Annal:1986 Festival de Cannes Jury Awards for Feature Films

The Mission

Roland Joffé

• 1986 Cannes Palme d’Or
• 1987 BAFTA-Film nominee
• 1987 Golden Globe-Drama nominee
• 1987 Oscar-Picture nominee
• Score: 28.36

The Mission is director Roland Joffé’s fuzzy effort at an epic in David Lean style without David Lean’s sense of emotional proportion. In fact, Lean’s most important screenwriting collaborator, Robert Bolt, wrote The Mission, which concerns a Jesuit missionary (Jeremy Irons) who establishes a church in the hostile jungles of Brazil and then finds his work threatened by greed and political forces among his superiors.

Robert De Niro is briefly effective as a callous soldier who kills his own brother and then turns to Irons’s character to oversee…

Smooth Talk

Joyce Chopra

• 1986 Cannes Palme d’Or
• Score: 10.36

Fifteen-year-old Connie Wyatt (Laura Dern) may be too young to drive, but she’s already driving the boys crazy. Her suspicious mother (Mary Kay Place) wants to keep her safely at home, but free-spirited Connie would rather while away the languid summer days hanging out with her friends and flirting with boys at the local burger stand. But when she flirts with an older, handsome and predatory stranger (Treat Williams), she isn’t prepared for the frightening and traumatic consequences.