Cannes 2025: 10 unmissable films playing this year

Although art is a common thread, Kelly Reichardt is following up her downbeat 2022 Michelle Williams-starring Showing Up with a film whose premise is ostensibly more thrilling: an art heist set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. Josh O’Connor, Alana Haim and John Magaro are among the zeitgeisty cast.

In 2021, Julia Ducournau became the second woman ever to win the Palme D’Or with Titane, a gender-bending body horror about a woman with an erotic fixation on cars, that also made profound points about the human desire for connection. Alpha is about an 11 year-old girl who is rejected by her classmates after she becomes infected with a rare disease. 

It’s hard to imagine French audiences being overjoyed at the news that an American filmmaker has made a film about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, but in Linklater we trust! It’s not the kind of project one might expect from the Austin native, but the beauty of Linklater is that he has always refused categorisation. Nouvelle Vague is no exception.

News dropped that MUBI had acquired Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier’s follow-up to The Worst Person in the World, as Cannes official line-up announcement was happening. “An intimate and moving exploration of family, memories, and the reconciliatory power of art,” Sentimental Value will star Renate Reinsve alongside Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas and Elle Fanning. 

Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne prove again they can move deftly between milieus to tell stories of social strife. Young Mothers or La Maison maternelle in French tells the story of five mothers, Jessica, Perla, Julie, Ariane and Naïma, housed in a young mother’s home and who dream of a better life.

It can be anxiety-inducing when actors turn their hand at directing, but the debut feature of Harris Dickinson—having quite a moment on the back of Babygirl and his casting as John Lennon in the Beatles biopic—seems promising. Set on the streets of London, Urchin tells the story of a drifter (Frank Dillane), tackling themes of social inequality and mental health.

Spike Lee may have bitten off more than he can chew with his modern retelling of Akira Kurosawa’s High & Low, which swaps out metropolitan Tokyo for his home-turf of New York. Still, another Spike joint starring Denzel Washington is too good to resist.

One for the Hong Kong cinema heads, Juno Mak’s sophomore feature will see the anticipated return of Asian cinema icon Takeshi Kaneshiro to the big screen, alongside an ensemble featuring Tony Leung Ka-Fai and Louis Koo. A crime thriller following a detective’s struggle with the successor to a drug-trafficking crime syndicate.

British filmmaker Harry Lighton’s directorial debut sees Alexander Skarsgard as a biker who takes on the meek Harry Melling as his submissive. We haven’t heard much more than that, but here at A Rabbit’s Foot we love psycho-sexual tales surrounding dangerous power dynamics, so Lighton has most certainly caught our attention.

“What begins as a minor accident sets in motion a series of escalating consequences”, teases the premise of director Jafar Panahi’s latest. Though it doesn’t reveal too much plot-wise, the framework feels characteristic of the Iranian New Wave, of which Panahi is one of the most prominent voices. We can’t wait.