The 78th edition of the Cannes Film Festival took place in a contrasting spring from Tuesday 13 to Saturday 14 May 2025. Covered by KillerS7ven and the celest wolf For almost nine days, the event was worth the trip since the festive atmosphere, the fairy décor of the Bay of Cannes, the encounters in queues and at the Press Room, the gourmet cuisine and the discussions between movie fanatics were arranged on the Croisette.
The curtain fell on this prestigious event, an essential showcase of the glamorous international cinema, commitment and creativity. Again this year, the selection was affirmed as a celebration of freedom of expression where art has interacted with the stakes of the world. In a troubled geopolitical context, programming has thus reflected the great contemporary debates and the ills of society through the diversity of voices of world cinema.
Under Juliette Binoche's presidency, the jury has rewarded works that push conventions and question the world today. An edition marked by societal and political issues, confirming the festival's role as an artistic and committed forum. Back to a year in which Cannes proved, once again, that cinema is a force for reflection and emotion for all lovers of 7th art. Follow the laurel leaves!
Contents
Eddington
May 2020 in Eddington, a small city in New Mexico, the confrontation between the sheriff and the mayor set fire to the powders by raising the inhabitants against each other.
Between viral paranoia and virulent satire, this post-COVID neo-western where masks fall sees his election campaign turn into a conspiracy nightmare. A slow-burning black farce where the duel between Joaquin Phoenix, a rebel sheriff, and Pedro Pascal, as a mayor as smooth as an election speech, becomes a bloody parable of the fractured America of 2020. And if it oscillates between the great West and the great anything, it's to better shoot live bullets on the fake news. Jubilatory!
Palmometer: 🌿🌿🌿🌿
The Wave (2025)
Waves of change erupt on campus, and among the occupation and gatherings is Julia, a music student who joins the cause to denounce the harassment and abuse suffered by students for far too long.
Between fighting songs and furious choreographies, this committed and electrifying musical about the Chilean feminist revolts of 2018 makes the slogans dance and vibrate consciousness. A rising tide of emotions and demands where a student, THE heart beating out of a movement that flows over a polarized society, turns her anger into a rhythm, her voice into a cry and her steps into a claim. Join the dance of change!
Palmometer: 🌿🌿🌿🌿
Arco
In 2075, a 10-year-old girl, Iris, saw a mysterious boy dressed in a rainbow suit falling from the sky. It's Arco. It comes from a distant and idyllic future where travel in time is possible. Iris collects him and will help him by all means to return home.
This animation nugget, which combines tenderness and science fiction with rare elegance, delivers an optimistic vision of a harmonious future between man and technology. One Ghibli to French with multiple levels of reading (abysses of reflection for the greatest) which, without artifices but with a soul, binds us on a rainbow of hope and confidence in imagination. A 1st long more than promising for Ugo Welcome, the intelligent animator who thinks up to children.
Palmometer: 🌿🌿🌿🌿
Case 137
File 137 is apparently another case for Stephanie, investigator at the IGPN, the police force. A tense demonstration, a young man injured by an LBD fire, circumstances to clarify in order to establish a responsibility. But an unexpected element will disturb Stephanie, for whom file 137 becomes something other than a simple number.
As tense as a LBD shot, this social polar anchored in the turmoil of the Yellow Gilets reveals the flaws of an institution in crisis. And as he questions a case using video protection and icy testimony, Dominik Moll (Night of the 12th) confronts its investigator, Magistral Léa Drucker, with the institutional shadows in which the blue uniforms are not always pink. A civic work where every silence weighs as much as a baton blow!
Palmometer: 🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿
The Plague (2025)
A clumsy teenager undergoes the ruthless hierarchy within a water-polo camp.
When humiliation becomes a collective sport and fear a norm, the transition to adolescence (the initiatory narrative) is contaminated by the plague of harassment (gender cinema). A first film with a suffocating atmosphere and striking visuals where, at the crossroads of Her Majesty the Flies and Carrieinnocence is lost under the weight of cruel games. The tension is palpable, the performance of the young prodigious actors and the institutionalized violence unbearable. Intelligent and traumatizing!
