A Look at the Cannes 2024 Critics Grids

The 77th Cannes Film Festival just wrapped, premiering many new buzzworthy titles that industry folks and cinephiles are still talking about. Even though Hammer To Nail did not attend the festival this year, we kept track of what our fellow critics have been saying about these arthouse gems and potential 2024 awards contenders. Every year, our friends over at Screen International and IONCINEMA each assemble a critics panel featuring publications and writers from all over the world. Each critic rates the film on a star-based system out of 5 (with half stars included) and their assessments are tallied up in a way that gives each competition title an average rating.

See the critics’ jury grids from IONCINEMA and Screen International below. No critic appears on both lists, but both critics groups agreed on the overall top 3!

IONCINEMA’s Cannes Critics’ Panel’s Top 10 Rated Films:

1. The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Mohammad Rasoulof) – 3.6
2. All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia) – 3.5
3. Anora (Sean Baker) – 3.4
4. Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard) – 3.4
5. Caught By The Tides (Jia Zhangke) – 3.0
6. Oh, Canada (Paul Schrader) – 3.0
7. Bird (Andrea Arnold) – 3.0
8. Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes) – 2.9
9. The Apprentice (Ali Abbasi) – 2.9
10. The Most Precious of Cargoes (Michel Hazanavicius) – 2.9

Screen International’s Critics Panel’s Top 10 Rated Films:

1. The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Mohammad Rasolouf) – 3.4
2. All We Imagine As Light (Payal Kapadia) – 3.3
3. Anora (Sean Baker) – 3.3
4. Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes) – 3.0
5. The Substance (Coralie Fargeat) – 2.7
6. Caught By The Tides (Jia Zhangke) – 2.6
7. Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard) – 2.5
8. Kinds of Kindness (Yorgos Lanthimos) – 2.4
9. Bird (Andrea Arnold) – 2.3
10. Three Kilometres to the End of the World (Emanuel Parvu) – 2.3

Both critics groups apparently had a lot of love for Mohammad Raolouf’s urgent Iranian drama The Seed of the Sacred Fig, just enough that it made the No. 1 highest-rated film on each of their grids. Payal Kapadia’s Grand Prix winner All We Imagine As Light was also the No. 2 highest-rated film on the grids while Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or-winning Anora made No. 3. Other crossovers on each of the Top 10 most-rated lists include Miguel Gomes’s Best Director winner Grand Tour, Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, Jia Zhangke’s Caught By The Tides, and Andrea Arnold’s Bird.

The lowest-rated title on IONCINEMA’s jury chart is Gilles Lellouche’s dark comedy Beating Hearts (L’Amour Ouf) with a rating of 1.6. Screen International has Michel Hazanavicius’s animated Holocaust film The Most Precious of Cargoes at the bottom with a 1.2 rating. However, IONCINEMA’s jury did favor the latter film much more with an average rating of 2.9, placing it No. 10 on their Top 10 list. Look out for these films as they head next to Telluride, Toronto, and the New York Film Festivals.

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