Previewing Cannes 2025

The festival and the mayor’s office are presenting Ukraine Day, a selection of three films that serve as “a reminder of the commitment of artists, authors, and journalists to tell the story of this conflict in the heart of Europe, which has been affecting the Ukrainian people and the world for three years now.” And tomorrow afternoon, there will be talks with Christopher McQuarrie, whose Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning will premiere out of competition, and with Robert De Niro, who will receive an honorary Palme d’Or this evening.

“Notebook has an international lens,” writes Daniel Kasman in his Cannes 2025 preview, but “it’s hard to ignore the American titles” in the lineup. In the main competition alone, we find new films from Wes Anderson, Ari Aster, Richard Linklater, and Kelly Reichardt. On Sunday, though, French composer Alexandre Desplat and Mexican director Guillermo del Toro will take to the stage to discuss their collaboration on The Shape of Water (2017) and Pinocchio (2022) as well as on the forthcoming Frankenstein.

Gleaned from several critics’ lists of their most-anticipated films as well as from headlines, social-media feeds, and other scattered shout-outs, here’s a sampling of what we can look forward to in each of the festival’s programs.

Vanity Fair’s David Canfield profiles Mia Threapleton, who costars with Benicio del Toro and Michael Cera—along with an army of other A-listers, of course—in Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme. She’s also Kate Winslet’s daughter and “has no interest in hiding this fact.” Threapleton plays Sister Liesl, who’s “headstrong, quick-witted, and emotionally removed from her father, Zsa-zsa Korda [del Toro].” With the help of her Norwegian tutor Bjorn (Cera), they team up to save the family’s “dicey” business.

Canfield finds that “Anderson movingly revisits the kind of troubled father-daughter dynamic he explored in The Royal Tenenbaums, within the structure of a fast-paced caper that’s at times giddily reminiscent of The Grand Budapest Hotel.” Threapleton recalls a moment on the set when “I had Tom Hanks on my left, Bryan Cranston on my right, Riz Ahmed diagonally, Benicio in front of me, Wes at one end, and Michael to the other side. Tom was telling a story about an experience that he’d had filming Saving Private Ryan. I just sat there and I put my hands under my legs. I’m thinking, It’s bloody Woody. Get out! What am I doing here? This is ridiculous.”

Canfield and Richard Lawson note that, since Parasite (2019), Neon has picked up every winner of the Palme d’Or for distribution in the U.S.—before the prizes were announced—and that this year, they’re backing Julia Ducournau’s Alpha and Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value. Canfield and Lawson also suggest keeping an eye on Macha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling: “Every Cannes, a few under-the-radar films prescreen and are promptly followed by enthusiastic whispers. This German drama connecting four generations of women is one of them.”

Variety’s Nick Vivarelli reports that the Iranian Independent Filmmakers Association is calling Woman and Child a propaganda film for the regime because director Saeed Roustaee obtained permission to make it—and because, three years into the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, female cast members wear the Islamic hijab. Having selected the film, Cannes, too, is complicit, claims the IIFMA. Mohammad Rasoulof (The Seed of the Sacred Fig) has come to Roustaee’s defense: “For me, there is a clear distinction between the propaganda films of the Islamic Republic and the films that are made under the constraints of censorship. The idea that some individuals may seek to block others from participating in international festivals goes against the principles of artistic freedom—and even against basic human rights.”

So far, besides The Phoenician Scheme, the competing titles with trailers are Ari Aster’s Eddington, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Young Mothers (in French), and Oliver Laxe’s Sirât. And Les Films du Losange has a short but intriguing teaser for Bi Gan’s Resurrection.

In 1982, thirty-five years before he was awarded the Nobel Prize, Kazuo Ishiguro completed his first novel, A Pale View of Hills, “a charged family story that connects England with Japan and the present with the past,” as Xan Brooks describes it in the Guardian. In Kei Ishikawa’s adaptation, Etsuko (Yoh Yoshida) tells her daughter Niki (Camilla Aiko) about her life as a young woman in Japan.

