News

Set to take place August 6-16, the 78th edition of the Locarno Film Festival has now unveiled its promising lineup. Among the highlights are the world premieres of Radu Jude’s second feature of 2025, Dracula; Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf; Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron; Maureen Fazendeiro’s The Seasons; Le Lac from Jean-Luc Godard’s collaborator Fabrice Aragno; Ben Rivers’ Mare’s Nest; Abdellatif Kechiche’s long-awaited sequel Mektoub, My Love: Canto Due; Sho Miyake’s Two Seasons, Two Strangers; and many more.

“Building the program of the Locarno Film Festival means engaging with the living matter of contemporary cinema. A cinema that unfolds while the world is undergoing violent upheavals, while we witness – in real time – horrors that we had only read about in history books or studied in archival footage,” said Giona A. Nazzaro, Artistic Director.

He continues, “The question is simple, and brutal in its inevitability:...

Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival will debut 17 features, including new works by Radu Jude and Abdellatif Kechiche, as part of its 2025 competition. This year’s event runs from August 6 to 16.

The festival announced its competition lineups this morning. The Radu Jude feature is his much-talked-about Dracula. The film was shot in Transylvania and is said to blend several takes on the Dracula story. Teasing the project as last year’s Locarno Film Festival, Jude said: “I am from Romania. My father is actually from Transylvania. It’s time that someone from Romania does a Dracula film. It’s only Hollywood that has done it 1,000 times. We shouldn’t let Hollywood dominate our Dracula.”

The Abdellatif Kechiche feature is Mektoub, My Love: Canto Due, the third edition in his controversial Mektoub series. Ben Rivers, a Locarno regular, will debut his latest feature, Mare’s Nest. Scroll down for the full Loarno lineup.

Despite significant wins at major film festivals and policies enforced by the National Film Board (Cnc) aimed at boosting female representation behind the camera, male crew members still dominate the French film industry.

A study conducted by the organization Collectif 50/50 on 220 titles released in 2024 shows that the proportion of women in key below-the-line positions has remained mostly stagnant compared with 2023, rising rarely.

The only two fields where women lead in terms of representation are costume designers and casting directors with 90% and 80%, respectively.

The org 50/50 says these “jobs are historically perceived as feminine” and are therefore “still overwhelmingly occupied by women.” These are followed by editors with 50% of women, set designers with 47% (compared with 41% in 2023), music composers with 12% (compared with 8% in 2023), cinematographers with 13% (compared with 18% in 2023), music composers with 12% and sound engineers with 11%. While modest, the biggest year-on spike was seen in special effects where the number of female heads of...

Lassoing the likes of Hafsia Herzi (fresh from showcasing The Little Sister in competition in Cannes), Benoît Magimel, Bastien Bouillon plus Monica Bellucci and Paul Hamy (The Ornithologist), Léa Mysius has locked in an impressive quintet for her rural drama thriller. In the works since 2023, Histoires De La Nuit (aka The Birthday Party) is now in production and seeing that her previous films Ava (2017) and Les cinq diables (read review) premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in the Critic’ Week and Directors’ Fortnight sections we expect this to be a strong contender for a Croisette splash.…...

KlikFilm proudly announces the exclusive Indonesian release of a curated selection of award-winning films, fresh from the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, including this year’s prestigious Palme d’Or winner. Continuing its commitment to championing world cinema, KlikFilm once again becomes the home for the most talked-about international films of the year.

Leading the lineup is “It Was Just an Accident”, this powerful new film from Jafar Panahi was made in secret in Iran. With masterful subtlety and a sense of quiet urgency, Panahi constructs a moral thriller about guilt and complicity in a tightly surveilled society.

Here are the celebrated films from 2025 Cannes Film Festival coming soon to KlikFilm:

Sentimental Value

Grand Prix winner Joachim Trier returns with an emotionally rich drama about a widowed father and his two daughters reuniting after years apart. With a cast led by Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, and Elle Fanning, the film explores memory,...

Ioncinema.com’s Chief Film Critic Nicholas Bell reviewed the entire competition and more. Here is a comprehensive guide to all the feature films across all sections, including logged reviews and forthcoming ones. Our Cannes coverage continues well beyond the festival dates.

Competition

Alpha – Julia Ducournau – [Review]

Dossier 137 – Dominik Moll – [Review]

Die, My Love – Lynne Ramsay – [Review]

Eagles of the Republic – Tarik Saleh – [Review]

Eddington – Ari Aster – [Review]

Fuori – Mario Martone – [Review]

The History of Sound – Oliver Hermanus – [Review]

It Was Just an Accident – Jafar Panahi – [Review]

La Petite Dernière – Hafsia Herzi – [Review]

The Mastermind – Kelly Reichardt – [Review]

Nouvelle Vague – Richard Linklater – [Review]

The Phoenician Scheme – Wes Anderson – [Review]

Renoir – Chie Hayakawa – [Review]

Resurrection – Bi Gan – [Review]

Romería – Carla Simón – [Review]

The Secret Agent – Kleber Mendonça Filho – [Review]

Sentimental Value – Joachim Trier – [Review]

Sirât – Óliver Laxe – [Review]

Sound of Falling – Mascha Schilinski – [Review]

Two Prosecutors – Sergei Loznitsa – [Review]

Woman and Child – Saeed Roustayi – [Review]

Jeunes mères – Dardennes – [Review]

Un Certain Regard

Aisha Can’t Fly Away – Morad Mostafa – [Review]

Caravan – Zuzana Kirchnerová – [Review]

The Chronology of Water...

