Along with movie theatres, film festivals are returning this summer—including the most prestigious of all, Cannes, in July. Its opening-night film, Leos Carax’s “Annette,” starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard, is scheduled for a late-summer release in theatres and on Amazon. All of Carax’s films have a major musical element—such as Denis Lavant’s mad, ecstatic dash in “Bad Blood” to David Bowie’s “Modern Love”—but “Annette” is his first full-on musical, and it’s one of a radical sort: even the dialogue is sung, to music by the duo Sparks, in a tale of a standup comic (Driver) and an opera singer (Cotillard) whose lives are changed by the birth of their daughter, a child prodigy.
A real-life Twitter thread by Aziah Wells King provides the premise of “Zola” (June 30), which the director, Janicza Bravo, wrote with Jeremy O. Harris; it’s the story of a waitress in Detroit (Taylour Paige) whose wild road trip to Florida with a sex worker (Riley Keough) turns violent. Colman Domingo and Nicholas Braun co-star. The versatile director David Lowery, whose work includes “A Ghost Story” and “The Old Man & the Gun,” adapts an Arthurian legend in the medieval drama “The Green Knight” (July 30), about Sir Gawain (Dev Patel) and his confrontation with a mysterious giant; the cast includes Alicia Vikander, Sarita Choudhury, and Joel Edgerton. “Candyman” (Aug. 27), the fourth entry in the slasher-film cycle, is set in a now gentrified part of Chicago, where an artist (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) paints the eponymous serial killer and becomes his target. The film’s director, Nia DaCosta, wrote the script with Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfeld. ♦
