ON THE ROW — Reviews from the 79th Cannes Film Festival

by Luigi Vitali

FJORD (Palme d’Or)

by Cristian Mungiu

Another solid film from Cristian Mungiu, who once again is at his best when he overturns perspective. What could easily play as a story about the questionable methods of a rigid Romanian Christian family raising children becomes something more destabilising when placed inside an advanced liberal society like Norway, where institutions and moral certainty are revealed just as rigid, punitive, and dogmatic as the family being judged. What the film questions is the confidence liberal societies place in their own systems of belief, and their instinct to reject what does not seem emancipated enough by their own standards. How far are we willing to defend freedom of thought for those who do not think like us? At what point do our certainties harden into authority?In articulating this almost Kafkian drama, Mungiu is not afraid to dissect the contradictions within social progress.

Inspired by the real Bodnariu case, the film follows a Romanian Christian family living in Norway after child welfare authorities remove their five children, including a toddler, over allegations of physical discipline and concerns around parenting, triggered after their teenage daughter is questioned at school about a bruise on her back. As the parents begin a long legal and emotional fight to bring them back, what starts as a small family case slowly expands into a broader conflict.

What the parents describe as occasional discipline, a “gentle slap,” becomes, through Norwegian institutions, a legal and moral question that places two mindsets face to face: one traditional, religious, and structured around discipline; the other progressive, rational, and institutionally certain, yet equally capable of moral absolutism. The central issue of the slap, whose extent is deliberately left uncertain in the movie, quickly grows beyond the act itself. It becomes a cultural battlefield where prejudice, religion, authority, family structure, and liberal discomfort toward what feels closed, rigid, or unfamiliar are forced into direct confrontation.

Mungiu’s strength lies in refusing easy reversals. He is neither defending the family nor condemning liberal societies. He uses that collision to show what happens when very different social, religious, and cultural realities are judged through the same legal and moral framework. In broader terms, he is touching on European identity itself, and on how countries with very different histories, values, and family structures are often measured through the same institutional lens. In the movie that contrast is embodied by Romania, a newly Schengen member still carrying much of its traditional and post-communist baggage, and Norway, one of Europe’s most progressive and institutionally trusted states. The larger question is whether behaviours, beliefs, and family structures can always be judged from the same point of view. And on what it’s base this point of view ?

Throughout this collision, the film remains almost observational in how it stages both perspectives. Even if we largely follow the family and inevitably sympathise with them, Mungiu keeps a careful ambiguity. There is no real resolution, no strong ideological verdict. What emerges most clearly is what happens when people stop listening to each other and remain trapped inside defending their own point of view and belief systems. That tension reaches its climax in the final scene, which, as often in his films, becomes symbolic, open, and almost visionary. It may be about how belief remains intimate, private, and impossible to legislate. Or perhaps about trusting each other, trusting ourselves, and accepting that we do not fully control reality, life, or its mysteries. There is always a distance between how we think we should be and what we actually are, and can be. In that gap, we may still find a way to step toward each other.

As always with Mungiu, the rigor is both formal and moral. Long takes, wide frames, restraint in form and emotion. An unsettling film about judgment, power, and how personal systems of belief can become obstacles to truly seeing each other.

MINOTAUR (Grand Prix)

by Andrey Zvyagintsev

Another incredible movie by Andrey Zvyagintsev, a story of infidelity that slowly reveals itself as a breathtaking dissection of the male authoritarian Russian mindset that made the war in Ukraine possible. It leaves you speechless. It moves almost like Crime and Punishment turned inside out. Where Dostoevsky’s novel was built around a murder followed by overwhelming guilt, moral torment, and the possibility of redemption, here in modern-day Russia there is violence without remorse, no inner reckoning, no punishment, not even the burden of conscience. Just the assertion of power, impunity, and a form of toxic masculinity that treats freedom itself as a threat to eliminate while presenting domination as duty, protection, even love. That is the whole point.

At its center is a wealthy Russian businessman whose life is upended by his wife’s affair, with the story unfolding in a Russia marked by wartime conscription and the flight of millions of young people from the country. As the film progresses, his wife’s infidelity begins to feel inseparable from the larger system of power, ownership, and impunity that protects and shapes him. What could have been a domestic noir becomes something much larger: a metaphor for control, domination, and the fear of losing what one assumes already belongs to him. The film never forces the allegory, but it is difficult not to read the woman’s desire for another life as resonating with broader questions of autonomy and sovereignty. Almost as if the war in Ukraine were being reframed through the logic of a man punishing a wife for seeking freedom.

There is something mythological in the story. As in Leviathan, the figure in the title sharpens the film’s political form. In the myth, the Minotaur is the monster hidden at the centre of a labyrinth and kept alive through sacrifice. Here, the labyrinth is the state machine itself: a system in which violence is not accidental but part of the mechanism that keeps everything functioning. And maybe the protagonist is the Minotaur too, already indistinguishable from the maze that protects him.