Thierry Frémaux, the Delegate Général of the Cannes Film Festival, is propping up the Majestic Beach’s main bar. The joint’s buzzing, the victors being lionized after what has been acknowledged as a strong competition and selection, and I have the temerity to wonder idly when he’ll retire.

“I don’t know,” he murmurs. “You know, in France the social contract is something different.”

“Even if I’m fired, I stay,” he finishes defiantly.

He laughs, then turns the tables and cheekily asks when I will retire.

“I don’t want you to retire,” he says caressing my arm. ”Stay with us.”

Fremaux first visited Cannes in 1979, driving from Lyon in a truck. Every day that year he remained on the Croisette without watching any movies “because I couldn’t attend any film. Each evening I used to go back to the highway and sleep in the car in the gas station.

Jafar Panahi’s “It Was Just an Accident” captured the Palme d’Or in Cannes on 24 May, sealing a comeback for the Iranian director four years after Tehran lifted his travel ban. Jury president Juliette Binoche praised the thriller as “a force that transforms darkness into forgiveness, hope and new life,” moments after Panahi urged viewers to “join forces so that no one will dare tell us what we should do or wear”.

The win crowns a politically charged edition disrupted hours earlier by a Riviera power outage that briefly threatened the red-carpet broadcast yet left the closing ceremony intact. Neon, distributor of the last five Palme winners, pre-bought North-American rights to Panahi’s film during the festival, extending its awards-season run and intensifying scrutiny of whether Iran will permit a domestic release required for international-feature Oscar eligibility.

Joachim Trier’s Norwegian family drama “Sentimental Value” took the Grand Prix after a 19-minute ovation,...

And the wins keep on coming for Neon. But also for Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, currently in exile from his home country of Iran for how he’s voiced opposition through his cinema. This includes his latest film and now Palme d’Or winner, “It Was Just an Accident,” a moral thriller that finds five dissidents debating whether or not to murder their former torturer.

In IndieWire’s review out of Cannes, David Ehrlich said of the film, “From the plot description alone, it’s obvious that ‘It Was Just an Accident’ finds Panahi working in a very different register than he had to while “banned” from making films — a period that saw his long-standing penchant for metafiction become considerably more pronounced, as he was forced to make himself the subject of iPhone/camcorder masterpieces like ‘This Is Not a Film.’ This one still had to be shot in secret...

Dissident Iranian director Jafar Panahi has won the Palme d’Or for best film for It Was Just an Accident at the 78th Cannes international film festival.

Panahi, who just a few years ago was imprisoned in Tehran and under a 20-year travel and work ban, returned triumphantly to Cannes, accepting his award from jury president (and vocal Panahi fan) Juliette Binoche.

Panahi’s film, his first since being released from prison in 2023, is a direct assault on Iran’s authoritarian regime. The thriller follows a former political prisoner who kidnaps a man he believes to be his torturer and then debates with other dissidents whether to kill or forgive him.

The win marks the sixth time in a row a film acquired by Neon for North America has won the Palme d’Or. Tom Quinn’s indie outfit kept its Cannes streak going by picking up It Was Just an Accident earlier this week.

Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just An Accident has won the Palme d’Or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, which wrapped on Saturday night (May 25).

Scroll down for full list of winners

It is the Iranian director’s first film since his release from prison and follows a man, his heavily pregnant wife, and their young daughter as they get into a minor car accident that sets off a dark chain of events.

In his speech Panahi addressed “all Iranians, with different opinions, in Iran and around the world”. He said: “The most important thing is our country and the freedom of our country.

Eagles of the Republic

Competition

Tarik Saleh follows The Nile Hilton Incident and Cairo Conspiracy with a darkly funny thriller about a famous actor forced to play Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in a biopic. Reteaming with star Fares Fares, who headlined the first two movies, Saleh tackles the dirty dealings between the regime and the film industry, showing how artists are co-opted — or rather coerced — into making propaganda in a country leaving them few other options. — Jordan Mintzer

Highest 2 Lowest

Out Of Competition

Spike Lee reunites with Denzel Washington in this dazzlingly entertaining spin on Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 kidnapping procedural, High and Low. The plot has been transposed to an environment Lee knows well — New York City, lushly captured — allowing the director to make the film his own, with wit, high style and kinetic energy to burn. The cast is top-to-toe excellent, with special honors to Washington and, in key roles,...

