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17 Films We’re Looking Forward to at Cannes 2025
Sirat With the Cannes Film Festival underway until May 24, here are 17 films our editors and writers are keenly anticipating. As always, look throughout the festival for reviews from Vadim Rizov and Blake Williams as well as interviews and festival reports.
The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt)
For her return to Cannes following 2022’s Showing Up, Kelly Reichardt latches onto Josh O’Connor’s rising star; after his profile-elevating turns in La chimera and Challengers, he’s in two competition titles this year (the other is Oliver Hermanus’s The History of Sound). Here he’s opposite Alana Haim, who also has a lot to promote with her band’s fourth album out this summer and her role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another; as a result of their combined firepower, Reichardt is able to make not her first period film, but her first 20th century-set period film, aiming to tickle a particularly pervasive stamp of cinephile with her take on the ‘70s. — Vadim Rizov
The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
But Kelly Reichardt is not the only person making her first period film set in the ‘70s! after the cinephilic documentary detour of Pictures of Ghosts, Brazil’s Kleber Mendonça Filho returns with his own film set in that decade, whose title adjacency to Joseph Conrad seems to be a coincidence rather than a clue. While Filho has seemed like an axiom of Brazilian cinema since he emerged, this is, somewhat improbably, only his fourth narrative feature; the last was 2019’s Bacurau. — VR
The Plague (Charlie Polinger)
New York-based director Charlie Polinger impressively makes his feature debut in Cannes’s Official Selection with teen bullying drama The Plague. The AFI grad caught my eye in ’23 with the SXSW-premiering short, Fuck Me, Richard, a story of loneliness, relationships and deception that he directed with writer, actor and producer Lucy McKendrick. (McKendrick returns as a producer of The Plague.) The log line? “A socially anxious twelve-year-old navigates the savage social order at an all-boys water polo summer camp. Over the course of the summer, his unbearable tween anxiety teeters into a full-blown psychological nightmare.” Based on the strength of Fuck Me, Richard as well as the overall buzz around Polinger — his second film, an Edgar Allen Poe adaptation, The Masque of the Red Death, starring Sydney Sweeney, is in already pre-production from Picture Start and A24 — The Plague’s Cannes premiere marks Polinger as a filmmaker to watch. Scott Macaulay
The Phoenician Scheme (Wes Anderson)
The red-letter item about Anderson’s latest is that it’s his first-ever live-action project to be shot by someone other than Robert Yeoman, his regular cinematographer on everything minus stop-motion work beginning Bottle Rocket. The film, surely, will look very similar, but is still a test-case for keen-eyed auturists as Anderson teams up, for whatever reason, with Bruno Delbonnel (Inside Llewyn Davis, Amélie) who (the plot thickens) had a cameo in Anderson’s The French Dispatch. — VR
Left-Handed Girl (Shih-Ching Tsou)
For more than two decades, Shih-Ching Tsou has collaborated with Sean Baker, first by directing together with him their 2004 film Take-Out. The two were living above a Chinese restaurant in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood and, inspired by Dogma ’95, made their neorealist-inflected drama about an undocumented delivery worker for $3,000. Remembering the beginning of her career, she told Taylor Hess, “I fell into filmmaking. I never had producing or directing in mind.” In the years following, Tsou produced, costume-designed and worked in the camera department on such Baker films as Tangerine, Red Rocket, Starlet and The Florida Project. And now, more than two decades after Take-Out, the writer/director makes her own feature debut in Cannes Critics’ Week. There’s a bit of a connection to Take-Out — instead of a Chinese restaurant, the Taipei-set film is centered around another kind of retail establishment, a stall in a night market — but the cast of characters is larger, focusing on a woman and her two daughters who leave their home in the countryside to work in the city. Baker co-wrote, edited and produced the film, about which Critics’ Week artistic director Ava Cahen said, “It’s a bit reminiscent of Tangerine and The Florida Project, for the way it captures reality, with a form of wonder, or at least a desire for the fabulous.” — SM
Bono: Stories of Surrender (Andrew Dominik)
