The 10 best movies we saw at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival

Los Angeles Times

24-05-2025

CANNES, France — Saturday's awards ceremony put a capstone on another edition of the Cannes Film Festival, but the bruises we received from some of our favorite films are ones we'll be rubbing for a while. A more vicious Cannes? Undoubtedly. Directorial debuts were especially bold and if you were an auteur returning to claim the throne, let's hope you brought plenty of firepower. In the case of the 10 titles below, they certainly did. You'll hear us raving about these in the coming months. Proceed with caution. Some of them have a sting.
If you've spent years waiting for Lynne Ramsay's films to come around — she's very cautious about committing — then you know how exquisite it is when they finally do arrive and they still knock you back. A dependable upsetter of expectations, Ramsay tries something completely different here, pushing an actor to the very edge of mania and dislocation. It helps that the actor is Jennifer Lawrence, who lately — especially in 'No Holds Barred' and the underseen 'Causeway' — seems to want to fling herself into new territory. 'Die, My Love,' about a new mom saddled with a husband she nearly hates and a rural home that feels like a tomb, turns its star into a casually violent supernova, throwing off sparks and pain and ruination. It's the most punk thing Ramsay has ever done and, for the maker of 'Ratcatcher' and 'We Need to Talk About Kevin,' that's saying something. — Joshua Rothkopf
Everybody loves June Squibb, who, at 95, has only now landed her second starring role. (Her first, the crime-fighting comedy 'Thelma,' was just last year.) Squibb is great fun to watch cutting loose. Here, her incorrigible Eleanor barks at a grocery store clerk to fetch the kosher pickles and cackles with glee informing her grandson that his mother's high school nickname was the 'class mattress.' But Eleanor goes too far when, out of loneliness, she falsely claims to be a Holocaust survivor and doubles down on the lie rather than admit the truth. First-time director Scarlett Johansson grounds this small New York story in empathy. You sense that she's made the kind of character-driven charmer she wouldn't mind acting in herself in five decades. An easy, breezy recommendation, 'Eleanor the Great' makes only one stumble, a scene that blurts its themes outright, but I suppose that's in keeping with its leading lady's big mouth. — Amy Nicholson
If forgiveness is sometimes the only way forward for those seeking justice, then memory is the enemy of that healing. And there are some things you just can't forget. Like the sound of a false leg, upon which every step becomes a little wheeze. We hear it right away — the guy with this leg has a family, a pregnant wife, a daughter and, on their drive home, some car problems. But the more he walks around (wheeze) and the more people hear it (wheeze), the more it becomes clear this isn't any old customer, but a former torturer who had his way with them in the old days. But can they be sure, even without their blindfolds? Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, jailed and banned frequently, has never allowed his work get mawkish. Yet this film is the closest he's come to expressing the rage of living under someone's thumb. It's his 'Death and the Maiden' and all the more major for it, with a gracefully devastating conclusion that you owe it to yourself to experience. — JR
Leave it to Kelly Reichardt, who turned Michelle Williams into a seething sculptor with frenemy issues in 'Showing Up,' to make the gentlest, most self-deprecating heist movie imaginable. As such, she's invented a whole new genre. The year is 1970 but don't expect anything Scorsesian to go down here. Rather, this one's about a half-smart art thief (Josh O'Connor, leaning into loser vibes) who, after snatching canvases of a lesser-known modernist from an understaffed Massachusetts museum, suffers grievously as his plan unravels. Reichardt, herself the daughter of law enforcement, is more interested in the aftermath: hypnotically awkward kitchen conversations with disappointed family members who won't lend him any more money and would rather he just clear out. (The exquisite period-perfect cast includes Alana Haim, Bill Camp, Hope Davis and John Magaro.) Danny Ocean types need not apply, but if you hear skittering jazz music as the soundtrack of desperation, your new favorite comedy is here. — JR
Director Harry Lighton's boundary-testing romance opens with a shy British lad named Colin (Harry Melling) in the back of his parents' car, gawking out the window at a leather-clad biker (Alexander Skarsgård). The soundtrack swoons with the '60s pop ballad 'I Will Follow Him.' Colin sure does — first to the local pub, then to a dark alley, then to the sexy stranger's house where the brute orders Colin to cook dinner, sleep on the floor and service him on command. Demeaning? Absolutely, but Colin is eager to please and genuinely loves to grovel. 'He says I have an aptitude for devotion,' the smitten boy beams, with his master's padlock chained around his neck. Lighton is curious to explore how submission gives Colin the confidence to go after what he wants. No one in the theater is in for a traditional love story, yet we, too, happily accept the terms of the deal. — AN
