Best of Cannes 2026: 20 Critics’ Picks From This Year’s Festival
The general consensus along the Croisette at this year’s Cannes Film Festival was that it felt like a quieter fest than usual: fewer big-name American titles, as festival director Thierry Frémaux himself admitted in his opening-day press conference, and slightly lower-key star wattage. From a critic’s perspective, however, that doesn’t necessarily make for a bad festival, particularly for those willing to dig into the sidebars away from the Competition — which, following last year’s vintage edition that included “It Was Just an Accident,” “Sirāt,” “Sentimental Value,” “The Mastermind” and “The Secret Agent,” was more uneven this time round.
Still, the highs have been high, as modern masters including Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Pawel Pawlikowski, Andrey Zvyagintsev and Valeska Grisebach returned — the latter three after notably long absences to boot — with mighty confirmation of their talents, while revelations away from the spotlight ran the gamut from a Nepalese trans thriller to a queer animated Alzheimer’s tearjerker to a most unexpected heartwarmer from Jordan Firstman that prompted the festival’s most heated bidding war. All that, and a deliciously kinky genre stew cooked up by Jane Schoenbrun with Gillian Anderson: Even in a so-called quiet year, cinema is still showing up loud and proud. Here are the titles that got our team of Cannes critics most excited.
“All of a Sudden”
Two women talk for three and a quarter hours, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi makes of it an unassumingly momentous miracle. The Japanese director’s gorgeous new feature is not merely good enough to remind you what cinema can be, but great enough to remind you what life can be. At times, suspended in the long silvery skeins of conversation that thread through the magnificent screenplay, it achieves a kind of levitating grace, leaving you a different, slightly mended version of the person you were before. (Read the full review by Jessica Kiang.)
“The Beloved”
Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s meaty and enjoyable making-of-a-movie drama follows a famous director, Esteban Martínez (Javier Bardem), who returns to his native Spain to shoot a movie in the desert and hires his estranged actress daughter to play one of the leads. It’s been a while since Bardem had a role this straight up that he could sink his choppers into. The subtle power of his performance, and it’s a terrific one, is that it takes us a while to grasp the kind of mind games Esteban is a master of. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)
“Clarissa”
Virginia Woolf’s interior epic “Mrs Dalloway” survives — and thrives — following a surprisingly successful transplantation from London to Lagos in brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri’s “Clarissa,” which places a superb Sophie Okonedo, radiant with melancholy, at the heart of its remarkably well-cast ensemble. The Esiris cast a perceptive eye on the elite social constellation that has fallen into orbit around this dutiful but unfulfilled society wife, and have nothing but compassion for her as she spins slowly around and around at its center. (Read the full review by Jessica Kiang.)
“Club Kid”
An unexpected father-son story, Jordan Firstman’s debut feature begins as an exhaustingly antic, coked-up rush through the highest, lowest, lewdest reaches of the New York queer club scene — before surprising its audience and protagonist alike with a drastic tonal about-face. Come for the arch, bitchy humor promised by the title and the director’s general social media brand; stay for the unabashed sweetness of the enterprise; leave with the distinct sense that there’s more to Firstman than his online persona. Small wonder A24 scooped it up for $17 million. (Read the full review by Guy Lodge.)
“Double Freedom”
Lisandro Alonso’s beautifully minimalistic comment on Argentina’s current political crisis marks a return to the simplicity of his earliest works. A direct sequel to his 2001 debut “Freedom, “Double Freedom” seems to pick up where its predecessor left off: Its protagonist is still contentedly chopping wood, smoking cigs, and hanging out in his makeshift shack. He’s aged, but otherwise his life looks pretty much the same as it did 20-plus years ago. Alonso takes this opportunity to shake things up — albeit in a rigorously subtle fashion that will excite his experimentally-minded followers. (Read the full review by Beatrice Loayza.)
“The Dreamed Adventure”
Sometimes, a movie sneaks up on you, sidling in like a lamb and striding out like a lion, revealing its brilliance only after you’ve brushed away the sand and grit of first impressions. Much more rarely — in fact, corresponding exactly to the release rate of movies by visionary German director Valeska Grisebach — the brilliance goes bone-deep, emerging from an astonishingly new and strange filmic architecture. Grisebach’s fourth feature is just such a marvel, a verité social drama, cast with non-professionals, that from the improvisational immediacy of small-scale real life, gradually gathers all the elements of a sprawling crime epic. (Read the full review by Jessica Kiang.)