Palmometer: 🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿
Dalloway
Clarissa, an inspirational novelist, joins a prestigious artist residence at the cutting edge of technology. She finds in Dalloway, her virtual assistant, support and even a confidant who helps her write. But little by little, Clarissa experiences an unease at the increasingly intrusive behavior of her AI, reinforced by the conspiracy warnings of another resident.
When the paranoid thriller is manipulated by an omnipotent AI, the Black Mirror French by Yann Gozlan (Black box) appears to have been written by ChatGPT. An adaptation of Tatiana De Rosnay's novel Shadow flowers Of course well executed in its form, but which quickly falls into the cross of the genre and dares to get wet in the themes that it carries (the technological revolution). Cécile de France is nevertheless involved and Mylène Farmer, the voice of the matrix, falsely protective.
Palmometer: 🌿🌿
New Wave (2025)
The story of the genesis and shooting ofIn Bout de Bout by Jean-Luc Godard, in the style and spirit with which Godard created In Bout de Bout.
After slamming all the doors of 7th art, Godard returns from the tribute window to better watch French cinema in the broken mirror of his past. He entered it like a dark room without a way out, met ghosts of film and shouted all his love for an industry then in full motion. A fake make-of dIn Bout de Bout who breathes passion, whose comic tempo and interpretation (the illustrious unknown Guillaume Marbeck) are irresistible. The ultimate movie signing? Yes, and a masterpiece that tells a masterpiece!
Palmometer: 🌿 Gold
Die, My Love
In a rural town, a young mother fights her inner demons.
Like a suffocating cry in a too quiet house, the postpartum depression hits a woman (fucking Jennifer Lawrence) on the brink of implosion. When Possession s Portrait of the girl on fireThe feverish mother's pain filmed as close to nerves trembles under the weight of raw emotion. A descent into psycho- (logical and sexual) hell to the taste of tears, where love lives as a chronic disease. It's beautiful, it's dirty, and it hypnotizes as much as it brutalizes. Radical... madness!
Palmometer: 🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿
Sirāt
A father and son arrive at a rave lost in the heart of the mountains of southern Morocco. They're looking for Mar. — daughter and sister — disappeared for several months at one of these endless festivals. Dive into electronic music and a raw freedom that is foreign to them, they tirelessly distribute his photo. Hope simmers, but they stick to and follow a group of ravers towards a last feast in the desert.
In the incandescent purgatory of a desert filmed in 16 mm by an acidic Terrence Malick, this Salary of fear hallucinated leads us into a technological road-movie where a father, in search of his missing daughter, sinks with his son into a collective rave of ecstasy and metaphysical loneliness. A film shock in which the dunes hide the end of the world and dust reveals the open wounds. Between heaven and hell, a path of psychedelic cross!
Palmometer: 🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿
Sons of the Neon Night
A sudden explosion takes place in Causeway Bay, a snowy neighborhood of skyscrapers in Hong Kong, killing a rich businessman and triggering a fierce conflict between drug traffickers and those who oppose them.
In an alternative snowy Hong Kong of the 90s, this criminal saga filled with betrayals and violence stings into a horribly nebulous narration (the montage is horribly chaotic) where sentimental dialogues do not explain anything. A huge waste in view of the resources involved, its prestigious casting and its particularly careful artistic direction, which reveals an initial project that is otherwise more ambitious since envisaged as an eight-hour mini-series. Under the neon of the city, the most complete confusion reigns!
Palmometer: 🌿
My Father's Shadow
Semi-autobiographical story taking place over a single day in the Nigerian megalopolis, Lagos, during the 1993 electoral crisis. A father tries to guide his two young sons through the huge city as political unrest threatens.
