May 27, 2025

By Jason Gorber

Every May (or July, in a COVID-affected year) cinema lovers from around the world descend upon the crescent-shaped central boulevard of Cannes to soak up the sun and sights during the 12-day festival. This most storied of events always brings forth surprises, positive or otherwise, and a few gems were certainly uncovered this year and  will inevitably dominate much of the discourse right through to awards season, just as Cannes premieres Anora, Emilia Pérez, The Substance, and All We Imagine as Light did last year.

And yet, this year felt a bit odd. Some of my colleagues were bending over backwards to declare this Cannes line-up the best slate in years, but I can’t help but wonder what they were disappointed about in the past, nor how hard they’re trying to elevate a number of titles that were mediocre at best and atrocious at worst.

I can’t speak to the calibre of this year’s Palme d’Or winner, Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, as I gifted my ticket to a colleague who covers the festival for Persian media, thus allowing the central focus of his coverage to thrive while I instead enjoyed some delicious food. It’s a trade I would make again, of course, but from the outside, it does seem more than a bit predictable. This title—shot in secret like the much ballyhooed Seed of the Sacred Fig last year—felt predestined to take home the top prize thanks to a mix of politics and love for the director.

It’s been fifteen years since jury president Juliette Binoche held up a sign with the director’s name to protest his imprisonment, so as long as the film wasn’t indefensibly bad, it was considered a shoo-in. Panahi joined the rare ranks of auteurs with top prizes from Berlin, Venice and Cannes, no small feat. (Tying Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Altman, and Henri-Georges Clouzot for the trifecta.)  Many colleagues who saw it championed it as a masterpiece. Others who I trust were more sanguine, allowing for the fact that despite all the hoopla, the film may hint at anti-regime sentiment, but still very much operated within a mode that’s not excessively critical to the regime in Panahi’s native Tehran.

Many of those championing the Iranian film sight-unseen were appalled at Ari Aster’s latest, Eddington, about an anti-masker sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) during times of COVID, but I was wowed by its acerbic tone and anarchic sentimentality. Similarly, I heard over and over complaints about Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, a moving father-daughter tale told with the unique brand of whimsy for which  the director is well known, was more of the same, while the turgid Two Prosecutors by Sergei Loznitsa, a plodding and repetitive bore, was somehow to be lauded despite being a carbon copy of what’s come before.

Meanwhile, Joachim Trier presented a film that was a close runner up in the Palme race, with many also predicting its chances at victory even before Cannes began. Sentimental Value checked off lots of boxes for a festival fave and understandably won the festival’s Grand Prix, or runner-up prize. First, it’s a story of a movie within a movie, a subject that when done right will find plenty of fans. Then there’s the stellar performances by Stellan Skarsgård, Elle Fanning, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, and Trier’s muse/lucky charm Renate Reinsve. The latter once again provided one of the year’s strongest turns. Then there’s the broad theatricality, the swings of emotion, and all the necessary ingredients to make a beloved film for cineastes. Its qualities as a film (and Trier being one of Binoche’s closest colleagues) should have made it a shoo-in, but the sentimental favourite was instead focussed on the director who had been imprisoned rather than the director who made what, for many, was the superior selection from this year’s competition.

Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind was one of two middling takes featuring new it-boy Josh O’Connor—his other romance with Paul Mescal in The History of Sound being one of the festival’s big disappointments after director Oliver Hermanus’ sublime preceding project Living. The first hour of Bi Gan’s Resurrection proved exceptional, but even it couldn’t sustain through to the end, although the jury’s Special Prize did reflect its qualities and ambition. Lynne Ramsay’s excruciating Die, My Love made me want to take its title literally while enduring a film of yapping dogs, screaming babies, and overarch acting that would play as camp if it weren’t so risible.

Former Palme winner Julia Ducornau’s Alpha was a far cry from Titane, a misfire on just about every level, while The Secret Agent by Brazil’s Kleber Mendonça Filho managed to hop along satisfactorily, slightly losing its way through a needlessly convoluted finale. It ended up winning Best Director and Best Actor (Wagner Moura).

Then there were the under-loved films from the competition, titles that genuinely entertained and moved but did not receive the kind of appreciation that they deserved outside of this uniquely bright spotlight. Dominik Moll’s Case 137 was a terrific policier, knitting a tale of internal affairs investigations to the gilets jaune protests in Paris a few years back. It’s a taut and clever script, akin to a French version of The Wire, and Léa Drucker’s powerful performance was one of the festival’s best.