This is Zvyagintsev at his most essential. More than in Leviathan, where state, church, and patriarchy formed a single machine of power against which ordinary people were powerless; more than in Loveless, where the absence of maternal care became a metaphor for a country incapable of loving its own children; here he strips everything down to the bare mechanism. Power wants obedience. Masculinity wants possession. The State, the man, the husband, offers itself as the only shelter, the only order, the only possible reality.

What makes Minotaur so unsettling is that there is no explicit judgment. No moral speech. No twist. No comforting opposition between monster and victim. This is just a cold, rigorous exposure of a mindset and the violence it naturally produces. Everything follows the male logic of control. Everything unfolds according to the logic of this imperial, macho worldview. It’s their happy ending. Domination wins. Impunity wins. Everyone aligns with this logic. And only then, the film leaves the only question that really matters: what does this leave to the next generation? What is this all for?

Shot with Zvyagintsev’s usual formal severity, the film has the clarity of a nightmare. There is no excess emotion in place, just a precise depiction of a society where violence becomes administrative, masculine pride becomes political thought, and war feels like the only possible outcome.

Immense movie.

LA BOLA NEGRA (Best Directors, ex aequo)

by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi

Los Javis’ surprising new film takes Federico García Lorca’s unfinished La bola negra—a surviving fragment of only a few pages centered on a gay character, unusually explicit for its time—and builds around it a story that reclaims the Spanish author as a queer symbol and martyr, while tracing a broader reflection on queer experience from the 1930s to the present through repression, inherited pain, and the impossibility of separating private emotion from Spanish history. But it gets even more complex than that.

La Bola Negra follows three intertwined timelines, partly drawn from Alberto Conejero’s play La piedra oscura and partly from literary and historical research: one set in the 1930s around Lorca and pre-Civil War Spain; another in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, where Sebastián and Rafael, two soldiers on opposite sides of the conflict—a Nationalist and a Republican—fall in love; and another in the present day, where Alberto, a student working on his thesis, reconnects with his family history and its unresolved emotional wounds. There is also a fourth thread: the staging of Lorca’s unfinished play itself, which gradually intersects with the other stories and folds them into one narrative.

Beyond memory, queer reclamation, and historical shame, one of the film’s central ideas running beneath all its layers is the humanisation of the “enemy” — the need to recognise the other as human, and how resentment, repression, and violence deepen when communication breaks down.

The film can be openly didactic, at times almost too clear about what it wants to say, but that immediacy becomes one of its strongest qualities. Los Javis are completely unafraid of going too far. They embrace what, in other hands, could easily become rhetoric or chaos: monumentalism, solemnity, over-articulation, literary dialogue, emotional excess, camp stylisation, multiple timelines, historical revisitation, an overcrowded cast, and an openly emotional use of music.

Instead, that excess, and their distinctly pop way of handling heavy material, becomes the film’s engine. Los Javis are fearless in restaging history through melodrama, spectacle, and queer memory, and La Bola Negra comes alive because it never apologises for its emotional and visual scale. There is no distance softening it, and no need to intellectualise every feeling before letting it land. You can feel how absorbed Los Javis are in their vision, and there is rarely any doubt about it, enough to forgive almost anything in its 155-minute run.

This is a major directorial statement for Los Javis, who bring their background in popular television and their instinct for connecting with audiences, pushing it into something much more cinematic. The scale is bigger, and so is the control. The editing, choreography, rhythm, and ensemble direction—especially with younger and non-professional actors, including Guitarricadelafuente, making an impressive screen debut—show a much stronger formal confidence than many could expect. The same goes for the way they direct the special appearances of Penélope Cruz, as an exuberant cabaret performer in what may be one of the most memorable performances of her career, and Glenn Close as a contemporary Lorca scholar.

In La Bola Negra, physicality matters. Emotion moves through bodies, music, desire, touch, and performance with unusual force. There is something deeply Spanish in that sensibility, and Los Javis embrace it fully, pushing it into a larger cinematic scale. The 20-minute applause at Cannes felt less like festival ritual than proof of how directly the film can move an audience and pull it into its world. With La Bola Negra, Los Javis won the Best Director prize ex aequo, marking Spain’s first Best Director award at Cannes since Pedro Almodóvar in 1999, placing Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi in a rare lineage of Spanish filmmakers recognised at that level, alongside figures like Almodóvar and Luis Buñuel. And rightly so, this is probably one of the most emotional, vulnerable, and striking films seen so far at Cannes.

FATHERLAND (Best Director, ex aequo)

by Paweł Pawlikowski

Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland revolves around a single quote the film never explicitly pronounces, yet which contains its entire meaning: Thomas Mann’s famous line that his true home was the German language. The film itself becomes an interrogation of Heimat—what home means when your country, your history, and your national pride have collapsed into moral catastrophe.

