A scene from The Beguiled. Photo / Youtube.
Cannes, the biggest and most high profile film festival, just wrapped up.
Debuting your upcoming film at Cannes is a huge honour and studios use the opportunity to generate buzz for their projects, many of which go on to be critical darlings, fan favourites or win Oscars. It's safe to say you won't find the umpteenth Transformers blockbuster at Cannes.
Here are nine films out of Cannes to watch out for in the coming months. These are the movies everyone is talking about.
Sofia Coppola's first movie since 2013's The Bling Ring (unless you count A Very Murray Christmas), The Beguiled is a triumphant return for Coppola to Cannes, picking up the Best Director prize, only the second woman to do so. It was a much warmer reception than when Coppola screened Marie Antoinette at the film festival in 2006 which was roundly booed by the French audience.
Starring Nicole Kidman, Colin Farrell, Kirsten Dunst and Elle Fanning, The Beguiled is an adaptation of Thomas P. Cullinan's 1971 novel. Set during the American Civil War, a wounded soldier turns up at a female seminary - his presence stirs the isolated atmosphere of the school.
The Beguiled will be playing at the Sydney Film Festival this month and will be released in cinemas on July 13.
Winner of this year's Palme d'Or, The Square is a satire about the art world from Swedish director Ruben Ostlund (Force Majeure) starring Elisabeth Moss and Dominic West.
Described by one reviewer as "gobsmackingly weird with moments of pure showstopping freakiness", The Square is the story of Christian, a museum curator gearing up for an exhibition that's supposed to inspire altruism. But when the PR agency creates an unexpected campaign for the exhibition and Christian loses his phone, everyone is sent into an existential crisis.
The Square is the first comedy to win at Cannes since Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004.
From Korean director Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Snowpiercer), Okja is a charming action-adventure story about a young girl who's trying to keep her best friend from the clutches of an evil multinational corporation.
Mija's bestie, a genetically modified "super pig" the size of a hippo, is the perfect pet. But Mija is stricken when she finds out her pet was a publicity stunt for a food company and now they want it back and in their bellies. Tilda Swinton plays a pair of competitive twins while Jake Gyllenhaal, Paul Dano, Steven Yeun, Giancarlo Esposito, Lily Collins and Ahn Seo-hyun also star.
Okja will be playing at the Sydney Film Festival this month and will be available to stream on Netflix on June 28.
One of two Netflix films that caused considerable controversy at Cannes (French exhibitors objected to Netflix's cinema-less release model), The Meyerowitz Stories is directed by Noah Baumbach, the man behind The Squid and the Whale, Greenberg and Francis Ha.
Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler star as two estranged half-brothers in this quirky family comedy about grown siblings learning to live with each other when they reunite for their sculptor father's (Dustin Hoffman) show.
It's already drawing comparisons to The Royal Tenenbaums and earning surprising praise for Sandler's performance with critics calling it his best turn since P.T. Anderson's Punch Drunk Love, proof Sandler can do good work when he's not involved in the writing, directing or producing.
The Meyerowitz Stories will be released on Netflix later this year.
A Cannes favourite from the moment it screened in the festival's first week, Loveless is from Russian director Andrey Zvyaginstsev who made the excellent, Oscar-nominated Leviathan in 2014.
Ostensibly about the toxic, dying marriage of two people who are spurned into action when their 12-year-old son disappears, like Leviathan, Zvyaginstsev uses Loveless to make a bigger point about Russian politics and culture, without directly saying it.
Variety's Owen Glieberman said it was more about "the crisis of empathy at the core of [Russia's] culture".
Loveless will be in cinemas later this year.
Directed by Lynne Ramsey (We Need to Talk About Kevin) from a novella by Jonathan Ames (Bored to Death), You Were Never Really Here earnt Ramsey a joint Best Screenplay award at Cannes while Joaquin Phoenix took home the Best Actor gong.
With echoes of Taxi Driver, the film is about PTSD-riddled Joe, a former soldier and FBI agent tasked with rescuing a senator's young daughter from a sex ring.
Austrian cult director Michael Haneke has won the Palme d'Or for his last two films, Armour and The White Ribbon and, this year, Happy End was selected for the official competition even if it didn't ultimately prevail.
Reuniting with frequent collaborator Isabelle Huppert, Haneke's ironically named Happy End is full of the usual Haneke themes - family dysfunction, social satire and revenge. Huppert plays Anne, the matriarch of a bourgeois family ignorant of the wider social calamities just outside their Calais compound.
Happy End will be screening at the Sydney Film Festival this month and will be released in cinemas later this year.
In 2014's Tangerine, Sean Baker took filmgoers into the back alleys of Los Angeles among the world of prostitutes and their pimps. In The Florida Project, he takes a similar approach in taking us on a journey to the margins of society, this time to a cheap motel a mile away from Disney World.
The film focuses on a six-year-old and her ex-stripper mother, scrapping together their weekly rent by working menial jobs. The closest thing the child has to a father figure is the motel manager (Willem Dafoe). It's a film very much about the resilience of children in dire circumstances from a director adept at portraying the humanity of the overlooked.
The other joint winner of the Best Screenplay category, The Killing of a Sacred Deer is Yorgos Lanthimos' follow-up to his critically beloved and inventive 2015 film, The Lobster.
In The Killing of a Sacred Deer, a surgeon (Colin Farrell) and his wife (Nicole Kidman) are the parents of an affluent American family living a fairly normal life until a teenage boy whose father died on the surgeon's table enters their lives.
The psychological thriller/horror has been likened to Blue Velvet and the early works of David Cronenberg as the interloper's sinister motives are revealed.
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