• The 79th Cannes Film Festival runs for 12 days starting Tuesday, with Park Chan-wook presiding over the jury
• American films are largely absent from competition, with only Ira Sachs and late addition James Gray representing Hollywood
• Honorary Palmes d’Or will go to Peter Jackson and Barbra Streisand at this year’s ceremony
• The White Lotus is also on the Croisette — filming its fourth season on location
• Key contenders include films from Pawel Pawlikowski, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Na Hong-jin and Pedro Almodóvar

The 79th Cannes Film Festival kicks off Tuesday on the Côte d’Azur, and for the next 12 days, the most obsessive movie conversation on the planet will be happening on one sun-drenched stretch of the French Riviera. Red carpets, late-night screenings, the slow stunned walk of someone who just watched something that rearranged their brain — it’s all about to begin.

South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook presides over the jury deciding the Palme d’Or this year. At the opening ceremony, Cannes will bestow honorary Palmes on Peter Jackson and, later in the festival, Barbra Streisand. And if you look closely at the official poster — Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis in that iconic steely pose from Thelma & Louise — you’ll notice the festival is in a reflective mood about what Hollywood used to send to France, and what it’s sending now.

The short answer: not much. American directors are largely sitting this one out. Apart from Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love and the late addition of James Gray’s Paper Tiger, no U.S. films were invited to compete for the Palme. That’s a notable shift from recent years — Sean Baker world-premiered Anora at Cannes in 2024 and went on to win Best Picture. There’s no Tom Cruise rappelling in for a gala this time, either.

Whether that reflects something about the current state of American cinema, festival politics, or simply the luck of the draw is genuinely debatable. But the lineup that’s actually here is formidable. Here’s what has everyone most excited.

The Film Everyone’s Picking to Win

If you were going to place one bet right now, Fatherland would be the name to write down. Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski — whose black-and-white period dramas Ida and Cold War earned a combined four Oscar nominations and one win — is back with a third entry in what’s becoming an unofficial trilogy of exquisite austerity. This one stars Hanns Zischler as German author Thomas Mann on a road trip following World War II, accompanied by his daughter.

That daughter is played by Sandra Hüller. The Anatomy of a Fall star has become the most electrifying actress working in prestige cinema right now, and her name alone in a cast list is enough to make a film a front-runner. Fatherland is distributed by Mubi, which knows exactly what it has.

The Star-Studded American Wild Card

Paper Tiger wasn’t even on the original competition slate — James Gray’s Queens-set Russian mafia drama was added late, and instantly became the most talked-about American entry at the festival. Adam Driver and Miles Teller play brothers who get tangled up with organized crime, with Scarlett Johansson co-starring. Between Driver and Johansson, there are four Oscar nominations and zero wins. Gray, who directed Armageddon Time and The Immigrant, has a track record of pulling extraordinary performances out of people — his Two Lovers, with Gwyneth Paltrow and Joaquin Phoenix, remains quietly essential. Teller, meanwhile, hasn’t had a role that truly stretched him in a while. This could be the one.

The Korean Filmmaker Ready to Break Through

Na Hong-jin has been one of the most quietly devastating directors working anywhere in the world, but Western audiences still haven’t fully caught up with him. His 2008 debut The Chaser played like someone who’d watched David Fincher’s Se7en on a loop for a year and then let it all out. The Wailing added ghosts, demons, dead crows, and a kind of dread that wouldn’t leave you for days. Now he’s back with Hope, a long-gestating sci-fi thriller that Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux said “constantly changes genres.” The cast is a genuine international event: Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung, Jung Ho-yeon, Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, and Taylor Russell. There is, apparently, also a tiger on the loose. Neon — the company that has now won a staggering six Palmes in a row — has already acquired it. If any film here has the potential to be a word-of-mouth phenomenon, this might be it.

