- Cannes 2026: Low Expectations, Death Has No Master, The Station (May 26, 2026)
A tender, sensitively observed first feature from Norway’s Eivind Landsvik, “Low Expectations” makes its home in the same Oslo where Joachim Trier and Dag Johan Haugerud set their quiet, introspective films. There’s a dreamily diffuse quality to the Nordic capital that befits the strain of empathetic naturalism that’s emanated of late from the country’s cinema. Amid the city’s serene, encouraging stillness, characters in the process of personal growth can come of age despite their stops and starts, on whatever timetable comes organically.
Debuting in the Directors’ Fortnight section at Cannes, “Low Expectations” marks the acting debut of Marie Ulven, better known as “girl in red”. Under that name, the 27-year-old Norwegian musician has specialized in synth-laden bedroom-pop anthems that sound at once ambient and stadium-ready, with bright melodies and spiky, shiny guitar riffs running an electric charge through her intimate, relatable lyricism. Deeply personal in their exploration of mental health and sexuality, these songs lay bare Ulven’s inner battles with brain chemistry as often as they find her nursing crushes on close friends or dancing with girls at the club. (Not for nothing has “Hey, do you listen to girl in red?” become lesbian shorthand.) In “Low Expectations,” starring as Maja, a musician who falls into depression as her popularity soars, Ulven delicately draws upon her career trajectory—including struggles with OCD and anxiety that spiked during the pandemic and found their way into her debut album—to form the aching foundation of a character whose sadness and self-doubt is threatening to stall her out.
Crushed under the pressure of global stardom and a record deal advance, as well as with deteriorating confidence and self-image, Maja moves back in with her supportive but frustrated mother (Tone Monstrum) and starts working part-time as an exam invigilator at a local high school. Recognized from her expansive social-media following by some students, though most leave her alone, Maja forms a friendship with senior school administrator Johannes (Trier regular Anders Danielsen Lie), who senses her loneliness and gently tries to reach through it. She also bonds with a student dancer (Embla Berntsen) who has followed Maja’s career out of both admiration for her music and curiosity as to how she might pursue her own passions.
Landsvik’s favored tone is one of witty, reassuring optimism, assisted by the wistful hues of 16mm cinematography by Andreas Bjørseth. Certain scenes in “Low Expectations,” including a particular standout set in a clothing store, strike a ruefully funny note, and his script occasionally expands to encompass an entertaining aside—like one in which Johannes and fellow teacher Oscar, played by Snorre Kind Monsson, bond over their shared obsession with Michael Mann’s “Heat.” But these touches are carefully judged, and a similar balance is struck with the heavier scenes where Maja’s mental crisis makes itself apparent. On the whole, the film is so patient and measured as to feel practically palliative, with Ulven’s magnetic and refreshingly unaffected lead performance extending to it a perfectly lo-fi type of star power. This is a showcase for Ulven’s acting abilities more than her music, though the original song she contributes is also memorably poignant (and surely another selling point for girl in red’s fanbase.) You’ll come away from the film—like Maja—at once lightly soothed and quietly nourished.
A more unsettling type of entrancement awaits in “Death Has No Master,” a Venezuelan drama from Jorge Thielen Armand—also in Directors’ Fortnight—about a woman named Caro (Asia Argento) who returns to her father’s cacao plantation in order to sell it, only to discover unwelcome occupants who conjure forth demons of their family’s colonial heritage.
An ominous, slow-simmering postcolonial giallo that channels the subgenre popularized by Italian horror maestros like Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento in more ways than just its central casting of Argento’s daughter, the film picks up as Caro arrives back in Venezuela after years living elsewhere, determined to set her father’s affairs in order and to extract any remaining profits from his crumbling estate. Arriving at the decrepit property with the dense ambience of the surrounding jungle deafening her on all sides, Caro discovers that its mansion is still occupied—by its current caretaker, Sonia (Dogreika Tovar, a non-professional actor who emerges as the film’s most spellbinding player), daughter of the previous caretaker, and her young son (Yermain Sequera), as well as another tenant (José Aponte) and an elder named Yoni (Arturo Rodriguez), who watched Caro grow up.
All are cautiously tolerant of Caro’s presence, though it’s immediately clear from her pink “Amore Amore” T-shirt, expensive shoes, and chunky designer sunglasses—not to mention her haughty, imperious demeanor—that she’s a foreigner in this country she lays claim to. As Roque warns Caro, “If you’re going to sell, sell quickly, because these lands will swallow you up.” At first perturbed, then incensed, by the presence of “squatters,” as she calls them, Caro vows to push them out of the family mansion, though the local police advise her to let the matter go, on account of how many years Sonia and the others—already well-known to the provincial and tight-knit community—have lived there. But Caro, smarting from decades of barely suppressed familial trauma tied up in her relationship to her father and the property she has inherited, can’t do that. Her tactics instead grow desperate and duplicitous, leading all involved down a dark, lawless path—and pulling “Death Has No Master” into a sanguinary spiral.
