I attended Cannes Film Festival for the 1st time. These are the movies I'd tell you to see — and skip — when they arrive in theaters.

Yahoo

6 days ago

I didn't expect to spend most of my time at the Cannes Film Festival in the beautiful French Riviera with my eyes glued to my phone, furiously refreshing the ticketing pages to get a coveted seat at a screening, but it paid off. I saw 11 movies over the course of six days.
Over the last few years, Cannes has become a major hot spot for filmmakers hoping to have their movies considered for the Oscars. In 2024, it gave us Best Picture winner Anora, buzzed-about box office shocker The Substance and the awards season villain of the century, Emilia Pérez. This year, the festival's top prize (the Palme d'Or) went to It Was Just an Accident, with other highly anticipated films like The Secret Agent, Sentimental Value, Sirât and Sound of Falling nabbing other accolades. This might be the last time you hear about those titles until January, but trust me, they'll be back for awards season in full force.
Often at festivals, movies screened for cinephiles on the ground never make it to a wider audience. But Cannes is now the battleground for trendy film distributors hoping to get movie lovers talking for the rest of the year and during awards season. Many of the movies I saw will be coming soon, and I wouldn't be surprised if they're all snatched up in the next few weeks for theatergoers' viewing pleasure.
I left after the first week of screenings, so I was crushed to miss out on buzzy flicks like Sentimental Value, The Secret Agent and It Was Just an Accident. The ones I did get to see have been haunting me in the best way, though. Here are my favorites from the festival — and the ones I've already forgotten.
Jennifer Lawrence is already an Oscar winner and a legend, but her brief time away from the spotlight was clearly refreshing because she turns this sad story about how a woman becomes increasingly unhinged after having a baby into a riveting masterpiece.
It's visually stunning, and Robert Pattinson is delightfully pathetic, but Lawrence steals every scene. It sold for a whopping $24 million, and if Lawrence doesn't get an Oscar nod for this one, I'll eat my Cannes-branded tote bag.
I had a particularly intense Mission: Impossible screening complete with the cast and my first-ever standing ovation, which went on for 7.5 minutes, but the movie is objectively big, loud and fantastic even without all of the pageantry of a premiere.
The alleged final movie of the franchise is in theaters now, so you won't have to wait to see it, but try to go IMAX if you can! You'll want to see Tom Cruise defying gravity and logic in the sanctuary of a big-screen theater, because it's truly a religious experience.
All you need to know about Sirât is that a father goes with his son to find his missing daughter at a rave, and it gets worse from there. The movie has an infectious score, and the plot is so jaw-droppingly unsettling and unexpected from start to finish that I was white-knuckling my seat.
Several people walked out of my screening, and when it ended, I ranted to my husband for five minutes straight about how upsetting it was. The next morning, I woke up realizing I had seen a masterpiece. Thank goodness Neon is bringing it to theaters.
I was particularly invested in Eddington because I spent hours standing in line to get a glimpse of its star-studded cast members like Pedro Pascal and Austin Butler, but the COVID-era Western satire fell flat for a lot of critics.
When my screening ended, a man in front of me stood up, shouted 'Boo!' and briskly exited the theater. It might be a little too soon for anyone to fully appreciate the uncanniness of pandemic life onscreen, but the polarizing movie comes to theaters July 18 regardless.
Plenty of actors premiered their directorial debuts at Cannes this year: Kristen Stewart, Scarlett Johansson and Harris Dickinson all had buzzy screenings. But I was lucky to see Urchin, which Babygirl standout Dickinson wrote and directed, as my final movie of the festival.
I loved how evident it was in the film that Dickinson's acting talent comes from his deep emotional intelligence. His directing elevated what could have been a depressing film about a man struggling to break out of the cycle of addiction and homelessness into a poignant tale that will haunt me.
Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave, is Richard Linklater's French-language, black-and-white ode to director Jean-Luc Godard. It recreates the filming of Godard's most iconic movie, Breathless, in 1959, and all the antics that ensued when the chaotic director pieced together a masterpiece based solely on vibes. That might sound a little pretentious and inaccessible to most audiences, and maybe it is, but this was Cannes, baby!
There was so much witty banter and so many references to influential filmmakers that my heart turned into a glowing ball of cinephilic pride. It felt like being in a college film class again. It's coming to Netflix, so you can have that feeling in your own living room.
If you've seen a Wes Anderson movie before, you'll be familiar with what goes down here: Quirky characters, elaborate set pieces and a series of ultra-famous faces.
Benicio del Toro stars as a businessman who taps his nun daughter (newcomer Mia Threapleton) as his sole heir, but assassins and business rivals — including Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston, who they must defeat in a basketball game — cause trouble for them along the way. Michael Cera is particularly delightful in his role. It's just a blast.
I was expecting a slow and sweet romantic drama to be Cannes's opening night movie, but I wasn't prepared for it to be a musical. The film follows a celebrity chef who must return to her hometown after a family emergency and reconnects with an old crush. It was a lot like The Bear, but with singing.
One thing that pervaded my jet-lagged mind during the screening, though, was how much I loved the main character's haircut. Should I get bangs?
Though I came to Cannes hoping to see controversy and critical accalaim, I was quietly moved by The Little Sister, which stars Nadia Melliti in her first-ever role as a Muslim teenager secretively coming to terms with her queer identity.
The movie demands patience and attention — a tall order for a long day of screenings — but delivers with one particularly gorgeous scene between the protagonist and her mother in which not much is said directly. I won't spoil it, but I promise it's worth it, and Melliti unexpectedly won Cannes's Best Actress prize for it.
Case 137 is about a detective investigating an act of violence by police officers — a timely premise that I have, unfortunately, seen played out on nearly every season of Law and Order in a tight 40 minutes.
What I will remember far longer than anything that happened in the movie, though, is the fact that one of its stars was banned from walking the red carpet at the premiere because of rape allegations against him. It was the first ban of its kind at Cannes, and it sparked quite a bit of discourse on the Croisette.
I was low on energy and worried about time when I slipped into the premiere screening of this German-language film about girls growing up in the same farmhouse over the span of 100 years. How many times could I watch generational trauma unfold without getting bored and worn down? Endless, apparently.
Its stars, who I had never heard of, delivered performances I'll never forget, and the plot went places I'd never think to go. The standing ovation was cut short for time — Mission: Impossible premiered after this one — but Sound of Falling was the best of the festival for me. I may give it my own standing ovation when it comes to theaters stateside.