“Elephants in the Fog”
Like the community of transgender women at its center, Nepalese drama “Elephants in the Fog” is gentle, fierce, and full of life and contradictions. Making his feature debut, writer-director Abinash Bikram Shah zeroes in on the transactional nature of trans acceptance in South Asia, a fragile prospect he explores through an authentically cast tale of adopted mothers and daughters. His camera performs a rousing restoration of the power often stolen from them, ensuring that by the time the credits roll, they’re finally imbued with the kind of divinity only offered to them in name. (Read the full review by Siddhant Adlakha)
“Fatherland“
Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski’s elegant, silvery and fascinating “Fatherland” is an incisive and ambitious movie that wants to lay bare the torn soul of Germany after World War II. The film, as photographed by Łukasz Żal, has been made in a spirit of nearly fetishistic meticulousness; it’s as subtle as a fine wine. It’s about a journey taken by Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller), an actress and writer, from West Germany to East Germany. The two actors are pitch-perfect, with Hüller’s Erika tart yet polite, reining herself in until she can’t take the old man’s buried narcissism anymore, at which point she lets her feelings fly. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)
“Fjord“
Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s superb Norwegian-set drama is his first to be set and shot outside his home country, with an international cast intelligently fronted by Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve. Many a great world-cinema auteur has come unstuck when venturing farther afield, but in Mungiu’s case, the journey makes perfect sense: So much of his work has been preoccupied with globalization, migration and cultural divides between eastern and western Europe that “Fjord” feels immediately of a piece with his searching, bristling oeuvre, despite its crisp new setting. (Read the full review by Guy Lodge.)
“Gabin”
Maxence Voiseux’s documentary is far from the first film to make a longterm investment in a child protagonist, training a camera on them over years as adulthood gradually approaches. Somehow, though, the concept feels miraculous every time. There’s something illuminating and ineffably moving about watching someone grow up before your eyes in quasi-timelapse fashion, and especially so in “Gabin,” which packs ten years of one rural village childhood into less than two hours — a remarkably fleet, fluent feat of observation and editing that still conveys its subject’s anxious, ongoing fear that his life might stall before it gets to start. (Read the full review by Guy Lodge.)
“Hope”
Na Hong-jin’s monster movie is hilarious, unwieldy and overlong and features some of the most breathtakingly elegant action moviemaking of this or any year. It’s an endless pleasure to see such exceptional filmmaking applied to such a gleefully generic setup. Even when some of the tricks become apparent, each new repetition somehow delivers more than the last, though the weightless, old-school video game aesthetic of the alien monster design sticks out even more amid the stylishness of the world captured in-camera. (Read the full review by Jessica Kiang.)
“La Gradiva”
Both the top prizewinner and the runaway word-of-mouth hit of this year’s Critics’ Week week program, Marine Atlan’s subtly spellbinding debut initially establishes the fractious, workshopped feel of Laurent Cantet’s “The Class” as it follows an unwieldy tour group of French highschoolers and teachers through the faded wonders of Pompeii. But its own woozy, hormonally overwhelmed tone emerges is its characters bond and bicker and scatter, with unformed, dangerously vulnerable queer desire at the heart of it all. (Full review to come by Guy Lodge.)
“The Man I Love”
Ira Sachs’ 1980s New York drama is small and delicate and disarmingly precise, with a performance by Rami Malek that should quiet all the critics who’ve been so snarky about him. He plays Jimmy George, a performance artist who is battling AIDS. Jimmy is the sort of aspiring “superstar” who once thrived in the downtown scene, and Malek colors him in with touching shades of anger and tenderness and saddened defiance. Sachs crafts the movie as if he were making a documentary about a fictional person. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)
“Maverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean”An enthralling documentary that boxes open your cinematic mind about who David Lean was and what he achieved. It’s full of singular stories, stunning film clips and extraordinary insights by a panoply of directors (from Francis Ford Coppola to Paul Greengrass to Celine Song). The film shows you how Lean, for all his lavishly exacting middle-of-the-road classicism, was a radical filmmaker and perhaps the key inventor (along with Hitchcock) of modern Hollywood cinema. But the revelation of “Maverick” is what a personal director the maker of “Lawrence of Arabia” really was. What the film fascinatingly captures is how the two sides of Lean — the classicist and the reckless romantic narcissist — worked together. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)
“Minotaur”
Exiled Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s majestic new film may be shot by necessity in Latvia, but that country fills in most persuasively for his homeland, conveying both its aggressive vastness in the midst of war and its eerie depopulation by people either fleeing or being called to battle. The world is a different place from when Zvyagintsev made “Loveless” in 2017; there is some catching up to do. Teeming with rage, despair, elastic metaphor and darkest gallows humor, “Minotaur” is very much up to the task. (Read the full review by Guy Lodge.)