With the specter of slavery embodied by former plantation workers who still roam the jungles, wielding spears and speaking allegorically of the land as an entity that can be controlled by an occupying power but never wholly owned, Thielen Armand deepens the postcolonial tensions between Caro and Sonia, even as this side of the story settles for a more primal resonance in comparison to films like “White Material” and “Chocolat,” by Claire Denis, that have excavated the complex barriers and betrayals of everyday postcolonial existence more completely. Instead, methodically guiding his film toward its bloodthirsty denouncement, Thielen Armand steeps it first in an atmosphere of miasmic, pulsating dread, suggesting a hypnagogic inevitability to the fates of his characters. Oppressive sound design envelops all, compounding the desolation of the humid hacienda setting, and is afforded greater dimension by the ominously throbbing drumbeats of its score.
There’s comparatively far less conveyed here on the level of dialogue, and Argento—who reportedly learned Spanish for this underwritten role—is most effective in channeling Caro’s eruptions of venomous rage and entitlement, the visceral sense of a character being corroded from the inside out by emotions carved into her at an early age. “Death Has No Master” successfully accrues tension ahead of its explosive finale, one that pays off the story’s slow boil with an outward spiral of violence brutal enough to stain the soil red, Peckinpah-style, while solidifying its larger ideas about cycles of colonial oppression and the annihilation they are still capable of enacting when passed down through generations.
Over in the Critics’ Week sidebar section, Sara Ishaq’s Yemen-set drama “The Station” trains its gaze on an oasis of female solidarity amid a raging regional conflict. With their country ripped asunder now more than a decade ago by a civil war that continues today, the Yemeni people still struggle to endure war-torn daily circumstances. Upon reportedly learning from family members about a real, female-only fuel station in Sanaa, Yemen’s capital city, Ishaq—here making her narrative feature debut after directing the Oscar-nominated short documentary “Karama Has No Walls,” about the 2011 Yemeni uprising—was moved to craft a fictional story around Layal (Manal Al-Maliki), a resourceful woman tasked with managing this essential business. Shot in Jordan with a cast of largely non-professional actors, Ishaq’s film is a Critics’ Week highlight, paying tense and powerful tribute to the resilience of Yemeni women under cycles of patriarchal violence.
As “The Station” gets underway, Layal’s efforts to make ends meet at her small station—which, in addition to carefully rationing out gasoline in jerrycans, sells “contraband” material like school textbooks, lingerie, feminine care products, and contraceptives—often revolve around insulating it from the threat of violence that otherwise hangs heavy in the air (literally, with fighter jets loudly tearing through the skies—across Sanaa). A sign outside the station’s gated compound reads: “No men, no weapons, no politics,” a proclamation of purpose that Layal fights to protect. Though she’s been able to maintain this sanctuary with the conditional support of a sheikh’s wife (Shorooq Mohammed), there’s nothing secure about Layal’s existence.
When her 12-year-old brother Latih (Rashad Alrajeh), typically confined to the compound as the sole male in its all-women environment, attracts unwanted attention from nearby soldiers and bureaucrats who believe he’s old enough to enlist, Layal—who has already lost an older brother to the fighting—struggles to save him from a similar fate. As she submits to paying bribes to ensure Latih can remain at home, Layal comes into contact with her estranged sister Shams (Abeer Mohammed), whose arrival—along with her differing, harsher opinions about what will be required to keep Latih safe—further complicates matters.
Ishaq’s film operates along two intriguing parallel tracks, bringing viewers inside the fuel stop’s private sanctuary of Yemeni women—whose community is a welcoming safe space, alive with little shows of solidarity and light-hearted banter—as it expands subtly outward to acknowledge the cultural and societal tensions of the seldom-seen world outside the station. One result of this is that we gradually learn more about the various pressures shaping Latih. Even as Layal strives to shield him from the outside environment, he’s sensitive to the camaraderie that other boys and the soldiers in surrounding areas seem to enjoy, and a new friendship with the tall, ungainly Ahmad—a 13-year-old who serves as Shams’ chaperone, per the region’s religiously restrictive laws—prompts Latih to grow up faster than Layal is prepared for. Consistently well-performed, nicely photographed, and surprisingly earnest even as the story takes several darker turns en route to a conclusion that—though foregone—still manages to pack an emotional punch, “The Station” is an emotionally resonant drama that augurs well for Ishaq’s future in narrative film.
- Ten Great Performances of Cannes 2026 (May 26, 2026)
The 79th Cannes Film Festival came to a close this past weekend with numerous writers putting forth the effort to assess its place in the history of the world’s most important cinematic event. Neon continued their incredible Palme d’Or streak, taking home their seventh in a row for Cristian Mungiu’s “Fjord,” but the conversation seemed to center on Cannes being in a down year, and the hope that it would bounce back in 2027. Considering nearly everyone who attended Sundance and SXSW this year also considered those below average, it leads one to wonder if it’s the broader state of the industry with which we should be concerned than Cannes specifically. This writer saw 40 films and the vast majority of them were worth watching, even if very few of them were legitimately great, maybe even none. “Cannes had a lot of good, very little great” is how I often summarized it to people, and that seems fair.
