You got a sense, at the press conference to announce the official selection of the 78th Cannes film festival, that Thierry Frémaux, its artistic director, knew the event was right back at the centre of the conversation.
In 2023, 2024 and 2025, three films that premiered here made it among the nominations for best picture at the Oscars. This year, for only the third time, a Palme d‘Or winner, Anora, took the top prize at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. A record 31 nominations went to films that opened at Cannes. So something has changed.
All of which is an extraordinarily vulgar metric by which to judge one of the world‘s most durable celebrations of high culture. Still, as that awful place is where we‘ve begun…
1. Is the best picture winner at the 2026 Oscars here?
Impossible to say. Nobody would have picked Anora 12 months ago. So don’t rule out Lynne Ramsay’s Die, My Love, featuring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson in a tale of postpartum depression. Joachim Trier, director of the much-loved The Worst Person in the World, directs Renate Reinsve and Stellan Skarsgard in the comedy drama Sentimental Value. Might Ari Aster, director of Midsommar, win academy friends with Eddington, his Covid satire? Stranger things have happened.
2. But what’s in it for the Irish?
Sadly, we can’t match the six productions that made it into the official selection last year. But Paul Mescal will be in competition with The History of Sound, Oliver Hermanus’s period drama. The immovable Bono will be here for the premiere of Andrew Dominik’s Bono: Stories of Surrender, a version of the U2 singer’s one-man show. Element Pictures, the Dublin-founded dynamo, premieres two films in the prestigious Un Certain Regard sidebar: Akinola Davies jnr’s African drama My Father’s Shadow and Harry Lighton’s much buzzed-about biker flick Pillion. (Alex Lutz’s Connemara, in the Cannes Premiere section, seems Irish only in its title.)
3. Hang on. What’s with all these directorial debuts from movie stars?
Beats me. But fully three films in Un Certain Regard meet that definition. Scarlett Johansson‘s Eleanor the Great stars June Squibb the Great as an elderly woman adrift in New York City. Kristen Stewart directs Imogen Poots as Lidia Yuknavitch in an adaptation of The Chronology of Water, that writer’s inspirational memoir. Harris Dickinson, the twentysomething star of Triangle of Sadness and Babygirl, is here with a tale of homelessness called Urchin.
4. So are all the stars on the wrong side of the camera?
Don’t be silly. We could fill this listicle with members of the cast of Wes Anderson‘s The Phoenician Scheme alone: Benicio Del Toro, Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson (again), Benedict Cumberbatch and so on. Joaquin Phoenix, Austin Butler and Emma Stone grace Eddington. Josh O’Connor is in The History of Sound and Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind. Denzel Washington heads Spike Lee‘s Highest 2 Lowest. Chris Evans and Margaret Qualley bounce about Ethan Coen’s Honey Don’t! Need we continue?
5. Did you just fail to mention Tom bleeding Cruise?
Oh right. There is just one franchise blockbuster here this year, but it is a big one. A week before hitting commercial cinemas, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is set (we assume) to bring the long-running action sequel to a dizzying conclusion. The Cruiser stars opposite Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames and Vanessa Kirby. Will they risk inviting that now aged gent to parachute on to the red carpet? Don’t rule it out.
6. What will everyone be talking about at the Marché?
Is that a real question? It seems a coincidence that Donald Trump announced his plans for a 100 per cent tariff on films from “Other Countries” just a week before the biggest confab for world cinema. But the timing remains perversely sublime. In the bowels of Le Palais des Festivals et des Congrès, thousands of film professionals – a few high-minded, most quite the opposite – will gather to flog their wares in the film market. If Trump is serious this could be a greater challenge than the pandemic.
[ The truth about Mission: Impossible and other films from Foreign Lands ]
7. Where is the unexpected breakthrough coming from?
Or, to put it another way, where is this year’s All We Imagine as Light? Obviously we can’t say what might match the winner of the 2024 Grand Prix for Payal Kapadia. That’s the thing about breakthroughs. There is, however, already a great deal of buzz around a competition film called Sound of Falling, from the relatively unknown German film-maker Mascha Schilinski. Deadline reports that the sales agent mk2 Films “put down a significant MG”, or marketing guarantee, to secure the movie, which follows four rural women in four distinct eras.
8. Have the women and the young(ish) finally arrived?
The industry has little to boast about as regards gender equality, but, with seven out of the 22 competition titles directed or codirected by women, the festival breaks, by one, the record set in 2023. That line-up is also stuffed with considerably more young film-makers than last year, when the octogenarians Francis Ford Coppola and David Cronenberg joined the septuagenarian Paul Schrader in competition. Indeed, for the first time, the festival opens with the debut from a woman film-maker: Leave One Day, by Amélie Bonnin.
9. Have they got some glam on the jury?
The jury for the main competition tends to combine highbrow cineastes with well-dressed celebrities (who, of course, may also be the brainiest cinema experts). The only surprise at the news that Juliette Binoche was to be this year’s president sprang from the awareness that she had apparently never done it before. Her fellow jurors Halle Berry and Jeremy Strong will satisfy the photographers. Kapadia, the Indian film-maker who emerged here last year, brings younger energies. The Korean master Hong Sang-soo represents the older guard.
10. What will attract interest from outside the main competition?
Expect controversy around Nadav Lapid‘s Yes, in the Directors’ Fortnight strand. The Israeli film-maker, a strong critic of his government, risks an apparent satire about a jazz musician creating a new national anthem after the Hamas-led attacks of October 7th. Shih-Ching Tsou’s Left-Handed Girl, produced by Sean Baker, the Anora director, could land well in Critics Week. But the hottest sidebar title is surely Lighton’s Pillion, in Un Certain Regard. Based on a book by Adam Mars-Jones, the film casts Harry Melling as a “submissive” to Alexander Skarsgard‘s handsome biker.
11. Will two old-timers finally break the most stubborn record?
As many as nine directors have won the Palme d‘Or twice. They range from expected names such as Michael Haneke and Francis Ford Coppola to less obvious repeaters such as Bille August and Ruben Östlund (still only 51). But nobody has yet taken a third. Following success in 1999, with Rosetta, and 2005, with L‘Enfant, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgian realists, here with The Young Mother’s Home, are the latest to try for the hat trick. They would be popular record breakers. If not them…
12. Who will win the Palme d‘Or?
It is pointless, at this stage, to speculate what Binoche‘s jury will plump for, but Neil Young, the Vienna-based film professional, has long offered (for entertainment only) impressively reliable odds. Young installs Renoir, a Japanese drama by the rising star Chie Hayakawa, as a surprisingly short ante-post favourite, at 3/1. Carla Simón’s Romería, from Spain, is next, at 4/1. Then Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, at 5/1, and Schilinski’s Sound of Falling, at 7/1.
Cannes film festival 2025 runs from Tuesday, May 13th, until Saturday, May 24th
