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When the competition program of the seventy-eighth Cannes Film Festival was announced several weeks ago, I wasn’t alone in predicting that the Iranian director Jafar Panahi would win the Palme d’Or, the event’s highest honor, for his new film, “It Was Just an Accident.” When I saw the film in Cannes last week, I felt more certain than ever. In the past two decades, Panahi, like many of his countrymen and fellow-artists, has faced continual persecution by the Iranian government: he has been detained and imprisoned, placed under house arrest, forbidden to leave the country, and banned from filmmaking. He has circumvented this last restriction numerous times, with great courage and ingenuity. Today, living in Tehran, he is a free man, a free artist, and, yes, a Palme d’Or winner; he was in Cannes to pick up his prize on Saturday evening, at the most thrilling and moving closing ceremony I can remember.
Panahi’s well-earned triumph capped off one of the strongest editions of the festival in years. You could see the richness of the selection reflected in the wide range of prizes handed out by the competition jury, presided over by the actor Juliette Binoche. Ranking all the films in the competition, from best to worst, has become something of a tradition lately, and never have I struggled more with the task. Assigning an order of preference imposes a useful discipline, in that it forces a commitment to a reaction in the moment; by the same token, it can also feel both arbitrary and provisional. I look forward to seeing many of these films again, if and when they play at other festivals and/or open in U.S. theatres in the coming months, and to discovering things about them that I may have missed the first time.
Here are the twenty-two films of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival competition, ranked in descending order, from greatest to most disappointing:
1. “Sirât”
It begins with a crowd of revellers in the Moroccan desert—a rave at the ends of the earth, but also, as whispers of a deadly global conflict reach our ears, possibly at the end of the world as we know it. This pre-apocalyptic wilderness odyssey—from the French-born Spanish director Oliver Laxe, who won a third-place Jury Prize at the festival—produced the competition’s most sustained and enveloping contact high. It draws you out of your seat with a mighty succession of sonic rumbles, then promptly knocks you back into it with the most jolting of tragedies. The title, in Muslim eschatology, refers to a narrow bridge between Paradise and Hell, which is fitting, insofar as Laxe’s movie is both a nightmarish experience and an exhilarating one—a pitiless ordeal that is nonetheless underpinned by extraordinary love and tenderness. Laxe’s tremendously physical filmmaking has already triggered comparisons to “The Wages of Fear” and “Sorcerer”; whether it stands up to them, I was properly and thoroughly ensorcelled.
2. “It Was Just an Accident”
The premise of Panahi’s Palme d’Or winner—several folks cram into a rickety van, arguing over where to go and what to do—might at first suggest a dysfunctional-family road-trip comedy. But, though there are farcical elements aplenty, as well as an acid vein of social critique, this deftly tone-shifting film soon reveals itself as a powerful moral thriller about the uncertainty of the truth, the abuses of the Iranian regime, the consequences of physical and psychological torture, and the choice between revenge and mercy. It builds to an astoundingly cathartic sequence, a one-take release of fury and horror that leaves you genuinely shaken—and unable to stop thinking about Panahi himself, a great dissident filmmaker who, not for the first time (or, I hope, the last), has turned the struggle of a lifetime into galvanizing art.
3. “Resurrection”
The thirty-five-year-old Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan is one of cinema’s most prodigious enchanters. In his first two features, “Kaili Blues” (2016) and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (2019), he pulled off dazzling feats of showmanship behind the camera, with tracking shots so languidly enveloping and elaborately choreographed that they were like magic tricks you could live in. There’s another of those one-shot wonders in Bi’s transcendent third feature, “Resurrection,” but the movie as a whole—garlanded with a special prize by Binoche’s jury—is an altogether stranger, more mercurial miracle than its predecessors. Starring a gamely shape-shifting Jackson Yee and a sublime Shu Qi, it leads us on a multi-part odyssey through a century’s worth of film history. Along the way, it riffs on “Blade Runner” and “Holy Motors”; pays homage to the Lumière brothers, F. W. Murnau, and Georges Méliès; and burrows deep into the landscape of genre, where spies, gangsters, spirits, monsters, and vampires hold the keys to cinema’s enduring popularity and its capacity for renewal. What makes “Resurrection” more than just another facile love letter to the medium is a melancholy awareness that such magic always comes at a cost—to the filmmakers who practice their art and the film lovers who bask in it. What the movies give, they also take away.
