One Cannes Film Festival movie has scored a rare 98 on review aggregator Metacritic, and it’s not Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. This year’s Cannes Film Festival has seen the premiere of several buzzed-about movies, including Johnny Depp’s “comeback” film Jeanne du Barry, the Natalie Portman/Julianne Moore drama May December and even the highly-anticipated Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. But no film has generated more buzz than Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, an epic based-on-fact Western drama about the serial killings of wealthy members of the Osage nation in the 1920s.

But as buzzy as Killers of the Flower Moon may be, one Cannes movie has outdone it by scoring a rare 98 on review aggregator Metacritic. That movie is The Zone of Interest, the latest feature film from Under the Skin director Jonathan Glazer. Based on a novel by the late Martin Amis, the movie takes place in the shadows of Auschwitz, and concerns a commandant and his wife building a life with their family in a home next to the camp.

Why The Zone Of Interest Is Getting So Much Critical Buzz

Any movie set outside Auschwitz, that takes the perspective of a Nazi camp commandant, is going to generate a lot of attention. Adding to the buzz for Zone of Interest is its director Glazer, a darling of critics whose three prior films were all highly intriguing and challenging works.

Originally a music video director, Glazer made his feature film debut with 2000’s Sexy Beast, a crime movie starring Ben Kingsley in a tour-de-force performance as a menacing gangster. Glazer later followed up that auspicious debut with 2004’s Birth, a thought-provoking drama about a woman (Nicole Kidman) who believes her dead husband has been reincarnated as her ten-year-old son. Glazer then waited nearly a decade to release Under the Skin, a bizarre, experimental sci-fi film starring Scarlett Johansson as an alien taking on the guise of a human woman and preying on men in Scotland.

Glazer’s sporadic output means that each new movie he releases is bound to hit hard within the world of indie film, and The Zone of Interest is hitting even harder than most, given its incredibly difficult and provocative subject-matter. After both having come out of Cannes with loads of buzz, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Glazer’s movie and Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon squaring off again come awards season. For now, The Zone of Interest seems to have the edge on Scorsese’s opus, at least among critics who've made the trip to Cannes.

Source: Metacritic