Having said that, there were some undeniably great performances among the acclaimed films on the Croisette, and we asked our team covering Cannes to highlight a few they loved. No one should consider this list entirely comprehensive. For one, we made sure that each film only had one entry (although played along with the jury and cheated a little for two performances that can’t really be extricated from one another), which means some other turns even in these same films that we love were excluded. (Our writers wanted to write about three separate performances from “Clarissa” alone, for example.) There may not have been many great movies at Canne 2026, but there were great performances everywhere. Here are ten of them. (Well, eleven.) – Brian Tallerico
Hiam Abbass, “Atonement”
Proverbs 25:21-22 states, “If your enemies are hungry, give them bread to eat, and if they are thirsty, give them water to drink, for you will heap coals of fire on their heads.” Indeed, there’s something so disarming about mercy, something so illogical about extending forgiveness, that for many, to receive such atonement can feel as violent as it is liberating. I haven’t seen a better embodiment of those verses than in Hiam Abbass’ performance in “Atonement.” There’s an acting adage that it’s far easier to play anger than it is to play hurt, and her work should be used as a masterclass going forward for performers seeking to play the latter.
Abbass plays Mariam Khachaturian, a woman who sees her husband and sons get gunned down before her eyes by U.S. Marine Lou D’Alessandro (Boyd Holbrook), while in Baghdad. Years later, Lou, seeking forgiveness, expresses a desire to meet with Miriam and her daughter, Nora (Gheed). Through Abbass’ performance, we see how the trauma she’s experienced has burrowed itself under her skin, like shrapnel that won’t leave. From the way she pours tea to the way she simply sits down on her couch, Mariam has been forever rattled by what’s happened. She’s in pain, yes, but she’s also confused, and Abbass captures the oscillation between those poles with such poise: she doesn’t want to torture Lou by not meeting with him, but she wrestles with whether absolving Lou will do a disservice to the memory of her slain family. By staying bitter, does she remain closer to the memory of her family?
The film understands that forgiveness is not about forgetting, and it does not come with the promise of a restored relationship. Such atonement is as much for the victim as it is for the perpetrator, a way for the hurt party to move on with their lives and be free. “We’ve cried out all our tears,” Mariam says; in many ways, the film is a gentle invitation for her to cry once more, to move on in hope that a new beginning is possible, even if such hope is undergirded by doubt. – Zachary Lee
Swann Arlaud, “A Man of His Time”
To call Henri Marre, the vain, pencil-pushing bureaucratic at the heart of Emmanuel Marre’s World War II dramedy, “slippery,” would grant him a level of self-awareness he’s incapable of reaching. Swann Arlaud, most notable for his turn in “Anatomy of a Fall,” plays the failed author turned vile civil servant with a hand in the Holocaust, with the freneticism of a lizard crawling up a tree.
The performance starts with Arlaud’s appearance, which I second-hand heard described by one person as a “silver fox rat boy.” He’s attractive, makes it easy for one to believe that he’d be let in the door for a party full of the hottest intellectuals. But he’s just cagey enough for one to believe that, like in the film, he’d fall flat on his face once inside. As the aloof protagonist, Arlaud never overplays his hand by laying a line too thick or working his face to make the film’s many crash-zoom sight gags land harder. He plays Henri earnestly, a twitchy bundle of nerves happy with the taste of a boot. The fact that he doesn’t play Henri as a cartoonish villain, but as a normal idiot, makes him all the more funny and frightening in a film about how the middle man is as dangerous as the top man. – Robert Daniels
Virginia Efira & Tao Okamoto, “All of a Sudden”
If an entire Cannes jury came to the conclusion that the chemistry between lead actresses Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto was so inextricable from their film’s overall effect that they should be jointly awarded the festival’s best-actress prize, who am I to disagree? More to the point, Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s transcendent “All of a Sudden” furthers the Japanese filmmaker’s signature interest in doubling, mirrors, and coincidence by observing an unexpectedly deep and emotionally significant friendship between two women.
Marie-Lou Fontaine (Virginie Efira) is the director of Garden of Freedom, a nursing home in Paris where she seeks to implement a radically compassionate care technique, known as Humanitude, in spite of resistance from burned-out staff; Mari Morisaki (Tao Okamoto) is an avant-garde theatre director whose latest work, “Up Close, Nobody Is Normal,” concerns society’s need for empathy toward its most vulnerable. Born in Paris, Marie-Lou once studied anthropology in Kyoto before embarking upon her current career path; born in Kyoto, Mari studied philosophy in Paris, which led her toward theatre.
After a chance encounter, Marie-Lou attends Mari’s play and is moved, even more so after she learns Mari is battling cancer; that night, as they discuss their respective paths and the interlinked perspectives these have instilled in them around such weighty subjects as late-stage capitalism and physical deterioration, a profound friendship takes root. Through its gentle, generous three-hour runtime, as “All of Sudden” explores the true extent of their connection, Efira and Okamoto each deliver master-classes in emotional sensitivity.
Meeting one another’s eyes with rapt curiosity as they converse fluidly back and forth across French and Japanese, growing intellectually intimate as insights spill forth, the two actresses never strike a false note, instead complementing and complicating their two characters through the quietly transformative act of taking time with each other. Rarely in modern cinema have such simple manifestations of humanity as looking and listening been made to feel so existentially enlightening. – Isaac Feldberg
Hannah Einbinder, “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma”
The first breakout title at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, by almost unanimous opinion, was Jane Schoenbrun’s “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” an intellectually rigorous and magnificently horny vivisection of the psychosexual impulses that fuel “problematic” horror movies and that smart seductively inside our relationships to such tantalizing, forbidden-fruit cinema. As Kris, the young queer filmmaker hired to direct a reboot of a long-dormant slasher franchise, Hannah Einbinder does more than hold her own against a sultry Gillian Anderson, as the “Camp Miasma” franchise’s purringly vampish final-girl-turned-grande-dame; the “Hacks” actress matches Anderson’s freak while gradually shedding layers of emotional and academic fixation to emerge as the film’s jittery, breathy, insatiably titillated heart.