The title of Kleber Mendonça Filho's Brazilian crime movie does it a disservice — put out of mind anything as creaky as Le Carré. Yes, bad things are happening in 1977 in the city of Recife: political disappearances, murder in the streets, a thorough sense of 'mischief,' as one early title card calls it. But the movie really rests on the soulful eyes of a superb Wagner Moura as a widower and scientist targeted by shadowy forces, someone who only wants to reconnect with his young 'Jaws'-obsessed son, who's beginning to forget his mother. Because this is Mendonça, the inspired maker of 'Bacurau' and 'Pictures of Ghosts' (a lovely ode to shuttered movie palaces), the new film is filled with vivid bits of cultural debris: tabloid stories about a disembodied leg that goes on a kicking spree of its own; or the sound of a theater audience screaming at 'The Omen.' This was the fullest meal I had at Cannes. — JR
Somewhere on the road to nowhere, a group of semi-tough strangers roll into the desert in speeding trucks. Look for meaning if you must: There's some chat about 'the end of the world' and also a missing daughter somewhere. Neither matters all that much, nor is any kind of rationale necessary to fall sway to director Oliver Laxe's deliriously cool survival story, gassed by a pedal-to-the-metal need for speed and pounding EDM music which, if played at the proper volume, should rattle your rib cage. 'Sirât' seems poised at the finale of civilization, but everything about it (including one shocking moment of destruction) is offered in the pursuit of pure exhilaration. Unconcerned with smallness, the movie comes within scraping distance of Michelangelo Antonioni's cryptic 1970 'Zabriskie Point' and maybe 'Quest for Fire' too, except this is a quest for beats, even as bodies break down. I'm totally fine with this being the end of the world. — JR
Michael Angelo Covino's sprightly comedy about self-destructing relationships opens with a bang: Carey and Ashley (Kyle Marvin and Adria Arjona) dodge a fatal highway crash, inspiring the latter to announce she's been cheating. Carey runs out of the car, into the wood and into bed with Julie (Dakota Johnson), his best friend's wife. Both couples claim they're hip enough to make non-monogamy work. Yeah, right. Everyone talks a big game to salvage their marriage and their pride and winds up looking ridiculous. (And while the hypocrisy is centered on the bedroom, it's applicable elsewhere, too). I'm unconvinced the naturalistic cinematography was the right call — it makes the script's fizzy hijinks come off a tad too mumblecore — but there's a fantastic sequence of Carey getting buddy-buddy with Ashley's lovers and a brawl that goes much further than you expect. People don't just lose their dignity: They lose their eyebrows. — AN
The 28-year-old actor Harris Dickinson first came to Cannes in 2022 as the himbo lead of Ruben Östlund's 'Triangle of Sadness.' Now he's back with his own film about a streetwise addict and it turns out he's a heck of a director, too. Dickinson plays a supporting part in 'Urchin' as a feral bum who steals wallets and harangues shopkeepers, but what you really notice is his generous spirit. He's given the film's starring role to Frank Dillane, who delivers a career-launching, protean performance as the lively, moody, violent Mike. A true actor's director, Dickinson invests so much life into his bit characters that even players with only a line or two feel like they could spin off into their own movies. 'Urchin' is rich in confidence without a penny of do-gooder pity. And it has a sense of humor, opening with a sidewalk preacher who flogs her Bible app. — AN
You can't take your eyes off Tel Aviv hipsters Yasmin and Y (Efrat Dor and Ariel Bronz). She's a wild sexpot, he's a hyperactive musician and together this hot-to-trot couple is the life of a party that's gotten a bit grotesque. They make a living kissing up to the rich and powerful — in the first 10 minutes, a wealthy woman literally commands them both to suckle her ears. But in the wake of the Oct. 7 tragedy and everything that's come since, their hangovers feel like death. Israeli director Nadav Lapid's audacious and dazzling 'Yes' thumps with dance music and the sound of people bouncing off the walls to distract themselves from pain. It's the first great film to grapple with the brainsick mental strain of enjoying a lovely day — the sun is out, the booze is flowing — while your phone dings with headlines of horrors happening elsewhere. Maybe you can relate. — AN