Cannes We Kick Off Already? These 7 Films Are About to Set France on Fire
From meta-fiction to monster tenderness, the 2025 Cannes lineup is a prism of risk, reinvention, and cinematic fever dreams
Each May, the Croisette becomes a mirrorball. Under its fractured light, cinema glimmers—unruly, brave, opulent, and strange. The Cannes Film Festival, now in its 78th edition, remains not just a calendar event but a temperature check of global film culture: part prophecy and part provocation. This year’s selections are an ensemble of ghosts and futures, artists making their first declarations and masters still redefining their final acts. With Juliette Binoche presiding as jury president—the second woman in two years to take the helm—and Robert De Niro receiving an honorary Palme d’Or, the 2025 lineup dances between reverence and rebellion.
Below, in no particular order, are the seven films that have set cinephile pulses racing in the lead-up to Cannes: stories that promise not just to be seen, but to be felt.
The Phoenician Scheme
by Wes Anderson
If Wes once built dollhouses, this time he’s designed a labyrinth. The Phoenician Scheme is international espionage as vaudeville: a nun (Mia Threapleton), her billionaire father (Benicio del Toro), and a cast that includes Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Willem Dafoe—all caught in a globe-trotting inheritance plot. But beneath the clockwork precision, Wes’ melancholia may be its true center.
Highest 2 Lowest
by Spike Lee
A remix, not a remake. Spike adapts Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low into an American noir opera starring Denzel Washington, Ice Spice, Jeffrey Wright, and A$AP Rocky. Denzel, hinting at retirement, gives Cannes his debut; Spike marks 36 years since Do the Right Thing first shook the Croisette. Expect power, paranoia, and a thunderous jazz of injustice. It’s a tribute and a reckoning.
Eddington
by Ari Aster
What if the American West was just a fever dream? In Ari’s latest, set during the pandemic’s first months, Joaquin Phoenix plays a sheriff caught between control and collapse. Pedro Pascal is his rival mayor. The town, Eddington, is a character itself: haunted, banal, and apocalyptic. Modern horror, political satire, and black comedy twist together like desert tumbleweeds. Expect dread and brilliance.
Urchin
by Harris Dickinson
The boy-become-man behind Triangle of Sadness now moves behind the camera. Harris’ directorial debut is a brutal and lyrical portrait of a London drifter (Frank Dillane) navigating mental health and institutional neglect. There’s the pulse of early Andrea Arnold, the grit of This Is England, and a haunting beauty that may announce Harris as more than just a matinee idol.
Sentimental Value
by Joachim Trier
Joachim returns to Oslo like a novelist obsessed with the spaces between memory and language. After the triumph of The Worst Person in the World, he reunites with Renate Reinsve in a tale of familial fracture and cinematic meta-fiction. A filmmaker (Renate), her sister (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), and their estranged father (Stellan Skarsgård) attempt to make a movie, perhaps as a way to survive one another. Elle Fanning appears like an alien starlet dropped into Nordic restraint. The result promises to be bruised, tactile, and quietly shattering.
Die, My Love!
by Lynne Ramsay
Adapted from Ariana Harwicz’s incendiary novel, Lynne’s latest features Jennifer Lawrence as a woman unraveling after childbirth, with Robert Pattinson as the husband who doesn’t quite see her. Raw, jagged, and violently interior, Die, My Love may be Lynne’s most radical work yet—a domestic descent rendered in poetic fragments and unflinching close-up.
Honey Don’t!
by Ethan Coen & Tricia Cooke
Margaret Qualley returns as a lesbian detective in this candy-colored, camp crime caper—the second in Ethan and Tricia’s queer trilogy. After Drive Away Dolls, Honey Don’t! promises more pulpy thrills, feminist noir, and pastel explosions. It’s gleeful, unserious, and possibly the most politically subversive thing on the schedule.
As the yachts dock and the camera shutters click, Cannes 2025 unfolds, a festival not just of films, but of questions: What defines art in a time of endless content? Who gets to tell which stories? And can cinema, still, surprise us?
The answer, seven times over, seems to be yes.
Photos courtesy IMDB
