Cannes Classics 2025
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Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925) was “one of the first truly worldwide cultural phenomena,” writes Lucy Sante. Watch it today, and “watching along with you, spectrally, are most of a century’s worth of people, in every corner of the globe, in opulent movie palaces and slum storefronts, on state-of-the-art equipment and sheets hung from trees.” The silent comedy “takes the Tramp, in his longest outing to date, from rags to riches, thus combining the pleasure of laughing at his pratfalls with that of vicariously sharing in his eventual good fortune—and what could have more universal appeal?”
On June 26, one hundred years to the day after The Gold Rush first opened at the Egyptian Theater in Los Angeles, a new 4K restoration will be screened in more than 250 theaters around the globe. On May 13, that restoration will see its world premiere as the pre-opening presentation of this year’s Cannes Classics program.
On opening night, Cannes will pay tribute to Edward Yang with a screening of Yi Yi (2000), a portrait of a middle-class family in Taipei. Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, and Wong Kar-wai “have each thought carefully about what it’s like to live in a city, how it affects your sense of space and time, your consciousness,” wrote Kent Jones in 2011. “But I’m not sure that any of them has rendered city living with such wondrous clarity as Yang does in Yi Yi.”
The lineup features two more films turning twenty-five this year. Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Amores perros “represented a quantum leap in the audiovisual grammar of Mexican cinema,” writes Fernanda Solórzano, while Kevin Smith’s Dogma was “a film out of time,” as Richard Corliss called it in Time, “the most devout movie in a modern setting since Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951) . . . Love Dogma or dismiss it, but don’t condemn the film for what it isn’t. As Ben Affleck, one of the zillion-dollar stars in this $10 million film, says, ‘It’s a rumination on faith. With dick jokes.’”
Director Gareth Evans (The Raid, Havoc) tells Letterboxd that John Woo’s Hard Boiled (1992) was “the absolute game changer in terms of action cinema for me.” As Barbara Scharres wrote in 1998, “Woo choreographs a hellish arsenal against his characters, and there is both beauty and exquisite Zenlike detachment in the way so much chaos is unleashed with limitless diabolical precision.”
The screening of the comedic drama Merlusse (1935) will be a triple-anniversary celebration: Fifty years since the death of writer and director Marcel Pagnol, seventy years Pagnol was the president of the festival’s jury, and ninety years since the premiere of the film itself. Further new restorations include films by Mikio Naruse (Floating Clouds, 1955), Miloš Forman (One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1975), Satyajit Ray (Days and Nights in the Forest, 1970), and four short films by Abel Gance and Nelly Kaplan.
Diane Kurys’s The One I Loved will tell the story of one of French cinema’s great couples with Marina Foïs and Roschdy Zem starring as Simone Signoret and Yves Montand. This year’s new documentaries include Stéphane Ghez’s David Lynch, une énigme à Hollywood; Lírio Ferreira and Karen Harley’s Para Vigo me voy, a portrait of Brazilian filmmaker Carlos Diegues; Vincent Glenn’s Dis pas de bêtises!, a tribute to cinematographer Pierre-William Glenn, who worked with François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Maurice Pialat, and Bertrand Tavernier; Jon Asp and Mattias Nohrborg’s Bo Being Bo Widerberg; and My Mom Jayne, Mariska Hargitay’s search for an understanding of her mother, Jayne Mansfield.
Quentin Tarantino, this year’s guest of honor at Cannes Classics, will present two westerns by George Sherman, Red Canyon (1949) and Comanche Territory (1950), and then chat with Elvis Mitchell about one of the most prolific directors in Hollywood history.
Cannes Classics 2025 will wrap on May 23 with Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975), an adaptation of Thackeray’s 1844 novel that “manages to be airy, spacious, sensually gratifying, without ever offering more than curtailed glimpses of anything like human happiness or generosity of spirit or even enduring satisfaction,” as Geoffrey O’Brien wrote in 2017. “The paradox of Barry Lyndon is that it brings us ever nearer to a reality that is made to seem further and further away.”
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