This year’s Cannes began with politics, with a speech at the opening ceremony from honorary Palme d’Or recipient Robert De Niro decrying the Trump administration’s cuts to arts funding, power play for control of the Kennedy Center, and stifling of dissent and forced disappearances, and an acknowledgement, from jury president Juliette Binoche, of the death in an Israeli airstrike of the Gazan photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, subject of a documentary, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, that played in the festival’s ACID sidebar. And it ended in politics, with a region-wide power outage, apparently the work of saboteurs, throwing the entire region into darkness — traffic lights and toilets were out all over the city and travel plans were thrown into disarray, though the festival’s main venue, the Palais, switched to generators and continued the encore screenings leading into a closing ceremony at which the great Iranian director Jafar Panahi won the Palme d’Or he had been widely expected to claim, for a film, It Was Just an Accident, that reflected his experiences as a political prisoner in his native country.
Binoche had taken up Panahi’s cause in 2010, speaking out on his behalf at Cannes after he had been imprisoned for making films “against the Islamic Republic,” and begun a hunger strike, the beginning of a 15-year-old legal battle that — following sudden imprisonments, house arrests and bans on travel and filmmaking activities, the latter of which he worked around by making several lauded films in secret — ended (knock wood) with the quashing of his original sentence in 2023, and his arrival in Cannes to receive the Palme and soak up the adulation.
Cannes put together a fun jury this year, with big personalities and the potential for real controversy, but whatever the differing sensibilities of Jeremy Strong and Halle Berry, or Hong Sang-soo and Carlos Reygadas, all of them presumably felt a fellow-artist’s empathy for a man who put his life and freedom on the line to make art. Cannes prides itself on being a place where cinema claims world-historical importance and there’s no greater confirmation of its self-image than Panahi’s ordeal; it helps that the film is very good, one of his best in fact. In It Was Just an Accident, a vanload of former political prisoners drive around with a hostage tied up on the back — a man they believe to be the guard who tortured them in prison, though whether they can know this for sure, and what their suffering gives them the right to do to him, is hotly debated among people whose experiences in prison, and perspectives on their own suffering and the suffering of others, is something like a moral cross-section of a nation. Formally airtight and philosophically urgent — as well as intermittently quite funny — it’s a worthy winner, if hardly likely to end up the last film standing on Oscar night, a la 2024 Palme winner and Best Picture Anora.
As the Academy attempts to diversify its slate of nominees, it has admitted a large contingent of members from outside the United States. This, combined with Hollywood’s disinterest in making mid-budget movies for adults, means that foreign films have a lane to occupy and a voting base to appeal to; the Oscar race starts in Cannes now. Or would, in theory, but though the industry’s new independent, internationally inclined new arthouse power players, like Neon and Mubi, arrived at the festival ready to play for the long haul, I didn’t see many eight-figure domestic box office hits in the Competition this year, or more than one Best Picture nominee.
Still, judging from the avid attention young and extremely online cinephiles now pay to Cannes, with plenty of traction for Neon’s twitter victory lap celebrating the victory of their festival pickup It Was Just an Accident, film culture is becoming more global — this despite noted Parasite hater Trump’s announced tariffs on films “from foreign lands,” a subject of much conversation on the ground at the festival, as well as much confusion. “Does that mean you can hold up the movie in customs?” Wes Anderson asked rhetorically at his press conference. “I feel it doesn’t ship that way.” Neon is an American company, but one which which in addition to the Panahi bought up Palme contenders from France and Brazil after bidding aggressively for them, and it was a major backer of new films from post-COVID Cannes hitters Julia Ducournau (whose Alpha, an AIDS allegory to follow up the Palme-winning body horror Titane, was poorly received except by a handful of critics, like me, who found its meditations on grief and cultural memory affecting) and Joachim Trier.
As with manufacturing, Trump seems to wish to put the genie of globally integrated supply chains back in the bottle (though in that case, why is his government investing so heavily in AI technologies that will put Hollywood technicians out of work?) (rhetorical question). It quite simply doesn’t work that way and there’s no reason it should — Sentimental Value, which won the Grand Prix, is even a film about an international coproduction. It stars Renate Reinsve, the breakout star of The Worst Person in the World, as Nora, a Norwegian actress who turns down a role in an autobiographical film written and directed by her estranged father Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård, rueful but not wise in a performance as good as any I’ve seen from him), forcing him to cast Elle Fanning as “Rachel Kemp,” a starlet presumably modeled on all the American actresses who requested a meeting with Trier after seeing what he did with Reinsve in The Worst Person in the World.
