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‘I have never seen a Cannes like this’: verdict and awards predictions for 2022 | Peter Bradshaw
This year’s festival had its ups and downs, but flashes of brilliance broke through the disappointments. Our critic forecasts the winners, and suggests a few more for categories that don’t (yet) exist
The 2022 Cannes film festival has finished in a mercurial mood: a feeling that the middling quality of the competition list has been redeemed in the final few days by a fiercely welcomed late burst of excellence. There was respect for Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa for his documentary A Natural History of Destruction and for Mariupol 2, by the late Mantas Kvedaravičius, the film-maker killed by Russian forces while filming this moment-by-moment study of life in the besieged city. The latter was completed by Kvedaravičius’s co-director and partner Hanna Bilobrova in time to be shown here – film-making from the frontline.
But I have never seen a Cannes like this for radical disagreement among critics on almost every single title: there’s hardly been a film here that hasn’t experienced a range of takes of all different temperatures. Each director is offered a rave and a meh and a quote-tweet putdown for the same film, from critics who seem, on the basis of all their published work, to have roughly similar tastes and assumptions. Claire Denis’s coolly received erotic drama Stars at Noon found itself being subject to a snowballing social-media roasting, and then a frontlash of defence from those who felt that this mockery was well out of order.
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