“Paper Tiger“
James Gray returns to more or less the same setting of his last film, “Armageddon Time,” with a comparable atmosphere of mouthy, close-knit Jewish domestic psychodrama. But the new movie has the dread-fueled engine of a neo-New Hollywood vérité thriller. If anything, Gray’s direction has grown even more supple and confident — he’s a master of simmering-under-the-surface family trauma — and “Paper Tiger,” for a while at least, plays like the contemporary answer to a Sidney Lumet film. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)
“Rehearsals for a Revolution”
Bought by Sony Pictures Classics after winning the L’Oeil d’Or award for best documentary at the festival, Iranian actress-turned-helmer Pegah Ahangarani’s feature debut is rich in political and cultural resonance as well as contemporary relevance. Her compelling personal perspective on 40-plus years of post-Revolutionary Iran provides a chronicle of great hopes and even greater disappointments. It is especially notable for the abundant visual and aural archives she accesses, the poetic, allusive editing and her beautifully modulated narration.” (Read the full review by Alissa Simon.)
“The Station”
Sara Ishaq’s highly anticipated fiction debut “The Station” is the multi-layered feature we’ve been hoping would follow her impressive 2013 documentary “The Mulberry House.” Much has changed in Yemen — for the worse — over the past decade, and the country’s absence on screen apart from one-dimensional news reports puts extra pressure on any filmmaker looking to humanize its population. Ishaq has made a film peopled with women and boys who go beyond simple archetypes, setting joyful female solidarity against omnipresent conflict in a way designed to communicate with a broad demographic. (Read the full review by Jay Weissberg.)
“Tangles”
Chronicling with tenderness and idiosyncratic humor her mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease, Sarah Leavitt’s memoir “Tangles” has become a touchstone work for many enduring the same cruel rite of passage with their loved ones. Largely preserving the text’s visual and narrative singularity, Leah Nelson’s candid, funny and incrementally heartbreaking adult animated feature — an impressive debut — deserves to do the same, with Julia Louis-Dreyfus beautifully voicing Leavitt’s mother in all her sliding states of consciousness. (Read the full review by Guy Lodge.)
“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma“
Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder serve in Jane Schoenbrun’s third feature, a delicious slasher homage that repurposes the pulpy pleasures of the video nasty into a metathesis on the power of the pop-cultural gaze, queered, Southern-fried and dunked in a dipping sauce of schlocky, self-aware fun. The director’s perennial questions around gender identity and identification are sublimated into a genre tribute that also is an exploration of the frequently fucked-up nature of female desire. (Read the full review by Jessica Kiang.)
Still, the highs have been high, as modern masters including Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Pawel Pawlikowski, Andrey Zvyagintsev and Valeska Grisebach returned — the latter three after notably long absences to boot — with mighty confirmation of their talents, while revelations away from the spotlight ran the gamut from a Nepalese trans thriller to a queer animated Alzheimer’s tearjerker to a most unexpected heartwarmer from Jordan Firstman that prompted the festival’s most heated bidding war. All that, and a deliciously kinky genre stew cooked up by Jane Schoenbrun with Gillian Anderson: Even in a so-called quiet year, cinema is still showing up loud and proud. Here are the titles that got our team of Cannes critics most excited.
“All of a Sudden”
Two women talk for three and a quarter hours, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi makes of it an unassumingly momentous miracle. The Japanese director’s gorgeous new feature is not merely good enough to remind you what cinema can be, but great enough to remind you what life can be. At times, suspended in the long silvery skeins of conversation that thread through the magnificent screenplay, it achieves a kind of levitating grace, leaving you a different, slightly mended version of the person you were before. (Read the full review by Jessica Kiang.)
“The Beloved”
Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s meaty and enjoyable making-of-a-movie drama follows a famous director, Esteban Martínez (Javier Bardem), who returns to his native Spain to shoot a movie in the desert and hires his estranged actress daughter to play one of the leads. It’s been a while since Bardem had a role this straight up that he could sink his choppers into. The subtle power of his performance, and it’s a terrific one, is that it takes us a while to grasp the kind of mind games Esteban is a master of. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)
“Clarissa”
Virginia Woolf’s interior epic “Mrs Dalloway” survives — and thrives — following a surprisingly successful transplantation from London to Lagos in brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri’s “Clarissa,” which places a superb Sophie Okonedo, radiant with melancholy, at the heart of its remarkably well-cast ensemble. The Esiris cast a perceptive eye on the elite social constellation that has fallen into orbit around this dutiful but unfulfilled society wife, and have nothing but compassion for her as she spins slowly around and around at its center. (Read the full review by Jessica Kiang.)