Set in 1949, the film follows Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika returning to Germany for the first time since fleeing the Nazi regime in 1933 in order to receive the Goethe Prize. The award itself carried enormous symbolic weight in postwar Germany: Frankfurt, in the American occupation zone and later West Germany, claimed Goethe as the emblem of democratic humanism, while Weimar—Goethe’s spiritual home, now under Soviet control in what would become East Germany—also sought to appropriate his legacy. Mann’s decision to accept invitations from both sides immediately transformed the journey into a political controversy, with Americans accusing him of legitimising the Soviet East while Germans projected onto him competing fantasies of national reconstruction.

It is inside this fractured ceremony within a fractured nation that Pawlikowski places his film which constantly circles the same unspoken question: where is home for the greatest living German writer when Germany itself has become morally and politically uninhabitable? We see Mann struggle to retreat into language, literature, culture—the belief that Germany survives as an ethical and intellectual construction carried inside him. Words are seen as refuge, as a stable architecture among ruins, something to hold onto. But the film is build to dismantle this position.

The emotional and political center of Fatherland is Erika Mann, played by a devastating Sandra Hüller. She openly accuses her father’s words of being beautiful but powerless. His speeches, his invocations of Goethe, culture, civilisation, humanism—none of it changes anything. Europe’s future is being decided elsewhere, between Washington and Moscow, while Germany remains spiritually destroyed beneath the rhetoric of reconstruction. Hüller becomes the voice of a generation no longer able to believe culture alone can save history, but also the voice of a daughter demanding emotional presence from a father who only knows how to love through rigor and restraint.

And beneath the political drama runs an even more devastating personal one: Klaus Mann. The homosexual enfant prodige son, emotionally abandoned by his father, trapped in addiction, self-destruction, and the desperate need for recognition dies of an overdose in Cannes while Mann and Erika are travelling through Germany. And in one of the film’s most brutal gestures, Thomas Mann decides not to return for his son’s funeral, choosing instead to continue toward East Germany to deliver his Goethe speech.

For Erika, this restraint becomes unbearable. How can her father continue speaking about literature, civilisation, and German culture while his own son has just died? How can words still matter at that point? That is the tragedy at the center of the film: Thomas Mann trying to preserve the moral and spiritual idea of Germany while emotionally failing inside his own family. His entire arch becomes suspended between rigor and emotional emptiness, intellectual greatness and personal failure.

And the film itself embodies that contradiction. Its formal control is almost frightening. Eighty minutes stripped to the essential. Severe black-and-white cinematography by Łukasz Żal. Precise framing. Controlled asymmetries. Empty spaces. A postwar Germany recreated with obsessive detail. With its static perfection, the film itself begins to resemble Mann’s language: elevated, disciplined, emotionally compressed.

And then, there is the final scene. While driving back, they enter a ruined church containing Bach’s organ, and Mann suddenly breaks down in tears while listening to Bach being played by an organist. Something beyond words, beyond ideology, beyond intellectual systems. A moment of pure emotion and human vulnerability. Almost of spiritual elevation. And suddenly Erika’s earlier line about Klaus returns: that Bach almost made him believe in God.

Pawlikowski himself stages the film almost like chamber music: restrained, elegant, minimal, haunted by absence. And inside that formal perfection we slowly stop seeing Thomas Mann as an intellectual giant or moral authority, and simply as a man standing before the emptiness left by history, still desperately trying to hold onto something through words, form, and rigor alone. But the true center is not him. It is Erika’s presence—and the ghostly absence of Klaus—that constantly expose the limits of his refuge. They remind him, and us, that culture, intelligence, and even beauty become useless when they are severed from empathy and human connection. That is the contradiction at the heart of Fatherland. And maybe also its final, fragile form of hope.

COWARDS (Best Actors Award)

by Lukas Dhont

Set on the Belgian front during World War I, where everyone is expected to contribute to the war effort, Coward follows a group known as the “band of rejects”: some effeminate, others socially marginalised, all brought together to form a theatre troupe staging drag performances for other soldiers. Inspired by real wartime units and images of soldiers performing behind the lines, the film shows how, in that devastated landscape, their presence becomes tolerated and even valued.

At its center is a love story between two soldiers who, against death and destruction, briefly find a space for intimacy and freedom. It is not framed through overt homophobia. The men around them are shown more as young soldiers trying to survive than as moral judges. Dhont is interested in how masculinity and patriarchal norms bend in that context, and how death and violence can temporarily suspend rules that civilian life would strictly enforce.

The cast is excellent. The two Cannes Best Actor winners, Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne, are extraordinary. Macchia, in his screen debut, is breathtaking in the way his face registers the slow recognition of his own feelings, while Campagne is exceptional as the more performative counterpoint. Together, they give Coward the tenderness, fear, and physical tension the writing does not always sustain. Overall the cinematography, staging, and isolated ideas are often stunning. But beyond its polished image and emotional ambition, something remains surprisingly conventional. As if it never fully reaches the complexity it sets up.

Even with a trench gaze that never avoids cruelty, and several intensely staged scenes, Dhont gradually softens some of the material. What begins as something far more paradoxical and emotionally charged often settles into a gentler register: an improbable romance, unevenly written, and a subdued realism that occasionally leans toward sentimentality. There is a comfort in that emotional framing that can at times feel more carefully guided than fully earned.