Following his 2016 3D documentary about Nick Cave, One More Time with Feeling, Andrew Dominik returns to music portraiture with what is already—from a technical standpoint, at least—a landmark film. Produced by Apple, Bono: Stories of Surrender is the first feature-length film made in the company’s proprietary Immersive Video format, ie. stereoscopic 8K VR180 video at 90 frames per second. The film represents a continuation of the tech giant’s partnership with U2 that dates back to the iPod U2 Special Edition released in 2004, which helped promote Apple’s “digital box set,” The Complete U2. I’m still wondering why Dominik’s project is being presented as a Special Screening—apparently in 2D at 24 frames per second—rather than as a headlining feature in the festival’s Immersive Competition, a sidebar that, after launching last year, is still struggling to convince anyone it’s worth their time or attention. International press have been encouraged to reach out to the film’s publicist to experience the film’s “immersive trailer” to supplement the film’s technically compromised festival screening. — Blake Williams
Sirât (Oliver Laxe)
The really excellent trailer for Oliver Laxe’s new film fully bears out the then-gestating project he described to Beatrice Loayza in a 2020 interview about his previous Fire Will Comes, which was the first Galician-language film to premiere at Cannes: “I’m making a psychedelic road movie, an adventure but also a spiritual tale about punks and raiders that are looking for a party in the desert in Morocco. I’ll be shooting in France, then finish in Mauritania. My references are pre-apocalyptic films like Mad Max, but also Easy Rider and Stalker.” Looks like there’s a little Gerry in the mix, as well as Laxe’s own previous journey of arduous trekking through his adopted second home of Morocco, 2016’s Mimosas. — VR
The Great Arch (Stéphane Demoustier)
1983: an unknown Danish architect wins a big commission at the start of the Mitterand regime—based on a true story. Cannes serves as the launching pad for a lot of workhorse French cinema that goes otherwise unnoticed by the international press, so why am I highlighting this particular, unpromising-sounding title? I was positively impressed by Demoustier’s otherwise obscure 2014 film Amour-40, and re-reading my review from 2015 the reasons came flooding back. Sometimes that’s enough! — VR
Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)
The great Danish-Norwegian director returns following his international hit, Worst Person in the World, with another picture starring that film’s discovery, Renate Reinsve. Joining her in the ensemble cast of Competition title Sentimental Value is Stellan Skarsgard and Elle Fanning, and Trier has collaborated on the script with his usual co-writer, Eskil Vogt. As for the description, promotional materials just tip it as “an intimate, poignant and often funny exploration of family, memories, and the reconciliatory power of art” — themes that play to this director’s considerable strengths. — SM
I Only Rest in the Storm (Pedro Pinho)
Pedro Pinho’s last film, 2017’s The Nothing Factory, was a three-hour sometimes-musical about elevator factory workers trying to collectivize their workforce and stave off mass firings, complete with a self-reflexive indictment of the fictional filmmaker documenting all this to, as he’s accused of, “impress your French friends.” As sprawling as it sounds, that film did indeed premiere at Cannes, and now Pinho is back with another work on the perils of attempting to implement liberalism and dignity under unpromising circumstances, this time tracking an environmental engineer working for an NGO in West Africa. — VR
Her Will Be Done (Julia Kowalski)
Julia Kowalski’s 2023 medium-length I Saw the Face of the Devil had an opening shot so freaky and strong that if the rest of the movie had followed suit I would have immediately deemed it one of Cannes’ best that year; as it was, I tucked her name away for future reference. And just like that short took the prompt of a girl who thinks she’s possessed to execute attention-getting, aggressively styled images, it sounds like this one (“Naw experiences trance-like episodes and strange powers, just like her dead mother before her…”) will continue in the same direction. — VR
A Useful Ghost (Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke)
Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s Cannes-premiering A Useful Ghost is a multilayered cinematic extravaganza (and feat) that manages to seamlessly combine several deep themes: toxic pollution, soulless capitalism, the perils of prioritizing self-interest over the good of the community, and the beauty of unconventional romantic relationships. And that’s all while doing so in the guise of a love story involving a man named March and his recently deceased wife Nat, who has now taken the form of a very sleek vacuum cleaner. — Lauren Wissot
Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk (Sepideh Farsi)
