Peter Bradshaw 

Cannes 2022: 10 movies to watch out for in this year’s festival

Austin Butler shakes his stuff as Elvis, Cronenberg gets creepy, Claire Denis takes on colonial agony and Hirokazu Kore-eda unwraps his first Korean-language film
  
  

Austin Butler in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis.
Whole lotta acting going on … Austin Butler in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. Photograph: Warner Bros/Allstar

Elvis

Baz Luhrmann brings his trademark truckload of spangly glamour and sugar-rush showbiz to the story of Elvis Presley with Austin Butler as the King and Tom Hanks as his manipulative manager, Colonel Tom Parker.

The Natural History of Destruction

Ukrainian film-maker Sergei Loznitsa returns to Cannes for a special screening of his new documentary, based on the book by WG Sebald about the horror of aerial bombardment during the second world war – a subject with a special resonance today.

Watch a trailer for Crimes of the Future

Crimes of the Future

Cannes regular David Cronenberg returns with his own long-gestating script, about a future world in which people have to adapt to transhumanism. Evolution accelerates, bodies sprout new organs and human identities are in a state of flux.

Showing Up

Michelle Williams is the regular leading player for film-maker Kelly Reichardt, and she returns as Lizzie, a sculptor whose life is about to be turned upside down by a new show. Other stars include André 3000, Judd Hirsch and Amanda Plummer.

Stars at Noon

European cinema icon Claire Denis brings a movie with a hint of Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously and her own keynote theme of colonial agony: Margaret Qualley and Joe Alwyn star as a journalist and businessman in 1980s Nicaragua.

Watch a trailer for Broker

Broker

Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda has made his first Korean language film, with Korean star Song Kang-ho, an intense emotional drama, based on a real case, about the “baby boxes” in which people can leave unwanted newborns.

One Fine Morning

Transgressive passion is the foundation of this movie from Mia Hansen-Løve, with Léa Seydoux as Sandra, a single mum with a young daughter, trying to find care for her elderly father, and embarking on an intense affair with an old friend.

Men

A frisson of League-of-Gentlemen unease in a creepy English country village where all the men (played by Rory Kinnear) have a weird resemblance to each other: Jessie Buckley stars in this scary movie from Alex Garland.

Silent Twins

Polish director Agnieszka Smoczyńska takes on the story of the British “silent twins”. Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrance star as identical twins June and Jennifer Gibbons – who spoke to no one but each other, wrote “outsider art” novels and were eventually sent to Broadmoor for arson and theft.

Paris Memories

Virginie Efira stars in Alice Winocour’s drama as a woman caught up in a terrorist attack in a Paris bistro. Some months later, stricken with PTSD and amnesia, and plagued with fragmented memories, she makes a determined attempt to reconstruct her past.

 

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