Gay Kink, Godard (Via Linklater) and German Girlhood: THR's Critics Pick the 20 Best Films of Cannes 2025

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25-05-2025

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
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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, Jeffrey Wright and A$AP Rocky. — DAVID ROONEY
COMPETITION
Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor offer more proof that they are among our best contemporary actors in Oliver Hermanus' tender account of a too-fleeting gay love affair interrupted by World War I. Adapted by Ben Shattuck from his short story, the film's romance blossoms from the intimate experience the two main characters share of traveling the backwoods of Maine in 1919, collecting traditional folk tunes from rural people. The director and his leads find quiet power in understatement. — D.R.
COMPETITION
Revolving around a group of ex-prisoners and the man they suspect of being their former torturer, Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi's intricately crafted drama examines the traumas suffered by political dissidents. The filmmaker puts aside the self-reflexive storytelling that has marked much of his work since he was first arrested in 2010, delivering a straightforward narrative that's plotted like a good thriller but builds into a stark condemnation of abusive power. — J.M.
COMPETITION
French cinema is littered with sexual coming-of-age films, but occasionally one comes along that cuts through the crowd with its confidence and texture, its erotic charge and lingering nostalgic ache. Hafsia Herzi's study of a Paris-area Muslim teen's lesbian awakening is such a film. Vibrantly felt yet impressively controlled — and blessed with a stone-cold stunner of a lead turn from newcomer Nadia Melliti — it's an instant queer classic, as moving in its humanism as it is sexy. — JON FROSCH
COMPETITION
Leave it to Kelly Reichardt to make a '70s movie that looks and feels like a lost '70s movie, from its scruffy visual aesthetic to its muted colors, its unhurried pacing to its unstinting investment in an underdog protagonist. Josh O'Connor is ideally cast as the out-of-work carpenter who pulls off a major art theft in a heist caper that spends as much time on the aftermath of the crime, when it morphs gracefully into another of the director's singular character studies of struggling Americans. — D.R.
UN CERTAIN REGARD
Akinola Davies Jr.'s feature debut — the first Nigerian film to premiere at Cannes — is a poignant meditation on the relationship between a man and his estranged sons, set over the course of a single day of Nigeria's 1993 presidential election. Considering how political unrest threatens not just the fragile optimism of a nation but also this family, the filmmaker employs a poetic visual grammar to envelop viewers in the memories of kids trying to understand their dad. — LOVIA GYARKYE
COMPETITION
Richard Linklater's charming homage, a behind-the-scenes peek at the making of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, is a far cry from Godard, stylistically. Yet it does an impressive job capturing the spirit of the man at work, showing what it took to put his groundbreaking movie together. With French newcomer Guillaume Marbeck as the iconoclastic auteur and Zoey Deutch as American leading lady Jean Seberg, the breezy film never takes itself too seriously while highlighting a very serious moment in film history. — J.M.
COMPETITION
Wes Anderson's latest won't have haters reconsidering, but it will entice those who've been feeling alienated to rejoin the ranks. The enchanting espionage comedy flaunts an excellent Benicio del Toro as a 1950s industrialist, who, after surviving an attempt on his life, names his estranged daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton) as heir to his empire. With Michael Cera and Scarlett Johansson among the sprawling cast, the movie bears the auteur's trademark aesthetics but also a tenderness that sneaks up on you. — L.G.
UN CERTAIN REGARD
Abuse, cringe humor and unexpectedly sweet queer romance somehow coexist in Brit writer-director Harry Lighton's audacious and disarming first feature about the relationship between a stern biker (Alexander Skarsgard) and a shy suburban London traffic warden (Harry Melling). The film is less about the shock factor of some very graphic gay kink than the nuances of love, desire and mutual needs within a sub/dom relationship. Both actors are fearless. — D.R.
UN CERTAIN REGARD
Charlie Polinger's thrilling directorial debut observes boys at a summer water polo camp, with terrific newcomers Everett Blunck and Kayo Martin portraying opposite ends of the power spectrum and Joel Edgerton in a brief but effective turn as their coach. Working from his own screenplay, Polinger uses horror conventions to tease out the psychic terror and intimidation of preteen social codes. In the age of renewed questions about the manosphere, the movie feels sharply relevant. — L.G.
