Comment on The movies that will keep buzzing after Cannes

CANNES, France (AP) — The Cannes Film Festival is a grand hierarchy with strictly defined elevations of movies and media access, where films are met by high praise or lowly boos. [...] what will stick in the mind from the festival, which closed Sunday with Jacques Audiard's refugee tale Dheepan winning the Palme d'Or, likely won't be the many panels about women in film, but the plethora of powerful leading performances by women, including Cate Blanchett (the sumptuous period romance Carol), Emily Blunt (the bleak drug war thriller Sicario), Marion Cotillard (a bleakly stylish Macbeth), Margherita Buy (the moving tribute My Mother), Emmanuelle Bercot (the up-and-down romance My King) and Charlize Theron the explosive Mad Max: Though summer blockbusters usually only supply the festival a flashy red carpet distraction, George Miller's "Mad Max" sequel-reboot was perhaps the most lauded film in Cannes, rivaled only by a far more serious sensation: "Son of Saul," a tracking close-up of a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz who believes he's spotted his son in the camp's gas chamber. Based on the 1952 Patricia Highsmith novel "The Price of Salt," the film stars Blanchett and Rooney Mara as two women — one married with a child, the other a mousy shop girl — who are intractably drawn together, but who must cloak their budding romance in disguised gestures and subtle glances. [...] look for the tender Pixar tale "Inside Out," Cotillard's empathetic Lady Macbeth and the veteran stars of Paolo Sorrentino's "Youth" (Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel) to find some award season attention. In his second film following the lean revenge film "Blue Ruin," Saulnier steps confidently into a bigger production, co-starring Patrick Stewart, about a touring hardcore punk band that runs into trouble at a backwoods gig for Neo-Nazi skinheads. A harrowing Holocaust drama set among the Jewish workers of a concentration camp is precisely the kind of film many feel obligated to see, rather than enthusiastic to watch.