As always with Dhont, the image is immaculate. Bodies, silence, vulnerability, mud, and closeness are framed with enormous precision. But he still seems more invested in shaping the image of emotion than in allowing emotion to fully unfold on its own.

There are striking ideas here, and moments of real beauty. It feels like a film always close to something sharper and more unsettling, yet it remains an ambitious and often moving study of masculinity, tenderness, and the fragile permissions war can create.

ALL OF A SUDDEN (Best Actresses Award)

by Ryusuke Hamaguchi

“Why making movies while the world is burning?” That question seems to haunt every frame of ‘All of a Sudden’, the monumental 3-hour-and-16-minute new film by Ryusuke Hamaguchi premiering in Competition at Cannes. And Hamaguchi’s answer is unapologetically direct.

Cinema is pedagogy and transformation. Like it or not. The attempt—almost painfully sincere—to prepare an audience, emotionally, intellectually, and physically, for social change. Too self-important, too self-conscious and subordinated to its function as a propaganda movie? It doesn’t matter; this is not just an author movie, it is intended as a transformative experience in the form that Hamaguchi masters: cinema. 

Because of that, ‘All of a Sudden’ is one of the most radical films in Cannes this year. The film is not really interested in character arcs or storytelling as ends in themselves. Even if its moments of realism, tenderness, pain, empathy and joy remain extraordinary, everything becomes subordinated to Hamaguchi’s larger intention. Few contemporary filmmakers would dare to make a movie so openly invested in teaching its audience how to think through the collapse of advanced capitalism and the paralysis it produces. Even fewer would be unafraid to center the discourse around clear answers.

So much so that, at the center of the film, Hamaguchi stages a twenty-minute whiteboard explanation diagramming the systemic logic of capitalism. One of the characters maps out the relationship between labor, care, aging, productivity, democracy, ecology, denatality and resource extraction with the density of an academic lecture or TED Talk.

He explains, in every possible way, how advanced capitalism continuously optimizes itself while simultaneously destroying the emotional, psychological and relational conditions necessary for human life—until even empathy and democracy themselves begin to appear economically irrational.

The film’s central setting—a care facility for elderly patients suffering from Alzheimer’s and terminal illness—functions as a direct mirror of these contradictions. Claire, a French anthropologist and caregiver played by Virginie Efira, is attempting to reintroduce emotional presence, listening and humanity into the facility. One day she meets Yoko, a Japanese performer and theater researcher played by Tao Okamoto, who has arrived in France to stage a play inspired by Franco Basaglia, the Italian psychiatrist who revolutionized mental healthcare through dignity and relational care. The relationship they develop is firstly intellectual, then deeply personal.

The Japanese protagonist approaches the topics they are discussing through philosophy, theater, performance and artistic ritual. The French protagonist through anthropology, medicine and caregiving. Their conversations, friendship and emotional proximity slowly become the intellectual architecture of the film itself.

The method Claire introduces inside the facility is called Humanitude: a form of care built around verbal kindness, eye contact, touch, presence and respect. Everything revolves around human connection itself. This is exactly what Hamaguchi is trying to translate in cinema: the belief that cinema is a relationship, and serves to expand and deepen relationships.

And against all odds, the film works.

Watching ‘All of a Sudden’ feels less like consuming a movie than participating in an attempt to reconstruct the very idea of possibility at a historical moment where catastrophe increasingly feels inevitable.

Yoko repeatedly speak about “making the impossible possible.” That line eventually reveals itself as the true subject of the film.

The film is constantly guiding, explaining, framing, persuading, which is also why it inevitably opens itself to criticism. But what emerges feels like the work of a filmmaker and thinker trying to place his art in service of something he genuinely believes to be urgent and necessary. Trying, in his own way, to do his part.

And he does so with such precision, delicacy and care toward his characters, emotions and ideas that the film ultimately becomes impossible to dismiss, even at its most excessive. Whether one experiences ‘All of a Sudden’ as transformative or unbearably pretentious, it is impossible to deny the scale of what Hamaguchi attempts here.

If he has spent the last decade asking himself what sense cinema still has today, ‘All of a Sudden’ may well be his answer.

A MAN OF HIS TIME (Best Screenplay)

by Emmanuel Marre

There are strong and genuinely successful ideas in Emmanuel Marre’s new film Notre Salut, set in Vichy, France, after the 1940 armistice, within the so-called zone libre, which Pétain’s regime presented as autonomous, even though its only real freedom was to submit to Nazi demands. At its centre is a grey bureaucrat and aspiring writer who builds his social ascent through a pragmatism he believes to be useful, efficient, even patriotic, convinced he can still serve France from within. The film is built around the illusion of someone who sees himself as rational, relevant, and morally serious, while remaining little more than a ridiculous instrument of power. His appeasement slowly turns into a grotesque form of moral self-justification that makes him complicit without any real autonomy.

