10 Cannes movies worth looking out for in a year of disappointments

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After 10 days of crazed moviegoing at the Cannes Film Festival, Times film critic Amy Nicholson and Times film editor Joshua Rothkopf are all but spent.They leave with 10 recommendations (listed below in alphabetical order), including several titles you’ll be hearing about during awards season, but also, admittedly, more reservations than usual.Amy Nicholson: There are worse ways to spend your life than watching four movies a day in the south of France.

For a week and half, we ran in and out of the dark theaters, blinking at the shock of the sun and bickering about what we just saw with the highest concentration of film lovers anywhere — most of us jacked up on espresso or rosé.Yet, we’re flying home miffed that the movies themselves were mediocre.

Cannes is meant to launch ambitious, prickly works by grandmasters and next-generation talents.This year, the programming looked like a party with an impressive invite list — Nicolas Winding Refn, Asghar Farhadi, Hirokazu Kore-eda — but upon arrival, all the guests felt like old acquaintances tapped out of anything interesting to say.I’m being harsh.

Cannes had good movies, too.But I needed this year’s Cannes to be great.

Audiences trickling back into theaters deserve to see something fantastic.Instead, too many filmmakers took the crowd’s attention span for granted; even the strongest films in competition could delete a half-hour of dead air.

Fittingly, the majority of my favorites came from Cannes’ kookier programming sections, Directors’ Fortnight and Un Certain Regard — and I suspect many of yours did, too, oui?Joshua Rothkopf: I did find a handful of films from the main competition that impressed me, but point taken: Nobody is served if we can’t admit that this year’s edition was weaker than others.We could blame screenwriting or pacing (though paradoxically I was impressed by both the longest and ...