4. “Sound of Falling”
The first film to screen in the competition remained, by festival’s end, one of the best and most memorable; it also signalled the fruition of a remarkable directing talent in the German filmmaker Mascha Schilinski, who shared the Jury Prize with Laxe. In this staggeringly ambitious second feature, Schilinski hopscotches among four constellations of characters, all of them occupying the same rural German farmhouse at different eras across roughly a century. The movie, in marrying ethereally elegant form to a damning thesis about the continuity of female suffering across the generations, sometimes suggests “The Turn of the Screw” as directed by Michael Haneke, but Schilinski proves herself to be her own filmmaker. Her touch is more playful and tender than punishing, and I can’t wait to see what she does for a follow-up. (A forthcoming Mubi release.)
5. “The Secret Agent”
Where “Sound of Falling” draws on ghost-story conventions to unearth long-established patterns of patriarchal violence, the Brazilian director and screenwriter Kleber Mendonça Filho’s marvellously rangy, sweatily atmospheric epic also uses genre to political ends—and with more finesse than he did in his last Cannes-competition entry, the rambunctiously violent “Bacurau” (2020). In “The Secret Agent,” Mendonça Filho deploys the language of gangster pictures, monster movies, and shark-attack thrillers to navigate the human wreckage of Brazil’s military dictatorship. It’s a maximalist affair, with a story that’s in no hurry to reveal its destination; it twists, bends, and folds in on itself, to ever more fascinating effect. Wagner Moura, playing a former university researcher who has already endured one tragedy and who seeks to avert another, gives a star turn of revelatory magnetism. He received the festival’s Best Actor prize; Mendonça Filho was crowned Best Director. (A forthcoming Neon release.)
6. “Woman and Child”
It was a good year for Iranian revenge thrillers. In this wrenching melodrama from the director Saeed Roustaee, a widowed mother of two (Parinaz Izadyar) suffers an unspeakable loss—and responds by exacting a measure of justice from the many men who, through cruel entitlement or thoughtless neglect, have contributed to her grief. The result is one of the finer men-are-trash movies of recent vintage, but “Woman and Child” is no mere broadside against some nebulously defined patriarchy; it takes aim with penetrating intelligence and carefully honed rage. As the living embodiment of that rage, the mesmerizing Izadyar comes to resemble a furious, wide-eyed wraith—an almost mythical agent of retribution.
7. “The Mastermind”
If you’ve seen Kelly Reichardt’s versions of a frontier Western (“Meek’s Cutoff,” 2011) and of an ecoterrorist thriller (“Night Moves,” 2014), you may know what to expect from her take on an art-heist movie: an exquisite groundedness, in which no detail or texture can be too precise, and genre mechanics play out to the unhurried beat of real life. The planner of the heist is a small-town Massachusetts family man (a marvellously scruffy Josh O’Connor) who, amid the upheaval of the early nineteen-seventies, becomes desperate to counter his own mediocrity. The crime he commits is a foolish, bumbling, desultory affair, but Reichardt observes every moment of it—and the ensuing fallout—with her usual dolorous, low-key mastery. She also elicits gemlike supporting performances from Alana Haim, Bill Camp, Hope Davis, John Magaro, and Gaby Hoffmann. (A forthcoming Mubi release.)
8. “Two Prosecutors”
Based on a novella by the Soviet writer Georgy Demidov, this superb drama from the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa unfolds like the bleakest of thought experiments: What if, amid the terrors of Stalin’s Russia, in 1937, a courageous, newly appointed state prosecutor took it upon himself to investigate a prisoner’s complaints of injustice and violence? Into the prison goes the young lawyer, named Kornyev (a fine Alexander Kuznetsov); whether he will ever emerge is far from certain. What gives this drama its extraordinary tension is Loznitsa’s slow, rigorously measured observation of Kornyev’s descent into a bureaucratic and totalitarian abyss, in which official after official seeks to gently (at first) cajole him into submission. You know it can’t end well, but you never know exactly how it will end—or at what point this meticulously constructed steel trap of a movie will snap coldly, decisively shut.
