Cannes Filmfestival 2026

Nagi Notes

Instruktør: Fukada Koji
Medvirkende: Takako Matsu, Ken'ichi Matsuyama, Shizuka Ishibashi
Land: Japan

“Although the film has an interesting approach to exploring identity and loneliness in the Japanese community, we suffer through a very slow pace and lack of events in the first half of the film, the long-awaited climax comes short in the next half, and two good scenes can't rescue a feature film in the end.”

Hosam Fahmy, Chroum

A Woman’s Life

Instruktør: Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet
Medvirkende: Yumi Narita, Marie-Christine Barrault, Charles Berling
Land: Frankrig

“A sharp character study of later middle age. The film belongs to Léa Drucker, who is fantastic at showing the cracks beneath a woman who seems to have everything under control.”

J. Sperling Reich, Celluloid Junkie

Fatherland

Instruktør: Paweł Pawlikowski
Medvirkende: Sandra Hüller, Hanns Zischler, August Diehl
Land: Polen, Tyskland

“A refreshingly short film that contains an impressive amount. Once again, Sandra Hüller demonstrates her formidable range in a role with as many meaningful pauses as lines of dialogue. Pavel Pawlikowski displays the same masterful control here as in the Oscar-winning film Ida. Once again, the Holocaust and the Cold War form the backdrop, as Germany’s great writer Thomas Mann confronts his Fatherland. But with his daughter Erika by his side, it becomes more complex and interesting.”

Kjetil Lismoen, Aftenposten

Histoires parallèles

Instruktør: Asghar Farhadi
Medvirkende: Valentin Campagne, Emmanuel Macchia, Jonas Wertz
Land: Iran, Frankrig

“Asghar Farhadi’s Parallel Tales seemingly has everything going for it, including an enticing pedigree (it’s a riff on Krzysztof Kieślowski's A Short Film About Love) and a cast of superb actors (Isabelle Huppert, Virginie Efira, Vincent Cassel). But if it starts out promisingly enough, this meditation on the morality of writers’ “borrowing” real-life stories settles into a dreary groove. Not short. Not really about love. The only question to ask is, why?”

Stephanie Zacharek, Time

Soudain

Instruktør: Hamaguchi Ryusuke
Medvirkende: Virginie Efira, Tao Okamoto, Marie Bunel
Land: Japan, Frankrig

“Aims to be a moving drama about the bond that develops between two women in Paris. Very quickly their discussions and the film shift focus towards the care for the elderly and people with cognitive decline. But in this process of promoting ‘humanitude’, the film comes across as condescending towards the caregivers and does not address the real-life difficulties in such situations. The film is so self-conscious that it becomes a demonstration video rather than an artistic telling of the story.”

Pragya Mishra, Dainik Prabhat Kiran

Gentle Monster

Instruktør: Marie Kreutzer
Medvirkende: Léa Seydoux, Catherine Deneuve, Jella Haase
Land: Østrig

“In light of its minefield of a subject matter, it is difficult to understand why the director took such a ‘soft’ approach on pedophilia in the film, which hinges on the most fundamental moral dilemma: whether we can portray a pedophile criminal as a good person and a loving father. I believe this is a fundamental mistake. Lea Seydoux gives a passionate performance, but she carries only half the film on her shoulders, because of the unnecessary plotline involving an Austrian policewoman.”

Géza Csákvári, Népszava

Sheep in the Box

Instruktør: Koreeda Hirokazu
Medvirkende: Haruka Ayase, Daigo Yamamoto, Rimu Kuwaki
Land: Japan

“There are interesting ideas here about AI, memory and whether technology can soothe grief or simply trap us inside it. But for a filmmaker whose best work can be emotionally devastating in the quietest ways, this is not nearly as involving as we have come to expect.”

J. Sperling Reich, Celluloid Junkie

The Beloved

Instruktør: Rodrigo Sorogoyen
Medvirkende: Javier Bardem, Victoria Luengo, Marina Foïs, Didier Maes,
Land: Spanien, Frankrig

“A film about a director’s fraught relationship with his actor daughter which commendably doesn’t try to seduce us by the film within the film. It's a raw portrait of abandonment that leaves a lot off screen and unsaid thanks to excellent performances from Bardem and Luengo with some powerful scenes carried by their unrequited gazes. Sorogoyen’s melodrama is always questioning whether cinema or art is worth totally dedicating your life to at the expense of people around you.”

Isabel Stevens, Sight and Sound

Paper Tiger

Instruktør: James Gray
Medvirkende: Scarlett Johansson, Miles Teller, Adam Driver
Land: USA

“Brotherhood and different forms of masculinity are at the center of a film which is both entertaining and moving, even though the presence of the Russian mafia is distracting with its clichés about soulless villains.”

Hosam Fahmy, Chroum

Moulin

Instruktør: László Nemes
Medvirkende: Lars Eidinger, Gilles Lellouche, Félix Lefebvre
Land: Frankrig, Ungarn

“There are some scenes in this well-made war film by László Nemes that will stay with you forever, like the staged killing scene, and the prisoners singing the national anthem.”

Pragya Mishra, Dainik Prabhat

Garance

Instruktør: Jeanne Herry
Medvirkende: Victor Chakravarty, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Sara Giraudeau
Land: Frankrig 

“The problem with addiction dramas is that you usually see every beat coming, including the inevitable relapse during recovery. Not so with Jeanne Herry’s Garance: Adele Exarchopoulos is wonderful as an exuberant, charismatic actress who is also a functional alcoholic. The movie barely has enough tension to hold it together dramatically—but maybe that’s a plus rather than a drawback. By the end, you feel you’ve lived through something with Exarchopoulos’ character, rather than just looking on as a concerned, and perhaps sometimes appalled, bystander.”

