Beyond the Multiplex

May 25, 2007 | CANNES, France -- With most of the major movie stars having decamped, and the French Riviera on the verge of plunging into its torpid summer season, it's a good time to take stock of Cannes 2007. The Palme d'Or ceremony is still to come on Sunday night (and I'll have a report on Monday morning), but while that will create international headlines and look great on the DVD case, Cannes' big prize has long since stopped being a box-office difference maker outside continental Europe. Still, it's not as if this festival has no reach. "Pan's Labyrinth" and "Volver" emerged from Cannes last year with worldwide buzz, and went on to find a wide audience in the English-speaking world that was never before accessible to Spanish-language cinema. "An Inconvenient Truth" had actually premiered at Sundance, but the media coverage surrounding Al Gore's visit to Cannes came right before the film's U.S. opening and helped push an unlikely hit. If pictures like Rachid Bouchareb's World War II drama "Days of Glory," Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Bergman-esque domestic drama "Climates," Andrea Arnold's erotic noir "Red Road" and Abderrahmane Sissako's confrontational docudrama "Bamako" never found the audiences they merited, they still got their shot, largely because of what happened here.

Of course, it can run in the other direction sometimes too. If you'd told me a year ago that well-liked Cannes films such as Aki Kaurismäki's "Lights in the Dusk," Israel Adrián Caetano's "Chronicle of an Escape" (aka "Buenos Aires 1977"), Wang Chao's "Luxury Car" and Pedro Costa's "Colossal Youth" would remain virtually unreleased and unseen in the United States, I'd have -- well, OK, I'd have believed you.

All of that is to state the obvious: Picking the hottest films out of any film festival is an inherently subjective matter of guesswork and taste, and I'm certain to be dead wrong about something on this list. I've included the films that were my personal favorites at Cannes this year, but of course I'm also reacting to the tides of gossip and innuendo and thirdhand enthusiasm that flow through any large group of people. I'm including a couple of films I haven't seen yet, based on the overwhelming reaction of those who have. (It's possible to see about half of the official selection at Cannes, and maybe more if you literally don't do anything else, but everybody leaves here regretting the movies they don't catch.)

A few words about the movies that aren't on my list, because in some cases their absence requires explanation. I'm not including Hollywood movies that screened here out of competition, like "A Mighty Heart" and "Ocean's Thirteen." I'm also not counting movies that have been extensively covered here and that will clearly get a mainstream or near-mainstream level of release. Those would include Wong Kar-wai's "My Blueberry Nights" (the opening-night feature here), along with the Coen brothers' "No Country for Old Men" and James Gray's crackerjack 1980s New York cop thriller "We Own the Night."

I'm essentially looking for this year's art-house surprises: challenging and adventurous films likely to appeal to a small but serious audience of cinema buffs all over the world. To my own surprise, I'm not going to include Korean director Kim Ki-duk's "Breath," Hungarian art-god Béla Tarr's "The Man From London," Alexander Sokurov's "Alexandra" or Gus Van Sant's "Paranoid Park." Those are all important directors, and those movies -- all respectfully received here -- are worth discussing in more detail. But none of them, to my mind, is a startling or exceptional work likely to reach beyond those filmmakers' existing fan bases. ("Paranoid Park," for instance, will play better in Europe than in America. "The Man From London," like most Tarr films, will barely escape the festival circuit.)

I'm fairly sure all of these will actually see U.S. release in the next year, but there can be major differences of scale. Pictures like Julian Schnabel's "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" or Juan Pablo Bayona's "The Orphanage" will be rolled out as potential foreign-language hits, while Carlos Reygadas' "Silent Light" may play half a dozen big-city venues. My advice is to catch them all, if and when you can. (The list is alphabetical and otherwise unranked.)

Next page: And now, the list ...