Dust off your black tie—the post-Oscars break is almost over and the 2027 awards race is about to begin, in the form of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. This year’s lineup, notably lighter on Hollywood blockbusters and heavier on international arthouse fare, will dazzle the Croisette between 12 and 23 May, with legendary auteur Park Chan-wook serving as jury president, the first Korean to be bestowed with this title in the showcase’s long and storied history. Meanwhile, two honorary Palme d’Ors for lifetime achievement are due to be presented to two industry titans: Barbra Streisand and Peter Jackson.
From surreal musicals to boundary-pushing thrillers, sweeping romances to socially resonant sci-fi, here’s a whistle-stop tour through the 17 releases not to miss from the upcoming 79th edition.
The Man I Love
The lone American in the Cannes competition line-up, Ira Sachs (Passages, Peter Hujar’s Day) brings us another characteristically idiosyncratic, richly rendered and deeply moving character study: a music-filled, late ’80s New York-set portrait of an accomplished actor (Oscar winner Rami Malek) who is taking on the role of a lifetime while also grappling with his own mortality. Completing his passionate, eclectic creative circle are Rebecca Hall, Tom Sturridge, The Bear’s Ebon Moss-Bachrach and The Crown’s Luther Ford.
Fatherland
From that karaoke scene in Project Hail Mary to winning the Berlin Film Festival’s prize for Best Leading Performance with her transformative turn in the 17th-century drama Rose, Sandra Hüller has already had a hell of a year—and her dominance continues with the next ravishing black-and-white heartbreaker from Ida and Cold War’s Oscar-winning Paweł Pawlikowski. The Anatomy of a Fall star is Erika, the daughter of Nobel laureate and prominent Nazi opponent Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler), who, at the height of the Cold War, returns to his native Germany for the first time since having fled to the US. On a road trip across their now flattened nation, the pair consider their painful past and still uncertain future.
Fjord
A previous Palme d’Or winner for his critically-acclaimed 2007 abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Romanian maestro Cristian Mungiu has enlisted Sebastian Stan and Sentimental Value’s recently Oscar nominated Renate Reinsve for his hotly-anticipated next outing. They take the lead as a couple who’ve recently relocated to a remote Norwegian village with their children, only to find themselves at the centre of a bubbling controversy and, soon after, at the mercy of an unfamiliar judicial system.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
I Saw the TV Glow’s Jane Schoenbrun serves up their latest head-spinning fantasia, this time with Gillian Anderson, Hacks’s Hannah Einbinder and Sorry, Baby’s Eva Victor in tow. It follows a queer filmmaker who is hired to resurrect a waning slasher franchise, and becomes obsessed with recruiting the original movie’s iconic final girl to reprise her role. As the two women’s lives become intertwined, they descend into a blood-soaked psychosexual mania. The director has described the film as “Portrait of a Lady on Fire set in a Friday the 13th sequel” as well as a “sleepover classic: an insane yet cosy midnight odyssey that beckons to unsuspecting viewers from the horror section at the local video store”. Consider me sold.
Her Private Hell
Provocateur Nicolas Winding Refn’s first film in a decade, following the Elle Fanning-led The Neon Demon, is a retina-searing romp featuring every major rising star going: Heretic and Companion’s Sophie Thatcher, May December’s Charles Melton, Bottoms’s Havana Rose Liu, The Buccaneers’s Kristine Froseth and The Night Manager’s Diego Calva. Their setting? A Tokyo of the future, rife with glitter, sex and violence, which is engulfed by a strange mist that unleashes an elusive deadly presence.
Bitter Christmas
After making his English-language feature debut with the Golden Lion-winning Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore vehicle The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodóvar is returning home for his next operatic melodrama: the tale of a highly successful commercials director (Bárbara Lennie) who throws herself into work to cope with the death of her mother. Over a long weekend in December, she jets off from Madrid to Lanzarote, and in a bid to overcome her writer’s block, begins adapting the personal tragedies of her closest friends into sparkling prose. As usual, expect immaculate design, gloriously saturated colour palettes, artful cinematography and a very generous sprinkling of autofiction.
The Black Ball
Also on the Cannes red carpet will be Almodóvar’s frequent leading lady Penélope Cruz, who, per the festival’s head Thierry Frémaux, has an unforgettable cameo in this wild, decade-hopping exploration of the inter-connected lives of three gay men, from Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi. Lending support alongside the charismatic lead, Spanish singer-songwriter Guitarricadelafuente, is everyone from Problemista’s Julio Torres to Glenn Close.
