La Bola Negra, directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi

A story told through three gay men across three different eras (1932, 1937 and 2017), whose desires and fates intertwine, all orbiting one of Federico García Lorca’s last, unfinished works. Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi (the duo behind Paquita Salas, known in Spain as Los Javis) share the Cannes award for best director for this one. It stars Spanish singer-songwriter Guitarricadelafuente in his acting debut, alongside Miguel Bernardeau and Carlos González, with Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close rounding out the cast in supporting roles.

The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, directed by Noah Segan

When John Turturro is the lead, not much can go wrong. In actor turned director Noah Segan’s Sundance premiered feature, an ageing career pickpocket who’s been working the subways and streets of New York since the ’80s gets tangled up in a theft gone very wrong, forcing him into a race across the city to fix his mistake before it costs him everything, including the ability to keep caring for his ailing wife. The cast is stacked enough to make any film lover blush (myself included): Steve Buscemi, Giancarlo Esposito, Tatiana Maslany, Jamie Lee Curtis and Will Price all circle Turturro’s performance, which reviewers out of Sundance and Berlin have called one of the best of his career.

Coward, directed by Lukas Dhont

Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont follows his Oscar nominated Close with Coward, a First World War set drama that played in Cannes competition this year to a lengthy standing ovation. Cannes director Thierry Frémaux called it a work of “pure cinema”, and Dhont has described it as a film about love and death, and about how something beautiful can grow even in the darkest moments. Inspired by archival photographs of soldiers staging cross-dressed theatrical shows behind the front lines, it follows two young conscripts, Pierre and Francis, whose relationship becomes an unlikely refuge from the brutality around them. It didn’t ultimately take home the Palme d’Or (that went to Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord), but it was one of the most talked about titles of this year’s festival.

All of a Sudden, directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi

If you’ve seen Drive My Car, which won Best International Feature at the Academy Awards and took out prizes at Cannes in 2021, you already know Hamaguchi works in a very specific and drawn-out emotional register. His latest, All of a Sudden, is his French language debut, shot largely in Paris with some scenes in Kyoto, and stars Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto, who shared the Best Actress prize at this year’s Cannes. Loosely based on the book When Life Suddenly Takes a Turn: Twenty Letters Between a Philosopher with Terminal Cancer and a Medical Anthropologist, it follows a French nursing home director trying to introduce a more humane model of aged care, and her growing friendship with a Japanese theatre director who is dying of cancer. The bridge between the two women, and between the film’s French and Japanese sensibilities, is Humanitude, a real care philosophy that puts the dignity of the patient at the centre of treatment.