In this edition of Screen’s Cannes Close-Up interview series, director Hafsia Herzi talks about her first Cannes Competition experience as a filmmaker with The Little Sister, an adaptation of Fatima Daas autobiographical novel The Last One.

It’s the story of a young lesbian Muslim woman who lives in the Parisian suburbs. Herzi loved the book and decided to make the film because she had “never seen a character like that on the big screen” - she is played by newcomer Nadia Melliti.

In the interview she talks about the “surprises” Cannes always brings, like having lunch with Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson,...

by Cláudio Alves

I don't know about you, but I can't contain my excitement for SIRÂT.

After Schilinski and Loznitsa had the honor of opening this year's Official Competition at Cannes, the next few days at the fest have seen many another auteur take their bow. Reviews vary wildly, but it seems that Oliver Laxe's Sirât is a winner, while Dominik Moll's Dossier 137 has inspired some of the least enthusiastic reviews coming out of the Croisette. Hafsia Herzi's The Little Sister didn't make much of a splash either, though critics have been kinder to the second French production vying for the Palme d'Or. Finally, nobody's indifferent to Ari Aster's Eddington, a polarizing Cannes premiere if there ever was one. But that's business as usual for the American director, whose works have caused extreme reactions of adoration and revilement ever since Hereditary hit theaters in 2018.

For Cannes at Home,...

German films and co-productions in Cannes this year are sure to entice festgoers and buyers alike with an eclectic selection heavy on historical drama and animation fare.

Highly anticipated works by Fatih Akin, Mascha Schilinski and Christian Petzold are premiering at the festival along with German co-productions from Wes Anderson, Sergei Loznitsa and Kirill Serebrennikov that explore postwar Germany, lives intertwined through time, loss and grief, international espionage, Stalin’s Great Purge and a war criminal’s escape from justice.

Unspooling in Cannes Premiere, Akin’s “Amrum” is a family drama set in 1945 on the titular North Sea German island and based on the autobiographical novel of screenwriter Hark Bohm, who also penned the script. It centers on 12-year-old Nanning (Jasper Billerbeck), who does everything he can to help his mother feed the family during the last days of the war, only to face all new challenges when peace finally arrives.

Four years after Julia Ducournau won the Palme d’Or with her jaw-dropping body horror car sex drama “Titane,” the filmmaker is back on the Cannes Croisette with her “Alpha.”

Ducournau’s third feature which, like “Titane,” will be distributed by Neon, centers on a titular teen whose life is upended after a mysterious decision. The film’s official logline reads: “Alpha (Mélissa Boros) is a troubled 13 year old who lives with her single mom (Golshifteh Farahani). Their world collapses the day she returns from school with a tattoo on her arm.” Tahar Rahim, Emma Mackey, Finnegan Oldfield, and Louai El Amrousy star.

“Alpha” is premiering in competition at Cannes, with Ducournau being one of seven female directors with new films in the main competition. Kelly Reichardt will also launch “The Mastermind,” while Mascha Schilinski has “Sound of Falling,” Lynne Ramsay has “Die My Love,” along with Hafsia Herzi’s “La Petite Dernière,...

The Little Sister unfolds as a delicate adaptation of Fatima Daas’s autofictional novel, guided by actress-turned-director Hafsia Herzi. Set in the working-class suburbs of Paris, the film follows Fatima (a striking debut from Nadia Melliti), the youngest daughter in a French-Algerian household, whose quiet devotion to Islam collides with the stirrings of a hidden love for women. Herzi divides this journey into seasonal chapters, each marking shifts in Fatima’s academic life—from the crowded hallways of lycée to the philosophical halls of university—and in her personal world.

Central to the drama is the tension between faith and self-discovery: Fatima navigates family rituals at home while experimenting with lesbian dating apps, all under the watchful lens of Dp Jérémie Attard. Moments of whispered confession in a moonlit bedroom contrast with the cello-led score by Amine Bouhafa, whose restrained themes echo Fatima’s guarded heart. Ji-Na (Ji-Min Park) emerges as both mirror and catalyst,...

Having turned 50 last year, the French film studio and arthouse cinema chain MK2 is far from a midlife crisis. The family-run company, which was founded by Marin Karmitz in 1974 and is now presided over by Nathanael and Elisha Karmitz, has never been more in the game. MK2 Films, whose international sales division is headed by Irish-born executive Fionnuala Jamison, rolled into Cannes with six films in competition and 12 in total across the Official Selection, likely more than any other sales outfits.

The company, which has always championed female auteurs, has been turning the spotlight on a new generation of daring female directors, from Celine Sciamma to Noemie Merlant, Justine Triet and Mati Diop. And at this year’s Cannes, they have three out of the seven competition films directed by female directors, Hafsia Herzi’s drama “La petite dernière,” Carla Simon’s “Romeria” and Mascha Schilinski’s “Sound of Falling” which has been unanimously praised.

Ari Aster’s Eddington has recorded the lowest score so far on Screen’s Cannes jury grid, while Hafsia Herzi’s The Little Sister lands with a middling average.