“Club Kid”
An unexpected father-son story, Jordan Firstman’s debut feature begins as an exhaustingly antic, coked-up rush through the highest, lowest, lewdest reaches of the New York queer club scene — before surprising its audience and protagonist alike with a drastic tonal about-face. Come for the arch, bitchy humor promised by the title and the director’s general social media brand; stay for the unabashed sweetness of the enterprise; leave with the distinct sense that there’s more to Firstman than his online persona. Small wonder A24 scooped it up for $17 million. (Read the full review by Guy Lodge.)
“Double Freedom”
Lisandro Alonso’s beautifully minimalistic comment on Argentina’s current political crisis marks a return to the simplicity of his earliest works. A direct sequel to his 2001 debut “Freedom, “Double Freedom” seems to pick up where its predecessor left off: Its protagonist is still contentedly chopping wood, smoking cigs, and hanging out in his makeshift shack. He’s aged, but otherwise his life looks pretty much the same as it did 20-plus years ago. Alonso takes this opportunity to shake things up — albeit in a rigorously subtle fashion that will excite his experimentally-minded followers. (Read the full review by Beatrice Loayza.)
“The Dreamed Adventure”
Sometimes, a movie sneaks up on you, sidling in like a lamb and striding out like a lion, revealing its brilliance only after you’ve brushed away the sand and grit of first impressions. Much more rarely — in fact, corresponding exactly to the release rate of movies by visionary German director Valeska Grisebach — the brilliance goes bone-deep, emerging from an astonishingly new and strange filmic architecture. Grisebach’s fourth feature is just such a marvel, a verité social drama, cast with non-professionals, that from the improvisational immediacy of small-scale real life, gradually gathers all the elements of a sprawling crime epic. (Read the full review by Jessica Kiang.)
“Elephants in the Fog”
Like the community of transgender women at its center, Nepalese drama “Elephants in the Fog” is gentle, fierce, and full of life and contradictions. Making his feature debut, writer-director Abinash Bikram Shah zeroes in on the transactional nature of trans acceptance in South Asia, a fragile prospect he explores through an authentically cast tale of adopted mothers and daughters. His camera performs a rousing restoration of the power often stolen from them, ensuring that by the time the credits roll, they’re finally imbued with the kind of divinity only offered to them in name. (Read the full review by Siddhant Adlakha)
“Fatherland“
Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski’s elegant, silvery and fascinating “Fatherland” is an incisive and ambitious movie that wants to lay bare the torn soul of Germany after World War II. The film, as photographed by Łukasz Żal, has been made in a spirit of nearly fetishistic meticulousness; it’s as subtle as a fine wine. It’s about a journey taken by Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller), an actress and writer, from West Germany to East Germany. The two actors are pitch-perfect, with Hüller’s Erika tart yet polite, reining herself in until she can’t take the old man’s buried narcissism anymore, at which point she lets her feelings fly. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)
“Fjord“
Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s superb Norwegian-set drama is his first to be set and shot outside his home country, with an international cast intelligently fronted by Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve. Many a great world-cinema auteur has come unstuck when venturing farther afield, but in Mungiu’s case, the journey makes perfect sense: So much of his work has been preoccupied with globalization, migration and cultural divides between eastern and western Europe that “Fjord” feels immediately of a piece with his searching, bristling oeuvre, despite its crisp new setting. (Read the full review by Guy Lodge.)
“Gabin”
Maxence Voiseux’s documentary is far from the first film to make a longterm investment in a child protagonist, training a camera on them over years as adulthood gradually approaches. Somehow, though, the concept feels miraculous every time. There’s something illuminating and ineffably moving about watching someone grow up before your eyes in quasi-timelapse fashion, and especially so in “Gabin,” which packs ten years of one rural village childhood into less than two hours — a remarkably fleet, fluent feat of observation and editing that still conveys its subject’s anxious, ongoing fear that his life might stall before it gets to start. (Read the full review by Guy Lodge.)
“Hope”
Na Hong-jin’s monster movie is hilarious, unwieldy and overlong and features some of the most breathtakingly elegant action moviemaking of this or any year. It’s an endless pleasure to see such exceptional filmmaking applied to such a gleefully generic setup. Even when some of the tricks become apparent, each new repetition somehow delivers more than the last, though the weightless, old-school video game aesthetic of the alien monster design sticks out even more amid the stylishness of the world captured in-camera. (Read the full review by Jessica Kiang.)
