Cannes 2025 Lineup

As of now, the festival has nineteen features set to compete for the Palme d’Or as well as an intriguing selection of sixteen films lined up for Un Certain Regard—plus another sixteen slated to premiere in four noncompetitive programs. The American presence will be strong this year, and it will be felt right at the outset when Robert De Niro receives an honorary Palme d’Or on opening day.

Four American directors have new films in competition, and for months, two of these films have been widely perceived as shoo-ins. After Focus Features released a trailer for Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme on Monday, Jason Kottke watched it “a couple of times” and wrote, “I still don’t know what it’s actually about? But from the looks of things, it is more of the same for people who like that sort of thing, which is lucky for me.” Benicio del Toro stars as Zsa-zsa Korda, one of the richest men in Europe, and the cast includes Mia Threapleton as his daughter as well as Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Mathieu Amalric, Richard Ayoade, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Rupert Friend, and Hope Davis.

Frémaux calls Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague a “thrilling” dramatization of the making of Breathless (1960), featuring Guillaume Marbeck as Jean-Luc Godard, Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg, and Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo. We look forward to keeping an eye out, too, for Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Chabrol (Antoine Besson), Rohmer (Côme Thieulin), Rivette (Jonas Marmy), Agnès Varda (Roxane Rivière), and Roberto Rossellini (Laurent Mothe). Nouvelle Vague was shot last spring in Paris, in black and white, in the 4:3 aspect ratio and, of course, in French.

Kelly Reichardt didn’t begin shooting The Mastermind until late last year, so it’s an exceedingly pleasant surprise to see that it will be ready to premiere next month. Starring John Magaro, Josh O’Connor, Alana Haim, Hope Davis, Bill Camp, Gaby Hoffmann, and Amanda Plummer, The Mastermind depicts an audacious art heist in New England in 1970. Ari Aster’s Eddington, a darkly comedic contemporary western, features Joaquin Phoenix as a small-town New Mexico sheriff facing off against the mayor (Pedro Pascal) during the COVID-19 pandemic. The cast also includes Emma Stone, Austin Butler, Deirdre O’Connell, and Luke Grimes.

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne—who have won the Palme d’Or twice, for Rosetta (1999) and L’enfant (2005)—will have a shot at what would be a record-breaking third win for Young Mothers. The new film focuses on five teens housed in a shelter for single moms and their babies. Julia Ducournau won the Palme d’Or in 2021 for Titane, and she’ll return with Alpha, her first feature in English. Alpha stars Tahar Rahim and Golshifteh Farahani as the parents of an eleven-year-old girl growing up in the 1980s in a fictionalized version of New York; one of the parents falls ill as the AIDS epidemic rages.

Renoir, directed by Chie Hayakawa (Plan 75), also happens to focus on an eleven-year-old girl coping with a terminally ill father and a stressed-out mother in the ’80s. In Tokyo, Fuji (Yui Suzuki) becomes fascinated by telepathy and delves deep into her own fantasy world. So far, Hayakawa, Ducournau, and Kelly Reichardt are three of a total of six women with films in competition. Hafsia Herzi’s The Last One is an adaptation of Fatima Daas’s 2020 novel, a groundbreaking work of autofiction about a queer Muslim woman coming to terms with her sexuality and faith in a Parisian suburb.

Carla Simón (Summer 1993, Alcarràs) will conclude her family cycle with Romería. Making her on-screen debut, Llúcia Garcia plays eighteen-year-old Marina, an orphan traveling to Spain’s Atlantic coast to meet her extended family for the first time. With Sound of Falling, a story that spans a century, Berlin-based director Mascha Schilinski will trace the lives of four young girls growing up on a farm in eastern Germany.

A Simple Accident will be the sixth feature Jafar Panahi has completed since Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Court included a twenty-year ban on filmmaking as part of the director’s sentence handed down in 2010. Little else is known as yet about the new film other than its logline: “What begins as a minor accident sets in motion a series of escalating consequences.”

Since 2018, when he made his last fictional feature, Donbass, Sergei Loznitsa has made seven documentaries. He’ll return to fiction with Two Prosecutors, an adaptation of the novel by Georgy Demidov, a Soviet physicist who died in 1987 believing that all of his writing had been destroyed. Set in 1937, Two Prosecutors is the story of a young lawyer who receives an anonymous letter written in blood, a plea from a prisoner for an investigation into his case.