9. “Nouvelle Vague”
It shouldn’t work, but really it does. Richard Linklater’s impeccably crafted behind-the-scenes account of how Jean-Luc Godard made “Breathless” and ignited a cinematic revolution is a playful Who’s Who of late-fifties French film, a wittily engrossing and ultra-disciplined execution of a conceit that sounded self-indulgent on paper. The three central performances, by Guillaume Marbeck (as Godard), Zoey Deutch (as Jean Seberg), and Aubry Dullin (as Jean-Paul Belmondo), hit their difficult marks with great skill and nary a whiff of self-congratulation. The black-and-white photography playfully evokes “Breathless”; the crisp, quicksilver editing wisely does not. “Nouvelle Vague,” as it happens, is one of two Linklater-directed portraits of artists that premièred at festivals this year; the other, “Blue Moon,” follows the lyricist Lorenz Hart a few months before his death—a twilight-of-the-career bookend to this movie’s youthful eruption.
10. “Sentimental Value”
Four years after Renate Reinsve won the Best Actress prize at Cannes, for her performance in “The Worst Person in the World” (2021), from the Norwegian director Joachim Trier, the two reunite for another beautifully acted and thoughtfully layered seriocomedy. In this one, which won the festival’s Grand Prix (effectively second place), Reinsve plays a gifted stage actress who, along with her younger sister (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), must contend with their estranged father (Stellan Skarsgård), a famous filmmaker, who comes back into their lives after their mother’s death. The script, by Trier and his longtime writing partner, Eskil Vogt, has their usual sparkling comic touch, with a wink of meta-savvy for cinephiles; a Haneke/Gaspar Noé joke absolutely kills. It also finds welcome room for Elle Fanning, luminous as an American actor who gets drawn into the fray. For all that, “Sentimental Value” telegraphs its emotional developments—and its inevitable, therapeutic convergence between life and art—a bit too predictably for my taste. It isn’t quite Trier’s best film, which is to say, it isn’t “The Worst.” (A forthcoming Neon release.)
11. “Case 137”
The gilets jaunes (“yellow vests”) protests, which began in France in 2018, furnish a tense backdrop for this intricately composed, emotionally roiling tale of police corruption and brutality, from the director and co-writer Dominik Moll. I’d happily watch an entire TV series built around the movie’s indomitable protagonist, a principled police investigator named Stéphanie (a splendid Léa Drucker), who, amid serious pushback from her colleagues, sets out to identify the cops who opened fire on a teen-age protester, leaving him with grievous injuries. As it is, Moll’s self-contained feature feels almost too neatly constructed in the way that it brings Stéphanie’s professional tensions into her familial sphere—a minor flaw that doesn’t make the outcome any less enthralling. Just because you’ve seen one French cop drama doesn’t mean you’ve seen a Moll.
12. “Young Mothers”
The Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, already among the most laurelled filmmakers in Cannes history, picked up another prize—Best Screenplay—for this characteristically sensitive and humane drama, set in and around a center for teen-age mothers in the city of Liège. It was an inspired choice of honor, insofar as the Dardennes, now in their seventies, have attempted something simple yet, for them, fairly novel: rather than giving us another study of individual conscience, like “The Son” (2003), “L’Enfant” (2006), or “Young Ahmed” (2020), they have divided their narrative focus among four young protagonists, each one confronting different challenges as she cares for a newborn. The segmentation can feel a touch diagrammatic in its distribution of specific struggles and issues, but it also feels true to the range of women who arrive at the center—and who depart it, regardless of circumstance, touched by these filmmakers’ bottomless empathy.
