Cannes Winds Down: Who’s Going to Win the Palme d’Or?

The most prestigious prize on the international film-festival circuit, the Palme d’Or, is now in the hands of a nine-member jury headed by director Pedro Almodovar and also including actors Jessica Chastain and Will Smith, directors Maren Ade and Paolo Sorrentino and composer Gabriel Yared.

Will Will Smith take his support of Netflix from the jury press conference to the deliberation room, and push for “Okja” or “The Meyerowitz Stories?”

The first competition film to screen this year was Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Loveless,” a gripping but sorrowful portrait of a disintegrating marriage and a missing child; it won raves and topped Screen Daily’s critics’ poll from wire to wire.

If this masterful but grim work is too tough to forge a consensus with the jury, or if it screened too early for them to recall it with immediacy, a more uplifting alternative could well be Robin Campillo’s “120 Beats Per Minute,” a touching chronicle of the early days of the AIDS activist group ACT UP in Paris.

The final competition film to screen, Lynne Ramsay’s twisted film noir riff “You Were Never Really Here,” could also make a play, though many critics felt that its rushed post-production showed.

[...] you’ve got Korean director Hong Sangsoo’s “The Day After” (its stylish melancholy makes it a dark horse), Noah Baumbach’s “The Meyerowitz Stories” (solid if not among the director’s best), Naomi Kawase’s “Radiance” (touching but slight) and Fatih Akin’s “In the Fade” (a workmanlike drama).

Almost certainly not — Cannes juries are never that predictable, at least not until Sunday afternoon, when sharp-eyed viewers begin spotting which filmmakers have been summoned to the awards ceremony in the Grand Theatre Lumiere.

[...] let the guessing games continue.