Covid-era Western Eddington received an average of 1.5, including a zero star (bad) from rogerebert.com’s Ben Kenigsberg.

Click on the image above for the most up-to-date version of the grid.

The film also scored six one-stars (poor) and three two-stars (average) but Katja Nicodemus (Die Zeit) and Mathieu Macharet (Le Monde) were more impressed, giving it a three-star (good).

Eddington stars Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone and Austin Butler...

Actress-filmmaker (she forever stole our cinephile heart for her role in Abdellatif Kechiche’s The Secret of the Grain back in 2007) Hafsia Herzi has made a striking impression adored on the Croisette with Tu mérites un amour (2019) locking up a premiere in the Critics’ Week and Bonne Mère (2021) being showcased in the Un Certain Regard section. Now, with La Petite Dernière (The Little Sister) she is one of very few films representing French cinema in comp this year.

The fifth film in competition was shot this past May. This third feature stars Aloïse Sauvage, Anouar Kardellas, Luna Ribeiro, Elisa Libri, Nacer Bouhanni, Olivia Courbis, Vincent Pasdermadjian, Rita Benmanana, Victorien Bonnet, and Nemo Schiffman.…...

Cannes – There has to be something quietly reassuring about the world that a movie about a first-generation French Algerian woman coming to terms with her sexuality is not deemed groundbreaking in 2025. This is a story we’ve seen many times before, either on film or television. Yes, even one centred on a queer person wrestling with their Muslim faith. So much so, as Hafsia Herzi’s “The Little Sister” begins to unfold, you start to wonder what about this particular story makes it worthy of being selected for competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival?

Continue reading ‘The Little Sister’ Review: A French Arab Queer Woman Tries To Find Herself [Cannes] at The Playlist.

The Little Sister drew big applause at the Cannes Film Festival. The audience gave writer-director Hafsia Herzi’s coming-out pic an energetic 12-minute ovation after its world premiere Friday at the Palais.

There were lots of whoops and shouts from the crowd before Herzi’s post-screening thank-you speech as people showed their enthusiasm for the French director’s third feature aka La Petite Dernière.

The film starring Nadia Melliti is adapted from Fatima Daas’s semi-autobiographical 2022 novel The Last One, the story of a young gay Muslim woman’s sexual awakening. In his Deadline review, Damon Wise wrote, “Herzi confidently takes what could have been a traditional coming-out tale and turns it into something altogether more defiant, a character study that takes place in the no-man’s-land between the oppressive certainties of childhood and the intoxicating freedoms of early adulthood.”

Related: Standing Ovations At Cannes: How We Clock Those Claps,...

Cannes film festival

Hafsia Herzi manages sexuality with confidence in her first Palme d’Or competition film, featuring an affecting lead performance from newcomer Nadia Melliti

Actor turned director Hafsia Herzi presents her first feature in the Cannes competition: a coming-of-age story of queer Muslim identity, with all the painful, irreconcilable imperatives that this implies, complicating the existing insoluble agonies of just getting to be an adult. It is adapted from La Petite Dernière, or The Last One, the autofictional novel by Franco-Algerian author Fatima Daas about growing up as the kid sister, the youngest of three girls, in an Algerian family in a Paris suburb with her mum, dad and siblings.

Non-professional newcomer Nadia Melliti plays Fatima, a smart kid battling with asthma who likes books, likes football, likes freestyling, likes running – and likes girls. (This last interest is secret.) As Fatima prepares to leave school and start her...

If you go to enough film festivals, you soon learn that one of the most exhilarating experiences comes when you discover an outstanding performer that the world has yet to see. There is nothing quite like realizing that you’re watching a newcomer confidently command the screen as if they’ve been acting in dozens of films. At last year’s Cannes Film Festival, that star-is-born moment went to the stellar Nykiya Adams in “Bird” and this year it is the truly magnificent Nadia Melliti in “The Little Sister.”

Serving as the anchor to a drama that otherwise frequently holds you at a distance, Melliti gives an understated yet riveting performance as a young woman finding her way in the world. The film lives and dies on her shoulders, making it all the more exciting to see her carry it with such nuance. As her character begins to explore her sexuality,...

It’s been seven years since Cate Blanchett led 82 women up the red carpet in protest at the male dominance of the world’s biggest film festival. Some progress has been made since then — the number of female Palme d’Or winners has tripled in the meantime — but Cannes is still a long way from gender parity. But though the numbers aren’t there yet (there are just seven female directors in Competition this year), the dial is moving in different and very welcome ways, bringing in new types of female-fronted stories.

The Little Sister is French actress Hafsia Herzi’s third feature, but it has the freshness of a debut, which sounds like a back-handed compliment but actually isn’t. Adapting Fatima Daas’s semi-autobiographical 2022 novel The Last One, the story of a young gay Muslim woman’s sexual awakening, Herzi confidently takes what could have been a traditional...

