Digging Into the Cannes Lineup, Sight Unseen: Heavy on English Movies and Light on Women

variety.com:

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Reviews will have to wait till the Cannes Film Festival kicks off on May 14, but it’s not too early for a critic to weigh in on this year’s lineup — or how it looks on paper, at least, and what the selection might say about the state of things.

At the top of the press conference, festival director Thierry Frémaux noted that last year would be a tough edition to top. The two big winners of the 2023 competition, “Anatomy of a Fall” and “Zone of Interest,” went on to score Oscar best picture nominations, alongside Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.” The festival made strides toward gender parity, with nearly a third of the films in competition directed by women.

And to complicate matters, Hollywood has since been hit by two production-stopping guild strikes, delaying films the studios might have sent to Cannes.

Judging by the titles unveiled today, however, the festival has no shortage of American movies headed for the Croisette. Two massive titles had already been announced: “Horizon, an American Saga” (the first half of Kevin Costner’s two-part epic Western) and “Furiosa : A Mad Max Saga,” a prequel to George Miller’s post-apocalyptic franchise, whose 2015 “Mad Max: Fury Road” also kicked off in Cannes (so did his indie “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” but better to let that slide).