{"id":659126,"date":"2026-05-22T20:28:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T20:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/659126\/"},"modified":"2026-05-22T20:28:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T20:28:09","slug":"best-of-cannes-2026-20-critics-picks-from-this-years-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/659126\/","title":{"rendered":"Best of Cannes 2026: 20 Critics’ Picks from This Year’s Festival"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe general consensus along the Croisette at this year\u2019s Cannes Film Festival<\/a> was that it felt like a quieter fest than usual: fewer big-name American titles, as festival director Thierry Fr\u00e9maux himself admitted in his opening-day press conference, and slightly lower-key star wattage. From a critic\u2019s perspective, however, that doesn\u2019t necessarily make for a bad festival, particularly for those willing to dig into the sidebars away from the Competition \u2014 which, following last year\u2019s vintage edition that included \u201cIt Was Just an Accident,\u201d \u201cSir\u0101t,\u201d \u201cSentimental Value,\u201d \u201cThe Mastermind\u201d and \u201cThe Secret Agent,\u201d was more uneven this time round. <\/p>\n

\n\tStill, the highs have been high, as modern masters including Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Pawel Pawlikowski, Andrey Zvyagintsev and Valeska Grisebach returned \u2014 the latter three after notably long absences to boot \u2014 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\u2019s tearjerker to a most unexpected heartwarmer from Jordan Firstman that prompted the festival\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAll of a Sudden\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tTwo women talk for three and a quarter hours, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi makes of it an unassumingly momentous miracle. The Japanese director\u2019s 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<\/a> by Jessica Kiang.)<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe Beloved\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRodrigo Sorogoyen\u2019s meaty and enjoyable making-of-a-movie drama follows a famous director, Esteban Mart\u00ednez (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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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<\/a> by Owen Gleiberman.)<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cClarissa\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tVirginia Woolf\u2019s interior epic \u201cMrs Dalloway\u201d survives \u2014 and thrives \u2014 following a surprisingly successful transplantation from London to Lagos in brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri\u2019s \u201cClarissa,\u201d 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<\/a> by Jessica Kiang.)<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cClub Kid\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAn unexpected father-son story, Jordan Firstman\u2019s debut feature begins as an exhaustingly antic, coked-up rush through the highest, lowest, lewdest reaches of the New York queer club scene \u2014 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\u2019s general social media brand; stay for the unabashed sweetness of the enterprise; leave with the distinct sense that there\u2019s more to Firstman than his online persona. Small wonder A24 scooped it up for $17 million. (Read the full review<\/a> by Guy Lodge.)<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cDouble Freedom\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tLisandro Alonso\u2019s beautifully minimalistic comment on Argentina\u2019s current political crisis marks a return to the simplicity of his earliest works. A direct sequel to his 2001 debut \u201cFreedom, \u201cDouble Freedom\u201d 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\u2019s 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 \u2014 albeit in a rigorously subtle fashion that will excite his experimentally-minded followers. (Read the full review<\/a> by Beatrice Loayza.)<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe Dreamed Adventure\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSometimes, a movie sneaks up on you, sidling in like a lamb and striding out like a lion, revealing its brilliance only after you\u2019ve brushed away the sand and grit of first impressions. Much more rarely \u2014 in fact, corresponding exactly to the release rate of movies by visionary German director Valeska Grisebach \u2014 the brilliance goes bone-deep, emerging from an astonishingly new and strange filmic architecture. Grisebach\u2019s fourth feature is just such a marvel, a verit\u00e9 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<\/a> by Jessica Kiang.)<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cElephants in the Fog\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tLike the community of transgender women at its center, Nepalese drama \u201cElephants in the Fog\u201d 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\u2019re finally imbued with the kind of divinity only offered to them in name. (Read the full review<\/a> by Siddhant Adlakha)<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cFatherland<\/a>\u201c<\/p>\n

\n\tPolish director Pawel Pawlikowski\u2019s elegant, silvery and fascinating \u201cFatherland\u201d 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 \u0141ukasz \u017bal, has been made in a spirit of nearly fetishistic meticulousness; it\u2019s as subtle as a fine wine. It\u2019s about a journey taken by Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra H\u00fcller), an actress and writer, from West Germany to East Germany. The two actors are pitch-perfect, with H\u00fcller\u2019s Erika tart yet polite, reining herself in until she can\u2019t take the old man\u2019s buried narcissism anymore, at which point she lets her feelings fly. (Read the full review<\/a> by Owen Gleiberman.)<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cFjord<\/a>\u201c<\/p>\n