13. “Romería”
Having drawn on elements of her family history in her début feature, “Summer 1993” (2017), the Catalan director Carla Simón makes a lovely return to autobiographical terrain with this delicate portrait of an eighteen-year-old aspiring filmmaker, Marina (Llúcia Garcia), who embarks on a holiday with several extended-family members she barely knows. She’s been cut off from these relatives since her parents’ AIDS-related deaths years before—one of a few uncomfortable truths that get a tense, overdue airing during the trip. Simón brings down the emotional barriers with graceful assurance and an abundance of sun-dappled coastal imagery, though here and there—in her occasional use of excerpts from Marina’s mother’s video diary, and in a major third-act shift in perspective—she hints at a level of formal daring that may achieve fuller realization in films to come.
14. “The Little Sister”
Like many directors who began their careers in front of the camera, the French filmmaker Hafsia Herzi has a sensitive touch with actors. In her warm and absorbing drama “The Little Sister,” she coaxes quietly powerful work from Nadia Melliti as Fatima, an emotionally reserved young Algerian French woman caught between her lesbian sexuality and her strict Muslim upbringing. Though the setup feels familiar, the film smartly never places faith, desire, and family in simplistic opposition. Instead, in the span of a year, Herzi simply observes as Fatima has her first experiences of sex and love, sometimes, though not always, with the same person (a terrific Park Ji-min). It’s an approach that occasions some narrative bagginess, though Melliti, who won the festival’s Best Actress prize, keeps you watching to the unresolved yet very touching end.
15. “Renoir”
The Japanese director Chie Hayakawa made her feature début with “Plan 75” (2023), a dour speculative fiction about rampant discrimination against the elderly. This sweetly reticent follow-up is a drama about the impenetrable singularity of a young girl’s mind. Fuki (Yui Suzuki), an eleven-year-old growing up in nineteen-eighties Tokyo, has a harried mom, a terminally ill dad, and a vivid imagination. Over the gently observed course of the movie, she hangs out with a friend, hypnotizes a neighbor, and briefly interacts with a dangerous stranger. What distinguishes Hayakawa’s approach is a principled refusal of the obvious; she doesn’t strain to make Fuki relatable, or diagnose her, or problematize her occasional flights of fantasy. She regards her protagonist with a certain equanimity, a certainty that she’ll be O.K. It isn’t the flashiest of conclusions, but it may well be the truest.
16. “Eagles of the Republic”
In a year marked by themes of dissidence and anti-authoritarianism, it was instructive to watch Tarik Saleh’s slick contemporary fable about a fictional Egyptian movie star, George Fahmy (Fares Fares), who is forced to star in a propaganda bio-pic about the country’s President, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi. For Fahmy, it’s a singularly grim and unrewarding assignment, though Saleh and Fares shrewdly exploit the material’s comic possibilities as well as its dramatic ones. They’ve wrought an entertaining portrait of a celebrity whose vices and vanities persist even under life-threatening circumstances. It’s thus harrowingly effective, if a bit dramatically abrupt, when Fahmy is confronted with the full, terrible reality of the scheme in which he’s embroiled; the ending shocks, and, for better and for worse, leaves you wanting more.
17. “The Phoenician Scheme”
Parsing the merits and demerits of this Wes Anderson film or that one, especially amid the hustle and bustle of a film festival, no longer seems a particularly useful exercise. His movies, nothing if not all of a piece, are expressions of a grandly overarching vision that is known, loved, and loathed for its obsessive invention and tireless consistency. A typically whirligig contraption, “The Phoenician Scheme” follows a reckless, wealthy nineteen-fifties industrialist, Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro), who, in seeking to launch a huge overseas infrastructure project, must fend off assassination attempts, persuade combative associates to invest, and reconcile with his long-estranged daughter, a nun named Liesl (Mia Threapleton). The result is more digestible, though also less moving, than Anderson’s recent “Asteroid City” (2023), but it does have a stealth emotional weapon in Threapleton’s Liesl, who exudes the intelligence and self-possession of a young Anna Karina. Her sensible, non-dogmatic applications of spiritual insight are an illuminating delight. (A forthcoming Focus Features release.)
