2026 Cannes Movie Reviews List

The 2026 Cannes Film Festival is underway with French filmmaker Pierre Salvadori’s The Electric Kiss serving as the opening-night pic.

Among the headline filmmakers debuting new works on the Croisette this year are previous Palme d’Or winners Cristian Mungiu and Hirokazu Kore-eda, two-time Oscar-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi and American indie veteran Ira Sachs.

The Electric Kiss is joined by new films from stalwart auteurs including Pedro Almodóvar, Cristian Mungiu, Guillaume Canet, Nicolas Winding Refn and Paweł Pawlikowski

Read all of Deadline’s takes below throughout the festival, which runs May 12-23. Click on the title to read the full review (some films will be reviewed only on this page) and keep checking back as we update the list.

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Section: Competition
Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Cast: Virginie Efira, Tao Okamoto, Kyoza Nagatsuka, Jean-Charles Clichet, Maria Bunel, Romain Cottard
Deadline’s takeaway: All of a Sudden, a film that marks Hamaguchi’s first French-made film, has much to recommend about it, but the overall impact is diluted due to the length of some sequences which feel endless and almost more like an academic exercise than an actual movie. — PH

Ashes

Section: Special Screenings
Director: Diego Luna
Cast: Anna Díaz, Adriana Paz, Luisa Huertas, Teresa Lozano, Guillermo Ríos, Adriana Jacomé, Sergio Bautista, Benny Emmanuel, Irene Escolar, Anna Alarcón, Dailyn Valdivieso, Charlie Rowe, Laura Gómez
Deadline’s mini-review: With strong guidance from Diego Luna returning to the director’s chair to tell a very personal story of family, the experience of leaving and being left, of racism, immigration, and finding new life in a foreign country, Ashes is a powerful and moving motion picture. It is also unique in dealing directly with the hot-button topic of immigration, but surprisingly in two countries that speak the same language. This separates it from the usual stories we have been seeing in America where Mexicans try to assimilate themselves in the U.S. and run into a government dead set on keeping them out. In this case though it is Spain, and Luna and his co-writers show that a shared language is not the antidote to hatred and being welcomed in a new land.

The opening of the film, shot in darkness and shadows, shows us a mother tearfully saying goodbye to her sleeping children. This is just the beginning of the long emotional journey for Lucila and Diego as they will find a way to reunite with their mother. Diaz as Lucila is a revelation and the heart and soul of Ashes, which is based on the book by Brenda Navarro. Paz is also effective as the mother who felt she was out of choices and made a fateful decision, one that has tragic consequences. Ashes becomes a rich, and undeniably timely, addition to film depictions of the experiences of immigrants in both heartbreaking and humane ways. — PH

Section: Competition
Director-screenwriter: Rodrigo Sorogoyen
Cast: Javier Bardem, Victoria Luengo, Melina Matthews, Marina Fois, Malena Villa
Deadline’s takeaway: Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s first Cannes Competition pic is an incredible achievement, and Javier Bardem’s career has been building up to this stunning moment. Certainly one of the best films about filmmaking since François Truffaut’s Day for Night, The Beloved might be the scariest since Peeping Tom. — DW

Section: Competition
Director-screenwriter: Pedro Almodóvar
Cast: Barbara Lennie, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Quim Guitierrez, Patrick Criado
Deadline’s takeaway: Bitter Christmas indeed is, for me at least, minor-Almodóvar, not likely to be the one that wins him his criminally long-denied Palme d’Or, but nevertheless a flawed movie that remains a fascinating peek into the master’s own head. — PH

Section: Directors’ Fortnight
Director-screenwriter: Kantemir Balagov
Cast: Barry Keoghan, Talha Akdogan, Riley Keough, Harry Melling, Jaliyah Richards
Deadline’s takeaway: The machine has yet to be invented that can tie up all the loose ends in this puzzling family drama about a fragile father-son relationship that touches on familiar issues of masculinity in crisis but doesn’t take them anywhere new. Barry Keoghan tries his best with the material, but there’s not really much he can do with it. — DW

Section: Un Certain Regard
Director-screenwriter: Jordan Firstman
Cast: Jordan Firstman, Cara Delvingne, Reggie Absolom, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Colleen Camp
Deadline’s takeaway: Although a father-child relationship is very much the focus, Firstman uses the setup to explore other issues, notably the pressures of being a single gay man trying to extricate himself from such a transient environment. The film will strike a chord with any retired party animal who, as David Bowie once put it, suddenly realizes they don’t want to go out anymore — they just want to stay home and get things done. — DW