\n\tRomanian director Cristian Mungiu\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201cFjord\u201d feels immediately of a piece with his searching, bristling oeuvre, despite its crisp new setting. (Read the full review<\/a> by Guy Lodge.)<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cGabin\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMaxence Voiseux\u2019s 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\u2019s something illuminating and ineffably moving about watching someone grow up before your eyes in quasi-timelapse fashion, and especially so in \u201cGabin,\u201d which packs ten years of one rural village childhood into less than two hours \u2014 a remarkably fleet, fluent feat of observation and editing that still conveys its subject\u2019s anxious, ongoing fear that his life might stall before it gets to start. (Read the full review<\/a> by Guy Lodge.)<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHope\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tNa Hong-jin\u2019s monster movie is hilarious, unwieldy and overlong and features some of the most breathtakingly elegant action moviemaking of this or any year. It\u2019s 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<\/a> by Jessica Kiang.)<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cLa Gradiva\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBoth the top prizewinner and the runaway word-of-mouth hit of this year\u2019s Critics\u2019 Week week program, Marine Atlan\u2019s subtly spellbinding debut initially establishes the fractious, workshopped feel of Laurent Cantet\u2019s \u201cThe Class\u201d 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.)<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe Man I Love\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIra Sachs\u2019 1980s New York drama is small and delicate and disarmingly precise, with a performance by Rami Malek that should quiet all the critics who\u2019ve been so snarky about him. He plays Jimmy George, a performance artist who is battling AIDS. Jimmy is the sort of aspiring \u201csuperstar\u201d 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<\/a> by Owen Gleiberman.)<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMaverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean\u201d<\/p>\n

An enthralling documentary that boxes open your cinematic mind about who David Lean was and what he achieved. It\u2019s 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 \u201cMaverick\u201d is what a\u00a0personal\u00a0director the maker of \u201cLawrence of Arabia\u201d really was. What the film fascinatingly captures is how the two sides of Lean \u2014 the classicist and the reckless romantic narcissist \u2014 worked together. (Read the full review<\/a> by Owen Gleiberman.)<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMinotaur\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tExiled Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev\u2018s 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 \u201cLoveless\u201d in 2017; there is some catching up to do. Teeming with rage, despair, elastic metaphor and darkest gallows humor, \u201cMinotaur\u201d is very much up to the task. (Read the full review<\/a> by Guy Lodge.)<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cPaper Tiger<\/a>\u201c<\/p>\n

\n\tJames Gray returns to more or less the same setting of his last film, \u201cArmageddon Time,\u201d 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 v\u00e9rit\u00e9 thriller. If anything, Gray\u2019s direction has grown even more supple and confident \u2014 he\u2019s a master of simmering-under-the-surface family trauma \u2014 and \u201cPaper Tiger,\u201d for a while at least, plays like the contemporary answer to a Sidney Lumet film. (Read the full review<\/a> by Owen Gleiberman.)<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cRehearsals for a Revolution\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBought by Sony Pictures Classics after winning the L\u2019Oeil d\u2019Or award for best documentary at the festival, Iranian actress-turned-helmer Pegah Ahangarani\u2019s 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.\u201d (Read the full review<\/a> by Alissa Simon.)<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe Station\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSara Ishaq\u2019s highly anticipated fiction debut \u201cThe Station\u201d is the multi-layered feature we\u2019ve been hoping would follow her impressive 2013 documentary \u201cThe Mulberry House.\u201d Much has changed in Yemen \u2014 for the worse \u2014 over the past decade, and the country\u2019s 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<\/a> by Jay Weissberg.)<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cTangles\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tChronicling with tenderness and idiosyncratic humor her mother\u2019s battle with Alzheimer\u2019s disease, Sarah Leavitt\u2019s memoir \u201cTangles\u201d has become a touchstone work for many enduring the same cruel rite of passage with their loved ones. Largely preserving the text\u2019s visual and narrative singularity, Leah Nelson\u2019s candid, funny and incrementally heartbreaking adult animated feature \u2014 an impressive debut \u2014 deserves to do the same, with Julia Louis-Dreyfus beautifully voicing Leavitt\u2019s mother in all her sliding states of consciousness. (Read the full review<\/a> by Guy Lodge.)<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cTeenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma<\/a>\u201c<\/p>\n

\n\tGillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder serve in Jane Schoenbrun\u2019s 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\u2019s 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<\/a> by Jessica Kiang.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The general consensus along the Croisette at this year\u2019s Cannes Film Festival was that it felt like a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":659127,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[32176,88,283907,275512,279316,275392],"class_list":["post-659126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-cannes-film-festival","tag-entertainment","tag-fatherland","tag-fjord","tag-paper-tiger","tag-teenage-sex-and-death-at-camp-miasma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=659126"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659126\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/659127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=659126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=659126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=659126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}