Brooks finds that the film is “a splendidly elegant and deliberate affair; a trail of carefully laid breadcrumbs that link a mothballed home in early ’80s suburbia with wounded, resilient postwar Nagasaki.” Ishiguro, who has seen and approved of adaptations of his novels The Remains of the Day (James Ivory, 1993) and Never Let Me Go (Mark Romanek, 2010) and has himself written the screenplay for Living, an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952) directed in 2022 by Oliver Hermanus, tells Brooks that “I always emphasize to filmmakers that they have to own the film—that [the book] shouldn’t be approached reverentially.”

June Squibb stars in Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, Eleanor the Great, as a nonagenarian who moves to New York and befriends a student in her early twenties. “It’s like a little gem,” Johansson tells InStyle’s Jason Sheeler. “I was inspired by those independent films from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s. Living Out Loud. Crossing Delancey. Moonstruck.” Screenwriter Tory Kamen tells Deadline’s Antonia Blythe that “these are really hard movies to get made: small, character-driven, independent movies where nobody kisses. And she committed to doing that. That’s the power of Scarlett Johansson.”

“Cannes this year is crawling with actors making feature directing debuts, including Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney. “The one that most intrigues me—and has generated strong early word of mouth—is Harris Dickinson’s [Urchin, a] raw portrait of an unhoused London man, played by Frank Dillane, attempting to break his relentless cycle of self-destruction and turn his life around.”

Along with A Pale View of Hills, there are now trailers for Zuzana Kirchnerová’s Caravan, Simón Mesa Soto’s A Poet, and Erige Sehiri’s Promised Sky.

The Hollywood Reporter’s Rebecca Keegan isn’t the first interviewer to find Spike Lee “alternately funny and introspective, worried and grateful, but always unapologetically himself.” Their conversation covers a lot of ground, but of course, it begins with Highest 2 Lowest, Lee’s “reinterpretation” of Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963). Denzel Washington stars as “a music mogul confronted with the dilemma of—well—how to do the right thing,” as Keegan puts it. The cast also features Jeffrey Wright as the mogul’s “chauffeur and friend, Ilfenesh Hadera as his wife, and A$AP Rocky in a role that is best left for audiences to discover for themselves.”

For the New York Times, Farah Nayeri talks with Thierry Klifa, who has directed Isabelle Huppert in The Richest Woman in the World, a story “very loosely” based on the scandal involving Liliane Bettencourt, the heir to L’Oréal who fell under the spell of writer and photographer François-Marie Banier and gave him more than a billion dollars in cash, annuities, and art. “There is a Shakespearean, Balzacian dimension to this story,” says Klifa.

Highest 2 Lowest has a teaser, and trailers are out for Martin Bourboulon’s 13 Days, 13 Nights; Cédric Klapisch’s Colors of Time (in French); Genki Kawamura’s Exit 8; Ethan Coen’s Honey Don’t; and Juno Mak’s Sons of the Neon Night.

Hlynur Pálmason (Godland) has cast his own children, Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir, Þorgils Hlynsson, and Grímur Hlynsson, in The Love That Remains, a portrait of a family caring for each other even as the parents (Saga Garðarsdóttir and Sverrir Guðnason) negotiate a separation. “People tend to think you always need to go ‘bigger,’” Pálmason tells Marta Bałaga in Variety, “but I’m not stimulated by that. It would make sense to maybe work in English; there are only 350,000 people in Iceland, which makes this language almost extinct. But I wanted to dive into the moment.”

When he was the guest of honor at Visions du Réel last month, Raoul Peck spoke a bit about his documentary Orwell: 2+2=5. “I was aware it might be the last film I made in the U.S., but how could you attack a film which addresses the Holocaust, slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, and shows that it’s all connected? There’s a moment in the film when I ask, ‘Make America Great Again’—when exactly was America great?” Variety’s Lise Pedersen notes that the comment “drew applause from the VdR audience.”

