Contemporary Air critic Justin Chang says All of a Sudden (starring Tao Okamoto and Virginie Efira) was his favourite film on the 2026 Cannes Movie Competition.
Courtesy of the Cannes Movie Competition.
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Courtesy of the Cannes Movie Competition.
The primary Cannes Movie Competition I ever attended, in Might 2006, was a deliriously star-studded affair. Penélope Cruz, Ethan Hawke and Kirsten Dunst walked up the red-carpeted steps. Future Oscar hopefuls like Volver, Babel and Marie Antoinette competed for the Palme d’Or, the competition’s high prize. There have been world premieres of blockbusters like The Da Vinci Code and X-Males: The Final Stand — horrible films, however nice picture ops. And close to the top of the competition, I walked into a movie I knew nothing about referred to as Pan’s Labyrinth and emerged understanding I might seen a traditional.
This yr’s Cannes kicked off with a Twentieth-anniversary screening of Pan’s Labyrinth, however in any other case, there wasn’t a lot of that 2006-era razzle-dazzle. The foremost Hollywood studios tightened their belts and stayed dwelling, maybe with still-fresh recollections of the stinging Cannes reception for the final Indiana Jones film again in 2023.
However there have been stars right here and there. Demi Moore and Stellan Skarsgård have been on this yr’s jury. Adam Driver and Miles Teller confirmed up for the world premiere of James Grey’s terrific 1986-set crime drama, Paper Tiger, wherein they play brothers who unwisely go into enterprise with the Russian mob. Driver and Teller are excellent, and Scarlett Johansson is heartbreakingly good as a member of the family pressured to cope with the fallout.
Paper Tiger deserved a prize, however it left the competition empty-handed. As a substitute, the jury awarded the Palme d’Or to the gripping and typically infuriating small-town drama Fjord. It is the second Palme win for the Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu; he received his first in 2007 for the film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and a couple of Days.
In Fjord, Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve are virtually unrecognizable as an evangelical Christian couple who’ve just lately moved from Romania to a small Norwegian city with their 5 kids. When the couple are accused of kid abuse, Fjord turns into a fierce battle between the forces of spiritual conservatism and secular liberalism. It might be set in Norway, however it’s more likely to resonate with American audiences when it opens later this yr.
I hope there may also be sturdy turnout for Minotaur, a superbly chilled story of adultery and homicide that received the Grand Prix, or second place. It is a remake of the 1969 Claude Chabrol drama La Femme Infidèle, this time set in Russia, not lengthy after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The director of Minotaur, Andrey Zvyagintsev, practically died of COVID in the course of the pandemic, and it was transferring to see him again in Cannes with a movie this highly effective and uncompromising in its critique of the Putin regime.
One of many buzziest out-of-competition titles was Membership Child, a massively satisfying comedy directed by the actor, author, comic and social-media star Jordan Firstman. He performs a homosexual New York Metropolis membership promoter who’s despatched reeling when he learns that he has a 10-year-old son. The result’s principally a ketamine-laced model of each adult-bonds-with-cute-kid film you have ever seen, however Firstman is an actual expertise.
Firstman’s additionally one among a number of queer filmmakers who made a daring impression on the competition this yr. Jane Schoenbrun, the director of the creative transgender allegory I Noticed the TV Glow, got here to Cannes with their third function, Teenage Intercourse and Dying at Camp Miasma. Starring a really recreation Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson, the film is a intelligent homage to, and deconstruction of, ’80s and ’90s slasher thrillers, digging deep into the often-unspoken connections between our love of popular culture and our hang-ups about intercourse and need.
Together with Paper Tiger, Membership Child and Camp Miasma have been welcome reminders that American cinema is not near lifeless, at Cannes or wherever else. Even so, I am unable to say that I minded the overall absence of Hollywood on the competition this yr. One of many causes I hold returning to Cannes is that it reveals attention-grabbing films from all around the world — films just like the beautiful and transferring Rwanda-set drama, Ben’Imana, about efforts to result in reality and reconciliation years after the 1994 genocide. The movie earned its director, Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo, the Caméra d’Or prize for finest debut function.
My favourite movie at Cannes this yr was All of a Sudden, from the Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. Set in and round a Parisian elder-care dwelling, it makes use of the shut bond between two girls — one French and one Japanese — to lift haunting questions on how we dwell, how we die, and most of all, how we discuss to one another. Like Hamaguchi’s Oscar-winning Drive My Automobile, All of a Sudden is a reminder that one thing so simple as a dialog between pals could make for sublimely transferring cinema. I am unable to wait to see it once more, and I am unable to wait so that you can see it, too.
