#The Hollywood Reporter Critics Pick the 20 Best Films of Cannes 2023

Competition

Starring a sensational Sandra Hüller as a German novelist on trial for the murder of her husband, French director Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winner is gripping and gratifyingly rich: part legal procedural, part portrait of a complicated woman, part snapshot of a marriage on the brink and part coming-of-age narrative. Above all, Anatomy of a Fall is about the essential unknowability of a person, of a relationship, and the perilous impossibility of trying to understand — whether it’s a child puzzling over his parents or a courtroom straining to make sense of an inscrutable suspect. — JON FROSCH

Special Screenings

Wim Wenders’ latest 3D documentary offers a mesmerizing cinematic catalog of German painter-sculptor Anselm Kiefer’s deeply tactile, maximalist oeuvre. As in Pina, Wenders’ luminous 2011 tribute to the late dancer-choreographer Pina Bausch, the director makes the best possible case for art house theaters to keep their 3D projection kit up to date: This is one of those rare movies that’s actually enriched by the use of the format and not an excuse for a gimmicky thrill ride for the easily amused or very young. — LESLIE FELPERIN

Un Certain Regard

The location of Anthony Chen’s intimate, satisfying film — the icy Chinese city of Yanji, near the North Korean border — eloquently underscores the circumstances of its protagonists, their lives suspended as if frozen in place. The characters are a woman and two men in their 20s (played with exquisite restraint and impeccable naturalism by Zhou Dongyu, Liu Haoran and Qu Chuxiao) entangled in a quasi-love-triangle and afflicted by anxieties seldom articulated. Their moments of introspection reveal as much as they withhold. — DAVID ROONEY

Competition

Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher’s invigoratingly strange and lyrical film revolves around a fascinating pocket community: the tombaroli, illegal grave-robbers who dig up Etruscan relics and make their money selling those antiquities on to fences who in turn sell them to museums and collectors for vastly larger sums. Josh O’Connor is superb in the central role of a haunted Englishman whom the tombaroli regard as a kind of mystic, able to locate fruitful spots to dig with a forked tree branch that serves as a divining rod. — D.R.

Cannes Premieres

It’s been 31 years since Spanish auteur Victor Erice made his last feature-length film, and it was worth the wait. The protagonist is an aging filmmaker and novelist (Manolo Solo), who, like Erice, hasn’t made a movie in decades, and who now lives like a hermit in a village on the Spanish coast. Deliberately paced but accumulating power, this poignant, vibrantly alive work builds to a crescendo in a closing act where a movie itself plays a pivotal role, resuscitating forgotten lives and memories as only the cinema can do. — JORDAN MINTZER

Un Certain Regard

Argentine director Rodrigo Moreno’s enchantingly enigmatic three-hour heist saga starts off as a leisurely crime story about two bank employees trying to free themselves from the daily grind. But then it digresses, deepens and complexifies, creating new mysteries out of old ones and love affairs out of thin air. The intimately cryptic epic is an acquired taste that demands patience, but for those willing to accept its meandering rhythms and puzzle-like structure, it offers many rewards. — J.M.

Competition

Finnish master Aki Kaurismäki is in vintage form with his first film in six years, a slender but enormously satisfying tragicomedy about two lonely blue-collar people stumbling toward what could be love. Running just 81 minutes, the third-place Jury Prize winner may be slight compared to many of Kaurismäki’s more complex narratives, but its well of feeling creeps up on you and delivers a good share of laugh-out-loud lines with droll aplomb. — D.R.

Competition

Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz’s richly textured and suspenseful historical drama — his first film in English — portrays Henry VIII’s sixth and final wife, Catherine Parr, as she attempts to avoid the chopping block. Despite being steeped in the atmospheric gloom of a country enveloped by plague and under tyrannical rule, the film is alive with vigorous contemporary attitude, providing a pair of plum lead roles for Alicia Vikander (in her best performance since Ex Machina) and a frighteningly mercurial Jude Law as the ailing monarch. — D.R.

Competition

In her heartbreaking docu-fiction, Kaouther Ben Hania invites professional actors to re-create a Tunisian woman’s devastating experience of losing her two eldest daughters, who ran away to join the Islamic State in Libya. Staging memories as scenes and interspersing the reenactments with interviews of the family members left behind, the director builds an enthralling narrative about memory, motherhood and the inherited traumas of a patriarchal society. — LOVIA GYARKYE

Directors’ Fortnight

Director Cédric Kahn’s stark and gripping courtroom drama revisits the 1975 trial of French leftist radical Pierre Goldman, accused of murdering two pharmacists and subject to blatant police antisemitism. Franco-Belgian actor Arieh Worthalter is riveting in the title role, convincing us of Goldman’s innocence, not to mention his commitment to political causes, far before the trial is over. The suspense revolves around whether the jury will agree with us. — J.M.

