Cannes 2026 Wrap-Up
Cannes 2026 is coming to a close. The Palme d’Or, Grand Prix, and Jury Prize will be handed out tomorrow night. Unlike the last few Cannes festivals, there is no clear frontrunner.
Here’s our breakdown, broken into categories:
Best Films
Best Performances
Films Pushing Boundaries
Enjoy!
BEST FILMS
Our top film of Cannes 2026 is All of a Sudden (Neon).
Dir: Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car).
It is a profound 3hr+ meditation on how to use art to reform thoughts and ideas. To keep pace with the slowest person. To let the outside in.
It revolves around a Japanese playwright and a director of a nursing home whose discourse allows the status quo of that retirement community to move to an enlightened level of humanity. Hamaguchi’s meditative pace allows his carefully constructed ideas to seep in and fill up your soul.
Fatherland (Mubi)
Dir: Paweł Pawlikowski (Cold War).
It’s a stark, powerful rendition of a father and daughter (Hanns Zischler as Thomas Mann and Sandra Hüller) as they journey across post-war Germany, trying to spiritually rebuild what has crumbled.
La Gradiva (1-2 Special)
Dir: Marine Atlan (cinematographer: Girl in the Snow)
Winner: Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prize
The film follows a group of high school students on the verge of being accepted or rejected by college, embarking on a school trip to the ruins of Pompeii. Some students see themselves as great legends, while others see themselves as pure trash. But what makes this fascinating is the stories they tell themselves, which distort and twist as the Pompeii legend comes into play. And how these students tear each other apart if only to keep from exploding.
Club Kid (A24)
Dir/Star: Jordan Firstman (directorial debut)
Acquired for $17M
Firstman plays a burned-out party promoter who's had the same night over and over for a decade. The existential crisis is gnawing at his soul. But a decade ago, he had one night when he made a real connection, and that comes back to haunt him and teach him a grand lesson. It’s charming, hilarious, and resonant.
Two other pieces of solid cinema:
James Gray’s Paper Tiger. Adam Driver and Miles Teller play brothers trying to make a quick buck, which gets them deeply involved with the Russian mafia. Scarlett Johansson internalizes the fear, disappointment, and rage in her family in a way that boils up within her in the most profound and distressing ways.
Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur. It is a taut, astonishing tale of a man trying to protect two kingdoms: home and company. Hanging over the entire thing is a blind sense of duty blanketing everything, which adds a wonderful absurdity.
BEST PERFORMANCES
Léa Seydoux turned in two sensational performances in Neon’s The Unknown, which plays like a French auteurist Freaky Friday. It’s strange, hard to follow, but anchored by Seydoux going mad over a unique type of body dysmorphia.
And in Gentle Monster, Seydoux anchors a very troubling film about a wife who retreats after learning something unthinkable about her husband. The scene where she confronts him is held much too late in the film, but Seydoux is able to draw from deep wells of emotional power and is piercing. Clip.
Rami Malek is sensational in Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love. He has warped his entire physicality for this role. In the opening, Malek tries to get into a comfortable reading position in bed, and the way he twists and contorts his body shows that this is not an easy world for him to find comfort. Watching Malek later lose his grip on reality is startling. Clip.
Talha Akdogan, who plays Barry Keoghan’s son in Butterfly Jam (Directors’ Fortnight), gives a breakout performance. Akdogan is a teenager growing up with a father whose refusal to grow up sparks his own maturity. Watching Akdogan’s eyes subtly fall as Keoghan makes a fool of himself carried much of the film's emotional weight.
FILMS PUSHING BOUNDARIES
Her Private Hell (Neon)
Dir: Nicolas Winding Refn
As startlingly cinematic as Blade Runner, if it were drained of plot and doused in neon.
Hope (Neon)
Dir: Na Hong-jin (dir: The Chaser, The Yellow Sea).
A hardcore action film with aliens. With a larger message on species extinction and immigration. There’s a micro and macro story being played out that twists the POV in a complicated way, showing that the grotesque humanoid aliens have the most heart of anyone on screen.
Parallel Tales
Dir/Wri: Asghar Farhadi (2x Oscar winner for A Separation and The Salesman)
This is a twisting tale of a dying writer who takes in a thief who steals her identity. It’s delightful in its narrative construction, with us seeing how a fiction informs a reality that then becomes a distorted mirror. Like the twisted, indie version of Stranger Than Fiction.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Mubi)
Dir: Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow)
It follows an indie filmmaker (Hannah Einbinder) whose sexual frustrations are explored by embracing the genre tropes of horror films. Gillian Anderson plays a Norma Desmond-like, burnt-out scream girl. The film manages to find emotional resonance in the oddest, yet most familiar of places.
Written and edited by Gabriel Miller.
Follow us on: Facebook | Instagram
Want to advertise with us? Email: clarke.scott@theindustry.co