It says less about “The Little Sister” than it does about a certain entrenched model of queer cinema shaped by past generations that we spend much of Hafsia Herzi’s third feature waiting for something terrible to happen. Coming-out stories have long been weighted with expectations of trauma or tragedy, and the stakes in this one are high: Our heroine Fatima is a devout Muslim girl from an Algerian immigrant household in Paris, fearful that her nascent lesbianism will see her cast out of her family and faith. But conflict doesn’t arise in quite the ways you’d expect throughout this quiet character study, in which self-acceptance is the most significant narrative hurdle to clear.

Sensitive and empathetic but a little timid in storytelling and style, “The Little Sister” rests considerably on its lead performance by first-time actor Nadia Melliti, an arresting presence who suggests Fatima’s vulnerabilities and...

Just like American cinema never wearies of road movies, French cinema has long been littered with sexual coming-of-age films: tales of young people exploring their bodies, appetites and identities over the course of a sun-soaked summer vacation, a tumultuous school year or a few formatively horny days.

As with any popular category of movie, a certain numbing redundancy — if not laziness — sets in after a while; few recent entries have had the tingle of discovery that allowed Maurice Pialat’s To Our Loves, André Téchiné’s Wild Reeds and various Catherine Breillat works to fire up our memories and imaginations, to say nothing of our loins.

Occasionally, however, a new one comes along that cuts right through the crowd with its confidence and texture, its erotic charge and lingering nostalgic ache. Hafsia Herzi’s superb The Little Sister (La petite dernière), about a French Muslim teenager’s lesbian awakening, is such a film,...

Between Megalopolis and The Brutalist, obsessive architects were at the center of two of the most ambitious arthouse movies released last year. A more modest addition to the group, but fueled by some of the same ego-tripping, technical hurdles, bureaucratic infighting and money squabbles, Stéphane Demoustier’s The Great Arch follows the tragic true story of Johan Otto von Spreckelsen, an idealistic Danish builder whose design for a massive new monument next to Paris wound up destroying his life.

Filled with more French-bashing than most movies coming out of Gaul, the film offers a play-by-play account of what von Spreckelsen went through after he was chosen to erect a brand-new arch in the futuristic La Défense district west of the city. He had high ambitions that his “cube,” as he constantly referred to it, would stand alongside the Arc de Triomphe and Eiffel Tower as an enduring part of the Paris landscape.

Oliver Laxe’s Sirat has divided opinion on Screen International’ s Cannes jury grid, receiving an average score of 2.5.

The family drama about a father, played by Sergi Lopez, searching for his missing daughter in Morocco, collected scores of four (excellent) from Justin Chang, Ahmed Shawky, Kong Rithdee and The Telegraph duo Robbie Collin and Tim Robey, as well as two threes (good).

Dragging the average down however was a zero (bad), from Die Zeit’s Katja Nicodemus, as well as ones (poor) from Peter Bradshaw and Mathieu Macheret.

Click on the image above for the most up-to-date version of the grid.

Hafsia Herzi’s breakout turn in 2007’s “The Secret of the Grain” catapulted her from obscurity to stardom, establishing her as a mainstay of French cinema. Just over a decade later, she redefined her artistic path with her self-produced directorial debut, “You Deserve a Lover,” which premiered out of Critics’ Week in 2019.

Lately, both sides of her career have reached new heights: she recently won the César for best actress for the crime thriller “Borgo,” and now enters the Palme d’Or competition with “The Little Sister.” This latest directorial outing reunites much of the crew from her scrappy debut — a loyal team that also worked with her on “Good Mother,” which screened in Un Certain Regard in 2021.

“I just got tired of waiting,” Herzi says of her leap into directing. “I’d always dreamed of doing something fast, a bit thrown together. One day I just said, let’s go.

Exclusive: It has been a year of firsts for French actress and director Hafsia Herzi.

In February, she became the first French artist of North African ancestry to win Best Actress in the 50th edition of France’s César awards for her performance in Corsica-set drama Borgo, as a prison guard suspected of being an accomplice in a double murder.

Three months later, she is in Competition in Cannes for the first time with her third feature film The Little Sister.

This success has not come out of the blue.

Herzi, who was born in France to parents of Algerian and Tunisian origin, has been steadily building her career ever since being discovered in Abdellatif Kechiche’s Coucous (La Graine et Le Mulet) in 2007. Having since racked up 60 credits as an actress, she moving into directing in 2010.

Her first feature You Deserve A Lover played in Cannes Critics’ Week in...

Michael Cera is getting behind the camera for his directorial feature debut and has quietly amassed a impressive cast, Variety understands

The actor — best known for roles in “Barbie,” “Superbad,” “Scott Pilgrim vs the World,” and “Arrested Development” — is set to direct “Love Is Not the Answer,” with Pamela Anderson (“The Last Showgirl”), Steve Coogan (“Philomena”), Fred Hechinger (“Gladiator 2”) and Jamie Dornan (“Belfast”) lined up to star. mk2 Films will launching the project in Cannes.

The plot of the film is being kept under wraps, but it’s described as a “precise yet unpredictable, absurdist comedy that moves between hilarity and heartbreak as it explores modern loneliness and the search for connection.”