18. “The History of Sound”
At a press conference for Oliver Hermanus’s gay romance, the centerpiece of which tracks a summer in 1920, the actor Paul Mescal shot down a journalist’s invocation of “Brokeback Mountain,” describing it as a lazy, reductive comparison. Well, yes and no: “The History of Sound,” adapted by Ben Shattuck from his own short story, does chart the forbidden and mostly alfresco romance between two young men—in this case, music students (Mescal and Josh O’Connor) who share a passion for singing, playing, and recording the American folk songs of their era. Where the comparison falters, alas, is in terms of quality: Hermanus’s earlier films, including “Moffie” (2021) and “Living” (2022), can quiver with passion, but his work here is polished and prettified to the point of inertia, and he never invests Mescal and O’Connor’s fine, affecting performances with palpable heat or real tension, let alone a lasting sense of tragedy. (A forthcoming Mubi release.)
19. “Die My Love”
I’ve written elsewhere about the Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s hyper-turbulent psychodrama, in which Jennifer Lawrence leaves no glass surface unsmashed and no expletive unscreamed. She’s certainly vivid as a woman cracking under the twin strains of a new baby and an unfulfilling marriage (to an oft-absent husband, played by Robert Pattinson), and Ramsay, a brilliant stylist, has a gift for dramatizing toxic relationships and ruptured psyches (“We Need to Talk About Kevin,” from 2011, “You Were Never Really Here,” from 2018). But this adaptation of Ariana Harwicz’s novel feels less enhanced than overwhelmed by the flailing intensity of Ramsay’s approach; the director pushes her frayed-nerves formalism to punishing and, finally, unrevealing extremes. (A forthcoming Mubi release.)
20. “Alpha”
The second—and more metaphorical—of two AIDS-themed films in the competition follows a teen-ager named Alpha (Mélissa Boros), her mother (Golshifteh Farahani), and her uncle (Tahar Rahim), who must confront the implications of a deadly but ill-defined plague that is spread primarily through syringes. The graphic manifestations of that illness, which gradually turns infected bodies to stone, are the most—perhaps only—compelling aspect of this new work from the French director Julia Ducournau, who showed a similar fixation with bizarre corporeal transformations in her Palme d’Or-winning shocker, “Titane” (2021). It’s laudable, to an extent, that she has veered away from that movie’s gory excesses in favor of a putatively more mature and emotion-driven experience. But what has emerged is a repetitive, unattractive, and finally unrewarding slog, in which Ducournau’s filmmaking verve itself seems to harden into lifelessness. (A forthcoming Neon release.)
21. “Eddington”
A movie that attempts to embody the polarization of present-day America can be assured of an equally polarizing reception, and so it was with this noirish comic Western from the director Ari Aster. Joaquin Phoenix, the star of Aster’s “Beau Is Afraid” (2023), here plays a small-town New Mexico sheriff who, in the early days of COVID-19, disregards mask mandates, brutalizes locals, and sets out to unseat the town’s liberal mayor (Pedro Pascal). Aster wants to say something about the moral and political putrefaction of the American soul, but, despite a pose of satirical neutrality, he mainly seems to want to score points off mask-wearers, young progressives, anti-racists, and other targets beloved of reactionaries. Whatever glancing insights he achieves early on are squandered in a second act that descends into sniggering superiority, cartoonish violence, and generally stultifying tedium. (A forthcoming A24 release.)
22. “Fuori”
I quite liked Mario Martone’s previous Cannes competition entry, the mournful and affecting gangster drama “Nostalgia” (2022). His latest, a bio-pic starring Valeria Golino as the novelist Goliarda Sapienza (1924-96), is a dull yet overly busy head-scratcher, as mystifying for its narrative decisions as for its presence in this year’s competition. It seeks to recount how Sapienza’s five-day prison stint in 1980—she was broke, and stole a friend’s jewelry—forever changed her life and introduced her to a new circle of meaningful friends, one of whom is played, in a memorably sparky performance, by Matilda De Angelis. But nothing else about the story tracks, least of all a bewilderingly nonlinear structure that keeps returning behind bars, likely in an attempt to make five days seem longer than they are. The film conveys little understanding of, or even curiosity about, Sapienza’s literary talents; noting, in the final moments, that she is “considered among the greatest writers of the twentieth century,” it trusts the uninitiated to shrug and move on. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