Section: Out of Competition
Director-screenwriter: Andy Garcia
Cast: Andy Garcia, Rosemarie DeWitt, Brendan Fraser, Dustin Hoffman, Danny Huston, Bill Murray, Vicky Krieps, Robert Patrick, Rachel Ticotin, Yul Vazquez, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Demian Bichir
Deadline’s takeaway: Andy Garcia wrote, directed, stars in and with Arturo Sandoval composed the music for this wonderfully atmospheric, nostalgic and entertaining contemporary gumshoe noir that serves as a shimmering love letter to L.A. with 52 locations shot over 25 days on an indie budget. — PW

Section: Out of Competition
Director: Pierre Salvadori
Screenwriters: Benjamin Charbit, Benoit Graffin, Pierre Salvadori
Cast: Pio Marmaï , Anais Demoustier, Gilles Lellouche, Vimala Pons, Gustave Kervern, Madeleine Baudot
Deadline’s takeaway: Pierre Salvadori’s charming and very French rom-com touches on loss, grief, deception and renewed love of life and art. With subtle comedy and perfectly cast actors, it’s a crowd-pleaser that could work nicely for audiences seeking escapism. — PH

Section: Competition
Director: Paweł Pawlikowski
Cast: Sandra Hüller, Hanns Zischler, August Diehl, Anna Madeley
Deadline’s takeaway: Fatherland is peak Pawlikowski. In 82 studiously controlled minutes, it follows the elderly Nobel-Prize winning writer Thomas Mann on a journey through Germany, cutting a swathe through all of postwar history. A masterclass in artistic discipline, it will be a hell of a movie that stands between this and the festival’s Palme d’Or. — SB

Section: Competition
Director-screenwriter: Cristian Mungiu
Cast: Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve, Lisa Carlehed, Vanessa Ceban, Heinrikke Lund-Olsen
Deadline’s takeaway: In his typical spare and deliberate style, Mungiu has crafted yet another Palme d’Or-worthy film that fearlessly treads into controversial issues in our society but pointedly doesn’t take sides. This may frustrate people who want it to, but Fjord is a fiercely intelligent and gripping movie that finds its power in providing no easy answers. — PH

Section: Competition
Director-screenwriter: Jeanne Herry
Cast: Adèle Exarchopolous, Sara Giraudeau, Anne Suarez, Mathilde Roehrich
Deadline’s takeaway: Exarchopolous has a great time with such an exasperating bad-girl character, but it’s telling that much of the film’s appeal evaporates when sobriety beckons and a little too much screen time is given to the lectures of a sanctimonious doctor. By the end, Garance’s demons have become way more interesting than her actual personality, and, in a funny way, we actually rather miss them. — DW

Section: Competition
Director-screenwriter: Marie Kreutzer
Cast: Léa Seydoux, Laurence Rupp, Jella Haase, Catherine Deneuve
Deadline’s takeaway: Why something with the punch of classical tragedy — love destroyed from within by an inexplicable streak of evil — had to be so over-egged is baffling. If only the narrative had been as uncluttered as Kreutzer’s cleanly defined framing; she pays attention to close-ups, making the most of Léa Seydoux’s fiercely felt performance. — SB

Section: Out of Competition
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Cast: Sophie Thatcher, Havana Rose Liu, Kristine Froseth, Charles Melton
Deadline’s takeaway: Is it pretentious? You bet! But it’s the kind of pretension that’s been missing for far too long in cinema. Her Private Hell is either for you or it isn’t and you’re either for it or you aren’t. Either way, this is a film that demands you pick a side. — DW

Section: Competition
Director-screenwriter: Na Hong-Jin
Cast: Hwang Jung-Min, Hoyeon, Zo In-Sung, Yung Bae, Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Taylor Russell, Cameron Britton
Deadline’s takeaway: Sci-fi alien monster mash never lets up for a minute of its two-hour, 40-minute running time and out-Hollywoods anything of its kind made by Hollywood. There can be no doubt Director Na is a master at this stuff, and the motion-capture work is comparable to Avatar, which keeps winning Oscars for doing this kind of thing. — PH

Section: Out of Competition
Director: Guillaume Canet
Cast: Marion Cotillard, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Aron Ramo, Denis Menochet, Luis Zahera, Marta Etura, David Talbot
Deadline’s takeaway: Marion Cotillard has one of the most intense roles of her career in Guillaume Canet‘s pulsating French thriller. With themes of cults, adoption, a missing person and escaping a troubled past, the film successfully navigates the line between arthouse and genuine commercial prospects. — PH