“Love Is Not the Answer” also teams Cera — who penned the script — with fast-rising hitmakers 2am, led by Christine D’Souza Gelb, David Hinojosa and Kevin Rowe and producers of “Bodies, Bodies, Bodies,” “Past Lives,” “Babygirl,” Celine Song...

Jason Segel is reuniting with his Shrinking director James Ponsoldt on Platinum Dunes’ psychological thriller Sponsor, which mk2 and UTA Independent Film Group are launching for sales in Cannes this week.

Segel will star as Peter, who gets involved in a terrible accident when he drives after partying too hard. Faced with the choice between prison or a recovery programme, he begrudgingly opts for the latter and encounters a charismatic sponsor, Jerry, whose unconventional methods push him into a living hell.

Ponsoldt and Segel co-wrote the screenplay and the producers are out to actors for the role of Jerry.

Segel and Ponsoldt said,...

Jason Segel is reuniting with his Shrinking director James Ponsoldt on Platinum Dunes’ psychological thriller Sponsor, which mk2 and UTA Independent Film Group are launching for sales in Cannes this week.

Segel will star as Peter, who gets involved in a terrible accident when he drives after partying too hard. Faced with the choice between prison or a recovery programme, he begrudgingly opts for the latter and encounters a charismatic sponsor, Jerry, whose unconventional methods push him into a living hell.

Ponsoldt and Segel co-wrote the screenplay and the producers are out to actors for the role of Jerry. Platinum Dunes...

© Cannes

¡Arranca la semana Cannes! Todos los ojos (al menos los cinéfilos) se posan ya sobre La Croisette, expectantes por descubrir las películas que darán más que hablar… y quién se alzará con la codiciada Palma de Oro, que el año pasado fue para Anora, luego coronada con el Oscar a la Mejor Película. ¿ Habrá esta vez victoria española, con Carla Simón u Oliver Laxe entre los aspirantes? Crucemos los dedos. ¿Repetirá Julia Ducournau la hazaña de Titane? Quién sabe. Lo que sí podemos hacer es seguir de cerca las reacciones, y para eso os dejamos un calendario con los estrenos mundiales de las películas en competición… y otras de las más esperadas del Festival.

MIÉRCOLES 14 Mayo COMPETICIÓN

15:00 | Sound of Falling (Mascha Schilinski)

22:30 | Two Prosecutors (Sergei Loznitsa)

Fuera De COMPETICIÓN

18:45 | Misión imposible: Sentencia final (Christopher McQuarrie)

Jueves 15 Mayo COMPETICIÓN

18:30 | Dossier 137 (Dominik Moll)

21:30 | Sirat (Oliver Laxe...

A few days before the start of the Cannes Film Festival, Variety gathered top French producers, distributors and talent, including Dominik Moll, Elodie Bouchez, Justine Triet and Coralie Fargeat at an intimate dinner hosted at the glamorous landmark restaurant Laperouse.

Bouchez, who recently starred in “Beating Hearts,” will be presenting two films at Cannes’ Directors Fortnight, “Enzo,” directed by Robin Campillo and late filmmaker Laurent Cantet, as well as “Classe Moyenne” by Anthony Cordier. The actor was sitting besides Oscar-nominated producer Marie Ange Luciani (“Anatomy of a Fall”) who produced “Enzo” as well as Laura Wandel’s “Adam’s Sake” which will open Critics’ Week; and Alexandra Henochsberg, president of Ad Vitam, which will distribute seven films from the Official Selection in France, including “The Secret Agent” by Kleber Mendonça Filho; “Romeria” by Carla Simón; “La Petite Dernière” by Hafsia Herzi; “Vie Privée,” starring Jodie Foster and directed by Rebecca Zlotowski; and “Enzo,...

[Editor’s note: This story was originally published on April 10, 2025 when the first lineup announcement for this year’s Cannes Film Festival was released. It has been updated today to include two new additions to the competition section, including Lynne Ramsay’s “Die My Love.” It was also updated on May 8, 2025 to account for one new addition to the competition slate.]

Updated, April 23, 2025: As promised when the Cannes lineup was first released on April 10, 2025, the festival has now added two more films to its official competition slate, including Lynne Ramsay’s “Die My Love.” With that addition, this year’s competition lineup now includes seven films directed by women, tying 2023’s then-record-breaking slate of female directed-films. Our original story follows, with an update below in the “2025” section of our official breakdown.

It’s a tradition I long ago grew weary of: waking up early on an April morning to see how few women filmmakers had made it into Cannes’ competition section. For a long time, the festival seemed destined to stall out with just four films directed or co-directed by women in the section. Hell, Cannes didn’t...

It will be a challenge to find a 2025 film that Josh O’Connor is not in. The “Challengers” breakout star is leading the third “Knives Out” feature (all we know is that he’s playing a priest), plus is starring alongside Paul Mescal in “The History Of Sound” and will be in Steven Spielberg’s next project about UFOs. First, though, O’Connor is starring in Kelly Reichardt’s latest, “The Mastermind.”

