| Hello! I’m Esther Zuckerman, a film critic for Pursuits, and I’ve just spent about two weeks at the Cannes Film Festival, which ends tonight. So what does that mean? Well, I saw more than 30 films in the lineup (including some pre-screenings back at home in New York), I drank a lot of rosé, I went to a bunch of beach parties, and I have a lot of opinions. Cannes is a festival known for its impossible glamour. After all, the premieres are black-tie affairs with strict dress codes. (This year nudity and volume were banned.) Meanwhile, anywhere you look on the Croisette you might see a celebrity. I never caught sight of Charli XCX, but she was bouncing around and chronicling her opinions on Letterboxd. I did spot Jason Momoa walking down the street, and he was massive. But for all the silliness outside the venues, inside the movies are typically extreme and intense.  The 78th Cannes Film Festival jury (from left): Carlos Reygadas, Payal Kapadia, Leila Slimani, Halle Berry, Jeremy Strong, Juliette Binoche, Dieudo Hamadi, Alba Rohrwacher and Hong Sang-soo. Photographer: Doug Peters - PA Images/PA Images The Cannes lineup favors challenging works from important auteurs, and for us critics and journalists that means wrestling with these efforts on sometimes very little sleep. Throughout the festival there are perpetual debates about what’s going to win the Palme d’Or, the top prize given by the jury, which this year is led by Juliette Binoche. It’s an impossible thing to predict considering it requires reading the minds of Binoche and her fellow deliberators, which include Halle Berry and Jeremy Strong. (Still, I think Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value has a great shot.) And then, some of us, who can’t help ourselves, start trying to figure out what this all means for the Oscar race, still relatively far away. But to get you excited for what’s on the horizon, here are my highlights from a very busy festival. Best of Cannes Film Festival 2025 |  Sentimental Value. Source: Kasper Tuxen/Cannes Hands down my favorite film this year was Sentimental Value from Joachim Trier, director of the also excellent The Worst Person in the World. That movie’s breakout, Renate Reinsve, stars as an actress dealing with the reemergence of her director father (Stellan Skarsgård), who has said he’s written a role for her in his new film. When she refuses to participate, he hires an eager movie star portrayed by Elle Fanning. That sounds like a recipe for chaos, but instead Trier has made an elegant, open-hearted film about the ways in which family members try and fail to connect with one another. Sentimental Value premiered near the end of the festival when everyone was exhausted, but it turned out to be just the kind of film that reinvigorates a crowd of jaded movie aficionados.  Eddington. Source: Cannes Shortly after seeing Ari Aster’s intentionally provocative Eddington, I ran into some friends on the street who loudly proclaimed they hated it. I had to disagree. But that’s the kind of discussion Aster’s pandemic-set quasi-western engenders, a conversation that’s bound to get more heated when A24 releases it over the summer. The movie stars Joaquin Phoenix as a small town sheriff in New Mexico, who, angry with mask mandates, decides to run for mayor against the incumbent, played by Pedro Pascal. Sounds simple enough? Well, it’s not. Aster’s movie descends into a madness only May 2020 can provoke, bringing to life a world pushed to the edge by an obsession with the internet. It’s funny and horrifying all at the same time.  Die My Love. Source: Okasha/Cannes Die, My Love was the other most hotly debated film on the Croisette. I, for one, was into Lynne Ramsay’s hypnotic, chaotic exploration of a young mother’s postpartum spiral starring a never-better Jennifer Lawrence. However, the aggressive filmmaking isn’t to everyone’s liking. The debate will undoubtedly continue into Oscar season, as Die, My Love made for one of the biggest deals out of the fest with Mubi purchasing it for a whopping $24 million. Expect Lawrence to be a best actress contender. An aura of dread hangs over Oliver Laxe’s wild and disturbing Sirât, one of the most unusual films out of Cannes this year, which nearly gave me a panic attack. A fable about the end-times, it follows a Spanish father searching for his missing daughter along at a rave in Morocco. Desperate, he follows a group of partiers through the desert to their next destination. But this is no ordinary landscape. It’s treacherous not just because of the heat and the rocky terrain but because World War III is happening just out of sight. To say I did not see the twists of Sirât coming would be an understatement. They truly rattled me.  Pillion. Source: Cannes Alexander Skarsgård leather daddy BDSM rom-com. Do I need to say more? Well, the good news is that Pillion is just as great as that description implies. Skarsgård plays a biker who takes a timid man (Harry Melling, wonderful) as his submissive in Harry Lighton’s film, which doesn’t shy away from showing everything that entails. But perhaps most surprisingly, it also plays like a heartening coming-of-age story that makes you smile by the end.  O Agente Secreto. Source: CinemaScopio/MK Production/One Two Films/Lemming/Cannes It takes a second to wrap your head around Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film about a man hiding out in 1977 Brazil. The movie is a sprawling story that jumps back and forth in time and includes the discovery of a man’s leg found inside a shark’s stomach. But once you lock in, it’s a deeply rewarding experience with a great turn from Wagner Moura. This German drama was one of the early standouts, the kind of awe-inducing cinematic experience that you can get at only an adventurous place like Cannes. The sprawling film from Mascha Schilinski is set in the same farmhouse over multiple generations. But nothing about this narrative is expected, as Schilinski takes an eerie, dreamlike approach to unraveling the trauma that has seeped into the bones of this place. Four girls—in eras spanning from WWI to the present day—grapple with the specter of death as well as their own burgeoning sexuality. One in the 1940s imagines what it would be like to be missing a leg; in the 1980s, flirtatiousness is contrasted with sexual abuse. Schilinski hauntingly blends the timelines—the sound of flies buzzing and a record scratching create a quality of eerie nostalgia—as her protagonists look straight into the camera, challenging the viewers to witness their stories.  The Plague. Source: Cannes Adolescence is a nightmare in this debut feature from Charlie Polinger, which follows a newbie at a water polo summer camp for boys. The ominous, almost medieval score from Johan Lenox implies something is amiss here, but writer-director Polinger keeps you guessing as to whether it’s something supernatural or just the horror of being a tween as he plumbs the psyche of Ben (Everett Blunck), a quiet boy surrounded by rowdy peers. Ben soon learns that the other boys avoid their fellow camper Eli (Kenny Rasmussen) not just because Eli’s a strange kid who talks to himself and likes to do a Gollum voice. They’ve decided that Eli has “the plague” based on a rash on his back. Ben’s pulled between his inherent sweetness and his desire to be liked, and Polinger’s allegory of bullying spins out in increasingly uncomfortable directions.  Urchin. Source: Cannes At a Cannes filled with films from movie stars making their directorial debuts—among them Scarlett Johansson and Kristen Stewart—Harris Dickinson’s entry stands out. The actor best known for The Iron Claw and Babygirl wrote and directed this story of a London drifter and addict named Mike who tenuously attempts to rehabilitate his life. Urchin avoids all the tropes of these kinds of stories with an experimental edge that can turn psychedelic. It’s also supported by an incredibly human performance from breakout star Frank Dillane.  Splitsville. Source: Cannes Sometimes it’s nice to laugh at Cannes, where all the movies can seem, frankly, really depressing. So I had a blast with this comedy from co-writers and stars Kyle Marvin and Michael Angelo Covino. They play two best friends who come into conflict when the notion of open marriage enters their partnerships with their respective spouses played by Adria Arjona and Dakota Johnson. It has the funniest fight scene you’ll see all year and the best joke about Lorenzo’s Oil.  The Mastermind. Source: Mastermind Movie Inc/Cannes I always look forward to a new movie from Kelly Reichardt (First Cow, Wendy and Lucy), and this one did not disappoint. In this Vietnam War-era period piece, Josh O’Connor (from last year’s heavy breather Challengers), looking wonderfully shaggy, plays a man who plans to steal a series of Arthur Dove paintings from a museum in his Boston suburb of Framingham. But Reichardt is not looking to fall into heist movie conventions. She’s far more interested in what he does after the crime, bumbling around almost aimlessly in search of something resembling freedom. YesIsraeli director Nadav Lapid’s Yes feels almost designed to be controversial. But it does far more than just touch the third rail of Middle Eastern conflict—it’s a veritable angry scream of a film. The film acts as a thorough indictment of Israeli society through outrageous satire that’s also rooted in a deep pain. Yes follows Y., a man who wants to be a jazz pianist but along with his wife Jasmine is essentially a party-starter/sex worker for the country’s warmongers and tycoons. Y and Jasmine themselves are not completely soulless; when they get notifications on their phones about the horrors in Gaza, the sounds of terror blare in their ears. And yet they are also constantly negotiating their desire to live a happy life with the terror around them. This takes a turn when Y. is given an assignment to compose music for a new anthem, the lyrics of which consist of a bloodthirsty call for death in Palestine. Last year’s festival was all about Sean Baker, who won the Palme d’Or for Anora. This year he returns in a much different capacity. Baker produced, edited and co-wrote Left-Handed Girl, the first solo directorial effort by his long-time collaborator Shih-Ching Tsou. The movie retains some of Baker’s indie, euphoric energy as it tells the story of a family of three women who’ve recently moved back to Taipei. There’s the exhausted mother, who opens up a noodle stand in a night market, her sardonic and provocative college-aged daughter, and her youngest, an adorable moppet, who is left-handed, a detail that her traditional grandfather thinks is the work of the devil. There’s a colorful vibrancy to the images Tsou puts on screen as she digs into the messy lives of these three with heart and humor.  My Father’s Shadow. Source: Cannes There’s a gorgeous, bittersweet quality to this Nigerian film from director Akinola Davies Jr., which looks at the 1993 political chaos in the country through the eyes of a child. A father (Sope Dirisu, wonderful) takes his two young boys into Lagos from their home in the countryside for a day. His goal is to approach his boss for money he’s owed, but the kids are simply in awe of how he draws attention from people on the street. They are mesmerized by their dad, but as an audience we see his pain more clearly. It’s a deft work of perspective. Finally, without a doubt, one of the most thrilling films I saw this year at Cannes was Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, an alternately devastating and darkly comedic drama about a group of former prisoners debating whether to take revenge on the man who tortured them in captivity. It’s a topic Panahi knows well having himself been imprisoned in his home country. (His return to Cannes was a deservedly stirring affair.) Panahi’s script is ingeniously methodical after an opening sequence that plays with the notion of who this film is really about. Is it the story of the man who accidentally hit a dog on a darkened road with his pregnant wife and young daughter in the car? And why is his presence so unnerving? The answers are a powerful indictment of a system that targeted Panahi himself, but they also make for a propulsive, excellent movie. | 