Similarly, Richard Linklater delivered again with Nouvelle Vague, which should be, with justice, one of the breakout films from this year’s slate. It’s a brilliant bit of homage, celebrating the making of Godard’s Breathless, but it’s a far deeper presentation than merely reveling in nostalgia. The army of people it took to recreate scenes that a few dozen originally accomplished was one of the project’s delightful ironies. Ss a visual feast, the 35mm projection was a thing to behold. Linklater may still be thought as a goofy American indie darling, but his craft and precision, as well as his eliciting of exceptional performances, should not to be overlooked. Debuting films at both Berlin and Cannes this year with Blue Moon bowing at the former, it’s a hell of a 2025 for this Texan auteur.

Then there was Sirât, Oliver Laxe’s explosive film about ravers who are on a journey from fest to fest, joined by a father and son looking for someone who has disappeared and is likely to be in attendance. Not since Apocalypse Now in 1979 has there been a competition film with as much audio impact, and the assaultive yet sublime sonic landscape the film created was ear-bleedingly excellent. Borrowing liberally from likes of William Friedkin’s mighty Sorcerer, this taut, exceptional adventure was best served by going into blind, and save for an epilogue that’s understandable but unnecessary, this was one of the grand exemplars from this year’s competition selection.

As always it’s the so-called “sidebars” where one finds many of the truly great films, and this year is no exception. While directorial debuts by superstar actresses Kristen Stewart (The Chronology of Water) and Scarlett Johansson (Eleanor the Great) took up much of the oxygen, it was the likes of Charlie Polinger’s The Plague and Harry Lighton’s Pillion that lit up the slate.

Few films generated as much anxiety as Polinger’s tale of kids at a water polo camp, mixing the mayhem of Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket opening with a dash of Lord of the Flies, its aquatic setting far less soggy than Stewart’s own debut. And Lighton’s film was simply sublime, as raunchy and revelatory as one could hope for a film pitched as a British BDSM romp. Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgård were truly stunning in this rich and detailed portrayal—a biker movie that easily could have tipped over at any time but managed to hold on during the many tight curves of its journey.

Canadians were represented at this fest as always, although not quite to the same prominence as in years past. Amour Apocalypse (given the appalling English title Peak Everything) by Anne Émond was a charming film that skated wildly between genres, from catastrophe film to romance to broad comedy, drawing in from sources as disparate as climate anxiety to the vagaries of finding love as one grows older.

Émond’s played in the Director’s Fortnight selection along with Félix Dufour-Laperrière’s handsome but slightly aimless Death Does Not Exist, an animated film with surreal visuals and a convoluted story that tried to colour outside the lines and ended up more a scrawl.

In the same selection was Yes!, Israeli director Nadav Lapid’s complicated, controversial film that sets its tale of artistic struggle and the notion of selling out directly in the aftermath of October 7th Israel. Half the film was a mess, half was unforgettably excellent, a seemingly perfect state of bifurcation for such a complicated region. Let’s see if Toronto festivals have the chutzpah to play it for local audiences unadulterated and allow them to make up their own minds about its qualities.

Yet no film at Cannes rocked harder than Sean Byrne’s Dangerous Animals, as close as this year’s festival got to a true midnight classic. While Ethan Coen’s latest, Honey Baby, was another misfire from one who has made his share of masterpieces, Byrne’s latest firmly established him as a master of the craft. The brilliantly executed serial murder-feeding-victims-to-sharks movie, with a killer take by Jai Courtney in particular, was the film that truly sank its teeth into audiences. With dozens upon dozens of self-serious projects and meandering narratives, it was refreshing for Cannes to deliver a wallop like this to remind why films can be so goddamn fun.

There was plenty of tartare and truffle gnocchi, the gathering of friends, and hours upon hours spent inside the hallowed halls of the festival. In the end, one experience I’ve long desired that finally came to fruition: being able to see Kubrick’s astonishing Barry Lyndon, newly restored for its 50^th anniversary and looking positively luscious, from the front row of the Debussy theatre. One of the greatest films of all time, in one of the greatest theatres in the world, the experience was positively orgasmic. Only time will tell about what films from this year’s selection will still resonate a half century on as deeply as this profound rumination on love, revenge, and beauty.