1. “Sirât“

It begins with a crowd of revellers in the Moroccan desert-a rave at the ends of the earth, but also, as whispers of a deadly global conflict reach our ears, possibly at the end of the world as we certainly know it. This pre-apocalyptic wilderness odyssey-from the French-born Spanish director Oliver Laxe, who won a third-place Jury Prize at the festival-produced the competition’s most sustained and enveloping contact high.It draws you out of your seat with a mighty succession of sonic rumbles, then promptly knocks you back into it with the most jolting of tragedies. The title, in Muslim eschatology, refers to a narrow bridge between Paradise and Hell, which is fitting, insofar as Laxe’s movie is both a nightmarish experience and an exhilarating one-a pitiless ordeal that is nonetheless underpinned by extraordinary love and tenderness. Laxe’s tremendously physical filmmaking has already triggered comparisons to “The Wages of Fear” and “Sorcerer”; whether it stands up to them, I was properly and thoroughly ensorcelled.

2.”It Was Just an Accident”

“It builds to an astoundingly cathartic sequence…that leaves you genuinely shaken.”

The premise of Panahi’s Palme d’Or winner-several folks cram into a rickety van, arguing over were to go and what to do-might at first suggest a dysfunctional-family road-trip comedy. But, though there are farcical elements aplenty, as well as an acid vein of social critique, this deftly tone-shifting film soon reveals itself as a powerful moral thriller about the uncertainty of the truth, the abuses of the Iranian regime, the consequences of physical and psychological torture, and the choice between revenge and mercy. It builds to an astoundingly cathartic sequence, a one-take release of fury and horror that leaves you genuinely shaken-and unable to stop thinking about panahi himself, a great dissident filmmaker who, not for the first time (or, I hope, the last), has turned the struggle of a lifetime into galvanizing art.

3. “Resurrection”

The thirty-five-year-old Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan is one of cinema’s most prodigious enchanters. In his first two features, “Kaili Blues” (2016) and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (2019), he pulled off dazzling feats of showmanship behind the camera, with tracking shots so languidly enveloping and elaborately choreographed that they were like magic tricks you could live in. There’s another of those one-shot wonders in Bi’s transcendent third feature, “Resurrection,” but the movie as a whole-garlanded with a special prize by Binoche’s jury-is an altogether stranger, more mercurial miracle than its predecessors. Starring a gamely shape-shifting Jackson Yee and a sublime Shu Qi, it leads us on a multi-part odyssey through a century’s worth of film history. Along the way, it riffs on “Blade Runner” and “Holy Motors”; pays homage to the Lumière brothers, F. W. Murnau, and Georges Méliès; and burrows deep into the landscape of genre, where spies, gangsters, spirits, monsters, and vampires hold the keys to cinema’s enduring popularity and its capacity for renewal. what makes “Resurrection” more than just another facile love letter to the medium is a melancholy awareness that such magic always comes at a cost-to the filmmakers who practice their art and the film lovers who bask in it. What the movies give, they also take away.

4. “Sound of Falling”

The first film to screen in the competition remained, by festival’s end, one of the best and most memorable; it also signalled the fruition of a remarkable directing talent in the German filmmaker Mascha Schilinski, who shared the Jury Prize with Laxe. In this staggeringly ambitious second feature, Schilinski hopscotches among four constellations of characters, all of them occupying the same rural German farmhouse at different eras across roughly a century.The movie,in marrying ethereally elegant form to a damning thesis about the continuity of female suffering across the generations,sometimes suggests “The Turn of the Screw” as directed by Michael Haneke, but Schilinski proves herself to be her own filmmaker. Her touch is more playful and tender than punishing, and I can’t wait to see what she does for a follow-up. (A forthcoming Mubi release.)

5. “The Secret Agent”

Where “Sound of Falling” draws on ghost-story conventions to unearth long-established patterns of patriarchal violence,the Brazilian director and screenwriter Kleber Mendonça Filho’s marvellously rangy,sweatily atmospheric epic also uses genre to political ends-and with more finesse than he did in his last Cannes-competition entry,the rambunctiously violent “Bacurau” (2020). In “The Secret Agent,” Mendonça filho deploys the language of gangster pictures, monster movies, and shark-attack thrillers to navigate the human wreckage of brazil’s military dictatorship. it’s a maximalist affair, with a story that’s in no hurry to reveal its destination; it twists, bends, and folds in on itself, to ever more fascinating effect. Wagner Moura, playing a former university researcher who has already endured one tragedy and who seeks to avert another, gives a star turn of revelatory magnetism. He received the festival’s Best Actor prize; Mendonça Filho was crowned Best Director.(A forthcoming Neon release.)

6. “Woman and Child”

It was a good year for Iranian revenge thrillers. In this wrenching melodrama from the director Saeed Roustaee, a widowed mother of two (Parinaz Izadyar) suffers an unspeakable loss-and responds by exacting a measure of justice from the many men who, through cruel entitlement or thoughtless neglect, have contributed to her grief. The result is one of the finer men-are-trash movies of recent vintage, but “Woman and Child” is no mere broadside against some nebulously defined patriarchy; it takes aim with penetrating intelligence and carefully honed rage. As the living embodiment of that rage, the mesmerizing Izadyar comes to resemble a furious, wide-eyed wraith-an almost mythical agent of retribution.

7. “The Mastermind”

If you’ve seen Kelly Reichardt‘s versions of a frontier Western (“Meek’s Cutoff,” 2011) and of an ecoterrorist thriller (“Night Moves,” 2014), you may know what to expect from her take on an art-heist movie: an exquisite groundedness, in which no detail or texture can be to precise, and genre mechanics play out to the unhurried beat of real life. The planner of the heist is a small-town Massachusetts family man (a marvellously scruffy Josh O’Connor) who, amid the upheaval of the early nineteen-seventies, becomes desperate to counter his own mediocrity. The crime he commits is a foolish,bumbling,desultory affair,but Reichardt observes every moment of it-and the ensuing fallout-with her usual dolorous,low-key mastery. She also elicits gemlike supporting performances from Alana Haim, Bill Camp, Hope Davis, John Magaro, and Gaby Hoffmann. (A forthcoming Mubi release.)

8. “Two Prosecutors”

Based on a novella by the Soviet writer Georgy Demidov, this superb drama from the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa unfolds like the bleakest of thought experiments: What if, amid the terrors of Stalin’s Russia, in 1937, a brave, newly appointed state prosecutor took it upon himself to investigate a prisoner’s complaints of injustice and violence? Into the prison goes the young lawyer, named Kornyev (a fine Alexander Kuznetsov); whether he will ever emerge is far from certain. What gives this drama its extraordinary tension is loznitsa’s slow, rigorously measured observation of Kornyev’s descent into a bureaucratic and totalitarian abyss, in which official after official seeks to gently (at first) cajole him into submission. You know it can’t end well, but you never know exactly how it will end-or at what point this meticulously constructed steel trap of a movie will snap coldly, decisively shut.

9. “New wave”

It shouldn’t work, but really it does. Richard Linklater‘s impeccably crafted behind-the-scenes account of how