One of Marre’s strongest ideas is to shoot this period film almost like an episode of The Office: handheld camera, near-documentary framing, and an awkward, almost satirical tone that exposes the contradictions of men who perform seriousness and lucidity while sinking deeper into servility. The other sharp idea is the use of contemporary music, mostly from the ’80s, creating a temporal anachronism and estrangement that makes past and present feel disturbingly close.

The cinematography is equally striking. Shot on film, the movie gives the movie a strong material texture, while many interior and night scenes borrow from the harsh frontal-light aesthetic of flash photography of the era: faces abruptly lit, hard shadows, and a beam-like source that isolates bodies within the frame. Visually, it is one of the most alive and formally interesting period films in recent memory.

There’s an autobiographical layer to it. Marre built it partly from letters he discovered from his grandfather, learning that his own ancestor had been a fascist collaborator. That personal material turns the film into a kind of distancing process, almost an act of confronting and quietly mocking both family memory and national history.

The problem, and it’s not a small one, is the length. At two and a half hours, the film stretches well beyond what its structure and material can fully sustain. The strong ideas that make it so interesting begin to lose force inside a monumental format that does not feel aligned with the sharper, drier, more observational nature of the project.

Still, it remains an ambitious and often compelling film about the fallacy of good intentions and how pragmatism, and efficiency (you can read it ‘optimisation’) can slowly come to look indistinguishable from complicity.

LA GRADIVA (DUST FAVOURITE)

by Marine Atlan

One of the biggest surprises of the festival. La Gradiva, first feature by Marine Atlan and also the screen debut for most of its cast, is a film of astonishing emotional intelligence. Built around an almost invisible purity of writing and an incredible ability to observe young characters from within their lives, the film stays miles away from adolescent cliché or artificial “generation portrait” territory, with every character carrying weight, depth, and emotional dignity without the film ever forcing it.

We follow a group of students during a school trip to Naples and Pompeii. At first the story seems almost uneventful, built through long slice-of-life interactions, group dynamics, sightseeing, small tensions, flirtations, and boredom. The atmosphere and narrative constantly feel suspended, drifting between sensuality, uncertainty, and discovery. Shot on 35mm with a restrained arthouse aesthetic, everything feels tactile and alive without ever becoming pretentious or overly aestheticised. Nothing here feels excessive or performed.

At the center are two boys, played by first-time actors—incredible Mitia Capellier and Colas Quignard— whose friendship slowly reveals deeper fractures and vulnerabilities. One is intelligent, cultivated, the son of a journalist from Le Monde, fully aware of his own ability to seduce people. The other is emotionally lost, insecure. He’s also openly queer, without the film ever making his sexuality an issue. His confusion comes from somewhere else: class, identity, future, belonging, self-worth. He genuinely does not know what to do with his life.

The trip gradually becomes for him a confrontation with his own origins. He grew up with the story of his grandmother fleeing Naples after an earthquake destroyed the aristocratic house where she worked as a maid before emigrating to France. He carries photographs of his grandfather, dead in the accident, fragments of memory, and names he continues searching for almost blindly. But the film slowly begins to question how much truth actually exists within this family mythology, and whether this territory truly offers roots and identity or simply produces new, unanswered questions.

And this is where La Gradiva becomes extraordinary. The long explanations given by the Latin teacher about Pompeii and the volcanic eruption—death, destruction, bodies eternally frozen in ash—which at first seem almost excessively detailed, slowly reveal themselves as the symbolic foundation of the film itself. Pompeii becomes an existential landscape where youth, desire, confusion, sexuality, and vitality coexist against the backdrop of an open-air cemetery, where past and present inhabit the same emotional space. Death and life, the uncontrollable eruption of a volcano, and the energy of adolescence suddenly exist within the same frame that Marine Atlan so carefully constructs.

The film constantly stages the tension between what has been destroyed and what somehow still survives. Between roots and reinvention. Between inherited memory and the terrifying openness of the future. Within this landscape, the characters’ seemingly small emotional problems slowly acquire existential gravity because identity itself is always constructed from absences, trauma, and fragmented histories.

There is so much inside La Gradiva, yet nothing feels forced or overstated. Everything flows with extraordinary naturalism, restraint, and precision. A film suspended between sensuality, melancholy, youth, and the difficulty of surviving all of them at once.

An incredible debut. One of the revelations of Cannes.

EL SER QUERIDO (DUST FAVOURITE)

by Rodrigo Sorogoyen

Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s El Ser Querido is a sharp study of male emotional abuse in its most subtle and socially accepted forms, the kind that rarely appears violent and still leaves deep damage.

The story is that of a father trying to reconnect with the daughter he left behind. Esteban, an acclaimed film director with a turbulent past, casts his estranged daughter Emilia in his new film, partly to help her career, partly to rebuild what was broken between them. He appears changed, sober, reflective, emotionally available, almost like a man who has genuinely worked on himself.

But the movie slowly put in place the gap between intention and behaviour.

The well-intentioned way he uses intelligence, charisma, and artistic prestige becomes another means of exerting control and creating emotional dependence. What makes it unsettling is that he often seems unaware of it himself. He cannot understand why every attempt at closeness keeps failing, and neither do we at first. 

