It wasn’t a banner year for the world’s most important film festival, but there were gems among the twenty-two films contending for the Palme d’Or.
Last year’s Cannes Film Festival competition was the strongest in recent memory. I remember it, perhaps a touch rosily, as an almost ceaseless parade of triumphs: this was where we caught our first glimpse of “Sirāt,” “Sound of Falling,” “The Secret Agent,” “Resurrection,” “The Mastermind,” and “It Was Just an Accident,” the eventual winner of the top prize, the Palme d’Or. The extraordinary strength of that lineup seems even more pronounced following the conclusion of a 2026 festival that, by consensus and by comparison, was a bit of a disappointment—not without its good and even great films, though with many head-scratchers in between.
The jury, led by the South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook, nonetheless found plenty to like. On Saturday, they awarded the Palme d’Or to “Fjord,” a complex, critically divisive social drama from the Romanian director Cristian Mungiu that takes place in a remote Norwegian town. It marked the filmmaker’s first time working outside his home country, and predominantly in a different language—also the case for another entry in the competition, the Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s “All of a Sudden,” which is set mostly in Paris. That isn’t the only example of two selections seeming to speak to each other. The experience of watching so many movies over a twelve-day period coaxes your brain into a heightened state of pattern recognition, and you might begin to wonder if certain films have been programmed based on narrative and thematic similarities. There are two films, “Coward” and “The Black Ball,” which focus on the experiences of gay male soldiers during wartime. Two films, “A Man of His Time” and “Moulin,” immerse us in the mind-set of a Frenchman during the German Occupation. Two films, “The Unknown” and “Gentle Monster,” star the French actress Léa Seydoux—which is reason enough to see at least one of them. And two films, “Bitter Christmas” and “Parallel Tales,” interrogate the ethics of artistic inspiration.
1. “All of a Sudden”
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi should have two Palmes by now, one for his exquisite Haruki Murakami adaptation, “Drive My Car” (2021), and another for this quietly astonishing new work. Like the earlier film, “All of a Sudden” ponders the imponderables of life and death and runs in the vicinity of three hours, but also moves along as lightly and wondrously as a dream. Set in and around a Parisian elder-care home, whose internal workings and staff tensions are explored with an observational rigor worthy of the late Frederick Wiseman, it hinges on a chance encounter between two women—played by Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto, who rightly shared the festival’s Best Actress prize—whose bond feels at once divinely orchestrated and utterly spontaneous. Hamaguchi joins Éric Rohmer, Richard Linklater, and Hong Sangsoo in the pantheon of directors who know the dramatic rhythm and transformative power of conversation; he’s made the rare movie that can take a dry-erase-board lecture, or a playful interaction with finger puppets, and make you feel as if you’re watching two souls converge.
2. “Paper Tiger”
Like “Little Odessa” (1994), “We Own the Night” (2007), and “Armageddon Time” (2022) before it, this supremely engrossing drama finds the director and screenwriter James Gray reshuffling elements from his family history. It’s a tale of two brothers, Gary (Adam Driver) and Irwin (Miles Teller), angling for a business deal with the Russian mob in 1986 New York—a foolish decision, born of hubris, naïveté, and greed, that Gray spins into a breath-sapping thriller and, by the end, an overwhelming tragedy. Driver and Teller tease out a rich spectrum of sibling emotions; as Irwin’s distraught yet determined wife, Hester, Scarlett Johansson gives a piercing performance. Gray, one of our last great American traditionalists, has also become a particularly resourceful memoirist, though what’s onscreen never feels like a retread. If he remains transfixed by his own past, his gaze seems to have grown only clearer, more penetrating, and more intensely sorrowful with time.
3. “Minotaur”
Why revisit Claude Chabrol’s “La Femme Infidèle” (1969), which was already adapted in the U.S., as “Unfaithful” (2002), by Adrian Lyne? Andrey Zvyagintsev, one of the most gifted Russian filmmakers of his generation, answers the question so decisively as to quell any knee-jerk remake fatigue. As in his earlier works “Leviathan” (2014) and “Loveless” (2017), he expands a study of a troubled marriage into something larger and vastly more unsettling. By grounding the material in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, not long after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, he suffuses a tale of upper-class adultery and murder with a white-hot political fury. True to its title, “Minotaur” traps us in the lair of a monster—here, a cuckolded businessman, outstandingly played by Dmitriy Mazurov—who demands human sacrifice, supplied, in this case, by the employees he is tasked with sending off to war. The result, which won the festival’s second-place Grand Prix, is a perfectly chilled portrait of a world that draws no distinction between crimes of passion and acts of totalitarian complicity.