The film will debut in competition at Cannes. Oliver Hermanus’ “The History Of Sound” will also be in the main competition so O’Connor has two shots at being in a Palme d’Or winner this year.

For “The Mastermind,” O’Connor plays Jb Mooney, an unemployed carpenter who becomes an aspiring amateur art thief. The only issue is that Jb’s first big heist goes haywire, leading him to confront his life choices. The film is set in rural Massachusetts in the 1970s.

Exclusive: European sales, production and financing company mk2 films and international fund manager Ipr.Vc have confirmed their first investment collaboration on Marie Kreutzer’s upcoming feature Gentle Monster, her follow-up to critically acclaimed historical drama Corsage.

It marks the first joint operation under the partners’ multi-year slate financing deal, which was announced last September.

“Our joint slate was inspired to support daring, authored cinema with global resonance. Marie Kreutzer’s Gentle Monster is the perfect embodiment of that inspiration,” said mk2 films Managing Director Fionnuala Jamison.

Paris-based mk2 Films will also manage international sales on Gentle Monster, in a move that continues the company’s collaboration with Austrian director Kreutzer following its successful sales, festival and awards campaign for Corsage in 2022.

“We are incredibly excited to support Gentle Monster as the first project in our collaboration with mk2 films,” said Andrea Scarso, Partner at Helsinki and London-based Ipr.Vc.

“This...

The Cannes Film Festival has added several titles to the official selection, including Lynne Ramsay’s “Die, My Love,” a thriller starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson, as well as Kristen Stewart’s “The Chronology of Water” in Un Certain Regard and Ethan Coen’s “Honey Don’t!” in the midnights section.

Other additions to the official selection are Saeed Roustaee’s “Woman and Child” in competition; Anna Cazenave Cambet’s “Love Me Tender,” Simón Mesa Soto’s “Un Poeta” and Pedro Pinho’s “O Riso E A Faca (Le Rire et le Couteau”) in Un Certain Regard; “Kōji Fukada’s “Renai Saiban,” Hlynur Pálmason’s “Ástin Sem Eftir Er,” Lav Diaz’s “Magalhães” in premiere; and Vincent Maël Cardona’s “Le Roi Soleil” in midnights.

“Die, My Love” was screened for the Cannes committee after the festival’s official press conference on April 10, during which chief Thierry Fremaux unveiled the lineup.

Cannes Critics’ Week, the festival sidebar spotlighting first and second features, has revealed the 11 competition and special screenings titles for its 64th edition running May 14-22.

Scroll down for full list of titles

Seven films will vie for four top prizes in competition, awarded by a jury helmed by Spanish filmmaker Rodrigo Sorogoyen. Five of those are first films that will compete for the Camera d’Or. Six films in the line-up are directed by women.

Ava Cahen, now in her fourth year as artistic director, told Screen this year’s selection is “a daring combination of films with panache that celebrates new voices.

The Cannes Film Festival 2025 line-up reveals the films that likely will be chatted about long through the year. Here’s what’s showing.

Cannes Film Festival has published its official line-up for this year’s event, and we get our first hint at the films that are set to be part of the awards conversation for the coming months. The festival will be screening several interesting films, including the directorial debuts of Scarlett Johansson and Harris Dickinson in the new filmmaker category.

Screening out of competition will be Spike Lee’s latest offering, Highest 2 Lowest, and Tom Cruise and company are taking Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning to the festival too. This has proved to be a public relations misstep in the past (remember Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny?) but with Mission releasing so soon after the festival, this seems like a savvy move to us.

The lineup for the 78th Cannes Film Festival has officially been announced. As of today, 19 films will be competing for the prestigious top prize, the Palme d’Or, which last year was won by Sean Baker's Anora. This year’s festival runs between May 13 and May 24, and the jury is headed by actress Juliette Binoche. Binoche won the Best Actress award at Cannes in 2010 for Certified Copy and an Oscar in 1996 for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in The English Patient.

Two of this year’s entries come from directors who have won the Palme in the past. Another three are from helmers who have won prizes in official competition other than the Palme. Seven selections are from directors who are having their first films screened in competition.

Cannes can also be a place to see the first glimpses of major Oscar contenders. Last year, three of the...

We haven’t yet relaunched, but Kevin Jagernauth and I wanted to have a quick conversation about the nineteen films (plus no-shows) selected for the 2025 competition film section. Running for the Palme d’Or this year we have the likes of Julia Ducournau, Dominik Moll, Tarik Saleh, Ari Aster, Mario Martone, Oliver Hermanus, Kelly Reichardt, Richard Linklater, Hafsia Herzi, Wes Anderson, Chie Hayakawa, Carla Simón, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Joachim Trier, Jafar Panahi, Oliver Laxe, Mascha Schilinski, Sergei Loznitsa, and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. More will trickle in next week. Check out our talk below let us know who you believe has the best chance at grabbing gold.…...

