The first Cannes Film Festival I ever attended, in May 2006, was a deliriously star-studded affair. Penélope Cruz, Ethan Hawke and Kirsten Dunst walked up the red-carpeted steps. Future Oscar hopefuls like Volver, Babel and Marie Antoinette competed for the Palme d'Or, the festival's top prize. There were world premieres of blockbusters like The Da Vinci Code and X-Men: The Last Stand — terrible movies, but great photo ops. And near the end of the festival, I walked into a film I knew nothing about called Pan's Labyrinth and emerged knowing I'd seen a classic.
This year's Cannes kicked off with a 20th-anniversary screening of Pan's Labyrinth, but otherwise, there wasn't much of that 2006-era razzle-dazzle. The major Hollywood studios tightened their belts and stayed home, perhaps with still-fresh memories of the stinging Cannes reception for the last Indiana Jones movie back in 2023.
But there were stars here and there. Demi Moore and Stellan Skarsgård were on this year's jury. Adam Driver and Miles Teller showed up for the world premiere of James Gray's terrific 1986-set crime drama, Paper Tiger, in which they play brothers who unwisely go into business with the Russian mob. Driver and Teller are outstanding, and Scarlett Johansson is heartbreakingly good as a family member forced to deal with the fallout.
Paper Tiger deserved a prize, but it left the festival empty-handed. Instead, the jury awarded the Palme d'Or to the gripping and sometimes infuriating small-town drama Fjord. It's the second Palme win for the Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu; he won his first in 2007 for the movie 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.
In Fjord, Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve are almost unrecognizable as an evangelical Christian couple who have recently moved from Romania to a small Norwegian town with their five children. When the couple are accused of child abuse, Fjord becomes a fierce battle between the forces of religious conservatism and secular liberalism. It may be set in Norway, but it's likely to resonate with American audiences when it opens later this year.
I hope there will also be robust turnout for Minotaur, a perfectly chilled tale of adultery and murder that won the Grand Prix, or second place. It's a remake of the 1969 Claude Chabrol drama La Femme Infidèle, this time set in Russia, not long after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The director of Minotaur, Andrey Zvyagintsev, nearly died of COVID during the pandemic, and it was moving to see him back in Cannes with a film this powerful and uncompromising in its critique of the Putin regime.
One of the buzziest out-of-competition titles was Club Kid, a hugely enjoyable comedy directed by the actor, writer, comedian and social-media star Jordan Firstman. He plays a gay New York City club promoter who's sent reeling when he learns that he has a 10-year-old son. The result is basically a ketamine-laced version of every adult-bonds-with-cute-kid movie you've ever seen, but Firstman is a real talent.
Firstman's also one of several queer filmmakers who made a bold impression at the festival this year. Jane Schoenbrun, the director of the inventive transgender allegory I Saw the TV Glow, came to Cannes with their third feature, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Starring a very game Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson, the movie is a clever homage to, and deconstruction of, '80s and '90s slasher thrillers, digging deep into the often-unspoken connections between our love of pop culture and our hang-ups about sex and desire.
Along with Paper Tiger, Club Kid and Camp Miasma were welcome reminders that American cinema isn't close to dead, at Cannes or anywhere else. Even so, I can't say that I minded the general absence of Hollywood at the festival this year. One of the reasons I keep returning to Cannes is that it shows interesting movies from all over the world — movies like the gorgeous and moving Rwanda-set drama, Ben'Imana, about efforts to bring about truth and reconciliation years after the 1994 genocide. The film earned its director, Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo, the Caméra d'Or prize for best debut feature.
My favorite film at Cannes this year was All of a Sudden, from the Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. Set in and around a Parisian elder-care home, it uses the close bond between two women — one French and one Japanese — to raise haunting questions about how we live, how we die, and most of all, how we talk to each other. Like Hamaguchi's Oscar-winning Drive My Car, All of a Sudden is a reminder that something as simple as a conversation between friends can make for sublimely moving cinema. I can't wait to see it again, and I can't wait for you to see it, too.
Copyright 2026 NPR
