Every year, nearly 3000 films are sent to the selection committee of the Cannes Film Festival. It’s up to a handful of people to select the few dozen that make up the line-up. Some of them are masterpieces. Some of them definitely aren’t. Some of them feel like they should be, based on who made them and who starred in them, but then get slated by critics instead. This is how the festival has operated for 78 years, mixing anticipation and discovery in its cinemas, and pure pomp on its iconic red carpet. On May 13, after a wild 2024 selection that included Anora and The Substance, the whole thing starts again.
Thanks to the strikes ending, it’s said that 2025 is bound to be a bumper year, and that’s mostly reflected in the line-up for this year’s festival. The movie stars are in town, and some of them are wearing director’s hats. Neon, the American indie movie studio, is bringing even more movies after winning the festival’s main prize, the Palme d’Or, for a record five years in a row. And like most years, there’s a bunch of movies featuring gay guys, because it’s the south of France and this is arthouse moviemaking.
The whole situation can get confusing. People throw around buzzwords and phrases that make little sense to most folks. Why do people talk about it with such great importance? What movie will premiere there that everyone will talk about ad infinitum, hailing it a new masterpiece and bragging about the fact you won’t be able to see it until November? To answer all of your questions, here’s what’s worth knowing about the Cannes Film Festival and its 2025 line-up.
Wait, So How Does This Whole Thing Work?
With some exceptions, like tickets for locals, Cannes Film Festival is famously just for the industry, with filmmakers and journalists––over 40,000 of them––populating its screening rooms.
Its official selection is spread across several sections. In order of importance, they are: the Official Competition, where mostly established directors compete for the Palme d’Or; Un Certain Regard, the home of new filmmakers and artier fare; Out of Competition, for the starrier (often a little more low brow) stuff; Cannes Premiere and Special Screenings, two sections that feel interchangeable, but that capture the less juicy arthouse material; Midnight, for pulpy, dark stuff; and Cannes Classics––for, well, the remastered or forgotten classics.
But not all of history’s Cannes hits originated here. There are three ‘sidebars’, as we call them. Director’s Fortnight has hosted the world premieres of some legendary director’s first and second films, among them Robert Eggers (The Lighthouse), Chloe Zhao (The Rider), Xavier Dolan (I Killed My Mother), and Chantal Akerman (Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles). Critic’s Week, a little more hit and miss in its offerings, has delivered masterpieces––among them Aftersun, that little Paul Mescal-starrer that went on to earn him an Oscar nomination. Then, there’s Acid, which is for the real heads. Most Cannes-goers will tell you not to bother venturing that far down the Croisette (the beach front of Cannes) unless the slate further up gets really dire.
The Big, Big Stuff
Before the main line-up is announced, we always have a strong idea of the splashy summer popcorn film that will opt for a bow. In the past, it’s been movies like Elvis or Mad Max: Fury Road. This year, that’s the (supposedly) last installment in the Mission Impossible franchise, titled Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning. That means Tom Cruise is coming. Last time he rocked up there, he brought a trio of fighter jets that flew so low over the skies above the city that most people on the ground were convinced that a war had broken out––not that the premiere for Top Gun: Maverick was taking place. What crazy stunt will he throw this time? Drop out of a helicopter onto the red carpet on a quad bike? Stage a fake hijacking of a private yacht and blow it up for fun? Fuck knows but the nerds (and by that I mean me) will be sat for this film’s world premiere, regardless of what bells and whistles that come with it.
If that’s not enough star power for you, they always seem to have a Wes Anderson film to hand. This year, it’s The Phoenician Scheme, which will bring Benicio del Toro, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Michael Cera, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Riz Ahmed and Scarlett Johansson to the Croisette. Johansson should also be present for another project. Next section, please.
First Time Directors (Who Also Act)
Spend long enough around directors on set and you’ll naturally develop a hunger to take the reins yourself one day. For two of the filmmakers in this year’s line-up, that’s true. The envy of every young male actor, Harris Dickinson, has brought his debut feature Urchin to the festival, about an unhoused, recovering addict trying to find his feet in contemporary London. Scarlett Johansson will stick around after her Wes premiere for her own directorial debut, Eleanor the Great, a June Squibb-starring comedy about a New York teenager befriending a 90-year-old Floridian woman. Years after its announcement, Kristen Stewart’s feature length directorial debut The Chronology of Water was rumored to make an appearance. It’s based on the memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch, a swimmer-turned-writer whose hopes of becoming an Olympic star were scuppered by her troubled childhood. The festival loves her, so its omission is a surprise—maybe it will show up at a later date. Encouragingly, these actors have all taken conscious steps out of the acting spotlight to focus on making these projects. In the past, stepping behind the camera was a vanity move designed to bring greater status in front of it. We hope this duo (potentially trio) are the real deal.