Section: Competition
Director-screenwriter: Andrey Zvyagintsev
Cast: Iris Lebedeva, Dmitriy Mazurov, Varvara Shmykova, Juris Žagars
Deadline’s takeaway: This strict weighting of elements may prove a challenging watch for viewers who can’t see the point of a pause. There are no firm conclusions, for all that the story smolders with outrage; it doesn’t make a political point, which may also feel frustrating. But that is to be expected; Leviathan, Zvyagintsev’s 2014 masterpiece, was similarly ambiguous. Minotaur doesn’t quite match that film’s moral sweep or exquisite skewering of a system, but it is a great piece of work. — SB

Section: Competition
Director: László Nemes
Cast: Gilles Lellouche, Lars Eidinger, Marcin Czarnak, Louise Bourgoin, Felix Léfebvre
Deadline’s takeaway: Moulin sometimes feels like we’re watching it through the wintry mist of a very lonely landscape. Unlike Nemes’ Son of Saul, we are often aware of other people in the frame, but, as the film goes to show, they are mere bystanders: Everything in this story was done for show and seen by people who did nothing to stop it. — DW

Section: Competition
Director-screenwriter: Kōji Fukada
Cast: Takako Matsu, Shizuka Ishibashi, Ken’ichi Matsuyama, Waku Kawaguchi, Kiyora Fujiwara, Sawako Fujima
Deadline’s takeaway: Nagi Notes could fittingly be described as scenic cinema; slow for sure but revealing in the same way a slow train can really open up the passing landscape. LGTB+-positive in a most unexpected and human way, it’s a modest film that charms by stealth and understatement. — DW

Section: Competition
Director-screenwriter: James Gray
Cast: Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, Miles Teller, Gavin Goudey, Roman Engel, Yavor Vesselinov, Victor Ptak
Deadline’s takeaway: This noirish little gem is right up there with the very best James Gray films. And it’s some of the finest work stars Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller have done. This superbly crafted story keeps you engaged at every turn by Gray, who knows how to twist a crime-genre tale into something fresh and pulse-pounding. — PH

Section: Competition
Director: Asghar Farhadi
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Virginie Efira, Vincent Cassel, Pierre Niney, Adam Bessa, India Hair, Catherine Deneuve
Deadline’s takeaway: What Farhadi has brilliantly cooked up ultimately feels wholly original and deliciously crafted on every level, and with the help of a perfectly chosen cast there isn’t a false step even in a tricky scenario like this one. This may be the filmmaker’s best-ever in terms of style and pure picturemaking skill, and for me certainly his finest since A Separation. — PH

Section: Competition
Director-screenwriter: Hirokazu Kore-eda
Cast: Haruka Ayase, Daigo, Kuwaki Rimu
Deadline’s takeaway: A light yet somehow profound study of grief that deals with death in an unusual but surprisingly cathartic way. By the end, it is clear that Kore-eda has taken the stuff of dystopian cyberpunk nightmares and turned it into an elegant, wistful fairytale, fashioning a beautiful allegory in which all the main characters are reborn. — DW

Section: Midnight
Director-screenwriter: Marion Le Corroller
Cast: Mara Taquin, Karin Viard, Kim Higelin, Sami Outalbali, Stefan Crepon
Deadline’s takeaway: Built around a fantastic scream-queen performance from Mara Taquin, Le Corroller’s film follows firmly in the trail pioneered by Julia Ducournau but brings its own thoughts to the woman-in-a-man’s-world body-horror genre. Its squishy mayhem taps into the sinister sci-fi paranoia that feeds David Cronenberg’s early movies and throws in a hefty dose of social satire that recalls Nicolas Ray’s Bigger Than Life. — DW

Section: Un Certain Regard
Director-screenwriter: Jane Schoenbrun
Cast: Hannah Einbinder, Gillian Anderson, Patrick Fischler, Eva Victor, Dylan Baker
Deadline’s takeaway: Jane Schoenbrun’s instant midnight-movie classic is a psychedelic tribute to the slasher-horror cycle of the early ’80s that subversively reclaims the genre from the traditional male gaze. Hannah Einbinder helps pull it off with the strength and vulnerability that is necessary to make a trippy, gory and still somehow perversely romantic love story the film’s beating, bloody heart. — DW

Section: Competition
Director: Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet
Cast: Léa Drucker, Mélanie Thierry, Charles Berling, Laurent Capelluto, Marie-Christine Barrault
Deadline’s takeaway: Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s solid female-centric drama is not what you might call thrilling cinema, but it is worthwhile, and in Léa Drucker’s hands we have a character who is something special to behold. — PH

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