Competition

Catherine Corsini’s stirring drama stars Suzy Bemba and Esther Gohourou as sisters returning to their native Corsica for the summer with their mom (Aïssatou Diallo Sagna), who’s serving as a nanny to a rich Parisian family. The film flawlessly shifts among the characters, following their separate arcs while digging into a tragic shared past. There’s nothing hugely novel about the story, but it feels fresh because of the actresses, who bring great charisma to their roles. — J.M.

Un Certain Regard

Three British high school grads’ summer trip to Greece takes a devastating turn when one of them is sexually assaulted in Molly Manning Walker’s quietly stunning feature debut, which won this year’s Un Certain Regard sidebar. Mia McKenna Bruce delivers a powerful portrayal of a young woman grappling with the dawning reality of what happened to her, as well as the shifting dynamics between her and the two friends struggling to understand her changed disposition. — L.G.

Special Screenings

Based on David Grann’s nonfiction book, Martin Scorsese’s enthralling account of the methodical elimination of oil-rich Native Americans in early 1920s Oklahoma is a sprawling, densely plotted chronicle of an escalating tragedy that never loosens its grip. A superb Leonardo DiCaprio plays the spineless man tormented by his part in the nefarious plot orchestrated by his cattle rancher uncle (Robert De Niro) — but the revelation is the wondrous Lily Gladstone as the Osage woman unfortunate enough to marry him. — D.R.

Un Certain Regard

Using a scale model of her childhood neighborhood and figurines to represent family, friends and neighbors — many interviewed here — Moroccan documentary-maker Asmae El Moudir takes a disarmingly folksy, hand-crafted approach to unpack multiple secrets in her feature debut. The result is a sly, often playful, ultimately moving study of community, generational anguish and atrocities covered up by the state, blending non-fiction technique with originality and polished storytelling skill. — L.F.

Special Screenings

Without interviews or archival material, Steve McQueen’s provocative four-hour-plus documentary combines an elegant portrait of contemporary Amsterdam with a matter-of-fact oral account of the city during its occupation by Germany. The film has the exhaustiveness of such Holocaust-chronicle magnum opuses as Max Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the Pity. But its perspective is fresh, eschewing nonfiction customs to peer into the liminal place where history’s ghosts linger — and stirring up something more complex than emotion. — SHERI LINDEN

Competition

In Wim Wenders’ eloquent and emotionally rich character study — his best narrative film in years — distinguished screen vet Koji Yakusho (winner of this edition’s Best Actor prize) plays a middle-aged Tokyo man who has pared down his life to a routine of service and small pleasures. It’s a movie of deceptive simplicity, observing the tiny details of an existence with such clarity, soulfulness and empathy that they build a cumulative power almost without you noticing. — D.R.

Competition

Where else but France would be the setting for one of the most exquisite art house food porn flicks to come along in a while? Starring Benoît Magimel and Juliette Binoche as a 19th-century gourmet and his long-time cook and lover, the new film from Tràn Anh Hùng (this edition’s Best Director winner) captures its mouthwatering dishes like edible, gorgeously realized tableaux, combining culinary marvels with a moving tale of middle-age love. — J.M.

Special Screenings

Pedro Almodóvar’s intoxicating half-hour queer Western features smoldering turns by Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal as former lovers — a sheriff and rancher, respectively — who reunite after 25 years. The Spanish master packs the short time with greater depth of feeling and evocative atmosphere than most directors manage in a full feature. — D.R.

Un Certain Regard

Inspired by the rhyming intricacy of a classic form of Persian poetry, writer-directors Ali Asgari and Alireza Khatami have constructed a thoroughly modern work of bracing concision and elegance. Each of the interlocking segments zeros in on a resident of Tehran as they try to reason with a government bureaucrat or authority figure. The situations the protagonists face are specific to Iran, but their escalating lunacy is universal. The film pulses with sorrow and outrage over the absurdity of tyrannical dictates that crush souls. — S.L.

Competition

Based on Martin Amis’ 2014 novel, this German-language film from Jonathan Glazer (winner of the fest’s second-place Grand Prize) is a devastating Holocaust drama like no other, proving the Brit auteur’s unerring control of tonal and visual storytelling. Centering on a senior SS officer’s family living their bucolic dream life just outside Auschwitz, it’s a stunner whose cool observational style somehow makes its scrutiny all the more chilling. — D.R.

A version of this story first appeared in the May 24 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.