Against the background of the 1993 Nigerian presidential election, this poignant story where the intimate and the political mix explores family ties through the eyes of two young brothers reconnecting with their absent father. And while filial love comes up against the silences, the unsaid and the scars of history, Akinola Davies Jr. captures the frenzy of the city with a (beautiful) childlike look at both candid and upsetting. A tender and poetic semi-autobiographical drama that whispers loudly.
Palmometer: 🌿🌿🌿
Secret Agent (2025)
1977, Brazil. Marcelo, a forty-year-old man fleeing a troubled past, arrives in the town of Recife where he hopes to build a new life and reconnect with his family. It's without counting on the death threats that roam and hover over his head...
When fiction is used to convey the truth and not to conceal it, the past exhumes to show the resistance of the intimate to the sharks of Brazilian corruption. False thriller of espionage but true social criticism imprinted on both the political cinema and the B series of the 70s, this work which bears the legacy of the dictatorship releases the collective memory of the oppressive regime with as "secret agent", a Wagner Moura (the series Narcos) preferring pacifism to violence. In the present, the reverse in memories must endure!
Palmometer: 🌿🌿🌿🌿
Exit 8
A man trapped in a subway corridor is looking for exit number 8. To find it, you have to track down anomalies. If he sees one, he turns around. If he sees none, he continues. But if he is wrong, he is sent back to his starting point. Will he manage to get out of this endless corridor?
Even if a few steps aside would have allowed him to borrow a less literal train, this cinematic adaptation of a genre video game is the best since the Silent Hill of Gans. A concept of an endless anxiogen loop, where fear of unknown (a nascent fatherhood) turns an empty subway corridor (urban solitude) into a mental labyrinth. A horror is all contemporary that traps the spectator in the alienation of modern man. Will you find your way out?
Palmometer: 🌿🌿🌿
The Phoenician Scheme
Zsa-Zsa Korda is a wealthy businessman, who has made a fortune in armaments and aviation, and who has built a world empire using sometimes dubious practices. After surviving the last of a series of attacks, he named his only daughter, Liesl, a nun about to make her vows. His decision upsets not only his nine boys, but also the world of international business.
When filial reconciliation (a grim industrialist in search of redemption through his religious daughter) serves an adventure comedy worthy of Tintin, the texan aesthetist and scholar filmmaker unfolds his espionage pastiche in a geopolitical theatre in internal stop-motion (architect cadres populated by brilliantly carved characters) where death hovers as much as absurd humour. Less guinded than in the past and filled with felted irony, an anti-capitalist work that ensures the « Gap » Hey!
Palmometer: 🌿🌿🌿🌿
Alpha (2025)
Alpha, 13, is a troubled teenager who lives alone with her mother. Their world collapses on the day she comes home from school with a tattoo on her arm.
If she continues to explore the limits of genre cinema dear to her director, this pseudo-transgressive fable on mourning misleads in her performance (banking as possible in her last third) and her emotions (stubbed like therapeutic acharging). And contaminated by its own ambitions (several films poorly matched in dust), this metaphor of AIDS is revealed at the end of life Serious sick and even close to a rattlesnake Titanium !
Palmometer: 🌿🌿
Highest 2 Lowest
A music magnate, known for having "the best ears of the profession", is the target of a ransom demand that gives rise to a moral dilemma between life and death.
When music, cinema and social engagement meet in New York, Spike Lee and Denzel Washington (for their 5th collaboration) sign an urban and contemporary rereading of the classic Between heaven and hell from Kurosawa. A thriller so funky adheres to good sounds and African-American culture, where class fractures and generational tensions are addressed in the riff of adventures as fun as energetic. Where the original was desperate, the recovery is optimistic!
Palmometer: 🌿🌿🌿
The richest woman in the world
The richest woman in the world: her beauty, her intelligence, her power. A photographer writer: his ambition, insolence, madness. The lightning strike that takes them away. A mistrustful heiress who fights to be loved. A watchful butler who knows more than he says. Family secrets. Astronomical donations. A war where all blows are allowed. A story too well known for not telling it otherwise.