Javier Bardem gives one of the strongest performances of his career precisely because Esteban never feels like a villain. He is articulate, capable of tenderness and reflection, but is more inclined to find justification and reasons for his behaviour than to see the effects of it.

What gives El Ser Querido its force is that it refuses to flatten this contradiction. Esteban genuinely suffers. He genuinely wants love and proximity. Yet he remains incapable of relating to people without being the centre of the relationship and acting outside of culturally inherited behaviours. Without empathy, even the best intentions irremediably turn into tools of control.

Written with Isabel Peña, the film moves away from the institutional tension of The Realm and the physical brutality of As Bestas toward a more psychological approach. The violence here is conversational, emotional, nearly invisible. The real question is not how forgiveness can be achieved, but whether emotional damage built through years of absence, narcissism, and dependency can ever be repaired until everyone fully understands the mechanism.

Formally, this may be Sorogoyen’s most controlled work. Long takes and close-ups keep every conversation under pressure, while the film-within-the-film structure blurs the line between rehearsal and private life.

Sorogoyen also works through multiple formats and visual textures. The film moves between colour and black-and-white, while also mixing 35mm, 16mm, and 8mm across different parts of the story. He uses changing lenses and framing distances throughout, and the film-within-the-film sections are shot separately from the surrounding narrative. Cinema is the language Sorogoyen knows best and uses to dissect something personal and deep: male cultural behaviours.

What El Ser Querido captures so well is how domination can survive inside educated, progressive, emotionally articulate environments. It is a film about emotional abuse inside a family, but also about Spanish patriarchal culture, and patriarchal culture in general, where even in sophistication, are hidden insidious forms of control.

Probably Sorogoyen’s most mature film so far.

THE UNKNOWN (DUST FAVOURITE)

by Arthur Harari

This is a strange and genuinely disorienting film that never lets you fully pin it down. The Unknown follows a man who, after sleeping with a woman he becomes obsessed with, undergoes a body swap and wakes up in her body, destabilising his sense of identity and reality as the story unfolds into a much deeper psychological crisis. The plot becomes more layered as the body swaps multiply, extending the theme through various characters. Even at its most elusive, the film sustains a strong tension because Harari treats identity crisis less as narrative puzzle than as something unsettling, and corporeal.

What really works is how visceral it feels. This is a film about alienation, bodily estrangement, emotional disconnection, and what it means to no longer feel at home inside yourself. When characters are no longer fully in their own bodies, the viewer is forced into the same mental exercise—constantly recalibrating who is who, what is real, and where consciousness sits. That instability becomes the language of the film.

It’s also formally very strong: cold precision, fragmented structure, and a detached but deeply unsettling atmosphere. At its best, it plays like psychological sci-fi, body horror, and existential thriller all at once, but it’s never really about genre. It feels like an auteur film focused on rendering a profound sense of estrangement. Its grip is the way it treats the body-swap premise not as a gimmick, but as a philosophical inquiry. The body becomes unstable terrain, raising deeper questions about identity, memory, desire, and what remains when those elements no longer align. Beneath its surrealism, the film also becomes a study of possession, intimacy, and the ways bodies and identities shape relationships. If physical form can shift and consciousness itself feels unreliable, what remains of selfhood? Harari never rushes to explain any of it, which is precisely why the film lingers.

It’s not always perfect. Some stretches feel overly abstract, some ideas slightly over-intellectualised, and not every emotional beat lands with the same force. But what stays with you is the sensation. It hits like a punch to the stomach. A rare film where confusion feels intentional, almost required of the viewer, leaving you alone with an unsettling feeling that can not be fully explained.

Léa Seydoux is incredible—haunted, restrained, carrying much of the emotional gravity through presence alone. Possibly one of the best performances at Cannes this year.

CLUB KID

by Jordan Firstman

Club Kid plays almost like a warm, emotionally accessible family dramedy about a thirtysomething trying to finally get his life together, following the structure of a classic Hollywood sentimental comedy. A man completely absorbed in his chaotic personal life suddenly has a kid dropped at his doorstep, forcing him into reluctant caregiving, absurd situations, emotional confrontations, and gradual emotional growth.

Except that here his world is the queer afterparty techno scene, and the film is completely immersed in its rituals, codes, slang, drugs, and emotional dynamics with a level of detail that feels almost documentary-like. It can get very informative about how to dose GHB, mixing ketamine and coke, taking MDMA, darkrooms, hookups, recovery mornings, and all the intimate dynamics and vocabulary of people permanently living between clubs and afters. Not in a sensationalist way, but as a common reality of anyone living in a big city and who likes partying. Which is probably what makes the film feel so honest.

Jason Firstman, directing and starring in his debut feature, plays a club promoter trapped in an endless loop of parties until his life is detonated by the discovery that he has a ten-year-old son from a drunk darkroom hookup years earlier. When the boy’s mother dies by suicide, one of her friends suddenly leaves the child in his care.