DIRECTORS' FORTNIGHT
Set in 1990s Iraq, Hasan Hadi's exceptional debut feature revolves around a third grader on a mission to complete a dreaded school assignment: baking a birthday cake for Saddam Hussein. With well-known American filmmakers among its producers (Eric Roth, Chris Columbus, Marielle Heller) and a cast of mostly untrained actors, the stirring, humor-laced drama is as perceptive as it is kinetic and, with one eye on the U.S. bombers overhead, brimming with life. — SHERI LINDEN
COMPETITION
Chie Hayakawa's delicately moving drama depicts a crucial summer in the life of 11-year-old Fuki (lovely newcomer Yui Suzuki) as she navigates her father's battle with cancer, her mother's stress and her own persistent loneliness. Set in suburban Tokyo in 1987, the film follows Fuki as she wanders the city and retreats into her imagination. Hayakawa calibrates her story to the volume of a whisper, as if in a conspiratorial conversation with her own memories. — L.G.
COMPETITION
Wagner Moura makes a stellar return to Brazilian cinema after several years away, playing a technology expert fleeing the country in 1977 while hitmen hired by a federal official pursue him in Kleber Mendonça Filho's masterful political thriller. Despite some brilliant comic flourishes, this is a deeply serious movie about a painful time in Brazil's past, when people disappeared and even far-flung cities where the dictatorship was invisible felt its long reach. It's a major achievement, sure to be one of the year's best films. — D.R.
COMPETITION
Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgard, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas and Elle Fanning illuminate Joachim Trier's piercing reflection on family and memory, centered around a house in Oslo that has absorbed generations of experience. The director's observation of the mutable contracts between sisters, and even more so, fathers and daughters, is intensely affecting in a movie freighted with melancholy but also leavened by notes of surprising humor. With traces of Bergman but also Chekhov and Ibsen, the film explores the volatile power of art and the cost of making highly personal work. — D.R.
COMPETITION
French-born Spanish director Oliver Laxe's beguiling and beautiful fourth feature follows a father and son searching for a missing family member who join a group of itinerant ravers in the deserts of Morocco. The result is a techno-infused meditation on death, grief and possibility in a world edging toward collapse. The stunningly conjured location functions as both a repository for overwhelming feelings and a reminder of our own smallness in the grand scheme of things. — L.G.
COMPETITION
It's not every day you see a movie that resembles nothing you've seen before. German director Mascha Schilinski's bold second feature is just that: a transfixing chronicle in which the lives of four girls are fused into one long cinematic tone poem, hopping between different epochs without warning, painting a portrait of budding womanhood and rural strife through the ages. It's a work that reminds us how cinema can still reinvent itself, as long as there are directors audacious enough to try. — J.M.
COMPETITION
This impeccably directed, impressively acted Stalin-era drama from Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa follows a law school graduate who attempts to take on corruption in the Soviet system and winds up facing the consequences. It's a slow-burn story of political injustice filled to the brim with atmosphere — specifically the claustrophobia of the U.S.S.R. at the height of the Great Purge. Loznitsa is reflecting on the past here, but for anyone who cares to look, he's also holding a mirror up to the present. — J.M.
UN CERTAIN REGARD
Harris Dickinson's impressive first foray behind the camera follows an unhoused Londoner trying to get clean while stuck on a treadmill of addiction. Neither the writer-director — whose influences here include Mike Leigh, Ken Loach and Gus Van Sant — nor lead Frank Dillane, who acts with a nervy volatility offset by insouciant charm and humor, courts our sympathies, even as the film shows unquestionable compassion. — D.R.
COMPETITION
The latest from the two-time Palme d'Or-winning Dardenne brothers is their most surprising work in years. A tender and clearsighted ensemble piece, it provides unfiltered emotional access to the anxieties and hopes of five vulnerable working-class teenage women and the babies requiring their love and care, often when they can barely care for themselves. There's never a false note from the young actors, all of whom have deeply moving scenes. — D.R.
A version of this story appeared in the May 21 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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