Stephanie Zacharek, Time

Hope

Instruktør: Na Hong-Jin
Medvirkende: Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung, Hoyeon
Land: Sydkorea

“For the first hour and a half, a monster tries to devour every human it encounters but is ultimately defeated. It gradually becomes clear that there are more of these creatures from a crashed spaceship. Our heroes resist, flee, some survive, and the man-eating aggressors – who look like a cross between tigers and oak trees – start babbling incoherently about a mission. Then the credits roll. In short, I don’t know what this is or what it’s doing in the competition, but it’s sinfully entertaining and innovative. Is it the bluff of the year, or is this the new wonder? I’ll take a chance on the latter.”

Géza Csákvári, Népszava

L’inconnue

Instruktør: Arthur Harari
Medvirkende: Léa Seydoux, Niels Schneider, Victoire Du Bois
Land: Frankrig

“The body-swap film eventually becomes overly convoluted, backing itself into a narrative corner it cannot quite escape. The idea is strong. The atmosphere is there. The execution, by the end, is harder to follow than to feel.”

J. Sperling Reich, Celluloid Junkie

Fjord

Instruktør: Cristian Mungiu
Medvirkende: Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve, Lisa Loven Kongsli
Land: Rumænien, Norge, Danmark, Finland, Frankrig, Sverige

“Cristian Mungiu has already revealed totalitarianism in Romania, but in his first film outside his home country he goes to Norway and looks at the Scandinavian Welfare State. He is testing our tolerance with the story about a religious Romanian family with its own approach to childcare. It’s a complex tale with no easy answers, but one still feels Mungius burning passion for the protection of minorities. Fjord is his best film sins the breakthrough with 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days from 2007.”

Claus Christensen, Filmmagasinet Ekko

Minotaur

Instruktør: Andreï Zvyagintsev
Medvirkende: Dmitriy Mazurov, Iris Lebedeva, Rudgy Pajany
Land: Frankrig, Letland, Tyskland

“An unnerving and imaginative retelling of Claude Chabrol’s 1969 erotic thriller The Unfaithful Wife by the way of Greek legend. Businessman Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov) faces two unwelcome tasks: feeding Russia’s special operation (the monster in the labyrinth) with 14 men from his haulage company; and hiring a private detective to track his wife who he believes is having an affair. Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan was a more thorough investigation of the machinery of corruption but Minotaur is notable as a thriller in which despair is always lurking: in the plot which details how brazenly a rich elite can bypass the law but also in its portrait of atomised, disconnected and miserable family life.”

Isabel Stevens, Sight and Sound

Amarga Navidad

Instruktør: Pedro Almodóvar
Medvirkende: Bárbara Lennie, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón
Land: Spanien

“Amarga Navidad has color, feeling and flashes of late-career self-examination, but its meditation on the creative process lands with varying degrees of success.”

J. Sperling Reich, Celluloid Junkie

Notre salut

Instruktør: Emmanuel Marre
Medvirkende: Swann Arlaud, Sandrine Blancke, Bruno Borsu
Land: Belgien, Frankrig

“There are two period films in the main competition that deal with France during the occupation. This is the less heroic — and the more interesting — one. We meet the ambitious 50-year-old Henri Marre, who, after a series of personal setbacks, sees an opportunity to succeed within the administration of the Vichy regime. The film shows how most people were preoccupied with navigating everyday life to keep head above water. And some of them, like Henri, were gifted opportunists.”

Kjetil Lismoen, Aftenposten

The Man I Love

Instruktør: Ira Sachs
Medvirkende: Rami Malek, Rebecca Hall, Ebon Moss-Bachrach
Land: USA

“It is well-intentioned, and it’s clear that a lot of thought has gone into recreating the 1980s on screen, but at times it feels like it is trying too hard. In an attempt to hit all the right notes, the music is lost."

Pragya Mishra, Dainik Prabhat

La bola negra

Instruktør: Javier Calvo & Javier Ambrossi
Medvirkende: Glenn Close, Penélope Cruz, Julio Torres
Land: Spanien, Frankrig

“This year’s great cinematic feast in the main competition. A powerful and playful film about the denial that long shaped the Spanish people’s relationship to their bloody Civil War, inspired by an unfinished play by Federico García Lorca. Here, the directing duo Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi continue the story and extend it masterfully all the way to the present day.”

Kjetil Lismoen, Aftenposten

Coward

Instruktør: Lukas Dhont
Medvirkende: Valentin Campagne, Emmanuel Macchia, Jonas Wertz
Land: Belgien, Frankrig, Netherlands

“The film may divide critics, especially those inclined to see it as a little too neatly shaped around queer longing in the trenches. Yet even when the narrative gets a bit wobbly, Coward has feeling, visual control and a sincere interest in performance as both escape and self-revelation. It is a war film about fear, desire and the fragile spaces where men briefly become something other than soldiers.”

J. Sperling Reich, Celluloid Junkie

Das geträumte Abenteuer

Instruktør: Valeska Grisebach
Medvirkende: Yana Radeva, Syuleyman Alilov Letifov
Land: Tyskland, Bulgarien

Histoires de la nuit

Instruktør: Léa Mysius
Medvirkende: Hafsia Herzi, Bastien Bouillon, Monica Bellucci
Land: Frankrig