Freely inspired by the real figure of Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers, heiress of the giant L-Oreal, this family tragedy, whose toxic relationship between the psychological thriller and the bourgeois drama makes a low hand on the maggot, owes much to the funny, then touching, scores of Isabelle Huppert and Laurent Lafitte. An elegant and cruel work that, behind its grinning humour, dissects the power relations and confidence in the other. So, does money really make happiness?
Palmometer: 🌿🌿🌿🌿
Dangerous Animals
Zephyr, a fearless surfer with a free temper is kidnapped by a serial killer obsessed with sharks. Sequestered on her boat and confronted with the madness of her kidnapper, she will have to fight to survive in the face of all the predators...
While the predator is not the one we believe, this maritime slasher who surfs the survival codes sees his rebellious prey (Hassie Harrison) fight against a serial killer (the sadistic and charismatic Jai Courtney) and hungry sharks. A salty horrific B-series where anxiety rises like tide and outburst, highly cathartic, serves to chew fascinating monsters. In troubled waters, the feminist-feminist ride is as brutal as it is subversive. JAWSOme!
Sharkometer: 🦈🦈🦈🦈
Eleanor the Great
Eleanor Morgenstein, 94, tries to rebuild his life after the death of his best friend. She returned to New York after living in Florida for decades.
Full of tenderness, this story about mourning and loneliness delicately accompanies an unageenary widow, the unverified solar June Squibb, who invented a past as a survivor of the Shoah to face the loss of her best friend. A bitter-sweet comedy as funny as it is heartbreaking, where the vital need for listening is shared with friendship relationships. We laugh, we cry, and we let ourselves be caught in soothing human warmth. A filmmaker was born...
Palmometer: 🌿🌿🌿🌿
Privacy (2025)
Lilian Steiner is a recognized psychiatrist. One day she learns the death of one of her patients. Troubled, Lilian persuades herself that it is an assassination, she then decides to conduct her investigation...
Even if he never goes to the end of his mystery, this elegant psychological thriller with remarkable casting knows how to spare his suspense. Part of Cluedo Surprising (there is vaudeville on the couch) which, in a maze of chimeras, moves from Freud's psychoanalysis to Jung's analytical psychology to (try to) understand the cause of a patient's death, followed by psychiatrist Jodie Foster (his first project in French), improvised for Sunday's investigative opportunity. I'm here!
Palmometer: 🌿🌿🌿
Love Me Tender (2025)
Clémence announces to her ex-husband that she has love stories with women. His life changed when he took his son's custody. Clemence will have to struggle to remain mother, wife, free.
Freely adapted from Constance Debré's novel, this poignant family drama bringing together Vicky Krieps (bouleversante) and Antoine Reinartz (detestable) tears the heart. A quest for love (not only maternal) and feelings where a mother, having left everything to write and live her homosexuality, must fight for her son and freedom. An inner revolution coupled with the break-up of a relationship which, not without a mordant sincerity, shouts as much its emancipation as its solitude. Be yourself, no matter what!
Palmometer: 🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿
Connemara (2025)
From a modest background, Helen has long left the Vosges. Today, she's in her 40s. A brutal burn-out forced her to leave Paris, return to where she grew up, between Nancy and Epinal. She settles down with her family, finds a good job, quality of life in short... One evening, in the parking lot of a franchised restaurant, she sees a famous face, Christophe Marchal, the beautiful high school hockey player. Christophe, this distant object of desire, an affair that Helen had not seen come...
Marked by the thorny question of determinism, this adaptation of the eponymous novel (by French writer Nicolas Mathieu) is a « human comedy » in rural areas where a defector is trapped between two worlds. But a return to the country that accumulates clichés on social classes and a love that seeks (beyond life paths) without any passion (but with sex), is necessarily the end of teenage illusions (especially that the past is over) for the spectators who will feel that they have not chosen the best!