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Blockbuster menswear at the French film festivalFollowing the millennial angst of the previous film, Sentimental Value takes a big swing at more timeless topics particularly family trauma and the cathartic power of art. Gustav based his script on his own mother’s death by suicide, and hopes to film in the Borg family home; the plan evolves and mutuates under the economic realities of filmmaking and the emotional realities of family, in ways that are gratifyinly specific and not programmatic. Some people find Trier intellectually lightweight but I would say he’s affable and accessible, and this doesn’t come off as pandering or tryhard because Trier and his cowriter Eskil Vogt construct each scene with a willingness to be surprised and a little vibration of pleasure in each little unexpected interpersonal dynamic or point of aesthetic interest. Nora’s relationship with her sister Agnes (the Norwegian actress Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, a find), the intermediary between her and father, adds several dimensions to the family — it’s intriguing, and pays off, that Agnes and not Nora was the child star of Gustav’s best movie (and, when we see a clip of it, it feels just right that the movie is pretty good, an impressively made and manipulative Holocaust-era movie in the shadow of Agnieska Holland); Gustav and Rachel’s first conversation, late at night at the Deauville American Film Festival, sitting under primary-colored beach umbrellas and looking out at the ocean, is typical of a densely textured movie that’s sufficiently lived-in to earn the bigger emotional moments that really worked on the people sitting around me at the press screening. If Neon had a Best Picture nominee at Cannes 2025 this is it.
Their other two big acquisitions, alongside Panahi, are equally crowd-pleasing. The Brazilian film The Secret Agent, from Best Director Kleber Mendonça Filho and starring Best Actor Wagner Moura, is something like a shaggy-dog thriller, about a political dissident holed up in Recife, the Brazilian director’s hometown, dodging a couple hired killers while also digging through the national archive for his mother’s birth record — but there are also digressions into the history of Recife’s cinemas, an urban legend about a severed leg attacking a popular cruising spot, wild sounds of carnival, and gorgeous celluloid blues, greens and yellows to go along with the rousing politics. And Sirat, from the French director Óliver Laxe, is an Islamic spiritual parable and post-apocalyptic road movie about anarchist ravers driving Max Max-style through stunning Saharan landscapes, set to a thundering and hypnotic techno score that took full advantage of the Dolby Atmos system newly installed in the Lumiere theater.
Sirat split the Jury Prize with Mascha Schilinski’s second feature The Sound of Falling, which interweaves the story of four generations of women living in the same farmhouse, from the Great War through the decades of a divided Germany up to today. Like Sentimental Value and The Secret Agent it’s about the family as archive; Schilinksi’s approach is to interweave the four storylines in a musical editing pattern reliant on echoing imagery and sensual memory, drawing out parallel stories of peril and exploitation in a way that’s boldly poetic and arguably affected — the titular sound of falling is an oppressive ambient buzz that’s less fugue than forced atmosphere, but by the end of the film’s two and a half hours I did appreciate that I’d watched a talented new filmmaker build out a whole world.
The year after Greta Gerwig handed the Palme to Sean Baker, this was a far less American-skewing jury, and Best Actress and Best Screenplay went to two mid French-language films. Eighteen-year-old first-time actor Nadia Melliti was a surprise Actress pick for her role in The Little Sister, based on a French bestseller about an Islamic girl coming to terms with her sexuality. The athletic Melliti is an evocative presence even if filmmaker Hafsia Herzi’s script gives her a very basic arc to play; the cultural specificity of the milieu struck French audiences as novel and vital but as a coming-out-story it yields few surprises. Two-time Palme winners Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne took the Screenplay prize for the worst film of theirs that I’ve seen, Young Mothers, an undisciplined and pathos-laden ensemble piece about a Belgian group home for teen moms; it’s a bad pick from the jury but the the brothers’ social-realist dramas, at once grounded in the everyday and spiritually profound, have earned them their stature, and I’m pleased that they’re still being treated as relevant even as Western distributors and festival programmers seem to have moved on from them.