MK2 Films has boarded revered Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi’s mystery movie “It Was Just An Accident” which will world premiere in competition at the Cannes Film Festival.

Panahi produced the film with Les Films Pelléas, the production company behind “Anatomy of a Fall.” It’s co-produced by Bidibul Productions and Pio &Co. The film did its post-production in France.

The plot is under wrap and the enigmatic logline says, “What begins as a minor accident sets in motion a series of escalating consequences.”

Panahi was last in Cannes in 2021 with his documentary “The Year Of The Everlasting Storm” which played in Special Screenings. His 2018 film “Three Faces” played in competition and won best screenplay.

Considered one of Iranian cinema’s greatest living masters, Panahi is known globally for prizewinning works such as “The Circle,” “Offside,” “This is Not a Film,” “Taxi,” and “No Bears,” winner of the Venice Film Festival’s 2022 Special Jury Prize.

The full list of films that will be screening at the 78th Annual Cannes Film Festival has been released. The line-up was announced this morning by the Cannes delegate general Thierry Frémaux and President Iris Knobloch at a press conference in Paris. The Hollywood Reporter has shared the program listing for this year’s event. While there are a number of anticipated high-profile titles, a bevy of auteurs will be showcasing their latest, including Kelly Reichardt, who will be returning to the competition with The Mastermind. The film is an art-heist drama and stars Josh O’Connor and John Magaro, which takes place during the Vietnam War.

Joachim Trier, the Norwegian filmmaker who made a splash in 2021 with The Worst Person of the World, returns with the new film Sentimental Value, which features Renate Reinsve. Julia Ducournau, the director of the surreal film, Titane, which got her a Palme d’Or...

The Cannes Film Festival has released the official selection for its 78th edition, featuring a mix of returning auteurs and first-time filmmakers. Scheduled to run from May 13 to 24, this year’s lineup includes world premieres from directors such as Wes Anderson, Julia Ducournau, Ari Aster, and Richard Linklater.

Announced by festival delegate general Thierry Frémaux and president Iris Knobloch during a press conference in Paris, the lineup spans the main competition, Un Certain Regard, and various sidebars. French actor and Academy Award winner Juliette Binoche will serve as jury president. The rest of the jury remains unannounced.

Among the films selected for competition is Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, debuting shortly before its theatrical release. Ari Aster returns with Eddington, a Western-inflected film distributed by A24. Linklater brings Nouvelle Vague, focused on the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. Ducournau’s Alpha is set in the 1980s and centers on...

The guessing game around which films could make the lineup for the 78th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, which runs from May 13—24, came to an end this morning at a press conference in Paris by Cannes delegate general Thierry Frémaux and president Iris Knobloch. If you tapped the latest works by Ari Aster (Eddington), Kelly Reichardt (The Mastermind), Richard Linklater (Nouvelle Vague), Wes anderson (The Phoenician Scheme), and the Dardenne brothers (Young Mothers) to make the cut, then you were correct.

Neon, which is on a five-year winning streak of Palme d’Or winners, two of which went on to win best picture at the Oscars (Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite and Sean Baker’s Anora), will try to make it a sixth with, for now, either of the two films it already has in its stable: Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value and Julie Ducournau’s Alpha.

Absent from the...

Dieciséis años después, el cine español vuelve a duplicar presencia en la Competición Oficial de la Croisette.

© Cannes

Hoy es un día para celebrar. Porque esta mañana se ha desvelado la programación oficial del Festival de Cannes 2025 y, por primera vez desde aquel histórico 2009 –cuando coincidieron Isabel Coixet y Pedro Almodóvar–, dos cineastas españoles competirán por la ansiada Palma de Oro. Ellos son Carla Simón (recordemos que ganó el Oso de Oro en la Berlinale 2022 con Alcarràs) y Oliver Laxe. España vuelve a estar doblemente representada en la Croisette con sus nuevos largometrajes: Romería y Sirat, respectivamente.

Romería, tercer largometraje de Carla Simón, es una obra profundamente personal en la que la directora catalana se sumerge en la memoria de su familia biológica paterna. La historia sigue a Marina (interpretada por la debutante Llúcia Garcia Torras), una joven adoptada que viaja a Vigo para encontrarse por primera con la familia de su padre biológico.

The Cannes Film Festival revealed its Official Selection on Thursday morning in Paris, and it was a typically star-studded and intriguing lineup. You can see the full lineup here. Below are our five key takeaways from the reveal.

1. Changing Of The Guard? Julia Ducournau poses with the Palme d’Or for ‘Titane’ in 2021

This is a fresh lineup. Cannes Film Festival head Thierry Frémaux said there’s more to come, but this wasn’t your typical Cannes Competition lineup studded with older, familiar auteurs. The festival is opening with a female debut filmmaker for the first time in the shape of Amélie Bonnin’s Leave One Day, and seven of the 19 films in Competition are first-time Palme d’Or contenders. The average age in Competition must be significantly lower than most years. Yes, there are three previous Palme d’Or winners in the lineup, but the likes of Mascha Schilinski,...