Cannes Ranking

The sad fact is that I've never seen so few films in Cannes, and many were must-sees to go with interviews. My calendar was packed with movies I never made it to because meetings and stories intervened. Of the ones I did see, here's my Cannes list, ranked with 1 being best (I'm following the lead of Anthony Kaufman):

1. Babel--brilliant, timely, moving and Oscar-worthy
2. Volver--ditto, and Penelope Cruz could be nominated
3. Marie Antoinette--delightfully shallow and gorgeous; it should get many technical nods, like art direction, cinematography and costumes
4. 2:37 --hot rookie Australian director Murali K. Thalluri
5. A Scanner Darkly --cool animation
6. Fast Food Nation --admirably hard-hitting and political but dramatically flat
7. X-Men: The Last Stand --entertaining in a mindless way, superficially fun, great effects and wire work, but too many characters given short shrift
8. Southland Tales--inchoate mess, but promising material there if it is recut radically and intelligently
9. The Da Vinci Code --too ponderous and serious, dull, too reverent toward the religious content
10. Lying --M Blash's first movie is pretentious, inexperienced, dull, almost without dialogue, well acted by Chloe Sevigne and Jena Malone