What follows is essentially a custody-and-parenthood film filtered through queer nightlife culture, following the messy experience of suddenly becoming responsible for someone else while barely managing yourself. At first, he treats fatherhood as just another inconvenience. Gradually, though, the film shows him discovering forms of care and emotional honesty that had long been missing from his life. His growth is never framed as a neat redemption arc, but it unfolds in genuinely affecting ways.

Sometimes funny, sometimes chaotic, occasionally very moving, the film never judges its characters or turns club culture into tragedy or moral lesson. There are as many cautionary moments as celebratory ones. Partying is framed less as self-destruction than as a form of community and belonging: a chosen family for people who often struggle to exist comfortably elsewhere. But at the same time, the film never romanticises that world, showing how easily it can become a vortex of emotional stagnation and loneliness that is hard to escape. These two aspects always coexist.

What makes Club Kid work is its realism and self-awareness. Beneath the irony and party excess lies a surprisingly direct film about self-worth, growth and the terrifying process of confronting responsibilities. The emotional trajectory itself is relatively classic, but what it offers is more than enough.

Shot on 35mm and independently produced, this may end up being one of the strongest debut features at Cannes this year.

ATONEMENT

by Reed Van Dyk

First feature by Reed Van Dyk, based on Dexter Filkins’ 2012 New Yorker article Atonement After Iraq and a true story: during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a U.S. Marine accidentally kills members of an Iraqi Christian Orthodox family during a chaotic exchange of fire and spends the following decade psychologically destroyed by PTSD before eventually meeting the surviving mother and daughter to ask forgiveness.

Van Dyk is clearly interested in depicting the effects of moral injury—as someone says during a PTSD support group scene, “the bullet goes both ways.” It’s obviously a tricky subject, especially after decades of American war films trying to metabolise soldiers guilt into redemption or innocence. But what makes the film interesting is its effort to fight that comfort, trying to leave space for both perspectives, searching for a balance where pain is can not be solved or forgiven, only carried, confronted, maybe survived. Political implications remain mostly outside the frame. The focus is pain itself and the emotional wreckage left behind.

On one side, there is the Marine’s somehow selfish need for emotional relief. On the other, the grief of a family forced to confront the human face of the country responsible for their trauma. The film becomes most compelling when it enters the ambiguity of that encounter itself.

You can constantly feel the movie trying to deconstruct patriotism or easy catharsis. It wants to remain inside contradiction. But at times it struggles under the weight of its own material: unnecessary subplots, illustrative scenes, emotional over-explanations. The film occasionally becomes too eager to guide the audience emotionally, softening the brutal ambiguity that initially made it so interesting.

The cast offers great performances. Especially the mother, played by an extraordinary Hiam Abbass. She gives the film its dignity, carrying grief not through melodrama but restraint.

There’s something undeniably honest in the attempt to confront the impossibility of repairing violence while still trying to find a way to live with it.

TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA
(Queer Palm)

by Jane Schoenbrun

One of the biggest surprises of Cannes so far. Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma starts like an ironic Gen Z meta-slasher, an ode to ’80s horror, and slowly mutates into something much stranger, smarter, and unexpectedly moving.

The premise follows a young queer filmmaker (Hanna Einbinder) hired to reboot a problematic 1980s slasher franchise accused of misogyny and transphobia, who becomes obsessed with bringing back the original final girl, played by a spectacular Gillian Anderson, now living in isolation near the abandoned camp where the first film was shot. Schoenbrun turns this encounter into a confrontation between two generations and two radically different understandings of horror itself.

On one side, there is the hyper-articulate Gen Z protagonist: overeducated, politically aware, emotionally blocked by layers of analysis, discourse, references, and trauma vocabulary. On the other hand, Anderson’s former scream queen, who understands horror in a much simpler way: body, fear, desire, blood, fluid. The film is brutally funny about progressive intellectual language and its obsession with decoding, categorising, and morally sanitising everything, mocking the illusion that language alone can protect us from harm. At the same time, it takes queerness, trauma, and female desire completely seriously.

That is where the film becomes interesting. Under the camp, gore, candy-coloured excess, absurd humour, and slasher mythology, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma can be read as a film about dissociation as a coping mechanism. The idea of fear tackled here expands from gender nonconformity—the killer is a bullied nonconforming kid returning from the lake where they drowned seeking revenge—to something much larger. It becomes a film about women learning to detach themselves from their own bodies in order to survive objectification, sex, expectation, and the fear of vulnerability itself. The classic slasher equation—sex equals death—returns here less as moral punishment and more as a metaphor for liberation from shame, powerlessness, and the terror of feeling hollow and consumable.

As the film spirals deeper into delirium, horror itself becomes liberation. The monster, death, possession, gore, all the ridiculous excess of the genre, slowly start breaking open the identities trapping these characters: sexual identity, professional identity, generational identity, social roles, and self-consciousness itself. At the same time, every interpretation the film offers eventually collapses into another layer until intellectualisation short-circuits into pure sensation. Flesh. Fluid. Fear. Pleasure.

