACTION PACKED
Beyond the competition films, the festival is bringing plenty of Hollywood action to the French Riviera resort town with the return of Cruise, whose last appearance in 2022 for “Top Gun: Maverick” memorably featured a fighter jet flyover.
The 62-year-old leading man will present the eighth, and perhaps final, iteration of the “Mission Impossible” action series with “Mission Impossible – The Final Reckoning” before its global release on May 23.
Another Hollywood icon, two-time Oscar winner Robert De Niro, will also be in town to receive an honorary Palme d’Or celebrating his six-decade-long acting career, while the leading man of the band U2, Bono, will be on screen in a new documentary “Stories of Surrender.”
British actor Harris Dickinson, who made a splash with Nicole Kidman in “Babygirl” last year, is competing behind the camera in the art-house film-focused “Un Certain Regard” sidebar section with “Urchin,” as is U.S. actor Scarlett Johansson with “Eleanor the Great.”
Other films outside competition include a documentary about English novelist George Orwell, a musical about feminists in Chile and a story set in 2007 about friends who get in over their heads in Gaza by directors Arab and Tarzan Nasser.
The 78th Cannes Film Festival will run from May 13-24, with French actor and Oscar winner Juliette Binoche heading this year’s jury that will hand out the Palme d’Or top prize.
The festival will open with the French film “Leave One Day” by director Amelie Bonnin.
(Reporting by Miranda Murray and Michaela Cabrera; Editing by Mark Porter)
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