Cannes 2025 - Awards and comments

Last year's awards was always going to be a tough act to follow, in which all the right films were rewarded (in my humble opinion!) and with a Palme d'or that went on to win the Oscar for best film, repeating Parasite's feat a mere few years later (although Sean Baker seemed more excited about winning the former than the latter). It seems like the bad memory of the last truly disastrous awards (2016, a year seared in the memories of Cannes attendees) is far behind us and this year, Juliette Binoche and her jury gave us a honourable list of awards.

Cannes 2025 - The Mastermind by Kelly Reichardt

The Mastermind is set in the 1970s and feels, in many respects, as though it could have been made then. Not as an exercise in nostalgia or hollow imitation, but in its mood: a gradually darkening tone, a background of social unease, and a moral landscape that remains ambiguous throughout. It is a film that resists easy characterisation, content to let its characters drift through uncertainty rather than obvious narrative arcs.

The premise is simple: JB Mooney (Josh O'Connor), a carpenter and amateur art thief, goes along with a bigger heist that, needless to say, does not go as planned. Kelly Reichardt is less interested in the mechanics of crime than the people behind it and the motives that put it into motion. The 1970s setting is crucial, but it is handled with restraint. There is no fetishisation of period detail, no series of signifiers. Instead, the era is evoked through atmosphere: tired interiors, muted colours, the sense of a society no longer convinced of its own coherence. Political and economic tensions are present, but mostly as background noise, shaping behaviour rather than driving plot. 

Cannes 2025 - The Last One for the Road by Francesco Sossai

The Last One for the Road starts with a seemingly simple premise: two broke fifty something friends with a "one last drink” philosophy meet a shy architecture student by chance and embark on an unexpected road trip with him. What unfolds is a film that initially feels modest but grows into something resonant: a reflection on youth, ageing and intergenerational curiosity that stays with you long after the end credits have rolled

Cannes 2025 - Vie Privée by Rebecca Zlotowski

When renowned psychiatrist Lilian Steiner (Jodie Foster) learns of the death of one of her patients, doubting the official version of events, she becomes convinced that something is amiss and decides to look into the circumstances herself. 

Vie privée is a psychological thriller but its genre category only tells part of the story. What makes the film  enjoyable and entertaining even if fairly slight is not the quickly forgotten resolution of its mystery  but Jodie Foster, delivering one of those performances that makes you remember, if it was ever needed, what a great, versatile actress she is, helped by a nicely written and compelling character, the most interesting part she has played in years. 

Cannes 2025 - Fuori by Mario Martone

Based on Goliarda Sapienza’s autobiographical account of her time in prison and her complex bond with a fellow inmate, both behind bars and beyond, Fuori has a soft, affecting touch that suits it perfectly. Rather than shaping Sapienza’s experience into a conventional story of incarceration or redemption, the film chooses something more elusive even if it means risking alienating some audiences that might expect a more conventional narrative.

Cannes 2025 - Magellan by Law Diaz

Set during the early stages of European expansion, Magellan follows the famed explorer Ferdinand Magellan as he embarks on his fateful voyage. When Magellan arrives in unfamiliar territories, encounters with indigenous populations quickly expose the ideological foundations of his mission. What begins as an expedition driven by prestige, faith, and imperial competition gradually becomes more complex and morally compromised.

Cannes 2025 - Alpha by Julia Ducournau

Winning a Palme d'or at an early age and the start of one's career can be a mixed blessing, like jury president Wim Wenders warned Steven Soderbergh about when he handed him the top award back in 1989. Expectations skyrocket and stakes are higher, so there was an intense curiosity about what 2021 winner Julia Ducournau would do next after Titane, being one of the youngest recipients in the history of the festival, only the second female director to do so and for such an unusual film. With Alpha, she returns to Cannes with her most devastating work yet, bold, mournful and very personal. On paper, the premise might sound almost too on-the-nose: a body horror metaphor for the AIDS epidemic but she takes it to far more unexpected and affecting places.

Cannes 2025 - I Only Rest in the Storm by Pedro Pinho

I Only Rest in the Storm is an expansive, quietly absorbing film that engages with the legacy of colonialism, exploitation and contemporary Africa without turning its characters into mouthpieces or its ideas into slogans. Set in Guinea-Bissau, it follows a Portuguese engineer, Sérgio (Sérgio Coragem) on a professional mission that gradually becomes something far less defined, as work, desire, guilt and disorientation blur into one another. At three and a half hours, it might sound forbidding on paper, yet the film’s patience and clarity of purpose make the running time feel not only justified but surprisingly fluid. 

Cannes 2025 - The Secret Agent by Kleber Mendonça Filho

The Secret Agent is a fascinating political thriller that feels both firmly anchored in Brazil’s tortured past and acutely attentive to the present. Set in 1970s Recife, at the height of the military dictatorship, the film works on several levels at once: as a genre piece, as a social portrait, and as a meditation on memory, surveillance and moral compromise. It is gripping without being schematic, dense without being didactic, and deeply atmospheric without ever descending into easy nostalgia. 