Awards or no, Cannes 2025 was still a launching pad for some of America’s name filmmakers, both in the competition and beyond. Denzel Washington took some time off Othello on Broadway to receive an honorary Palme d’Or from Spike Lee at the premiere of Highest 2 Lowest, as Cannes celebrated an actor and director who bring out each other’s most charismatic work. A remake of the Akira Kurosawa classic High and Low, a police procedural in which kidnappers targeting the son of a mogul nab the chauffeur’s boy instead, Highest 2 Lowest, out later this summer, opens with real swagger, with majestic views of the Manhattan skyline under opening credits set to “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” from Oklahoma! It’s an overture for film and city, like the opening credits of 25th Hour, but with the new luxury condos of Downtown Brooklyn shooting skyward instead of the post-9/11 Tribute in Light beams, with all the difference in tone between the two films that that implies. Washington’s record executive David King (“King David”) is up there on the terrace of one of those condos, making calls and making deals, psyching himself up to regain control of his legendary hip-hop label, and get back in the game in earnest. Lee identifies with him — with his office with frames photos of James Brown and Stevie Wonder that he addresses, as well he might, as his peers; with his Basquiat canvas and Brunson jersey framed on the wall. The kidnapper, played by A$AP Rocky, represents the city’s striving underclass, the hustle that informed the music that carried King to his throne.
Once the kidnapping plot is set in motion, there are as many amateurish or corny scenes in Highest 2 Lowest there are electric ones — Washington, both a classy actor and a furious one, code-switches as King moves between the corporate world and the streets, but Lee is best when he gets his camera out of the boardroom and penthouse, where it’s pent up and low-energy, and out onto the subway — he sets the ransom drop on a 4 train full of screaming Yankee fans above a Puerto Rican Day salsa concert — and into the Bronx, in a recording studio where Washington and Rocky face off in a dialogue that’s almost a rap battle, and at least begins to touch on the contradictions of individual Black success in a racist society.
At the premiere, Lee looked resplendent in an orange-and-blue suit celebrating his Knicks, who knocked off the Celtics to advance to the Eastern Conference finals earlier in the festival — an outcome even the film, which includes among its many pleasantly obnoxious and gratuitous in-jokes and digressions a scene in which Washington banters with Rick Fox, playing himself, dared not imagine.
Highest 2 Lowest screened Out of Competition; the festival’s second-tier competition, the Un Certain Regard section, has since the pandemic become a showcase for early-career filmmakers — as Cannes strives sort of, for gender parity and greater geographic diversity in its main competition, UCR is something like a G League squad from which the next generation of festival mainstays might emerge. This year, several of those filmmakers were notable actors. Kristen Stewart’s long-gestating passion project The Chronology of Water was the festival’s hottest ticket. (The Chronology of Water is not to be confused with Competition dud The History of Sound, a Brokebackian and interminably morose and precious romance between ethnomusicologists Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor.) Harris Dickinson, star of past Palme winner Triangle of Sadness, directed Urchin, a character study of an unhoused Londoner (Frank Spillane, who won UCR’s Best Actor prize) which starts out as a rather sanitized exercise in kitchen-sink realism and eventually morphs into something less formally predictable.
Either Stewart or Dickinson might graduate to the main competition eventually; if Scarlett Johansson continues directing, her films are more likely to find a home elsewhere. Along the Croisette there was widespread disbelief that Eleanor the Great wasn’t in Sundance, where this story of a feisty retiree (June Squibb) who forms a bond with an undergraduate journalism student (Erin Kellyman) by kinda sorta accidentally spinning an elaborate lie about being a Holocaust survivor, would have fit right in. With its unlikely but mutually nurturing central friendship, gently upbeat music, bring-your-mom one-liners and pat lessons about grief, it skims along the surface of its premise. In a move that I, at least, am tickled by, Johansson hired the brilliant cinematographer Hélène Louvart, who shot La Chimera, to photograph the film’s anodyne New York City locations in conventional coverage setups, so the lighting is 20% richer and more numinous than it would otherwise be, to no end whatsoever.