4. “The Unknown”
A man named David (Niels Schneider) sleeps with a woman, Eva (Léa Seydoux), and later finds, to his horror, that his consciousness is now inhabiting her body. He concludes that Eva must now be trapped in his body, but no; David’s physical form has become a vessel for someone else’s consciousness entirely. The notion of rampant soul travel as a kind of sexually transmitted contagion distinguishes “The Unknown” from past comedies of corporeal exchange, to the point of confusion for some; Cannes audiences were split right down the middle. But I was moved and ultimately captivated by the director Arthur Harari’s insistence on treating the loss of identity as grist for tragedy rather than farce, and taken with his leap into uncharted terrain (especially after co-writing the 2023 Palme winner, “Anatomy of a Fall”). He also pulls off perhaps the single most squirmingly funny and mind-bending scene of the competition—one that redefines the notion of autoeroticism, and which sees Schneider’s and Seydoux’s performances rise to interchangeable levels of greatness.
5. “The Dreamed Adventure”
Early on in this enveloping neo-noir, which won the festival’s third-place Prix du Jury, the German director Valeska Grisebach pulls off a remarkable feat of narrative transference: Said (Syuleyman Alilov Letifov), a poker-faced man of mystery who’s recently arrived in a small Bulgarian border town, turns out not to be the film’s protagonist. In the first of several droll surprises, he gets swapped out for the suggestively named Veska (an outstanding Yana Radeva), an archeologist who, with sharp wits and dogged curiosity, proceeds to excavate a vast and sprawling network of criminality. Like Grisebach’s previous Cannes entry, “Western” (2018), “The Dreamed Adventure” refuses shortcuts, resists predictability, and moves with a raggedy authenticity that belies its precise construction; it enacts a prismatic conversation between the textures of realism and the codes of genre until both layers seem to fuse, miraculously, into one.
6. “A Man of His Time”
Live in such a way that your descendants won’t one day make a movie about your inexorable, soul-killing descent into moral oblivion. The French writer and director Emmanuel Marre deservedly won the festival’s screenplay prize for this rigorous, unsparing portrait of his great-grandfather, Henri Marre (a brilliant Swann Arlaud), whom we meet in Vichy in 1940, desperately trying to advance his own interests under the collaborationist regime. The camera locks Henri in its sights, catching his every empty boast and complicit deed as Hitler’s Final Solution looms, and offering nary a shred of redemption or reassurance. But Marre’s ironically titled movie also deploys several anachronistic flourishes—nondescript interiors, contemporary needle drops—to throw our own everyday capitulations to authoritarianism into discomfiting relief.
7. “Fatherland”
Crystalline images in boxy black-and-white frames. A whiff of cigarette smoke and postwar malaise. Yes, it’s a new film from the Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski, and one that, along with his earlier “Ida” (2014) and “Cold War” (2018), forms a bleak-chic trilogy of European soul-searching. In the 1949-set “Fatherland,” the exiled novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller) embark on an unhappy road trip through Germany, a broken and divided homeland that they have been called on to help rehabilitate. Pawlikowski’s filmmaking—which earned him Best Director, the same prize he won for “Cold War”—is a marvel of wry concision, sometimes to the point of feeling undernourished. But he and his superb actors leave us with a melancholy understanding of the venality of artists, which can complicate, but never overpower, the sublimity of art.
8. “Bitter Christmas”
Then there are artists who evince a different kind of amorality: feeding like parasites on the lives of their friends and acquaintances, crafting stories that become insidious distortions of the truth, and offering them to us without apology. The Spanish master and perpetual Cannes-competition bridesmaid Pedro Almodóvar has mined this terrain several times before, in confessional dramas such as “Bad Education” (2004) and “Pain and Glory” (2019). In “Bitter Christmas,” he once more indicts his own vulturism, this time through an onscreen alter ego, Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), whose latest project takes intricate shape before our eyes. Almodóvar nests one story inside another, leaps between them with breathtaking fluidity, and brings them both to a virtuosic, if abrupt, finish. What lingers, and what he seems to understand and dramatize better than any filmmaker now working, is how an act of creation can also be an act of destruction, claiming the closest relationships as its greatest casualties. “Bitter” really is the operative word.