Some Legends Didn’t Return (But a New One Joined Their Ranks)
Directors over the age of 50, almost all of them men, somehow manage to create a sustainable lifestyle for themselves by releasing movies at the same cadence that Lady Gaga makes albums that both gay and straight people like: once a decade. When those long-gestating projects are finally finished, they’re usually brought to the Croisette. Perhaps the most talked about this year was Terrence Malick, the man who ruined Adrien Brody’s life (or saved it, he says) by cutting him entirely from The Thin Red Line, and radicalized a new generation of filmmakers with the magnificent, often impenetrable The Tree of Life. Finally, nearly six years after the shoot wrapped, everyone thought his religious epic The Way of the Wind would come to Cannes. It’s probably going to be a very long masterpiece—so long, in fact, that he didn’t finish it in time for the announcement. Perhaps it’ll be a late addition to the line-up, or maybe the 81-year-old director will take another year to finish it.
Also conspicuously absent is Cannes regular Jim Jarmusch, whose new film Father, Mother, Sister Brother stars Cate Blanchett. In his place is a younger auteur who, after skipping festivals with his last film, Beau is Afraid, has the confidence to premiere his new one to the most discerning audience in cinema: Ari Aster. His latest film Eddington, a satire said to riff upon the sharp political divide in the States, will bring Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone and Austin Butler to town.
Joining him in the competition line-up are some of the others who make regular appearances: Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who’ve won the Palme d’Or before, enlisted Close director Lukas Dhont to produce their latest social realist film Young Mothers. And prolific Iranian master Jafar Panahi surprised us with a new one, titled A Simple Accident. Despite him not being part of this morning’s announcement, Spike Lee has already confirmed that he’ll be bringing his latest, the A$AP Rocky-starring Highest 2 Lowest, to the festival too, where it will premiere Out of Competition.
Gay Guys Everywhere
The Queer Palm is the annual prize doled out by a selection of filmmakers and critics to the film in the official line-up that captures the LGBTQ+ experience. The parameters have been loose in the past (last year’s Bird qualified for its themes of “chosen family”––sure!), but this year has a handful of films that formally fit the bill. Most of them, on first inspection though, are about gay guys. Rumor has it Pillion, appearing in Un Certain Regard, is laden with gay sex scenes. A24 picked up the film last year, and it’s based on the novel Box Hill, about a curious young gay man who falls into a sadomasochistic relationship with a leather-clad biker. Alexander Skarsgard and Harry Melling star. Pictured above, Campillo’s Enzo, about a teenage boy from an affluent family who meets a young Ukrainian man during his masonry apprenticeship, also sounds pretty gay, and while it’s not appeared in the Official Selection, there are swirling rumors it will show up in Director’s Fortnight when that’s announced later this month.
But perhaps the centerpiece of the gay guy line-up is Oliver Hermanus’ The History of Sound, a contemplative period drama about two men who meet in music college and engage in a quiet love affair. Paul Mescal leads opposite Josh O’Connor, who’s in town for a Cannes double whammy: He also leads The Mastermind, a drama from American indie director Kelly Reichardt. That’s about art thieves during the Vietnam War, and also stars Alana Haim.
Can Neon Do It Again?
The team over at Neon, the independent movie studio, must come to Cannes each year feeling like they own the place. Since 2019, they’ve won every single Palme d’Or: from 2019’s Parasite through to last year’s Anora. (Titane, Triangle of Sadness, and Anatomy of a Fall came in between––2020 was a fallow year for the pandemic). They arrive at this year’s festival with a handful of projects that could continue that crazy, unrivalled streak. Maybe it will be Alpha, the new film from Titane’s Julia Ducournau, about a teenage girl in an alt-New York City during the AIDS crisis. Or, after having a crazy, post-Cannes ascent with The Worst Person in the World, Danish-Norwegian director Joachim Trier is back with Sentimental Value, a family drama that reunites him with his Worst Person breakout Renate Reinsve, and introduces Elle Fanning into that world. It feels impossible that they’ll manage it for again, but we said that last year and look where it got us.
The One Everyone’s Talking About
Every year, there’s one film that nobody’s seen, from a director few people have heard of, that people make intimidatingly big claims about. In 2024, that was All We Imagine as Light, Payal Kapadia’s brilliant film about three friends in modern day Mumbai reckoning with gentrification, womanhood and tradition. This year, everyone I talk to seems to be whispering about one film, and it’s a German film from a director who hasn’t made a new film since 2017. In the in-between time, she’s been directing episodes of a fairly straight-laced crime series, and working on this: Sound of Falling. With the working title The Doctor Says I’ll Be Alright But I’m Feelin’ Blue, the film is said to be set across four generations, focusing on the lives of four different young women who all live on a farm, but find themselves connected to one another.
The beautiful thing about Cannes is that this film might just be one of the most wonderful things to grace our screens in 2025. Or it might be completely rubbish. We just won’t know until the festival kicks off on May 16. We’ll be there to tell you!