Donald Trump may be threatening tariffs to keep foreign films out of America but France is happily cheering a Hollywood invasion next week.
The annual Cannes Film Festival boasts its most glittering line-up for years, including stars Jennifer Lawrence, Joaquin Phoenix and Tom Hanks and directors Wes Anderson and Richard Linklater. Robert De Niro will be in town to accept an honorary award, and some guy called Tom Cruise will toast the world premiere of Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning.
Even the jury for the Palme d’Or includes Halle Berry and Succession’s Jeremy Strong, although it is headed by French actress Juliette Binoche.
Most strikingly, this year features directorial debuts from Scarlett Johansson, Kristen Stewart and Harris Dickinson, who will compete in the festival’s Un Certain Regard strand. Actors turned directors often play it safe with their first films, perhaps aware that they are venturing into new territory — but that is not the case here.
Dickinson, 28, who starred in the Palme D’Or-winning Triangle of Sadness and will play John Lennon in Sam Mendes’s forthcoming Beatles films, has made a commendably audacious feature in Urchin. He draws a nuanced performance from Frank Dillane, son of the actor Stephen Dillane, as a homeless chancer in London and the film is full of bold, stylistic flourishes, from fantasy sequences to striking musical cues.
Harris Dickinson will premiere his directorial debut Urchin
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Johansson’s Eleanor the Great stars the 95-year-old June Squibb (The Age of Innocence, Nebraska) as a Holocaust survivor opposite Chiwetel Ejiofor. “Scarlett’s clear about what she wants to do,” Trudie Styler, who produced the film, told me in January. “Because she’s been an actress since she was six, she’s got very good actors’ notes. She hears everything in her own head.”
Stewart’s The Chronology of Water stars Imogen Poots in the true story of Lidia Yuknavitch, an American author who defied childhood abuse through competitive swimming and writing.
Cannes has also become a more significant Oscars bellwether, once again the place to see the best new films first. This year’s Academy Awards were dominated by titles that premiered at the festival in 2024: Emilia Pérez led the nominations with 13, The Substance was nominated in five categories, while Anora won five Oscars including best picture, best director and best actress. These films’ international pedigree was strong: despite being set in America, Anora had a mainly Russian and Armenian cast, while Emilia Pérez was in Spanish and, like The Substance, had a French director and French financial backing.
June Squibb stars in Johansson’s film Eleanor the Great
A decade ago the picture looked very different. Venice was the Oscars springboard for films including Birdman (2014), Spotlight (2015), La La Land (2016) and The Shape of Water (2017). Thierry Frémaux, the director of the Cannes Film Festival since 2007, has long scoffed at the idea of measuring success with a Hollywood yardstick. “I don’t understand this obsession with American movies,” he sniffed of Venice in 2018. “I think a festival must show the cinema of the whole world.”
But things began to shift in 2019, when Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite took the Palme and went on to win four Oscars. The South Korean film gave Frémaux his jackpot combination of world-cinema cachet and mainstream oomph — a mix the festival has continued to deliver.
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This year Linklater, Anderson and their fellow American Ari Aster will compete for the Palme against directors including the South African Oliver Hermanus, the Norwegian Joachim Trier and a record seven women — among them the British director Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher, We Need to Talk About Kevin) and the French director Julia Ducournau, who won the Palme in 2021 for Titane. Anderson, who premiered his previous two films at Cannes, makes it three in a row with The Phoenician Scheme, an espionage black comedy starring Benicio del Toro, Johansson, Hanks, Benedict Cumberbatch, Richard Ayoade and Bill Murray. No disputing the glamour quotient there.
Kristen Stewart is a tantalising prospect as a director, as is Johansson
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Meanwhile, Linklater (Boyhood) brings Nouvelle Vague, precision-engineered for the Croisette: a French-language film about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle. Aster, the director of Midsommar, brings Eddington, a western about a standoff between a small-town sheriff (Phoenix) and a mayor (Pedro Pascal) in New Mexico. Ramsay’s Die, My Love, starring Jennifer Lawrence and adapted by Enda Walsh from Ariana Harwicz’s 2017 novel, is a dark comedy thriller set in the French countryside about a new mother who sinks into postpartum depression and psychosis.
Will these headline films dominate next year’s Oscar and Bafta nominations? It’s likely, but for my money the more interesting race is the one between the actors unveiling their first films. Johansson and Stewart are both clever, subtle performers with several strings to their bow and a tantalising prospect as directors. And if the rest of the festival is as good [inventive?] as Dickinson’s Urchin, 2025 looks set to be a vintage year.
The Cannes Film Festival is on May 13-24. Details festival-cannes.com