Gender equality flies in face of style bias

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. And so there was a strange fittingness that the scandal of the 68th Cannes Film Festival, where all status is measured, came down to the importance of a few inches.

Woman's footwear, of all things, was thrust to the forefront of Cannes after several women were turned away from a premiere because they weren't wearing high heels but flats. It was the kind of Cote d'Azur tempest that often overtakes Cannes, especially because the prevailing theme of this year's festival was female equality in film - the kind of roles thrust to the center of movies and the people directing them.

Cannes was in sync with the attention the issue had recently received elsewhere. But what will stick in the mind from the festival, which closed on 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: Fury Road).

But what is a hit on the Croisette is sometimes a blip back home. As the glow of Cannes fades, here are the films from the festival that may sustain the buzz they earned on the Riviera:

Todd Haynes' Carol is grippingly contemporary despite the lushness of its period drama. Based on the 1952 Patricia Highsmith novel The Price of Salt, the film stars Blanchett and Rooney Mara as two women who are intractably drawn together, but who must cloak their budding romance in disguised gestures and subtle glances.

Moviegoers who see Audiard's Dheepan will have a choice between siding with Cannes critics or the Coen brothers. Though many Cannes scribes didn't embrace the French filmmaker's latest as warmly as his previous efforts, the jury led by Joel and Ethan Coen surprisingly picked Dheepan for the Palme d'Or.

Outside of the festival, Dheepan may resonate better for its tale of Sri Lankan refugees posing as a family in order to gain asylum in France.

Cannes isn't known for its genre thrills. But just as the cinematic horror hit It Follows drew raves at the festival last year, The Green Room, by Jeremy Saulnier, should be marked by thriller fans. 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.