This year’s Cannes Film Festival featured its fair share of star-studded, high-profile disappointments (Die My Love, Eddington), as well as some middling directorial debuts from Hollywood heavyweights (Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water and Scarlett Johansson’s Eleanor the Great) and several films which were more enjoyable than excellent (Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, Akinola Davies Jr’s My Father’s Shadow, Carla Simón’s Romería, and Michael Angelo Covino’s Splitsville).
But for me, five releases really rose to the occasion—ranging from poetic family dramas to pitch-black comedies and hair-raising horror movies—all of which I haven’t been able to get out of my head since my first viewing. These are the Croisette-debuting films you need to catch later this year.
Norwegian arthouse favourite Joachim Trier’s follow-up to his transcendent millennial coming-of-age saga, The Worst Person in the World (with Renate Reinsve and Anders Danielsen Lie in tow, yet again), is both an intimate character study of two sisters and their domineering filmmaker father, and a decades-spanning account of their family history, rooted in the cavernous, cracking-at-the-foundations Oslo home they’ve long occupied. It is also, easily, the best film of the year so far, nimbly balancing humor and heft, and delivering an ending which reduced me to a weeping puddle. Watch it for the razor-sharp, expertly modulated script and the sensational performances, including from Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, and Elle Fanning, and look out for it in the 2026 awards race.