And that’s probably where the film’s real power lies: its ability to hold together sincerity and parody, theory and emotional honesty, camp and seriousness, without collapsing under the weight of any of them. The movie constantly risks becoming ridiculous, pretentious, or overly academic, but always escapes those traps because it understands something fundamental about horror: it cannot be fully intellectualised or tamed through language. Something inside it always remains irrational, physical, excessive, embarrassing, and uncontrollable. Like life itself.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is messy, funny, horny, theoretical, emotional, and completely alive. A fever dream oscillating between queer body horror, generational satire, philosophical essay, camp comedy, and existential meltdown.

A clear voice of a generation. Instant cult.

BUTTERFLY JAM (Quinzaine Opening Movie)

BY Kantemir Balagov

Probably the first real disappointment of Cannes. After dealing masterfully with femininity, trauma, and violence in Beanpole, Kantemir Balagov returns with Butterfly Jam, turning his attention directly toward masculinity and its fragility, suspended somewhere between tenderness, humiliation, repression, and social performance.

Living in exile since leaving Russia in 2022 after publicly condemning the invasion of Ukraine, Balagov relocates the story to America, inside the Circassian diaspora community in New Jersey, for his first English-language film with an international cast. Shot between New Jersey for exteriors and France for interior, the formula changes, but the approach remains recognisably his: claustrophobic frames, suffocating emotional environments, bodies trapped inside inherited cultural systems. Only this time the film drifts more toward atmosphere, fragments of life, surreal moments, almost like a melancholic fairytale trying to unpack masculinity and its contradictions. Without ever fully making a point.

The opening scene introduces a teenager whose father has died. It plays almost like a flashforward before the narrative moves backward to reconstruct the months preceding the event. But for nearly half the film, scenes simply accumulate without a strong dramatic direction: we see rituals, awkwardness, silence, and often shame of a group of friends dealing with small personal failures and modest lives. But above all tender father-son interactions, domestic intimacy, moments of physical affection between male frineds, as if this tenderness was the lens through which oppose as the film’s exploration of masculinity and how it is socially performed and constantly monitored. The father, played by an incredible Barry Keoghan, cooks, takes care of plants, hugs his son openly, expresses emotions without embarrassment. Balagov clearly wants to dismantle patriarchal masculinity from inside the community itself rather than judging it from the outside. And the film deserves credit for that.

But overall the material struggles to fully engage and often feels directionless. Until approaching the father’s death, when the film suddenly resurrects itself, becoming more absurd, symbolic, and emotionally unstable, filled with strong scenes and interesting ideas. Like in his previous films, Balagov eventually moves toward light, but here not through desperation—it’s through resolution, in a luminous, self-ironic ending. The final scene is extraordinary.

Still, despite the good intentions, strong ideas, narrative turns, and surprisingly funny moments of dark humour, the film never fully comes together. What made Closeness and Beanpole devastating was their emotional precision. Here, atmosphere overwhelms the structure of the movie. Scenes and symbolism accumulates as notes on a paper but the story never move through real dramatic escalation. Balagov’s visual intelligence is still extraordinary, and some moments reach an almost unbearable tenderness, but the film often feels trapped inside its own fog.

And yet, even when Balagov loses control of the film, you still feel a real filmmaker wrestling with something personal, unresolved, and maybe too dense to fully handle.

LA VENUS ELETRIQUE (Opening movie)

by Pierre Salvadori

To open the most important film festival in the world, Cannes chose this insignificant movie: Pierre Salvadori’s The Electric Kiss (La Vénus électrique). A nostalgic, colorful postcard period comedy set in 1920s Paris, filled with every imaginable cliché about painters, la ville lumière, travelling spectacles, seduction, and romance. It can be charming at times, and it works as a well-orchestrated crowd-pleaser for prime-time television, but how does such an inconsistent, safe, Sunday-afternoon movie end up opening Cannes?

The answer says more about the festival than about the film itself.

For years now, Cannes has used the opening slot to reinforce French cinema, presenting commercial films made for the broad French public and acknowledged as the backbone of a national cultural industry. Because of that, they are elevated, protected, institutionalised. The opening slot becomes less about artistic importance and more about strengthening the French cultural machine itself, with the film opening theatrically across France the very same week it receives Cannes exposure.

This movie represents that. Salvadori is not a major auteur, but he is respected enough, and deeply embedded within an ecosystem that continues to sustain its filmmakers with remarkable consistency. Les Films Pelléas, France 2 Cinéma, Diaphana, RTBF—all the familiar institutional structures are behind the film. Even the screenplay, developed from an idea by Rebecca Zlotowski and Robin Campillo, feels designed to provide just enough cinephile legitimacy to a fundamentally harmless movie.

But honestly, that system works. France keeps financing, protecting, and platforming its cinema with rare confidence, while Cannes reminds the world that cinema culture survives because somebody locally keeps investing in it, institutionalising it, and forcing visibility onto it before the market decides whether it matters.

That might be the most political statement Cannes has made so far.