The Best Movies From the 2026 Cannes Film Festival

At once reminiscent of an exuberant Sundance premiere that would have swept the audience and jury awards, Firstman’s coming-of-age story that involves a music-loving father and son bonding for the first time (yes, the word “kid” refers to both of them) is among this year’s rare instant hits at Cannes. An adoring New York story with dotingly specific details about the city’s LGBTQ+ community as a chosen family for the story’s main protagonists (played by Firstman and fantastic young actor Reggie Absolom), Club Kid will capture the hearts of everyone with a tale that’s both edgy and surprisingly conventional, where laughs are served with a generous side of tears.

Those old-timey slashers of the ’80s? (Think Friday the 13^th and a little Evil Dead.) Schoenbrun loves them like the rest of us, and knows their limbs from bowels inside and out. This is hardly a surprise for anyone who’s seen their We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow, two cult favorites also fashioned by the filmmaker’s sharp genre sensibilities. Compared to their former work, Camp Miasma might be more mainstream, but it’s also equally and proudly queer, elevated by the dizzying sexual chemistry between Hannah Einbinder and an especially memorable Gillian Anderson with an instantly iconic Southern drawl. Both spoofing and cheekily accepting of all the parts that make up the slashers we adore (including, refreshingly, the problematic parts), Camp Miasma is both a gory blast and as sexy as movies come, all the way through its final climax.

Loveless and Leviathan auteur Zvyagintsev has certainly been missed, and his latest thriller Minotaur was well worth the wait. Full disclosure: If you are as deeply familiar with Adrian Lyne’s gorgeous Unfaithful and Claude Chabrol’s The Unfaithful Wife (on which Lyne’s perfected reimagining is based) as this critic, Minotaur might be more of an intriguing exercise for you rather than an intense one. (Not knowing the story beats is a big part of the experience and suspense.) Still, the filmmaker’s finesse in transposing the marital strife story to Russia, with the backdrop of severe corruption and deadly political volatility under a dictator, is undeniable. Compared to its predecessors, Minotaur is still formally austere and quietly charged by an undercurrent of dread when infidelity and murder rock the worlds of an affluent couple. Its searing parting note is knowingly bleak and aptly nihilist in a brand-new way that the varying conclusions of the former movies aren’t. It leaves a throbbing aftertaste.

This year’s Cannes played host to several wonderful animation premieres—including Louis Clichy’s Iron Boy and Phuong Mai Nguyen’s In Waves. But Nicolas Athane and Marco Nguyen’s delightful and rapturously funny Jim Queen claimed a special spot at the festival’s midnight offerings. Not only is their Jim Queen wittily animated with vivid colors and unapologetically adult, it is also deeply original with a satirical sense of humor reminiscent of South Park. The premise goes something like this: A worldwide virus that turns gay men straight is on the loose, and a gay Parisian gym influencer has to reverse his fate at once. An adoring celebration of queer culture and a spoofy critique of internet fame, Jim Queen is strictly for grown-ups who don’t need polite jokes to laugh with and at the lovable characters. It’s a riot.

Sure, Rami Malek won an Oscar before for his Freddie Mercury portrayal in Bohemian Rhapsody, but Sachs might actually be the first filmmaker who knew exactly what to do with Malek’s unique, sharp-edged talents and features. Here, Malek simply stuns as a charismatic downtown New York performance artist Jimmy George, living with AIDS at the height of the crisis in the ’80s. Rather than instructively spelling out just how cruel things were for AIDS patients of the era, The Man I Love honors the details of a creative life, strengthened by love, intellectual attraction, and the beauty of a committed community keen on adding meaning into one another’s lives through art. Graced by Sachs’s observant aesthetic, The Man I Love is both mournful and caringly commemorative.

This year’s Cannes featured a timeless still from Thelma & Louise on its poster, and looking back at the lineup, that was for good reason. The selections often featured female duos supporting, challenging, and lifting up one another in enriching ways. This is very much the case in Oscar-winning Drive My Car filmmaker Hamaguchi’s gentle and infinitely tender exercise on life and death, full of immersive, philosophical musings that wash over our souls. Deserving winners of a joint Best Actress award at the festival, Virginie Efira and Tao Okamato play an innovative care home director and a theater director with cancer, respectively, forging a soul-stirring friendship of ideas. Patient and tranquil in a way that only Hamaguchi can seize, All of a Sudden feels like a meditation that transforms a viewer into a better version of themselves.

Telling a story of emotional survival from past trauma, the beautifully fable-esque Chilean film La Perra trails the friendship of a middle-aged woman and the abandoned puppy that she adopts to fill a harrowing void in her life. Attentive both to the ocean-sprayed daily routines of the Chilean island where it’s set and the realistic lives of dogs that will make you gush—it shows that Sotomayor knows and loves our furry best friends unequivocally—La Perra impressively constructs a parallel narrative where both Yuri the dog and her human crave independence on their own terms. Winner of this year’s Palm d’Og (it’s a real award), La Perra might distress those of us dog lovers with some severe scenes, but it’s still a movie to cuddle, hold close, and heal with.

Corsage director Kreutzer’s understatedly feminist and disquieting Gentle Monster asks, what if the person you love the most and share your life with is someone dark? How would you steer your denial, shock, anger, and maybe acceptance? These questions challenge and rattle Léa Seydoux’s famous pianist and musician when her husband’s office gets raided by the police one day for an unspeakably horrible reason. Unraveling before her is not only her own life as an artist, wife, and mother of a young boy, but also the life of the female police officer who’s investigating her case while dealing with her own share of men troubles. Among the most provocative competition films this year, Gentle Monster feels like a quiet scream and will be talked about at length once it arrives stateside via Netflix. Watch for a possible awards bid for Seydoux.

A gorgeous reimagining of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway adapted for a Nigerian-set narrative, Esiri Brothers’ Clarissa is both as classical as movies come and quietly revolutionary in its mining of new ideas in an old text. With a major cast that wowed the festival (among them are Sophie Okonedo, David Oyelowo, Ayo Edebiri, and more), the story follows the eponymous affluent Lagos woman as she prepares for a party, reconnecting with close friends and old flames of her youth while the group—both in present time and in flashback—reflects on their lives, passions, and sexual desires they still feel in their older years. From queries into identity to class divides and deeply rooted devastations of colonialism, no stone gets unturned in Clarissa, one of the most radical films that will reach our theaters this year.

A story of sisterhood and feminine camaraderie, Marrakchi’s socially realist and ultimately hopeful Strawberries is also an urgent and globally relevant look at the lives of immigrants as an exploited workforce. The film’s central duo—two young Moroccan women—work as seasonal strawberry pickers in the South of Spain, while fending for their lives and dignity at the hands of their abusive, predatory boss. Honoring the bravery of those who speak up and fight against patriarchal systems, Strawberries refuses to succumb to doom and gloom in celebrating the lives of women everywhere who strive for justice and refuse to be victimized by their male-dominated circumstances.