9. “The Beloved”
A revered but inactive director, intent on a comeback, reaches out to his actress daughter after years of estrangement, hoping to cast her in a significant role. If that sounds like the setup for last year’s much acclaimed “Sentimental Value,” “The Beloved,” from the Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen, is less a copy than a corrective; it’s the relentlessly honest, messily full-bodied movie that “Sentimental Value” refused to be. Here, rather than getting waved aside in a feel-good haze, the unresolved tensions between father and daughter come into blistering focus; the emotional mechanics, superbly embodied by Victoria Luengo and Javier Bardem (who gives his strongest performance in years), become one with the nuts and bolts of the filmmaking process. We’re often force-fed bromides about how art and life can nourish each other; it’s bracing to be reminded that they can poison each other, too.
10. “Nagi Notes”
I don’t have any naggy notes for this moving drama set in the remote Japanese town of Nagi. It’s a haven, albeit one that’s changing in ways not always visible to the casual observer; the director Koji Fukada means to grant us a more intimate view. Nagi is a farming village, a locus of military activity, and a place still largely in thrall to patriarchal dynamics. But in Fukada’s gently corrective vision, it’s also a home for dreamers, a place where two teen-age boys can fall passionately in love, and two former sisters-in-law—one a Tokyo-based architect (Shizuka Ishibashi), the other a local artist (Takako Matsu)—can forge a friendship on their own terms, beyond family ties.
11. “Fjord”
Cristian Mungiu’s gripping ensemble drama awed some critics and alienated others with its tale of a conservative Christian couple (a starkly deglamorized Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve) who, shortly after moving from Romania to Norway, are accused by social services of physically abusing their children. More than a few wondered if the director, whose Romanian-set films have forcefully criticized religious fundamentalism, had suddenly moved rightward as his camera drifted west. My sense is that he was simply adapting to his surroundings; Mungiu brings to each new environment an inherent skepticism of the local powers that be. He also brings his usual meticulously choreographed long takes and multi-character structure, conducting, as in his superior “R.M.N.” (2023), a sociological X-ray of a close-knit community. Impressively executed as it is, that sweep doesn’t always serve his purposes. If anything, it’s Mungiu’s pose of omniscience that opens him up to charges of stacking the deck—or even of playing God—in a movie that holds its own beliefs close to the vest.
12. “Coward”
After winning awards and generating controversy at Cannes for “Girl” (2019) and “Close” (2023), two queer coming-of-age dramas that veer between exquisite sensitivity and near-exploitative cruelty, the Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont returned this year with his third and strongest feature, set during the First World War. Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne shared the jury’s Best Actor prize for their skillfully harmonized performances as a pair of soldiers who participate in a military theatre troupe; as entertainers, they’re not only granted some respite from the trenches but also allowed to push against the norms of gender expression via drag. Dhont expertly handles the tension between the homosocial and the homoerotic, and if his honey-toned visual style sometimes leans toward fussiness, it’s counterbalanced by the brutality of the combat sequences. Mercifully, he avoids his usual lurch into tragedy; war, he figures rightly, is terrible enough.
13. “Hope”
The movie that struck its detractors as the competition’s most incongruous entry was, for the rest of us, precisely what the race needed: a jolt of pure, unfiltered blockbuster adrenaline, courtesy of a South Korean horror maestro, Na Hong-jin, whose blood-soaked action-thrillers have accounted for some of my happiest Cannes memories. “Hope,” a riotous mashup of thrillingly staged and daringly attenuated chase scenes, mordant small-town comedy, and delightfully craptacular C.G.I., isn’t as fully realized a nightmare as some of Na’s earlier triumphs, such as “The Yellow Sea” (2011) and “The Wailing” (2016). Nor am I prepared to defend the coda, which makes a bewildering swerve into alien-species lore, all to lay the groundwork for a sequel that I doubt the world needs. For now, though, the world does need “Hope.”