Squibb, still lively at 95, gives a consummate pro’s well-calibrated performance, and in her director she’ll surely have an eager proxy on the awards circuit. (Sony Classics will release the film in the US.) Last year in the Oscars horse race, niche distributor Mubi snagged The Substance off of Universal and rode its Cannes success to over $80 million worldwide and Oscar glory; Mubi was back on the Croisette with billion-dollar valuation and a desire to make a splash, which they duly did by paying over $20 million for the Die My Love, starring Jennifer Lawrence, which failed to light up the Competition in the festival’s first week.
Lynne Ramsay is widely acknowledged as one of the U.K.’s major directors, but Die My Love is just her fifth feature in a 25-plus-year career; her style is jarring and immersive, full of emphatic formal flourishes — ostentatiously controlled compositions, orchestrations of sudden shocking violence, jumbled chronology, subjective sound design, replayed scenes blending fantasy and reality, strident performances — which go deep into the bones of characters experiencing extreme interior states, whether in the kitchen-sink realism of Ratcatcher, the numbing grief and self-destructive abandon of Morvern Callar, the bad-mom ambivalence of We Need to Talk About Kevin, or the violent trauma fugue of You Were Never Really Here. Her experiential approach can connect with viewers on a visceral level but can be more or less hollow depending on the bones of the story. Die My Love, starring Jennifer Lawrence as a first-time mother and frustrated writer going feral postpartum, is cranked up to 11 from the opening scenes, when she and Robert Pattinson, as her husband, go to town on each other in the unfinished kitchen of their new home, moshing and grappling and groping to a speed metal soundtrack before Ramsay cuts away to a (possibly metaphorical, definitely CGI) forest fire.
Lawrence, a naturally high-voltage performer who does her best work with directors who match her freak, is a producer here and throws herself into a role that seems like a quite personal project given her own journey as the mother of a young child. Grace crawls through the yard like a sex kitten or caged tiger; she swears and screams and tears at the walls, demands sex from her husband even as Pattinson (whose metier is the mumble) withdraws from her. She wields razor-sharp sarcasm and stubbornness along with a shotgun and a kitchen knife and drips ink and breast milk on the empty page. Her isolation and libido manifest in acting-out at parties and possibly imagined encounters with a motorcycle-riding neighbor (a barely-there Lakeith Stanfield in a surely truncated and underthought role), and Ramsay pummels the audience with a soundtrack of discordant pop music, a wailing baby, and animal noises from a yapping dog to a buzzing fly. A collage from inside a mind (and body) fighting for itself, the film at its best has a thrilling physical sense of mental health and presents a fiercely embodied treatise on motherhood, but often Ramsay’s showstopper effects are more impressive than meaningful — many great directors filter simple observations through a personal style to yield fresh insights, but Ramsay isn’t Claire Denis, say, whose wafer-thin theses about the nature of desire shapeshift and deepen when explored in a tactile and intuitive visual design that argues, implicitly, for feeling as a form of knowing. Here, an overabundance of big choices and daring symbolism that’s often conceptually obvious or underdeveloped overwhelms the material.
Given her history of troubled and abandoned projects, we shouldn’t take a new Ramsay film for granted, but equally we shouldn’t take a new Wes Anderson film for granted just because he keeps cranking them out. An excellent way to tell which working film critics checked out years ago will be tracking who repeats the usual plug-and-play arguments against Anderson when reviewing his new one. For a filmmaker who’s reliably called exoticizing, apolitical, glib, The Phoenician Scheme is about a Suez Crisis–esque international incident triggered by an infrastructure project in the Middle East, a transformational project founded on an alliance between investment capital and the Catholic church (like much of human history), which is also a wayward father’s attempted reconciliation with his daughter, sparked by fear of mortality and nagging religious guilt.
Benicio del Toro is Zsa-Zsa Korda, another rouge Anderson patriarch who is almost assassinated midair in the film’s first scene; we gather, from del Toro’s echt-Andersonian sangfroid and musical clipped deadpan that this is a common enough occurrence. Still, he’s started to have black-and-white visions of himself being judged by God (Bill Murray) and his thoughts turn to his legacy, particularly his daughter, who he pulls out of convent school with Mother Superior’s blessing to help him finalize his plan for a major dam and railway project in Phoenicia, an imaginary land like the Zubrowka of Grand Budapest Hotel, but inspired by the North African backlot of von Sternberg’s Morocco instead of the Mitteleuropean backlot of von Sternberg’s Dishonored.
