13/05/2025 - New features by Lynne Ramsay, Ari Aster, Julia Ducournau, Bi Gan and Óliver Laxe stud an especially mouthwatering line-up on the Croisette this year

Donald Trump’s import tariffs – including, potentially but still unbelievably, on international film production – may have rocked the world’s planning and economic prognostications, but we hear there’s a pretty exciting film festival just around the corner to distract us. It is indeed the Cannes Film Festival, taking place from 13-24 May, on which so much of contemporary world cinema depends, and which so many press professionals and celebrities flock to, guaranteeing saturation headline news.

At the announcement press conference last month, General Delegate Thierry Frémaux described the festival as like a “publishing house” that sticks by its “authors”, but this edition seems to be geared in celebration of a newer wave of major auteurs; beyond the great Dardenne brothers with nine, the highest number of previous competition appearances by any chosen director is three. It’s also well balanced in terms of diversity, gender and nationality, with US auteur statements rubbing shoulders with more urgent political dispatches from the likes of Jafar Panahi and Sergei Loznitsa. Jury president Juliette Binoche’s excellent taste is well documented, so maybe this year, the Palme d’Or might go to a film less primed for the US awards season?

There were enough noteworthy rejections to justify an article called “10 Cannes-snubbed Films We’re Anticipating”, but otherwise, here are several undeniable choices, and perhaps a few new to your radar. And, of course, Cineuropa is your port of call both with our published articles and through social media. Merci and cue the Camille Saint-Saëns soundtrack!

Eddington - Ari Aster

(USA – Competition)

On one hand, this is one of the competition’s hottest prospects, providing talking points (and, surely, startlingly weird imagery) to mull over during the festival’s early days; on the other, we have a director in Aster who miscued slightly with his last film, the macabre Beau Is Afraid [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], and is aiming to establish himself as something other than an “elevated horror” specialist. For one, this Arizona-set neo-western aims to be a topical provocation: it is set in the surreal days of 2020, with Joaquin Phoenix playing a local sheriff who embarks on an upstart mayoral campaign against the incumbent Pedro Pascal, amidst reams of COVID-19 misinformation and broader conspiracy theories.
Premieres 18.45, Friday 16 May in the Grand Théâtre Lumière

Alpha - Julia Ducournau

(France/Belgium - Competition)

Looking back at the 2020s' Palme d'Or victors, Julia Ducournau's Titane [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Julia Ducournau, Vincent Li…
film profile] still feels like one of the most audacious choices, even if its critically divisive status made sense. Four years later, we have the even more ambitious-sounding Alpha, which takes place in a New York City-like imaginary metropolis in the 1980s and meditates - which could generate some controversy, we imagine - on the AIDS crisis. The premise centres on a 13-year-old girl who returns home from school one day with a strange tattoo on her arm, to the shock of her single mother.
Premieres 22.30, Monday 19 May in the Grand Théâtre Lumière

Resurrection - Bi Gan

(France/China - Competition)

…and the nerdier portions of the Cannes audience (and beyond) can breathe a sigh of relief. Completed, and approved by China’s censors at the 11th hour, the film sees Bi Gan making his inaugural competition appearance with this sci-fi detective mind-bender, set in a future world where only a “monster” has the ability to dream; a woman (the great Shu Qi) gains the ability to enter these dreams, "determined to uncover the truth that lies hidden within”. 
Premieres 22.15, Thursday 22 May in the Grand Théâtre Lumière

The President’s Cake - Hasan Hadi

(Iraq/USA/Qatar - Directors’ Fortnight)

With the premise for The President’s Cake, Iraqi director Hasan Hadi attempts to find a gentle, yet fierce, way to stare down laughable state propaganda: amidst food shortages, a girl must reluctantly gather ingredients for the mandatory cake produced by every school for Saddam Hussein’s birthday. Playing in the Directors’ Fortnight, it’s one of the features heralding a new approach for the strand’s programming after the last two years, with slightly more audience-friendly and genre films studding the line-up. The film’s US indie and Hollywood pedigree is also worth noting, with eminent screenwriter Eric Roth and director Marielle Heller executive-producing.
Premieres 8.45, Friday 16 May in the Théâtre Croisette

Sirât [+see also:
trailer
film profile] - Óliver Laxe

(Spain/France - Competition)

Sergi López, determined yet unfazed, wandering through a blinding desert rave… There’s no question that Galician director Óliver Laxe has alighted on a strong hook for his belated first Cannes competition appearance. With López perhaps the first actor he’s cast to equal his facility for capturing landscapes, he’ll play a stricken father searching for his lost daughter amidst the unauthorised EDM raves of Morocco. The title itself refers to Islamic eschatology, specifically a bridge spanning a chasm to hell, connecting the world to paradise.
Premieres 21.30, Thursday 15 May in the Grand Théâtre Lumière

Highest 2 Lowest - Spike Lee

(USA - Out of Competition)

Denzel Washington must be one of the only actors who can match the particular brooding charisma of Toshiro Mifune in the original High and Low; with the original mooted for a Hollywood remake for many years, Spike Lee takes the reins for this NYC-set reimagining, in his first return to the Croisette since his jury presidency in 2021. Mifune was a shoe mogul in booming postwar Japan negotiating a ransom plot; here, Denzel is an elite music tycoon. Expect topicality and energy for days.
Premieres 19.00, Monday 19 May in the Grand Théâtre Lumière

Pillion - Harry Lighton

(UK/Ireland - Un Certain Regard)