The Beloved
Beside Cruz on the Riviera will be her husband and fellow Oscar winner Javier Bardem, taking centre stage as an acclaimed and notorious filmmaker who reunites with his actor daughter (Victoria Luengo) in this tense family drama helmed by Rodrigo Sorogoyen. Following a prolonged estrangement, he offers her a part in his latest project, seemingly to help restart her stalled career. But, together in the desert, as the cameras roll, they find that their renewed closeness also prompts the reopening of old wounds which never fully healed.
Parallel Tales
After A Separation, The Salesman and A Hero, Iranian impresario Asghar Farhadi is now, of course, unable to film in his own country, as the war rages on. So, he has instead turned his always thoughtful, incisive lens to Paris and a quartet of French heavyweights—Isabelle Huppert, Virginie Efira, Vincent Cassel and Catherine Deneuve—as they navigate the aftermath of the November 2015 terrorist attacks in the capital. Having claimed the lives of over 100 people, they remain the deadliest incident of their kind in the nation’s history.
All of a Sudden
Both Efira and the city of Paris are also central to this tender tale of a quietly blossoming friendship from another international master: Drive My Car’s Oscar-winning Ryusuke Hamaguchi. She is the director of a nursing home attempting to make significant changes to their system of care, whose life is transformed when she meets a terminally ill Japanese playwright (Tao Okamoto).
Sheep in a Box
Hamaguchi’s fellow Japanese luminary Hirokazu Kore-eda, who scooped the Palme d’Or back in 2018 with the gently devastating Shoplifters, is, however, staying on home turf. His latest morally murky fable tackles the ever-urgent topic of artificial intelligence. When a couple (Haruka Ayase and Daigo Yamamoto) lose their young son, he’s replaced by a humanoid made in his image (Kuwaki Rimu). Can this newcomer heal their broken hearts, or will he simply stand as a constant reminder of what is gone forever?
Club Kid
I Love LA’s Jordan Firstman makes his directorial debut with this rowdy caper, in which he stars as a washed-up New York underground party promoter who is suddenly forced to care for a son he never knew he had. Joining him on that chaotic joy ride are Diego Calva and, in her first major part in several years, none other than Cara Delevingne.
Diamond
For this splashy directorial effort from Andy Garcia, a contemporary noir which has been almost 15 years in the making, the Hollywood veteran has amassed quite the ensemble: Vicky Krieps, Brendan Fraser, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Murray, Dustin Hoffman and Danny Huston. The filmmaker himself is at their centre, as a man with a traumatic past who has an uncanny talent for solving impossible crimes.
Full Phil
Billed by its director, Quentin Dupieux, as being “like Emily in Paris in hell”—honestly, say no more—this absurdist comedy tracks a wealthy American industrialist (Woody Harrelson) attempting to reconnect with his estranged daughter (Kristen Stewart) via a blow-out trip to the City of Light. Cue French food, a vintage horror movie and a meddling hotel employee all throwing a wrench into their plans. With shades of The White Lotus, and Emma Mackey and Charlotte Le Bon filling out the supporting roles, it’s set to be a corker.
Hope
Squid Game’s Hoyeon is joined by the likes of Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbender and Taylor Russell in this ambitious South Korean sci-fi thriller from Na Hong-jin. Playing out in a secluded village near the demilitarised zone bordering North Korea, it finds a close-knit community thrown into panic following local sightings of a tiger. But soon, these fears escalate into something far stranger, with terrifying, unspooling mysteries which make the residents question everything.
The Unknown
Justine Triet and Arthur Harari, who won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 2024 for Anatomy of a Fall, have co-authored this knotty and cerebral fever dream, this time with the latter in the director’s chair. In it, a photographer (Niels Schneider) has a one-night stand with a stranger (Léa Seydoux), and inexplicably wakes up in her body. It is, by all accounts, more The Substance than Freaky Friday.
Avedon
The extraordinary life and pioneering work of prolific photographer Richard Avedon is the subject of a new documentary from double Oscar winner Ron Howard. Intended to be the definitive portrait of the Vogue fixture, it’ll feature ravishing deep dives into his meticulous, never-before-seen archives and interviews with many of his most illustrious subjects. Prepare to swoon.