In Koji Fukada’s Love on Trial, a J-Pop idol (Kyoko Saito) is sued for violating a “no dating” clause in her contract. “This film deliberately avoids portraying the most dramatic and scandalous moments of her social downfall in real time,” Fukada tells Variety’s Naman Ramachandran. “Doing so would risk replicating the old-fashioned media practices of sensationalizing celebrity scandals for entertainment.”

Fatih Akin’s Amrum, set on the island north of the German coast during the final days of the Second World War, has a trailer, and so does Sylvain Chomet’s The Magnificent Life of Marcel Pagnol, which will premiere as a Special Screening.

Enzo, the project initiated by Laurent Cantet and completed by his close friend Robin Campillo after he died, will open Directors’ Fortnight tomorrow. Newcomer Eloy Pohu plays a sixteen-year-old who meets Vlad (Maksym Slivinskyi, another newcomer), a Ukrainian construction worker who kindles Enzo’s burgeoning sexuality. When Cantet fell ill, “I told him I would be very happy to complete the film,” Campillo tells IndieWire’s Ryan Lattanzio. “Of course, I couldn’t do a film the way he would do it. I said I would try my best to make the best film I could. You cannot be the brain of someone, even though I knew him so much. It was a real pleasure to do this film. It was not sad at all. I think it would have been more difficult for me or more sad if we had stopped everything. It would have been a real death, a sudden death to me.”

Yes, a late addition to the Fortnight lineup, is one of twenty films writers at the Film Stage are most looking forward to. “If there’s one guiding voice we need to hear from about the Israel-Palestine conflict, it’s Nadav Lapid,” writes Luke Hicks. “For centering on a jazz musician tasked with rewriting Israel’s national anthem in the wake of the October 7 attacks, expect a movie that pisses off half of the world and leaves the other singing its nuanced praises.” Speaking of nuanced, Christian Petzold’s Mirrors No. 3 is also on the Film Stage’s list.

Fortnight titles with trailers include Sean Byrne’s Dangerous Animals; Alina Gorlova, Simon Mozgovyi, and Yelizaveta Smit’s Militantropos; Thomas Ngijol’s Untamable (in French); and the closing night film, Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby, the winner of the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance.

The team behind Critics’ Week has posted interviews with the directors of every single film in the lineup, short films included. This year’s edition will open with Laura Wandel’s Adam’s Sake, starring Anamaria Vartolomei (Happening, Mickey 17) as a mother whose four-year-old may be taken from her after the boy is hospitalized for malnutrition. One nurse (Léa Drucker) will do all she can to ensure that the mother and child will not be separated. “Sometimes you may forget yourself because you give everything to your children,” Vartolomei tells Nicolas Rapold in the New York Times. “You have to heal yourself, too, in order to be a good mother. But you have to admit that you have the right to ask for help.”

Guillermo Galoe’s Sleepless City, set outside of Madrid in the largest illegal slum in Europe, has a trailer. And Déni Oumar Pitsaev has posted a clip from Imago, a record of his journey to Georgia, where he reconnects with his fragmented Chechen family.

Organized by the Association du Cinéma Indépendant pour sa Diffusion, ACID is usually the most unfairly overlooked program running parallel to the festival, but an immensely sad and enraging tragedy has brought one of the films in this year’s lineup to the fore. Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is constructed around conversations between director Sepideh Farsi and Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassona. On April 16, Hassona was killed along with ten members of her family in an Israeli airstrike on their home in Gaza City. Hassona was twenty-five.

“Her assassination adds another layer to this tragedy, but the tragedy was already there,” Farsi tells Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri. “As much as she was my eyes in Gaza, I was a window for her to the outside world.” Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is “no longer the same film that we will be supporting and presenting in every theater. All of us, filmmakers and viewers, must be worthy of her light.”

On April 23, Cannes issued a statement, calling Hassona “one of the far too many victims of the violence that has engulfed the region for months.” The festival aimed to “express its dread and profound sadness at this tragedy that has moved and shocked the whole world.”