14. “Another Day”
I didn’t know beforehand that this modest, winning comedy-drama, written and directed by the French filmmaker Jeanne Herry, was an addiction story. What’s refreshing about “Another Day” is that it doesn’t really seem to know it, either; it deftly sidesteps a minefield of rehab and relapse clichés, sees its protagonist whole, and doesn’t treat any one of her problems as definitive. Garance (wonderfully played by Adèle Exarchopoulos) is a talented, struggling actress who, over the course of the movie, endures the COVID-19 pandemic, falls in love with another woman, gets fired from her job, supports her younger sister through a serious illness, and, along the way, downs enough glasses of wine to put her at serious risk of liver failure. “Another Day” ’ s jittery rhythms add meaning to its English title: every moment is fleeting and, like this movie, worth savoring for what it is.
15. “A Woman’s Life”
The two-time César winner Léa Drucker is overdue for a Best Actress win at Cannes; her lead performances in “Last Summer” (2023) and “Case 137” (2025) were among the strongest to grace the festival competition in recent years. She’s in typically memorable form here as Gabrielle, a middle-aged maxillofacial surgeon who—like Garance in “Another Day,” the competition’s other French femme-centric slice of life—exists in a continual state of upheaval: staff turmoil in an already high-stress job, frustrations with her husband and stepchildren, and an unexpected new love (Mélanie Thierry). The director Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet tries to bring texture and grit to a romantic-dramedy tradition known for its gloss and sentimentality; the occasional surgery scenes, though unlikely to faze anyone who’s binged “The Pitt,” succeed in doing so. I’m less enamored of the decision to compartmentalize the story into a series of chapters, each one with a self-consciously aphoristic title.
16. “The Man I Love”
After the tempestuous romantic triangle of “Passages” (2023) and the exquisitely ruminative chamber piece “Peter Hujar’s Day” (2025), the American director Ira Sachs completes a decade-hopping trilogy of reckonings with gay artists with this moody portrait of late-nineteen-eighties New York. Rami Malek stars as Jimmy, a stage performer who, after being hospitalized for AIDS-related illnesses, tries to get his career back on track with an ambitious new piece, inspired by André Brassard’s film “Once Upon a Time in the East” (itself a 1974 Cannes competition entry). Mostly, though, Jimmy exists to frustrate and magnetize the men who love him; Tom Sturridge is especially, achingly good as his devoted partner and caretaker. With subtle brilliance, Sachs evokes the tones and textures of his milieu and makes inventive use of music: the George Gershwin song of the title, a recurring French ditty from the Brassard film. What’s missing, though, is a center worthy of the frame. Malek is an actor of lithe physicality—his body language in the dance scenes has a witty expressiveness—but he never conjures a sense of Jimmy’s inner life. Seldom has his emotional range felt more glaringly inadequate.
17. “Moulin”
In this bleaker-than-bleak thriller about Jean Moulin (Gilles Lellouche), the martyred leader of the French Resistance—a natural companion to “A Man of His Time,” with its indictment of French nonresistance—the Hungarian director László Nemes pays principled tribute to wartime heroism by refusing to glorify or glamorize it. Deploying the sinuous visual style of his earlier films, “Son of Saul” (2015) and “Sunset” (2019), albeit in a more noirish register, he charts Moulin’s capture, interrogation, torture, and murder with an intensity of focus worthy of a passion play. The filmmaking is classically handsome, and Lellouche’s resemblance to Lino Ventura—the star of Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 French Resistance masterpiece, “Army of Shadows”—is crucial to the power of his performance. But the picture also feels stolid and one note. Nemes doesn’t have much talent for modulation, which may be why Lars Eidinger’s leering, Colonel Hans Landa-esque performance as Klaus Barbie, Moulin’s sadistic captor, threw me out of the movie more often than it sucked me in.
18. “Gentle Monster”
In the lesser of her two competition films, Léa Seydoux plays another character navigating the unknown—an avant-garde musician, Lucy, whose life is upended when her husband, Philip (Laurence Rupp), is arrested for possession and distribution of child pornography. The Austrian director Marie Kreutzer is working queasily close to the bone here: Florian Teichtmeister, one of the actors in her period drama “Corsage” (2022), was charged with child-pornography possession shortly after the film’s release. She has a strong collaborator in Seydoux, who expertly navigates Lucy’s fluctuations between worry and denial as she weighs the future of her marriage and the grim possibility that Philip may have abused their young son. But Kreutzer’s handling of the material proves far less assured. An overextended subplot centered on the home life of an investigating police officer (Jella Haase) makes the thuddingly reductive argument that we’re all enabling the monsters in our lives, gentle and otherwise.