Palmometer: 🌿🌿
Aisha won't fly away anymore
Aisha, a 26-year-old Somali girl, lives and works in Ain-shams, a neighbourhood in Cairo where a large community of African migrants lives. The violent tensions between the Egyptians and the various African groups totally indifferent the authorities, which left control of the neighbourhood in the hands of the gangs. One day, one of them offers to Aisha to ensure his safety in exchange for services to be rendered. But the situation is rapidly deteriorating.
In the face of a fantastic allegorical sometimes violently crado, this social drama, with its rigorous words, paints an unmistakable picture of the precarious situation of migrant women, victims of silent servitude and trivialised violence killed by the authorities. And nailed to the ground, such as the ostrich, a Somali woman (sombre in her game) forced to live in Egypt sees this submission gradually slip into her flesh, increasingly bruised. A voice and a body that, in an environment without escape, gives visibility to those whose emancipation is denied.
Palmometer: 🌿🌿🌿
Sentimental value
When their mother died, Nora and Agnes saw their father Gustav reappear in their lives. A former film director, he wrote a screenplay that he wanted Nora, now an actor, to play the main role, but the latter categorically refused. During a retrospective dedicated to him at a French festival, Gustav meets a young Hollywood star who, upset by one of his films, manifests his desire to work with him.
When silences say more than words and where art repairs the bonds of the heart, Joachim Trier weaves the portrait of a fractured family (the luminous Renate Reinsve and the magnetic Stellan Skarsgård) in a house whose fragile foundations reveal the deep feelings (regret, grief, anger, etc.). Northern drama « bourgeois » to the infinite sweetness which, beyond the meta commentary on the state of cinema, orchestrates a magnificent score on the emotional heritage.
Palmometer: 🌿 Gold
Magellan (2025)
Magellan, a free-loving Portuguese navigator, rebelled against the King's authority, who refused to support his dreams of exploration. Driven by an insatiable thirst to discover the limits of the world, he persuaded the Spanish Crown to finance a bold expedition to the mythical lands of the East. But the journey turns into a difficult journey: hunger, storms and mutinies put the crew on their knees.
Far from myth and anticolonial, this intimate epic on the incredible journey of the sailor Fernand de Magellan is unfortunately terribly leniful despite its plastic beauty. A perfectly documented history book with pictorial plans worthy of a work of art that have a hard time taking life. While the ocean and the wind eventually tell the story, the slow pace and dry storytelling can hardly pass through the strait. Contemplative shipping? Too much!
Palmometer: 🌿🌿
Resurrection (2025)
In a world where humans can no longer dream, a being like others loses foot and can no longer distinguish illusion from reality. Only a woman sees clearly in him. She manages to penetrate her dreams, in search of the truth...
When the 20th century China crosses the light (brought to the darkness) of the cinematographer, the great figures of 7th art and history meet in a cinemaphilic dream made of film with spectral beauty. From Méliès to Murnau, Zhangke, the Lumière brothers, Wong Kar-wai, Welles and many others, this episode dream defies the laws of time and borrows from several genres (muet, polar, fantastic, etc.) to better stimulate our (five) senses. Eternal, cinema takes us away from the melancholy of our lives!
Palmometer: 🌿 Gold
The man who saw the bear who saw the man
Gregory and Michel are not of the same generation but they are united by friendship, love of nature and a great affection for a bear escaped from a circus.
When Pierre Richard, a pillar of the French popular comedy, celebrates friendship (without age) and the right to difference 18 years after his last incursion behind the camera, his dephased universe appreciates life alongside a escaped bear of the zoo. Unrighteous sometimes, a little apart above all, this slice of sensitive, whimsical, funny and lunar good mood serves a Morteau sausage welcome to wage slavery. When a bird is in a cage, freedom is mourning!
Palmometer: 🌿🌿🌿
A simple accident
After a simple accident, events continue...