Cannes 2025 - Nouvelle Vague by Richard Linklater

Nouvelle Vague is an affectionate, often very funny cinephile tribute to a moment in film history that is now revered. The director chooses a lighter, more generous approach however. It celebrates chaos, enthusiasm and invention, capturing the sense of youthful urgency that surrounded the making of Breathless and the small group of critics-turned-filmmakers who rebelled against the "cinema de papa".

Cannes 2025 - Die My Love by Lynne Ramsay

Die My Love is an abrasive, unsettling film about postpartum depression and the slow disintegration of a marriage, staged as something close to an American gothic nightmare. From its opening moments, it is clear that Lynne Ramsay is uninterested in comfort or moderation. Everything is pushed to extremes: emotions, sound, acting,,. It is raw, often deliberately unpleasant and powered by a performance from Jennifer Lawrence that feels fearless in its exposure. It is also a film that will undoubtedly divide audiences, not because its subject is unfamiliar, but because of the way it chooses to confront it. 

Cannes 2025 - Eddington by Ari Aster

Set in the fraught early days of the pandemic and riding the emotional chaos of the Black Lives Matter protests and some ever hardening culture wars, Eddington revolves around a standoff between a small-town sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) and a progressive mayor (Pedro Pascal) in Eddington, New Mexico in May 2020 as lockdown tensions rise and misinformation swirls.

This premise have been a fertile narrative canvas with themes that are ever so topical still but instead of insight, we get a conveyor belt of vaguely “edgy” jokes that feel written to elicit some smug chuckles from A24 bros. The targets are obvious, the punchlines toothless, and the whole affair reeks of that particular brand of ironic detachment without actually ever daring any truly controversial or bold narrative development that might challenge the audience.

Cannes 2025 - The Plague by Charlie Bollinger

Set at an all-boys water polo camp, The Place centres on a socially anxious twelve-year-old boy, Ben (Everett Blunck) caught between the desire to belong and a quiet discomfort with his teammates' behaviour and particularly their treatment of an outcast, Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), affected by an imaginary infectious plague (or is it imaginary...?).

 The Plague is, at times, a frustrating film but not without its merits. What initially feels like a familiar tale of adolescent cruelty and toxic group dynamics eschews some more dramatic development and instead skilfully captures the insidious nature of bullying and how it hides behind rituals that pass for jokes and light banter.  Rather than positioning Ben as the victim, the script’s smartest choice is to cast him as a character in between, someone who gradually earns a fragile, conditional acceptance from the other boys, yet remains the only one who speaks to Eli, running the risk of being shunned himself.

Cannes 2025 - Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning by Christopher McQuarrie

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning arrives carrying the weight of a long awaited conclusion, expectation and legacy, and it buckles under all three. Dour, interminable and strangely inert, it feels less like the culmination of a long-running franchise than an exercise in narrative exhaustion. What should have been a celebratory send-off instead drains the series of its defining pleasures, replacing fun with solemnity. 

The follows directly from the previous instalment, with Ethan Hunt once again racing against time to prevent a global catastrophe on the cusp of being triggered by a rogue A.I. Governments are paralysed, institutions are compromised, and only Hunt possesses the moral clarity, physical ability and spiritual resolve to avert disaster. His team follows, loyal and supportive, but largely sidelined. The narrative frames this as necessity rather than choice, but the effect is to narrow the film’s emotional and dramatic core to a single, overburdened figure. 

Cannes 2025 - Two Prosecutors by Sergei Loznitsa

Two Prosecutors lays bare the machinery of Stalinist justice with an unflinching severity. From its opening moments, the film is all about patience, repetition, and an almost punishing attention to procedure. Nothing is rushed, nothing softened. The horrors of the regime are not dramatised through spectacle or excess, but through process, forms, corridors, silences and the slow grinding down of an individual who still believes, at least initially, that the system can be reasoned with. 

Cannes 2025 - The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo by Diego Céspedes

Set in the early 1980s in a remote mining town in Chile, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo follows Lidia (Tamara Cortés), an eleven-year-old girl growing up within a vibrant and fiercely protective commune of transvestites who are being shunned as a mysterious illness begins to spread transmitted through nothing more than a gaze, or so does the rumour go.

Cannes 2025 - Enzo by Robin Campillo

Enzo was due to be directed by Palme d'or winner Laurent Cantet who sadly passed out during production, only for Robin Campillo (120 BPM) to step in and take over directing duties. The film opens with an impressive scene that lays the cards narratively and thematically right from the start. We meet the titular character on a building site, visibly out of his depth, fumbling through manual tasks as an apprentice until his exasperated boss cuts his day short and drives him home despite the young man's reluctance. But his family home turns out to be a striking modern villa high in the hills of Marseille overlooking the sea. It is a smart reveal, establishing both Enzo’s discomfort in his new environment as well as his unease with his own social standing.

Cannes 2025 - Partir un Jour by Amélie Bonnin

Partir in Jour is an unexpected pick to open the most prestigious film festival in the world: a musical romantic comedy with a relatively unknown cast especially to foreign audiences and Amélie Bonnin's first feature-length film. It is not without its charms, and there are moments when it briefly finds a rhythm of its own, but taken as a whole it feels slight and, too often, uninspired. What could have been a modest, bittersweet diversion settles instead for something rather thinner, its good ideas insufficiently developed and its emotional beats too predictable to linger.