Cannes has recently become a “launchpad for Hollywood blockbusters” from “Top Gun: Maverick” to “Killers of the Flower Moon”, said The Times. But in its 79th year, a “strange thing has happened”: it’s once again all “about the art”.
Major studios wary of rocking the box-office boat with negative early reviews have shunned the French festival, and instead the 2026 line-up is filled with indie collabs, and what the Oscars call “foreign-language” films. Here are some of our top picks.
Fatherland
Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski’s film about “exile and betrayal” is “an impossibly elegant, poised historical vignette”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Shot in “lustrous monochrome” by Lukasz Zal, it follows German novelist Thomas Mann as he returns home to Frankfurt in 1949, having fled the Nazis before the war “for California exile”. He is accompanied by his “long-suffering” daughter, Erika, played with the “usual bayonet of intelligence” by Sandra Hüller. But the Germany they find is “dead”, and “perhaps Mann himself, with his American passport, is now a ghost”.
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When the Night Falls
Daniel Auteuil directs and stars in this “taut drama, set in occupied Lyons in 1942”, said Ed Potton in The Times. It’s based on a true story of efforts to save hundreds of Jewish people in an internment camp “from being sent somewhere much worse”. The Nazis never appear on camera; they remain ominously out of shot, adding to the “sense of dread”. Auteuil plays an “intrepid” Catholic priest, desperately searching for reasons to save prisoners. “Acted with restraint” and “atmospherically directed”, the film builds to a “perilous rain-lashed finale which reminds you that this war had plenty of French heroes”.
Hope
Na Hong-jin’s sci-fi horror is “crazy good” fun, said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. Right from the opening scenes, it’s clear you’re “in the hands of an assured genre auteur”. Police are called to a remote village in South Korea where “vicious slaughter” has left a “bull dead in the middle of the road with massive claw marks gouged deep into its fur and flesh”. As officers try to hunt down the mysterious predator, viewers are treated to “set piece after kickass set piece” and “superbly choreographed clashes”. It’s a “wildly entertaining assault of turbo-charged thrills” with “virtuoso camerawork” and a “pulse-pounding score”.
Fjord
This “magnificently controlled yet blood-boiling drama” stars Sebastian Stan and Renata Reinsve as a devoutly religious Romanian couple who move with their children to a remote Norwegian village, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph. But their “strict attitude to discipline raises their neighbours’ hackles” and they soon find themselves “sucked into a serpentine child protection nightmare”. Writer and director Cristian Mungiu has made a “slow-burn provocation that knows exactly which buttons it is pressing”; he isn’t afraid to “grapple” with the “thorny” issues he’s raising. And the lead performances are “superb”.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
It was always going to be tricky following up the “meta-oddness” of “I Saw the TV Glow” but director Jane Schoenbrun has pulled it off with this “unqualified triumph”, said Donald Clarke in The Irish Times. Hannah Einbinder stars as Kris, “a queer feminist director” tasked with rebooting a slasher movie franchise that began in the 1980s. She tracks down the “reclusive” original star (Gillian Anderson having “fabulous fun”), and the film descends into a “decadent reverie that is all Schoenbrun’s own”.
Clarissa
“Exquisite and moving, ‘Clarissa’ is Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs Dalloway’ transported to present day Lagos,” said Tim Robey in The Telegraph. The cast is led by the “luminous” Sophie Okonedo in the title role: a hostess getting ready for a party and “micromanaging every detail”. Directed by Nigerian twin brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri, the themes of Woolf’s novel are made to “vibrate, resonate, and dance before us, 100 years later, in a time and place far beyond the author’s reach”. It’s an “elegant” film that beautifully brings to life a “bittersweet reunion in which the sobering passage of time is on everyone’s minds”.