19. “The Black Ball”
The weakest of the three Spanish-directed films in the competition was the only one to win a prize. Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, known to their many international fans as Los Javis, shared the Best Director award—with each other, and with “Fatherland” ’s Pawlikowski—for this swollen, convulsively plotted epic about three gay men living, respectively, in the years 1932, 1937, and 2017. The trio are connected through the whims of fate, the bonds of blood, the power of art (Federico García Lorca looms large), the horrors of war, and, mostly, the magic of overediting. There’s an undeniable political purpose to the film’s unfettered, two-and-a-half-hour-plus maximalism: Calvo and Ambrossi bring a forthright sensuality to the central drama of a Spanish Civil War soldier (played by the singer Guitarricadelafuente) who falls for a leftist captive, and their desire to pay homage to an earlier queer triptych, “The Hours” (2002), couldn’t be plainer. But none of the stories here feels potent or stirring enough on its own to work in tandem with the others, and neither a terrific pop-up appearance by Penélope Cruz nor a daft one by Glenn Close can keep so much frenzied crosscutting from reaching the point of diminishing returns.
20. “Parallel Tales”
In 2022, The New Yorker’s Rachel Aviv investigated allegations of plagiarism and intellectual-property theft that had dogged the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi over his drama “A Hero,” which won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2022. Four years later, Farhadi has returned with the most rudderless film of his career, and one in which he seems bent on trolling the audience: “Parallel Tales” not only borrows from (and credits) the sixth episode of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Dekalog” (1989) but also showcases literary larceny as a prominent plot device. The film’s worst crime might be its wasting of the great Isabelle Huppert, cast here as a Parisian novelist writing tortured romantic fiction about a trio of sound engineers (Virginie Efira, Vincent Cassel, and Pierre Niney) who work in an apartment across the street. Farhadi’s better movies, which include an earlier Paris-set drama, “The Past” (2013), are models of airtight construction; here, he loosens up a typically elaborate plot with humor and whimsy, and the result is all mannered meta-nonsense. As an inquiry into the ethics of mining truth for fiction, it makes Almodóvar’s “Bitter Christmas” look even more incisive.
21. “Sheep in the Box”
The Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda is a beloved mainstay of the Cannes competition; he won the Palme d’Or in 2018 for “Shoplifters,” one of his best films, and won nothing this year for “Sheep in the Box,” one of his worst. Ostensibly wired for our moment of A.I. anxieties, the film—about a bereaved couple, Otone (Haruka Ayase) and Kensuke (Daigo Yamamoto), who are gifted a humanoid facsimile of their late son, Kakeru (Rimu Kuwaki)—instead feels dated from the jump, not least because it takes such obvious inspiration from Steven Spielberg’s “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” (2001). Kore-eda has generated Spielberg comparisons before, given his facility with child actors, his affinity for dramas about broken families, and his ability to walk a tightrope between sentimentality and restraint. But his instincts fail him continually in a dull, emotionally anesthetized story that surges to life only in the presence of Otone’s combative mother-in-law (Kimiko Yo), who seems rightly skeptical of Kakeru 2.0. Her wonderfully human frowns aside, Kore-eda’s restraint has rarely felt more robotic.
22. “The Birthday Party”
I don’t know if the French director Léa Mysius’s home-invasion thriller is the worst film in this year’s competition, but for its nearly two-hour duration, it struck me as by far the biggest waste of time. Hafsia Herzi plays Nora, a successful government worker living in a beautiful house in a marshy stretch of French countryside, with a dependable husband, an annoying daughter, and Monica Bellucci for a neighbor. The remoteness of their surroundings is no accident; one of these characters is fleeing an inconvenient past, which returns with a vengeance in the form of a beefy sadist (Benoît Magimel) and his two hostage-taking henchmen. “The Birthday Party” is adapted from a novel by Laurent Mauvignier, and I had heard it described beforehand as a genre exercise in the vein of Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games.” But there’s nothing shocking or subversive about this movie, which plays like proficient, forgettable straight-to-streaming fare for the first ninety minutes and then botches its big, bloody finale. I’ve admired Mysius’s work as a co-screenwriter on such features as “Paris, 13th District” (2021) and “Stars at Noon” (2022). “The Birthday Party” isn’t good, but I wish Mysius many happier returns to Cannes in the future. ♦