This is another film where the identity of the lead takes slight precedence over the director (for now), and Alexander Skarsgård probably plays better in roles working in counterpoint to his studly looks, such as his Musk stand-in in Succession. In Pillion, he’s a seductive, sinister gay biker, who initiates Harry Melling’s character into a world of BDSM sex and power play. Early reactions promise another British breakout in the festival’s secondary competitive section – something both comic and impactful.
Premieres 11.00, Sunday 18 May in the Salle Debussy

New Wave - Richard Linklater

(France - Competition)

For all the festival’s increasing resistance to more challenging cinema in its main competition, Jean-Luc Godard enjoyed two memorable premieres in the 2010s for Goodbye to Language [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] and The Image Book [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], proving you can’t keep an old provocateur-deconstructionist down. Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague filmmaking chronicle shows us how it all began, on the very set of Breathless [+see also:
trailer
film profile] in 1959. All you need is a “girl and a gun”, and one Swiss film critic in cool shades, apparently.
Premieres 18.00, Saturday 17 May in the Grand Théâtre Lumière

The Secret Agent - Kleber Mendonça Filho

(Brazil/France - Competition)

Following up I’m Still Here [+see also:
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trailer
film profile]’s retelling of a flashpoint event in Brazil’s 1970s military dictatorship, Kleber Mendonça Filho returns with a fully fictional story set in that era, with Wagner Moura (Civil War [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Narcos) taking on the role of a university professor on the run from the authorities, who touches down in Mendonça Filho’s typical setting of Recife to reunite with his son. Mixing timely political engagement, suspense and – most intriguingly – body horror, this feels like a potential prize contender, especially with its prime weekend slot.
Premieres 15.00, Sunday 18 May in the Grand Théâtre Lumière

Die, My Love - Lynne Ramsay

(USA - Competition)

One of the most highly anticipated titles in the line-up overall, this is oddly enough the first feature of the Scottish director’s without any European funding. It also sees Jennifer Lawrence on both acting and producing duties. Gradually re-mounting her career after a few years’ break, the Oscar-winning actress plays a new mother suffering postpartum depression and eventually psychosis, as she juggles a love triangle between actors Robert Pattinson and LaKeith Stanfield. Promisingly, the tone veers towards horror and comedy, surely helped by Ramsay’s typical fast-paced editing.
Premieres 20.45, Saturday 17 May in the Grand Théâtre Lumière

The Mastermind - Kelly Reichardt

(USA - Competition)

Kelly Reichardt’s 1970s-set latest potentially has the festival line-up’s most ironic title: in early descriptions, Josh O’Connor’s lead character seems a pretty hapless opportunist, an unemployed carpenter who spots an opportunity for an art heist on a small museum in central Massachusetts, all as anti-Vietnam War protests and the burgeoning women’s lib movements simmer around him. It could be the subject of a narrative-driven early song by Springsteen, whose scruffy styling O’Connor resembles in the stills.
Premieres 18.45, Friday 23 May in the Grand Théâtre Lumière

Sound of Falling - Mascha Schilinski

(Germany - Competition)

Quite spectacular praise has already been lavished on Mascha Schilinski’s second feature, after her debut, Dark Blue Girl [+see also:
trailer
film profile], quietly premiered in the Berlinale’s now-scrapped Perspektive Deutsches Kino strand in 2017. We’ll see for ourselves on the festival’s very first afternoon competition screening, as the plot braids together four different eras, unveiling the fates of four women across time on a remote German farm, “separated by decades, but united by trauma”.
Premieres 15.00, Wednesday 14 May in the Grand Théâtre Lumière

Romería - Carla Simón

(Spain/Germany - Competition)

The majority of auteur films are personal, but Catalonian director Carla Simón’s first three features are intensely so, directly mining her family history’s most painful aspects. Almost an answer film to her debut, Summer 1993 [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Carla Simón
film profile], Romería picks up in 2004, as orphaned teenager Marina (Llúcia Garcia, in her first screen credit) travels to Vigo, in Galicia, to attain a signature for a scholarship abroad from the paternal grandparents she’s never met. During her time there, her parents’ lives and “tempestuous” love story are finally unveiled in all their detail.
Premieres 15.00, Wednesday 21 May in the Grand Théâtre Lumière

The Last One for the Road - Francesco Sossai

(Italy - Un Certain Regard)

One of this writer’s first festivals abroad was Tallinn Black Nights 2021, where Francesco Sossai won the Best First Feature Prize for Other Cannibals [+see also:
film review
interview: Francesco Sossai
film profile], made as part of his film-school training at DFFB. Stay in this business long enough, and Thierry Frémaux might be reading out your name one spring morning during the Cannes announcement. Sossai has already shown a 20-minute short, the grungily atmospheric The Birthday Party, in the 2023 Directors’ Fortnight, and The Last One for the Road seems to have his debut’s feeling for tentative social connection, following two middle-aged men who are joined by a shy architecture student as they drink their way through Veneto’s bars.
Premieres 14.00, Wednesday 21 May in the Salle Debussy

Sentimental Value - Joachim Trier

(Norway/France/Denmark/Germany/Sweden/UK - Competition)

“Mastery” is a word thrown out liberally in film advertising copy, but on the basis of Joachim Trier’s three main Oslo-set dramas, Reprise [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Joachim Trier
interview: Karin Julsrud
film profile], Oslo, August 31st [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Joachim Trier
film profile] and The Worst Person in the World [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Joachim Trier
film profile], we might be looking at a true example. Trier wisely reunites with Renate Reinsve, who here plays an actress unwillingly brought back into her estranged father’s (Stellan Skarsgård) life when he asks her to act in his latest film. Initial word suggests Trier has risen to the challenge with an even richer movie after Worst Person’s international success, meditating on “family, memories and the healing power of art”.
Premieres 22.30, Wednesday 21 May in the Grand Théâtre Lumière