Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola)

Last year, all the talk around Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestating sci-fi epic was whether he would ever get around to finishing it; now, having steered the film to a berth in the Cannes main competition, the heat is on to find a distributor willing to back it (It’s already been picked up for release in France). An early screening for studio heads in March garnered mixed reviews, alongside titillating nods to the reportedly “orgiastic”, last-days-of-Rome tone – “Jon Voight’s huge erection”, anyone? But we’d like to think the 84-year-old auteur’s still got enough fire in his belly to make this “cautionary tale about where America is headed” count.

The Apprentice (Ali Abbasi)

Iranian-Danish director Abassi’s fourth film is a kind of Portrait of the Grifter as a Young Man, a film about Donald Trump’s relationship with his former mentor, Machiavellian lawyer and political fixer Roy Cohn, who fought (and lost) a $100m lawsuit on his behalf in the 1970s. It’s potentially explosive stuff from the Border and Holy Spider filmmaker, but best of all here is the casting, as seen in the sole pic teased from the film thus far, a cream-suited Trump played by Sebastian Stan (Pam & Tommy) as he’s watched over by none other than Succession’s Jeremy Strong as a vampiric-looking Cohn.

Parthenope (Paolo Sorrentino)

Last year in Cannes, fashion house Saint Laurent marked its first foray into film production with Pedro Almodóvar’s Western short Strange Way of Life. Now they’ve upped the stakes with a surprising three feature films in competition at this year’s event – David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez and this, Paolo Sorrentino’s new Naples-set epic. Filmed in a fashionable mix of black-and-white and colour, the film follows the life and times of a beautiful young woman (Celeste Dalla Porta) named after a Greek siren who drowned and washed ashore in Italy, lending Naples its early name. Intriguingly, Gary Oldman co-stars in this latest love letter to The Hand of God director’s home city – expect to be ravished, and seduced.

The Shrouds (David Cronenberg)

Body-horror maven Cronenberg returns to the Croisette with a new film rumoured to be among his most personal; initially conceived as a series for Netflix, it’s a horror film written after the death of his second wife, film editor Carolyn Zeifman, in 2017. Plot particulars are mostly off-limits for now, but the basic premise concerns a grieving widower (Vincent Cassel) who invents a new device to help people connect with the dead; given past form, I don’t foresee any unwelcome repercussions with this at all.

Bird (Andrea Arnold)

British director Arnold takes a fourth crack at the Palme with what may be her buzziest film yet, a Kent-set drama starring Saltburn’s Barry Keoghan and Franz Rogowski (Passages, Great Freedom). Keoghan reportedly passed up a role on Ridley Scott’s incoming Gladiator sequel to star in the movie, which will screen as a rough cut at the festival – proof, if any were needed, of Arnold’s allure as one of our most respected auteurs.

The Substance (Coralie Fargeat)

One of the surprises of this year’s main competition, The Substance is the second feature from Coralie Fargeat, whose debut Revenge was a take-no-prisoners rape-revenge drama in the bloody mould of the New French Extremity films of the 2000s. She’s following that with an English-language body horror starring Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley and Ray Liotta in his final role before his death in 2022. Could it cause an upset on the level of Julia Ducournau’s autoerotic freakout Titane, which took home the Palme in 2021? Only time will tell.

Kinds of Kindness (Yorgos Lanthimos)

Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone reteam fresh from the Oscar-winning Poor Things with Kinds of Kindness, a three-hour anthology film with a strong ensemble cast including Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Jesse Plemons, Hong Chau and Hunter Schafer. Swapping the steampunk aesthetics of their last collab for a contemporary-set American drama, the film is reportedly “hostile [and] aggressive” in tone, encouraging news for fans of the Greek weird-wave director’s abrasive breakout, Dogtooth, still considered unsurpassed by some of his fans.

Oh, Canada (Paul Schrader)

Taxi Driver scribe Schrader turns his gaze north of the border for his latest study in septuagenarian angst, adapted from the late Russell Banks’ novel Foregone. With an eye-catching supporting turn from Jacob Elordi (Saltburn, Priscilla), the film follows the last days of a writer, Leonard Fife (Richard Gere), who fled the US for Canada to dodge the Vietnam war draft. Expect wintry musings on mortality from the existential master, on a roll from late-career gems like First Reformed and Master Gardener.

Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhangke)

When Jia Zhangke describes his new film as a “concentration of 20 years of experience”, he means it literally: Caught by the Tides, which brings the Chinese director back to the Croisette for an impressive sixth tilt at the Palme D’Or, was shot over a 20-year period and stars his wife, Zhao Tao, as a woman caught up in an on-off affair who follows her lover to a faraway province. Making use of his signature blend of fiction and documentary filmmaking techniques, Jia even turned his hand to AI in bringing his vision to life, his first fiction feature since 2018’s Ash Is Purest White.

Anora (Sean Baker)

Sean Baker is low-key one of the best filmmakers working in the US today, an instinctive crowd-pleaser drawn to the lives of people living on the fringes of society. Anora, his second film to compete for the Palme d’Or after 2021’s Red Rocket, sees him return to a favoured theme with an “adventure rom-com” about a New York City sex worker played by Mikey Madison, perhaps best known for her role as a disturbed Manson-family member in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Cannes Film Festival 2024 runs from 14 – 25 May 2024.