Cannes 2026 Lineup

Cannes’s seventy-ninth edition will open on May 12 with Pierre Salvadori’s La Vénus électrique,a comedy set in 1920s Paris that will premiere out of competition, and run through May 23.

Of the twenty-one films so far slated to premiere in the main competition, three come from Japanese directors. Shot in Paris and Kyoto, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden stars Virginie Efira as the director of a nursing home whose life is changed when she watches a terminally ill playwright (Tao Okamoto) develop a new project.

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Sheep in the Box is set in a near future when it is not all that unusual for a couple (Haruka Ayase and Daigo Yamamoto) to welcome a state-of-the-art humanoid into their home as their son. And Nagi Notes, directed by Koji Fukada, is the story of two friends and former sisters-in-law coming to terms with turning points in both of their lives.

The national cinema best represented in the lineup is, naturally, France’s, and that goes beyond the directorial talent. Isabelle Huppert, Vincent Cassel, Virginie Efira, Pierre Niney, and Catherine Deneuve lead the cast of Parallel Tales, the latest feature from Iranian director Asghar Farhadi (A Separation). Deneuve also costars with Léa Seydoux, Laurence Rupp, and Jella Haase in Gentle Monster, a story of two women realizing that they’re devoting their lives to men. Austrian Marie Kreutzer (Corsage) directs.

Seydoux will also lead the cast of The Unknown, the third feature directed by Arthur Harari, who—despite raves for his Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle (2021)—is still best known for cowriting Anatomy of a Fall (2023) with Justine Triet. In The Unknown, a photographer (Niels Schneider) spots a woman (Seydoux) he can’t take his eyes off of, and when he wakes the next morning, he discovers that he is inhabiting her body.

Along with Harari, the French contingent boasts Léa Mysius (The Five Devils), whose Histoires de la nuit stars Hafsia Herzi, Benoît Magimel, Bastien Bouillon, and Monica Bellucci in a story of a birthday party disrupted by intruders; Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet (Anaïs in Love), whose A Woman’s Life stars Léa Drucker as an overworked surgeon; Jeanne Herry (In Safe Hands), whose Another Day,featuring Adèle Exarchopoulos, is a portrait of a struggling actor; and Emmanuel Marre (Zero Fucks Given), whose Notre salut depicts the early days of the Vichy regime.

Hungarian director László Nemes (Son of Saul) will make his French-language debut with Moulin, starring Gilles Lellouche as Jean Moulin, a hero of the French Resistance. Lukas Dhont (Close) calls Coward, which centers on a young Belgian soldier fighting in the First World War, “my most ambitious film to date.”

Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, whose working title was 1949, stars Hanns Zischler and Sandra Hüller as Thomas and Erika Mann, father and daughter, both renowned writers, taking a road trip in a black Buick through a divided Germany at the height of the Cold War. The Dreamed Adventure, the long-awaited fourth feature from Valeska Grisebach (Western), is set in a region between Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey and focuses on a woman who agrees to help an old acquaintance with a plan to commit a crime.

Hope, Na Hong-jin’s even-longer-awaited follow-up to The Wailing (2016), stars Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung, and Jung Ho-yeon as well as Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander in a story set in a remote harbor village, where reports of a tiger on the loose spark a panic that escalates into something weird.

Cristian Mungiu, whose 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days won the Palme d’Or in 2007, returns with Fjord, starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as a married couple—he’s Romanian, she’s Norwegian—moving to her isolated hometown in Norway. Their new neighbors grow suspicious about the way they’re raising their children, leading to difficult questions about personal freedoms and societal norms.

Frémaux suggested on Thursday morning that Minotaur, directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev (Leviathan), is a loose remake of Claude Chabrol’s The Unfaithful Wife (1969). Facing crises at home and at work, the director of a successful company teeters on the brink of an emotional and moral collapse.

Pedro Almodóvar says Bitter Christmas is “the film where I’ve been cruelest with myself.” Already in theaters in Spain, Almodóvar’s twenty-fourth feature stars Barbará Lennie as Elsa, a director of commercials writing a screenplay in 2004 that draws from the painful lives of her friends. Elsa’s story, though, turns out to be a screenplay that Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia) is working on in 2026.

Javier Bardem stars as an acclaimed director who casts his daughter (Victoria Luengo) in his latest project in Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beloved.The Black Ball, codirected by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, is inspired by an uncompleted work by Federico García Lorca, tracks the interconnected lives of three gay men, and stars Guitarricadelafuente, Miguel Bernardeau, Carlos González, Milo Quifes, Lola Dueñas, Penélope Cruz, and Glenn Close.

Up to this point, Ira Sachs is the sole American filmmaker with a film in the main competition. The Man I Love stars Rami Malek, Tom Sturridge, Luther Ford, and Rebecca Hall in a “musical fantasia of a city under duress,” New York in the late 1980s.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, the third feature from Jane Schoenbrun (We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, I Saw the TV Glow), will open Un Certain Regard, the competitive program introduced in 1978 to spotlight up-and-coming filmmakers. Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson star as a filmmaker and an actor at work on the latest installment of Camp Miasma, a slasher franchise. Schoenbrun has described Teenage Sex and Death as “my best attempt at the ‘sleepover classic’: an insane yet cozy midnight odyssey that beckons to unsuspecting viewers from the horror section at the local video store.”

One highlight of the noncompetitive Cannes Première program will be Visitation, the latest feature from Volker Schlöndorff. Set in and around a house by a lake near Berlin, the story spans generations and decades, from the rise of fascism through the reunification of Germany. The ensemble cast includes Lars Eidinger, Martina Gedeck, Susanne Wolff, Michael Maertens, Ulrich Matthes, Detlev Buck, Angela Winkler, and Wigand Witting.

Nicolas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell, a thriller about a mysterious mist engulfing a major city, was shot in Tokyo, features Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton, and has been selected to premiere out of competition. Quentin Dupieux says that Full Phil, a Midnight Screenings selection starring Kristen Stewart and Woody Harrelson, is “like Emily in Paris in hell—a fever dream, a nightmare version of it.” And Steven Soderbergh, whose The Christophers will open tomorrow, will see his nonfiction feature John Lennon: The Last Interview premiere as one of seven Special Screenings.