For the second consecutive year, the festival’s Official Selection includes a solitary film that, in name only, tells a story of Gaza: last year it was French filmmaker Yolande Zauberman’s Tel Aviv-set The Belle from Gaza—a Special Screening selection that documented the experiences of several trans women living in Israel—and Arab & Tarzan Nasser’s Once Upon a Time in Gaza—a crime film about drug dealers made by twin Palestinian filmmakers whose work has traditionally been unconcerned with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict—placed in this year’s Un Certain Regard lineup. So far, work that is critical of Israel’s genocide has been relegated to the festival’s sidebars, this year in ACID and the Quinzaine. The latter added Nadav Lapid’s Yes! to its lineup after the late submission was turned down by Fremaux & co., while the former presents Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi’s Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk. Composed entirely of video calls between Farsi and Palestinian freelance photographer Fatima Hassouna, the documentary made international headlines when, a day after it was announced that the film would screen in Cannes, Hassouna and ten of her family members were killed in Gaza after an apparently targeted Israeli missile strike on their home. After the industry outcry prompted by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences’s silence following Oscar-winning filmmaker Hamdan Ballal’s March 24 assault and abduction, Cannes’s first day has been greeted with the release of a signed letter from prominent AMPAS members condemning Hassouna’s murder, asking, “Why is it that cinema, a breeding ground for socially committed works, seems to be so indifferent to the horror of reality and the oppression suffered by our sisters and brothers?” — BW
Resurrection (Bi Gan)
With Terrence Malick deciding to take another year to work on what may end up being his final, career-defining opus, Cannes needed an arty “event film” to accent this year’s otherwise solid-on-paper lineup. Perhaps the bubble I exist in is just exceptionally loud in this case, but that seemed to arrive with the last-minute addition of Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan’s 160-minute science fiction film, Resurrection, to the festival’s competition. The anticipated follow-up to his noir-ish Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018) sees Bi working with Shu Qi and Jackson Yee to once again mine his characters’ dreams, which he tends depict in impressively protracted long takes—a 40-minute shot marked the conclusion of his 2015 debut, Kaili Blues, while Long Day’s oneiric 59-minute back half was not only unbroken but presented in post-converted 3D. Reports from earlier this year suggested that Bi may have once again experimented with 3D for Resurrection—claims that remain, as of this writing, unsubstantiated—but I’m excited to see if and how the filmmaker will push the boundaries of his distinct brand of art cinema further. — BW
Eddington (Ari Aster)
Ari Aster makes his debut appearance at the Cannes Film Festival with what is reported to be the film he intended to launch his career with. He set the script aside to make Hereditary instead and subsequently reworked it, setting it in May, 2020, in the early days of the pandemic. Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone and Austin Butler star in what, based on the teaser, looks like a black comedy whose confrontations are emblematic of COVID-era political skirmishes. — SM
Die, My Love (Lynn Ramsay)
Any film by Lynn Ramsay — launched as an auteur even prior to her 1999 debut, Ratcatcher, on the basis of a series of acclaimed shorts — is both an event and probable photo-finish. A late addition to this year’s Competition lineup, Die, My Love has an impressive cast — Jennifer Lawrence (who also produces), Robert Pattinson, LaKeith Stanfeild, Nick Nolte, and Sissy Spacek — in an adaptation of Argentine writer Ariana Harwicz’s debut novel dealing with postpartum depression and psychosis. With lines (in the novel) like, “I’m a mother, full stop. And I regret it, but I can’t even say that,” the material recalls Ramsay’s earlier We Need to Talk about Kevin, but the books goes in a very different direction. Also, Ramsay seems defiant on never repeating herself, with each of her films an entirely new vision, although her dedication to capturing the sensory details of her psychologically-charged worlds remains a constant. — SM
Militantropos (Yelizaveta Smith, Simon Mozgovyi and Alina Gorlova)
Militantropos (a neologism formed from “milit,” Latin for soldier, and “antropos,” Greek for human) is a stunning vérité trip focused on the myriad citizenry of today’s Ukraine crafted by three members of the Ukrainian filmmaking collective Tabor, Yelizaveta Smith, Simon Mozgovyi and Alina Gorlova. (Gorlova is a talent I’ve been keeping an eye on since first discovering her debut feature No Obvious Signs at Docudays UA 2018, and including her followup This Rain Will Never Stop in my Top Female Filmmakers of IDFA 2020.) It’s also an in-depth and visceral study of how, as the doc’s spot-on Directors’ Fortnight synopsis puts it, “the human is absorbed into war — and war, in turn, becomes part of the human.” — LW