From a simple accident, Jafar Panahi interrogates after prison and torture inside a van where the Tehran regime is tried. Politically committed, funny and open to moral reparation, this social tragi-comédie turned underground is of a crazy precision when it evokes, at the rhythm of twists that just type, Iranian struggles and the revolt that roars. Both in the background and in form, a beautiful lesson of humanity that is freed from the desire for revenge.
Palmometer: 🌿🌿🌿🌿
Splitsville
While his wife has just applied for divorce, Carey runs for support from her friends, Julie and Paul. He then discovers that the secret of their happiness is that they are in a free couple.
When jealousy sucks under the front smiles, the sentimental comedy sends in the air with the Italian farce. A tender and brimming satire of modern relationships that, facing the limits of the free couple, amuses love chaos with a lot of fun. Dialogues are chiselled, scholarly staging, irresistible actors and humorous situational twisting. So this is an anatomy of a fall to cry for laugh!
Palmometer: 🌿🌿🌿🌿
Honey Don't!
Honey O
After Drive-Away Dolls, Ethan Coen continues his trilogy of queers films inspired by the B series with this eccentric revisit of the black novel. The codes of the genre are there, the retro aesthetic too (although the action takes place in our time), and the actors slip perfectly into their clothes of stereotypes. Nevertheless, even though it is so amusing and condemning religious greed, this exercise of style remains reluctant to develop the ins and outs of its business.
Palmometer: 🌿🌿🌿
The Awards
Feature Films
Palm gold
A SIMPLE ACCIDENT
Jafar PANAHI
Grand Prix
AFFEKSJONSVERDI
(SENTIAL VALUE)
Joachim TRIER
Jury Prize (ex-æquo)
SIRATE
Oliver LAXE
SOUND OF FALLING
Mascha SCHILINSKI
Award for Stage Design
Kleber MENDONÇA FILHO for O AGENTE SECRETO (L-AGENT SECRET)
Scenario Award
Jean-Pierre DARDENNE & Luc DARDENNE for YOUNG MERS
Women's prices
Nadia MELLITI in THE LAST PETITE directed by Hafsia HERZI
Price for men
Wagner MOURA in O AGENTE SECRETO directed by Kleber MENDONÇA FILHO
Special prize
KUANG YE SHI DAI (RESURRECTION)
Bi GAN
Short films
Palm gold
GLAD YOUYRE DEAD NOW
Tawfeek BARHOM
Special mention
ALI
Adnan AL RAJEEV
A Certain Look
Un Certain Regard Prize
MIRADA DEL FLAMENCO (THE MYSTERIOUS GASE OF THE FLAMINGO)
Diego CESPEDES
1st film
Jury Prize
A POETA
Simón MESA SOTO
Award for Stage Design
Arab & Tarzan NASSER
for Once Upon a Time in Gaza
Best Actor
Frank DILLANE
in Urchin directed by Harris Dickinson
Best Actress
Cleo DIÁRA
in O Riso e a Faca (Laughter and Knife) directed by Pedro Pinho
Best Scenario
PILLION
Harry LIGHTON
1st film
Golden camera
Price of the Golden Camera
THE PRESIDENT
Hasan HADI
Filmmakers' Fortnight
Special mention
MY FATHERS SHADOW
Akinola DAVIES JR
A Certain Look
The Cinef
First Prize
FIRST SUMMER
Heo GAYOUNG
KAFA, South Korea
Second Prize
12 MOMENTS BEFORE THE FLAG-RAISING CEREMONY
THAT Zhizheng
Beijing Film Academy, China
Third prize (ex-æquo)
GINGER BOY
Miki TANAKA
ENBU Seminar, Japan
WINTER IN MARCH
Natalia MIRZOYAN
Estonian Academy of Arts, Estonia
. . . our hearts and mouths. To listen without moderation before going to read the post-session and the analyses of the films that have us [...]
[...] at the last Cannes Film Festival, from which he returned to the Grand Prix, Joachim Trier's new feature film, entitled [...]