“La Gradiva”
Both the top prizewinner and the runaway word-of-mouth hit of this year’s Critics’ Week week program, Marine Atlan’s subtly spellbinding debut initially establishes the fractious, workshopped feel of Laurent Cantet’s “The Class” as it follows an unwieldy tour group of French highschoolers and teachers through the faded wonders of Pompeii. But its own woozy, hormonally overwhelmed tone emerges is its characters bond and bicker and scatter, with unformed, dangerously vulnerable queer desire at the heart of it all. (Full review to come by Guy Lodge.)
“The Man I Love”
Ira Sachs’ 1980s New York drama is small and delicate and disarmingly precise, with a performance by Rami Malek that should quiet all the critics who’ve been so snarky about him. He plays Jimmy George, a performance artist who is battling AIDS. Jimmy is the sort of aspiring “superstar” who once thrived in the downtown scene, and Malek colors him in with touching shades of anger and tenderness and saddened defiance. Sachs crafts the movie as if he were making a documentary about a fictional person. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)
“Maverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean”An enthralling documentary that boxes open your cinematic mind about who David Lean was and what he achieved. It’s full of singular stories, stunning film clips and extraordinary insights by a panoply of directors (from Francis Ford Coppola to Paul Greengrass to Celine Song). The film shows you how Lean, for all his lavishly exacting middle-of-the-road classicism, was a radical filmmaker and perhaps the key inventor (along with Hitchcock) of modern Hollywood cinema. But the revelation of “Maverick” is what a personal director the maker of “Lawrence of Arabia” really was. What the film fascinatingly captures is how the two sides of Lean — the classicist and the reckless romantic narcissist — worked together. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)
“Minotaur”
Exiled Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s majestic new film may be shot by necessity in Latvia, but that country fills in most persuasively for his homeland, conveying both its aggressive vastness in the midst of war and its eerie depopulation by people either fleeing or being called to battle. The world is a different place from when Zvyagintsev made “Loveless” in 2017; there is some catching up to do. Teeming with rage, despair, elastic metaphor and darkest gallows humor, “Minotaur” is very much up to the task. (Read the full review by Guy Lodge.)
“Paper Tiger“
James Gray returns to more or less the same setting of his last film, “Armageddon Time,” with a comparable atmosphere of mouthy, close-knit Jewish domestic psychodrama. But the new movie has the dread-fueled engine of a neo-New Hollywood vérité thriller. If anything, Gray’s direction has grown even more supple and confident — he’s a master of simmering-under-the-surface family trauma — and “Paper Tiger,” for a while at least, plays like the contemporary answer to a Sidney Lumet film. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)
“Rehearsals for a Revolution”
Bought by Sony Pictures Classics after winning the L’Oeil d’Or award for best documentary at the festival, Iranian actress-turned-helmer Pegah Ahangarani’s feature debut is rich in political and cultural resonance as well as contemporary relevance. Her compelling personal perspective on 40-plus years of post-Revolutionary Iran provides a chronicle of great hopes and even greater disappointments. It is especially notable for the abundant visual and aural archives she accesses, the poetic, allusive editing and her beautifully modulated narration.” (Read the full review by Alissa Simon.)
“The Station”
Sara Ishaq’s highly anticipated fiction debut “The Station” is the multi-layered feature we’ve been hoping would follow her impressive 2013 documentary “The Mulberry House.” Much has changed in Yemen — for the worse — over the past decade, and the country’s absence on screen apart from one-dimensional news reports puts extra pressure on any filmmaker looking to humanize its population. Ishaq has made a film peopled with women and boys who go beyond simple archetypes, setting joyful female solidarity against omnipresent conflict in a way designed to communicate with a broad demographic. (Read the full review by Jay Weissberg.)
“Tangles”
Chronicling with tenderness and idiosyncratic humor her mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease, Sarah Leavitt’s memoir “Tangles” has become a touchstone work for many enduring the same cruel rite of passage with their loved ones. Largely preserving the text’s visual and narrative singularity, Leah Nelson’s candid, funny and incrementally heartbreaking adult animated feature — an impressive debut — deserves to do the same, with Julia Louis-Dreyfus beautifully voicing Leavitt’s mother in all her sliding states of consciousness. (Read the full review by Guy Lodge.)
“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma“
Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder serve in Jane Schoenbrun’s third feature, a delicious slasher homage that repurposes the pulpy pleasures of the video nasty into a metathesis on the power of the pop-cultural gaze, queered, Southern-fried and dunked in a dipping sauce of schlocky, self-aware fun. The director’s perennial questions around gender identity and identification are sublimated into a genre tribute that also is an exploration of the frequently fucked-up nature of female desire. (Read the full review by Jessica Kiang.)