“Korda” was the name of three Hungarian-born super-producers and directors active in the British film industry of the 1930s, especially, and as has been pointed out, much of the movie revolves around Zsa-Zsa’s attempts to finance an international coproduction, with no tariffs to worry about but still plenty of budget uncertainty, such that he has to pour his own money back into his legacy project to get it off the ground. But in addition to being a movie (nothing is ever one-to-one in Anderson, he stacks his references), Zsa-Zsa’s scheme is also a Middle Eastern development project undermined by the espionage of a NATO-like cabal. Zsa-Zsa’s nun daughter (Mia Threapleton) asks the world-builder if his scheme can justify the labor that will be exploited to carry it out; the film is about nothing less than the progress of human civilization, which is perhaps why Anderson’s typically teeming dollhouse production design includes real masterpieces by Renoir and Magritte on set in addition to all the usual mocked-up books (a volume called Patrons of the High Renaissance is especially telling). Anyone as interested as Anderson is in the high points of human culture also needs to know about money, and this is his most cash-conscious film. Money makes the world go round; it makes The Phoenician Scheme whirl so fast you’ll miss many of its visual puns, surprisingly cruel one-liners and exquisite costuming choices — as per usual. How does Anderson do what he does, as often and as densely as he does it?
Inspired by Anderson’s own education at a Texas Christian academy and dedicated to his Lebanese father-in-law, The Phoenician Scheme is not just densely referential but authentically international; and despite its very American scrappiness and insouciance, it was shot at Babelsberg studio outside Berlin (von Sternberg worked there too). So the question of tariffs would have been relevant even if the film did not include a plotline about Western powers driving up the cost of commodities in order to sabotage Korda’s Eastern development plans. The theme on the ground this Cannes was that the rest of the world is in the brace position awaiting America’s next move. (Will Jafar Panahi be allowed into the U.S. to promote the film his American distributor spent so ambitiously on?) Ari Aster’s Eddington was the film that most explicitly embodied this anxiety on screen. Aster is a filmmaker whose neuroticism manifests as superstition. In Hereditary, Midsommar and Beau Is Afraid, Aster has imagined intrusive thoughts into being: a child or a lover thinks an uncharitable thought about a parent or a partner, to whom something unspeakably awful then happens, instigating a spiraling guilt trip, as if the little boy from the “It’s a Good Life” episode of The Twilight Zone was in psychoanalysis four times a week. 2020 in the United States — a time characterized by an extremely contagious and fatal airborne respiratory virus, police violence and protest, the social division and family strain of lockdown, and rumbling online echo chamber of disinformation — was the time when all our worst-case scenarios came true. Maybe there was something to those superstitions — as the woke viral tweet went, the country is built atop an ancient Native American burial ground. And so Aster’s late spring and early summer 2020 period piece, starring Joaquin Phoenix as an anti-mask sheriff who impulsively declares his run for mayor on Facebook live — on a front-facing cameraphone video from the driver seat of his car — is not so much a troll job or grotesque satire it has been received as by some critics, but more a deep immersion into a time when the Pandora’s Box of our national pathologies opened.
You remember this stuff, though — you remember libertarians suddenly not knowing how to breathe through a mask; you remember teen antiracists loudly declaring their intention to sit their white ass down and listen; you remember people’s parents fearing for their lives about something called “antifa”; you remember the mask-casual fundraisers of Newsom-like virtue-signalling technocrats like Pedro Pascal’s incumbent mayor — and Aster’s film, in which everyone from across the political spectrum is their shrillest and most one-dimensional, caricatures of the excesses of do-gooderism or paranoia, as they appear to the other side on cable news is less satire than stenography. Each scene is distilled into a meme, like the ones that appear in the film’s many scenes of characters scrolling social media or filming each other for a later gotcha. Aster’s imagination is most activated by family dynamics, not politics, and Phoenix’s relationship with his wife (Emma Stone), whose private trauma has led her deep into a QAnon rabbit hole, deepens the material in ways that his checklist-item parodies do not — at least until a shift more than halfway through the movie in which violence is unleashed in new and imaginative and provocatively spurious ways. The film culminates in an action sequence that travesties that most all-American of genres, the Western. Facing the prospect of tariffs designed to make American moviegoing a closed shop, Eddington is a suitably gross domestic product.
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