The Auteurs With Something to Prove

Ryusuke Hamaguchi made history when Drive My Car became the first Japanese film nominated for Best Picture. Now he’s making his French-language debut with All of a Sudden, starring Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto in a story about a nursing home director and a terminally ill Japanese playwright. The subject sounds heavy, but Hamaguchi has a way of making grief feel like an act of grace.

Fellow Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-eda, who won the Palme d’Or for Shoplifters in 2018, is here with Sheep in the Box — a sci-fi film about a grieving couple who adopt an infant humanoid robot. In almost anyone else’s hands, that premise would be a provocation. In Kore-eda’s, it sounds like it might break your heart in the most tender way imaginable.

Nicolas Winding Refn, the Danish director who somehow channeled all his beautiful weirdness into Drive — a film that’s now baked into the DNA of Los Angeles — is back with his first feature in a decade. Her Private Hell takes place in a futuristic Tokyo and stars a cast of young unknowns. A decade away, a new city, a new world. The conditions are right for something unhinged and essential.

And then there’s Arthur Harari, who co-wrote the Palme-winning Anatomy of a Fall with his partner Justine Triet. In The Unknown, he directs a film about a photographer who follows a woman home from a party — and wakes up in her body. Starring Léa Seydoux, who has a gift for making art-house films feel like events. Neon has already bought this one too.

The Personal, the Provocative, and the Flat-Out Bizarre

Pedro Almodóvar is practically a resident of the Croisette at this point. After making his English-language debut with The Room Next Door — starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore — he returns to Spain with Bitter Christmas, described as a multilayered melodrama about filmmaking, grief, and aging. It’s being called one of his most personal films yet, which, for Almodóvar, is saying something.

Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev, whose Leviathan and Loveless were both Oscar-nominated, returns after a near-death experience during the pandemic with Minotaur, following a business executive in crisis in rural Russia. The circumstances alone make it one of the most anticipated comebacks in the lineup.

Sebastian Stan, fresh off a run of genuinely adventurous choices — A Different Man, The Apprentice, even Pam & Tommy — took time away from the Marvel universe to shoot Fjord with Romanian heavyweight Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days). He and Renate Reinsve play a Romanian-Norwegian couple relocating to her remote Norwegian hometown. Mungiu doesn’t make comfortable films, and that’s exactly the point.

Rami Malek stars in Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love as an actor with a life-threatening illness in 1980s New York, preparing for what might be his final performance. It was the sole American competition entry before Gray’s film arrived, and it still feels like a quiet dark horse.

Jane Schoenbrun opens the Un Certain Regard section with Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a meta-horror film starring Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson about the making of a slasher film. Schoenbrun’s work — I Saw the TV Glow, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair — is the kind of thing that doesn’t hit everyone the same way, but when it hits, it hits hard. Un Certain Regard is also where Zachary Wigon’s gothic horror Victorian Psycho lives, starring Maika Monroe, Thomasin McKenzie, and 13-year-old Jacobi Jupe, who was the best thing in Hamnet.

And then there’s Quentin Dupieux. The French filmmaker — once better known as techno artist Mr. Oizo, directing puppet-filled music videos on Euro MTV — has been making some of the strangest, most delightful movies in any language for years. Full Phil is his first English-language comedy since 2013’s Wrong Cops, and his most star-laden film ever: Woody Harrelson and Kristen Stewart as a father and daughter on a Parisian vacation. There are no rules here. That’s the whole point.

The One Playing Outside Competition

Steven Soderbergh’s documentary John Lennon: The Last Interview screens as a special presentation rather than a competition entry, but it may be the most talked-about film at the festival. The film is built around Lennon’s final interview, given at the Dakota in New York shortly before he was killed. Soderbergh has acknowledged using artificial intelligence to illustrate some of Lennon’s more philosophical musings — a detail that drew headlines before a single frame was seen. Whether that choice illuminates or distracts is exactly the conversation Cannes was made for.

Oh, and while all of this is happening on screen, The White Lotus will be filming its fourth season on the Croisette itself. Even the real world at Cannes this year looks like a movie.

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