Best of Cannes 2026: 20 Critics’ Picks From This Year’s Festival - Variety

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The general consensus along the Croisette at this year’s Cannes Film Festival was that it felt like a quieter fest than usual: fewer big-name American titles, as festival director Thierry Frémaux himself admitted in his opening-day press conference, and slightly lower-key star wattage. From a critic’s perspective, however, that doesn’t necessarily make for a bad festival, particularly for those willing to dig into the sidebars away from the Competition — which, following last year’s vintage edition that included “It Was Just an Accident,” “Sirāt,” “Sentimental Value,” “The Mastermind” and “The Secret Agent,” was more uneven this time round.

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Still, the highs have been high, as modern masters including Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Pawel Pawlikowski, Andrey Zvyagintsev and Valeska Grisebach returned — the latter three after notably long absences to boot — with mighty confirmation of their talents, while revelations away from the spotlight ran the gamut from a Nepalese trans thriller to a queer animated Alzheimer’s tearjerker to a most unexpected heartwarmer from Jordan Firstman that prompted the festival’s most heated bidding war. All that, and a deliciously kinky genre stew cooked up by Jane Schoenbrun with Gillian Anderson: Even in a so-called quiet year, cinema is still showing up loud and proud. Here are the titles that got our team of Cannes critics most excited.

Two women talk for three and a quarter hours, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi makes of it an unassumingly momentous miracle. The Japanese director's gorgeous new feature is not merely good enough to remind you what cinema can be, but great enough to remind you what life can be. At times, suspended in the long silvery skeins of conversation that thread through the magnificent screenplay, it achieves a kind of levitating grace, leaving you a different, slightly mended version of the person you were before. (Read the full review by Jessica Kiang.)

Rodrigo Sorogoyen's meaty and enjoyable making-of-a-movie drama follows a famous director, Esteban Martínez (Javier Bardem), who returns to his native Spain to shoot a movie in the desert and hires his estranged actress daughter to play one of the leads. It's been a while since Bardem had a role this straight up that he could sink his choppers into. The subtle power of his performance, and it's a terrific one, is that it takes us a while to grasp the kind of mind games Esteban is a master of. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)

Virginia Woolf’s interior epic “Mrs Dalloway” survives — and thrives — following a surprisingly successful transplantation from London to Lagos in brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri’s “Clarissa,” which places a superb Sophie Okonedo, radiant with melancholy, at the heart of its remarkably well-cast ensemble. The Esiris cast a perceptive eye on the elite social constellation that has fallen into orbit around this dutiful but unfulfilled society wife, and have nothing but compassion for her as she spins slowly around and around at its center. (Read the full review by Jessica Kiang.)

An unexpected father-son story, Jordan Firstman's debut feature begins as an exhaustingly antic, coked-up rush through the highest, lowest, lewdest reaches of the New York queer club scene — before surprising its audience and protagonist alike with a drastic tonal about-face. Come for the arch, bitchy humor promised by the title and the director's general social media brand; stay for the unabashed sweetness of the enterprise; leave with the distinct sense that there's more to Firstman than his online persona. Small wonder A24 scooped it up for $17 million. (Read the full review by Guy Lodge.)