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 - 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 - 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.