Delivering every line of dialogue as if on the edge of orgasm, savoring fried chicken and gummy candy with the same finger-licking relish, moving beyond shame to awaken the sweet and sanguinary nature of her own desire through an emotionally complex and progressively blood-drenched détente with her ultra-canny leading lady, Kris is an inspired creation. Einbinder invests her with a shivering combination of terror and lust, even as the actress enables us to simultaneously witness Kris achieving a kind of intellectual freedom through erogenous overdrive. A standout scene in which a video-conference pitch meeting goes off the rails, leaving Kris flushed with arousal and her producers baffled, is only one showcase for the chaotically erotic energy Einbinder can harness even when alone in a snowy car park. And when she comes together with Anderson for giddily gore-splattered, libido-liberating scenes that blur the boundaries between reality and fantasy, the actress commits with stupendous and surprisingly tender abandon to a climax so powerfully cathartic it sends shockwaves through the screen. – Isaac Feldberg
Hoyeon, “Hope”
There was only one entrance at this year’s Cannes Film Festival in screenings I attended that produced actual applause. For almost an hour, we’ve been watching the great Hwang Jung-min race through devastation to track the monster that’s destroying the small village in which he’s a cop in Na Hong-jin’s divisive “Hope”. He’s perfect at capturing a sort of panicked desperation, the kind of character who doesn’t really want to catch what he’s chasing because then it might kill him. And then Hoyeon’s Sung Ae comes speeding in driving a cop car like she’s Sarah f-ing Connor and the tone shifts. Is she more heroic or just more reckless? Is there much of a difference?
So much of what’s been written about (and will be written about) “Hope” will focus on the men (and the creatures), but the film doesn’t work without Hoyeon’s deceptively great work to balance the macho chaos. It also helps a great deal that the “Squid Game” star seems to quite literally just be having a blast, as if she can’t believe this shit either. Even when she’s screaming her way through the insane places this movie goes, there’s almost a smile on her face, and that energy can be contagious. She’s the part of this movie that subconsciously encourages us to just sit back and enjoy the ride. And you very likely will. – Brian Tallerico
Victoria Luengo, “The Beloved”
The first scene of Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s “The Beloved” is arguably the best of the year, a tone-setting showcase for Javier Bardem and Victoria Luengo that hums with equal amounts of hope and resentment, emotions that can co-exist in children that have felt let down by their parents. That’s how Luengo’s Emilia Martinez approaches this restaurant sit-down with her estranged father Esteban Martinez, played with icy precision by Bardem. In this sort of “Unsentimental Value,” Esteban is there to offer his struggling actress a job on his new project, “Desierto,” and the two performers imbue the scene with so much back story that we instantly believe everything that the script needs us to over the next twenty minutes. Rarely has a foundation been laid more confidently as we witness Esteban’s controlling nature just through tone and Emilia’s refusal to let him rewrite history. It’s a perfect prologue in that it plays like an overture, defining the themes the orchestra will play in the drama to follow.
Either Bardem or Luengo could have made this feature but it’s the latter who feels more like a revelation, even if the Oscar winner hasn’t been this good in years. Also appearing at Cannes in Pedro Almodovar’s “Bitter Christmas,” Luengo feels this year like she’s reached a new level in terms of character work and subtlety, never leaning into the potential heartbreak of her arc in “The Beloved,” but letting us see her emotional journey unfold on her face. When Esteban eventually gets around to his toxic ways on the set of “Desierto,” Luengo maintains the restraint of a child who has seen this behavior from their parent before, a portrayal of a pain that comes from knowing you’ve been let down yet again. – Brian Tallerico
Masahiro Motoki, “The Samurai and the Prisoner”
You might think a guy cast in a samurai film would have to brush up on his swordplay skills. But as Murashige Araki, a 16th-century Japanese warlord, the actor Masahiro Motoki has to master verbal jousting: The heart of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “The Samurai and the Prisoner” lies in the conversations between Motoki’s character, who is engaged in a struggle against another warlord, and Kanbei Kuroda (Masaki Suda), a cunning prisoner from whom he seeks advice on strategy and murder mysteries.
Kanbei’s brilliance is beyond doubt, but he may not have Murashige’s interests at heart. He repeatedly suggests that Murashige has violated the samurai code by showing too much mercy. If you can imagine the dynamic between Clarice and Hannibal reconstituted for a bone-dry, stately samurai epic, you might not be too far off, although Kanbei evokes far more sympathy than Hannibal does. Still, the trickiest task might go to Motoki, who has to play Lord Murashige as a curious mix of ruthlessness and generosity, of knowledge and ignorance. He addresses Kanbei with respect even while holding him captive. It’s the larger of the two main roles, and Motoki gives it an understated unpredictability. – Ben Kenigsberg
Sophie Okonedo, “Clarissa”
Cutting a figure that’s as arrestingly elegant as it is unexpectedly mournful, Sophie Okonedo’s performance as the titular Clarissa in the Esiri brothers’ adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway finds its shattering power in restraint. That’s not to say that it’s a quiet performance; when we meet Clarissa from the start, she’s in the throes of organizing a party, and her words can be as gentle and cutting as the Lagos wind as she scolds her children and staff alike. It would have been easy to write off Clarissa as being curmudgeonly or bitter, a woman whose youthful ideals have been sanded down by the realities of growing up, but it’s the way Okonedo laces tenderness and regret that makes her performance so noteworthy.
This is also a performance that wouldn’t work without India Amarteifio playing a younger Clarissa, both of them acting from a strong sense of identity, even if the older Clarissa is more easily defined by calcified heartache. Breaking through Clarissa’s steely exterior, whether it’s through the way she might hug an old friend or gaze off into the distance, we see flashes of her longing, of a woman who still dreams even if the logistics of life have kept her from ever fully exploring them. We see Clarissa come to life as more guests arrive at her party, the tension behind her eyes slowly slackening. What we see before us is a woman coming alive again, who allows herself the grace to remember fondly and to hope unabated. It’s all thanks to Okonedo’s full-bodied commitment to embracing all of Clarissa’s multitudes. – Zachary Lee
Sebastian Stan, “Fjord”
I’m more skeptical of Cristian Mungiu’s expertly directed “Fjord,” this year’s Palme d’Or winner, than many others. The story—in which a family from Romania with strict religious and socially conservative views is targeted on a dubious pretext by child services in Norway—struck me as jerry-rigged to promote the caricature that Big Government persecutes free-thinking individuals. One test of this is that the film removes any possibility that the targets don’t grasp the machinations against them: The parents, Mihai (Sebastian Stan), an I.T. expert, and Lisbet (Renate Reinsve), a nurse originally from Norway herself, are educated, know three languages, and recognize that they are being railroaded by powerful bureaucrats who regard them as insufficiently progressive.
Even so, I can’t find fault with the almost unrecognizable Stan’s performance as the patriarch, who decides that adhering to the legal counsel he and Lisbet are given is a losing strategy. While I knew in advance that the Romanian-born Stan was in the film, at some point during the festival frenzy I’d put that information out of my mind. So—much as Roger once found with Charlize Theron in “Monster”—I spent all of “Fjord” wondering who that charismatic actor was and what I’d seen him in before, which is one definition of a performer vanishing into his role. – Ben Kenigsberg
Tom Sturridge, “The Man I Love”
Every time the camera turns to Tom Sturridge, the light around him seems to bend differently. In Ira Sachs’ quietly affecting study of a character and an era, Sturridge is Dennis, the dedicated partner to actor Jimmy George (Rami Malek). Throughout “The Man I Love,” George persistently cheats on Dennis. Yet, Dennis, determined and intense, remains by George, who’s battling AIDS through a blend of showmanship and song.
Sturridge, as his character entails, is a supporting player here. But every time he appears, he grounds a film filled with bright musical performances and actorly jokes. He reminded me of Sterling Hayden, the granite-face leading man whose ruggedness could belie the genuine pathos he brought to films. Sturridge walks through this film with a similar nimbleness. At first, through his frozen visage, he appears unapproachable. But as the film advances, his exterior melts, revealing a deeply sensitive man whose love isn’t delivered through physical or emotional affection but through the repetitive, yet necessary tasks he performs with notable familiarity, to keep his partner alive. This is a rich turn, by a seasoned actor, who knows exactly who this character is down to his core. The result is the best performance of Sturridge’s career. – Robert Daniels
- Cannes 2026: Elephants in the Fog, Yesterday, The Eye Didn’t Sleep, A Girl’s Story (May 25, 2026)
Each night, in a small Nepalese village nestled in a deep forest, the community carries torches between the trees to ward off wild elephants that would otherwise rampage through farmers’ crops. At once a time-honored ritual and a practical responsibility, this custom embodies the complex, often painful collisions between past and present that constitute everyday life in Abinash Bikram Shah’s “Elephants in the Fog.”
Winner of the Un Certain Regard sidebar section’s Jury Prize at Cannes this year, this beautiful, mysterious, and emotionally captivating debut directorial feature is set at the heart of Nepal’s transgender community. The matriarch of a house of transgender refugees living in a traditional Kinnar community—an ancient Nepalese way of living for those who identify as members of the country’s legally respected “third gender,” with religious roots in both Hinduism and Islam—middle-aged trans woman Pirati (Pushpa Thing Lama) has embraced many young trans refugees who live as “daughters” under her roof. Overseen by spiritual gurus, the Kinnar bless weddings and new births for a nearby village from which they are otherwise separated.
Even Pirati chafes against the strict, conservative conditions under which the Kinnar’s hierarchy is structured—including vows of chastity that she’s quietly elected to violate due to her romance with a warm-hearted drummer (Aashant Sharma), who accompanies the Kinnar’s ceremonies, and with whom she dreams of escaping to New Delhi. To Pirati’s adopted daughter Apsara (Aliz Ghimere), a former sex worker who brings rebellious energy to the community, the Kinnar’s historical rigidity—and its belief that trans women should be thought of not as women but as a third gender beyond the binary—is similarly outdated and limiting of the life she wants for herself.