Wagner Moura stars in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent as Marcelo, a teacher caught up in the political turmoil of the final years of Brazil’s military dictatorship. Tarik Saleh (The Nile Hilton Incident, Boy from Heaven) will wrap his Cairo trilogy with Eagles of the Republic, the story of an Egyptian movie star forced to accept a leading role in a film commissioned by the country’s highest authorities.

Joachim Trier (The Worst Person in the World) reunites with cowriter Eskil Vogt and star Renate Reinsve on Sentimental Value, a family drama about two sisters forced to deal with their estranged father following the death of their mother. The father and brother of a missing woman go searching for her in the mountains of Morocco, where they come across a gaggle of partying ravers in Oliver Laxe’s Sirat. Josh O’Connor and Paul Mescal star in Oliver Hermanus’s The History of Sound, based on a short story by Ben Shattuck about two men who set out to record the lives, voices, and music of New Englanders in the immediate wake of the First World War.

Léa Drucker headlines Dominik Moll’s Dossier 137 as an investigator working for the internal affairs department of the French national police. She discovers that an incident she’s looking into is going to take a personal turn. Mario Martone’s Fuori stars Valeria Golino as the writer Goliarda Sapienza, who forged lifelong friendships with the women she met in prison in 1980.

Harris Dickinson’s and Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debuts are attracting plenty of attention, of course, but half the films lined up this year for Cannes’s program showcasing emerging talent are first features. Dickinson’s Urchin stars Frank Dillane as a Londoner given to self-destruction, while Johansson’s Eleanor the Great features June Squibb as a ninety-year-old Floridian looking to start her life anew in New York following the death of her best friend.

Claes Bang, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Swann Arlaud, and Xavier Dolan lead the cast of Stéphane Demoustier’s L’inconnu de la Grande Arche, an adaptation of Laurence Cossé’s 2016 novel about a major architecture competition held in 1983. The winner will design La Défense, a monument commemorating the bicentennial of the French Revolution. Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgård star in Harry Lighton’s first feature, Pillion, an adaptation of Adam Mars-Jones’s 2020 novel Box Hill, the story of an abusive relationship in the 1970s.

Kei Ishikawa has written, directed, and edited A Pale View of Hills, an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel, originally published in 1982. Suzu Hirose (Our Little Sister) plays Etsuko, a widow who survived the bombing of Nagasaki and then moved to London. Fumi Nikaido (Himizu) plays Niki, Etsuko’s daughter and a writer who slowly begins to take interest in her mother’s past.

Czech filmmaker Zuzana Kirchnerová’s road movie Caravan features Aňa Geislerová as a mother who has cared for her disabled son for twelve years and is hoping that a trip to Italy will offer some relief. Hubert Charuel will follow up on Bloody Milk (2017) with Meteors, in which three childhood friends get back together.

Frémaux sprang his biggest surprise with the selection of a first feature by a relatively little-known director as the opening night presentation. Amélie Bonnin’s Partir un jour looks to be an expansion of her 2021 César Award–winning short—same title, same cast—about a high-school graduate (Bastien Bouillon) returning to his hometown right after setting up a new life in Paris.

With Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise and director and screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie aim to wrap a franchise that will be celebrated with an exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. Mission: Impossible—Story and Spectacle will be on view from April 18 through December 14. Jodie Foster stars in Rebecca Zlotowski’s Vie privée as a renowned psychiatrist who becomes convinced that one of her patients has been murdered. The cast also features Daniel Auteuil and Virginie Efira.

Six films are lined up for the noncompetitive Cannes Premiere program, including Orwell: 2+2=5, the new documentary from Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro); Sebastián Lelio’s The Wave, a musical inspired by the “feminist May” movement launched in Chile in 2018; and Kirill Serebrennikov’s The Disappearance of Josef Mengele, starring August Diehl as the notorious “Angel of Death” who conducted merciless and usually fatal experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz.

Juno Mak’s Hong Kong crime thriller Sons of the Neon Night, one of three Midnight Screenings, stars Takeshi Kaneshiro, Sean Lau, Louis Koo, Tony Leung Ka-fai, and Gao Yuanyuan. And among the three Special Screenings is Sylvain Chomet’s A Magnificent Life, an animated salute to the great playwright, novelist, and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol.