With two essential films, Cannes finds haunting new prisms on the Holocaust

Even before it entered its first weekend, the 76th Cannes Film Festival had claimed its first critical triumph and competition standout with “The Zone of Interest.” An implacably chilling, entirely mesmerizing portrait of a family living in the shadow of the inferno, the movie was greeted at its Friday night gala premiere with rave reviews, crass Academy Awards speculation and the usual meaningless gush about its lengthy standing ovation. Haneke’s own “The White Ribbon,” a more oblique commentary on the sins of the Third Reich, won the Palme in 2009, at the same festival where Quentin Tarantino premiered his Nazi-napalming revenge epic, “Inglourious Basterds.” In 2015, the Grand Prix was awarded to László Nemes’ grimly immersive Auschwitz drama “Son of Saul,” a movie whose furious handheld camerawork and up-close look inside the barracks and gas chambers are the antithesis of “The Zone of Interest’s” coolly measured, outside-and-not-quite-looking-in style. I’m talking about “Occupied City,” the first documentary feature from the British director Steve McQueen and one of the essential early highlights of this year’s Cannes. An image from the documentary “Occupied City.” What makes “Occupied City” a challenge — and a welcome, worthwhile one — isn’t its leisurely four-and-a-half-hour running time, but rather its formal daring. In many senses, the new movie feels like a labor of love; it’s based on the illustrated book “Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945,” by the writer and filmmaker Bianca Stigter, who is married to McQueen.