When Apsara vanishes after a quarrel with Pirati, her blonde wig was discovered the next day by children playing in the forest; it is unclear whether she has absconded for parts unknown or if something worse has befallen her. Pirati chooses to look for her lost daughter, contacting friends from Apsara’s past and learning that a married rickshaw driver (Sanja Gupta) had been the one to whom she had expressed an attraction. Soon, the conditional nature of the Kinnar’s acceptance by their neighboring communities comes into focus, as the indifference of police and barely concealed resentment of local villagers complicate Pirati’s increasingly anguished efforts to discover the truth about Apsara’s disappearance.
Evolving—at first almost imperceptibly—from a warm, vibrant examination of everyday Kinnar existence into a tense, nocturnal crime saga, “Elephants in the Fog” emerges as an emotionally kaleidoscopic, immensely ambitious film. Yet even as its story circles the ignorance, prejudice, and violence the trans community faces in South Asia, its lens upon the trans characters at its core is sensitive and revealing. Gracefully, it portrays the solidarity and sisterhood that bind the found families of the Kinnar together without minimizing the fraught nature of their existence in contemporary Nepal, where progressive and reactionary politics remain in flux.
It’s all held together by an extraordinarily moving lead performance by Thing Lama, a Kinnar activist who’d never acted before this film but is riveting in moments of joyous sensuality, as well as in moments when her stoic features are stricken with sorrow. Thing Lama’s eloquent distillation of Pirati’s despair and determination in the face of mounting obstacles, the maternal anguish and desire for justice that slowly burn inside of her, add up to a scorching performance and a truly unforgettable cinematic experience.
Palestinian filmmaker Rakan Mayasi’s lyrical debut feature “Yesterday, the Eye Didn’t Sleep,” also in the Un Certain Regard section, similarly explores what forms of agency remain accessible to women navigating life within larger structures that systematically deprive them of their voices. Set within the patriarchal rituals of Bedouin tribes in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, Mayasi’s film charts intertribal conflict and its consequences for the daughters of one family, even as it is deeply grounded in the close bond between two sisters whose emotional lives are richer than their tradition-bound families can perceive.
Opening with the arresting visual of a truck engulfed in roaring flames, “Yesterday” gradually fills in the context. An enigmatic young woman, Gamra, has fled her family and is assumed to have set the vehicle on fire while making her escape; the truck may have belonged to her lover, who chose another woman. Under cover of darkness, her cousin Yasser (Yasser Al Mawla) searches for her, but his night-time pursuit turns tragic when he accidentally hits and kills a member of the neighboring Bedouin tribe. It is decided that, by way of reparation and in an effort to settle the blood feud, one of his two sisters—the quiet fieldworker Rim (Rim Al Mawla) or outgoing nurse Jawaher (Jawaher Al Mawla)—will be delivered to the aggrieved tribe as an honor offering.
Mayasi’s fascinated by the balance between tradition and modernity in Bedouin tribal life, and he depicts these forces as coexisting in a way that requires the characters—especially the two sisters at the film’s center—to actively negotiate their fates. After Jawaher submits herself to marry one of the rival sheiks’ sons, “Yesterday” shows us their wedding as a celebration where melancholy thrums beneath the merriment, all the bright colors and rhythmic choreography of a traditional ceremony revealing the tribe’s desire for collectivism even as its oppressive customs impose a somber, underlying sense of isolation upon Jawaher and her sister. It’s only through their private conversations—which reveal their own romantic interests and fraught feelings toward their family dynamic—that Rim and Jawaher are able to reconcile the contradictions of their existence. In the periphery of the action, “Yesterday” also occasionally leaves the sounds of war drones buzzing and explosions echoing through the valley, situating the film in a present-day Bekaa Valley beset by repeated Israeli air strikes.
Shot without a script and with a non-professional cast, “Yesterday” treats that overarching story as a starting point, trusting in the familiar instincts of its actors—many of whom are members of the same family—to guide them through scenarios presented by Mayasi’s plot, which he in turn based on accounts of his grandmother’s forced marriage at age 14. That Mayasi studied under Abbas Kiarostami is evidenced by this film’s poetic, neo-realist style, though the improvisational element of its production can make for an occasionally indistinct narrative experience. Even so, the film’s patient attention to landscape and its steady influence on the tribal rituals of its characters also gains texture and potency as “Yesterday” enters a more surrealist, searching final third. There’s an elegant ambiguity to its closing images, involving a pilgrimage through the plains and toward a fertile tree at the base of the mountains, one that reflects the centuries-deep connection between this desert region and its people as, even in contemporary times, a source of spiritual refuge for characters attempting to seize freedom from societal strictures.
Elsewhere in Un Certain Regard, a different sort of rendezvous with past and present—similarly grounded in one woman’s experience struggling to reclaim agency in a society structured upon her subjugation—dominates writer-director Judith Godrèche’s “A Girl’s Story,” which adapts a book of the same name by Nobel Prize-winning French author Annie Ernaux. “It is the absence of meaning in what one lives, at the moment one lives it, which multiplies the possibilities of writing,” Ernaux memorably reflected in this volume, as elegant a précis as any for her richly introspective body of work.
