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The 11 Best Movies We Saw at Cannes This Year
It was the best iteration of the French festival in years.
Her Palme D’Or winner Titane blew me away a few years ago, and I was moved yet again by this film, about a 13-year-old girl named Alpha (Mélissa Boros), her beloved mother (Golfshiteh Farahani), and her uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim), who comes to live with them while in the throes of heroin addiction in an unnamed city in the 1990s. Set at an aquatic sports summer camp for kids right on the terrible cusp of becoming teenagers, Charlie Polinger’s debut is centered on sweet, awkward Ben (Everett Blunck), whose precarious place on the bottom rung of the social ladder is imperiled when he’s kind to the designated outcast, whom everyone else has declared has “the plague.” The Plague is exquisitely cast, from the Nickelodeon star smirk of ringleader Jake (Kayo Martin) to his cohen target Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), a genuine oddball. When the two impulsively follow a few wayward attendees out into the desert for another planned rave, Sirât turns into a nihilistic survival thriller about the different forms of denial we practice to cope with an increasingly disastrous reality, whether it’s doing drugs and dancing, or clinging fast to the idea that you can personally protect your family even as things go to hell.
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