At its best, of course, film can similarly serve as a conduit to one’s personal history, allowing filmmakers to narrativize past experiences and situate them within a greater sociological context. Ernaux’s written work is justly acclaimed for such emotional excavation. In the hands of Godrèche—a French actress and author who also became a key figure in the country’s surging MeToo movement—the film adaptation of “A Girl’s Story” proves remarkably successful in evoking the same liminal space between sensation and memory, between the acuteness of lived experience and the subsequent haze of reminiscence, where Ernaux sets her focus.
“A Girl’s Story,” in which Ernaux revisits the summer of 1958—a formative one in her teenage years that helped to shape her literary identity—was approached by the author as both memoir and reevaluation, allowing her to “explore the gulf between the stupefying reality of things that happen, at the moment they happen, and, years later, the strange unreality in which the things that happened are enveloped.” At the core of Ernaux’s interest was the period when, at seventeen-and-a-half years old and while working as a camp counselor, she was seduced by the head counselor and spent her first night with a man.
This sexual encounter was unhappy and overwhelming, not only in the moment but afterward, as she was forced to reckon with the sting of rejection and subsequent social fallout that left her isolated. At that age, without the emotional framework or feminist vocabulary to recognize what had happened as a set of abuses and manipulations, Ernaux internalized this trauma in ways that—decades later, looking back on her youth through the lens of adulthood—she remained invested in processing fully later in life.
Godrèche’s beautifully burnished film adaptation, starring her daughter Tess Barthélémy as the teenage Ernaux, approaches this chapter in the author’s life with considerable sensitivity but also an unsparing, clear-eyed attention to the power dynamics that dictate life at this summer camp. She does in part by bringing the 70-year-old Ernaux ((Valérie Dréville) into the picture, narrating passages of “A Girl’s Story” aloud at a public event, which allows her to directly frame the younger Annie’s tumultuous experience in the reflective and reconciliatory terms that Ernaux laid out in her book.
A delicate, doe-eyed screen presence, Barthélémy is all too believable as a gangly, guileless young woman who’s desperate to fit in with the other, much more worldly counselors. With her wire-frame spectacles and long skirts, she cuts a demure figure, especially compared to her chic, cigarette-smoking colleagues. This sheltered quality leaves her vulnerable to the older head counselor, Herve (Victor Bonnel), who wastes little time before cornering Annie at a co-ed dance party, kissing her against a wall, then pulling her by the hand toward the dormitories.
The glow of excitement that Barthélémy exudes early in this seduction is partially and poignantly undone by the flashes of fear and confusion in her eyes, as the inexperienced Annie is uneasily reduced to an object for this man’s use but also denied opportunities to seek her own pleasure within the encounter. As word of her dalliance with Herve spreads, she finds herself ostracized from the other girls at camp, even as the boys hungrily circle her to try their luck. And when she endeavors to set more favorable terms for herself with “H.,” as she sometimes dreamily refers to him, the twentysomething callously disregards her, soon altogether discarding his conquest.
Godrèche captures, through rapt attention to Barthélémy’s performance, the deep feelings of betrayal, shame, and humiliation that Annie was left to carry through that long, painful summer. Simultaneously, in the defiance that she discovered within herself, and the increasing (though by no means consistent) confidence with which she learned to defend her corporeal and emotional state from the intrusions of others, Godrèche also assuredly shows us the stirrings of Ernaux’s literary style, the contradiction between molten desire and cool self-examination that makes her prose so electrifying.
Ernaux’s work has been adapted for the screen before; most recently, Audrey Diwan’s second feature, “Happening,” based on Ernaux’s 2000 memoir of the same name, won the Golden Lion at Venice. Godrèche’s film, co-written with her lead actress, will certainly be embraced by those who admired Diwan’s precise, painful distillation of Ernaux’s prose. Whereas that film resonated sharply in our present political moment with its claustrophobically taut chronicling of a university student’s emotionally and physically traumatic efforts to obtain an abortion in 1963 France, prior to its legalization, A Girl’s Story seeks a more gently aching, empathetic embrace of what has always been a universal experience: that of a young woman in the messy, painful process of coming to more deeply understand both herself and the man’s world she must maneuver.
- Cannes 2026: Table of Contents (May 25, 2026)
The 2026 Cannes Film Festival starts Tuesday, May 12th, running through May 24th. The Ebert team returns this year with coverage of all of the major films in review and video form.
Below is a running index of our reviews, dispatches, and video reports from the festival.
Full Reviews
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma review: Slasher fans get the homage they deserve by Brian Tallerico
Propeller One-Way Night Coach review: Travolta’s directorial debut never takes flight by Brian Tallerico
Hope review: Bonkers Korean monster movie destroys the hero narrative by Robert Daniels
Her Private Hell review: Refn is back with shallow trip to the underworld by Brian Tallerico
Fjord review: Thorny moral quandary in this icy drama by Brian Tallerico
The Samurai and the Prisoner review: Riveting 16th century epic plays like Samurai Columbo by Brian Tallerico
Victorian Psycho: More frustrating than fun horror-comedy can’t find a tone by Brian Tallerico
Video Reports
Cannes 2026 Video #1: The 79th Cannes Film Festival Begins!
Cannes 2026 Video #2: A Look Back at Day One of the Fest
Cannes 2026 Video #3: Nagi Notes, Camp Miasma, Werner Herzog
Cannes 2026 Video #4: Festival Dispatch with Zachary Lee
Cannes 2026 Video #5: Festival Dispatch with Ben Kenigsberg
Cannes 2026 Video #6: Club Kid, Paper Tiger, Clarissa
Cannes 2026 Video #7: Festival Dispatch with Jason Gorber
Cannes 2026 Video #8: Dua, I’ll Be Gone in June, La Gravida
Cannes 2026 Video #9: Critics Roundtable
Cannes 2026 Video #10: Reflecting on the Award Winners
Festival Dispatches
Cannes 2026: The Electric Kiss by Ben Kenigsberg
Cannes 2026: Fatherland, Parallel Tales by Brian Tallerico
Cannes 2026: Nagi Notes, Ashes by Ben Kenigsberg
Cannes 2026: Ken Russell’s The Devils, Pan’s Labyrinth, Moonlighting by Brian Tallerico
Cannes 2026: All of a Sudden, Think Good by Ben Kenigsberg
Cannes 2026: Clarissa, Atonement, Butterfly Jam by Brian Tallerico
Cannes 2026: The Beloved, A Woman’s Life, Gentle Monster by Robert Daniels
Cannes 2026: Paper Tiger, Sheep in the Box by Brian Tallerico
Cannes 2026: John Lennon: The Last Interview, La Libertad Doble by Ben Kenigsberg
Cannes 2026: The Meltdown, La Frappe, I’ll Be Gone in June by Brian Tallerico
Cannes 2026: Avedon, Visitation by Ben Kenigsberg
Cannes 2026: Club Kid, Marie Madeleine by Robert Daniels
Cannes 2026: The Unknown, Another Day by Ben Kenigsberg
Cannes 2026: Iron Boy, Tangles, Lucy Lost by Brian Tallerico
Cannes 2026: Minotaur, Red Rocks by Ben Kenigsberg
Cannes 2026: The Man I Love, Orange-Flavoured Wedding by Ben Kenigsberg
Cannes 2026: Dua, Made of Flesh and Fuel, Six Months in a Pink and Blue Building by Robert Daniels
Cannes 2026: The Black Ball, Bitter Christmas by Brian Tallerico
Cannes 2026: A Man of His Time, Moulin, Coward by Robert Daniels
Cannes 2026: I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, Diary of a Chambermaid, La Perra by Robert Daniels
Cannes 2026: Maverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean, Dernsie: The Amazing Life of Bruce Dern by Brian Tallerico
Cannes 2026: The Birthday Party, When the Night Falls by Brian Tallerico
Cannes 2026: The Dreamed Adventure, Too Many Beasts, Women on Trial, Che Guevara: The Last Companions by Ben Kenigsberg
Cannes 2026: Everytime, Ben’Imana, Titanic Ocean by Robert Daniels
Cannes 2026: Colony, The End of It, Roma Elastica by Brian Tallerico
Cannes 2026: Full Phil, Sanguine (Species), Jim Queen by Zachary Lee
Cannes 2026: Second Takes on Some of the Year’s Best Films by Brian Tallerico
Cannes 2026: Elephants in the Fog, Yesterday, The Eye Didn’t Sleep, A Girl’s Story by Isaac Feldberg
- Cannes 2026: Second Takes on Some of the Year’s Best Films (May 25, 2026)
While we try to divide and conquer a large amount of the Cannes program, including every one of the Competition titles, the scheduling inevitably leads to situations where a writer on this team sees something that was assigned elsewhere. It could be a case of wanting to be a part of the conversation about the biggest titles, no other alternatives in a timeslot that aren’t being covered, or just the final day, when all of Comp replays. In my 40-film schedule (!!!), I ended up seeing seven films that were hit first by Robert Daniels or Ben Kenigsberg at this site, and only one misfired for me (“Coward”). I’d like to offer a few thoughts on the other six, all worth tracking as they make their way from Cannes to a theater near you later this year.
“All of a Sudden”
One of the buzziest titles coming into Cannes seems to be one of the titles that also satisfied viewers here in ways that works by other acclaimed authors (“Parallel Tales,” “A Sheep in the Box”) failed to do. Ryusuke Hamaguchi is back with a 196-minute drama that justifies its length by being intrinsically about patience. It’s a film that asks us to be patient and present with people, especially the elderly and the infirm. Virginia Efira stars as the head of a program called Humanitude at a nursing home in Paris, where she is stymied by practicalities like financial concerns. When she meets a dying theater director (Tao Okamoto), she’s inspired to work harder to connect with those who are so often denied connections. In a year with a lot of cynicism and anxiety in the Cannes line-up, “All of a Sudden” is a big-hearted cry for empathy, a film that asks us to really look people in the eyes, put our hand on their shoulder, and be there in the moment with them. It’s an antidote to a fest that can be exhausting to consider the wealth of humanity on display in Hamaguchi’s vision, a movie that grows in esteem in my mind every day since I saw it.
“Club Kid”
The explosive buzz generated by the world premiere of Jordan Firstman’s writing/directing/acting showcase could be heard across Europe. In a fest with few standout sales titles, this one going to A24 for a whopping $17 million is easily one of the year’s big stories. Firstman plays a party organizer near the end of his rope when a woman drops a kid off at his door, claiming that he’s the father. As cheesy as it sounds, Firstman’s hilarious and moving dramedy is earnestly about how your kids can make you a better version of yourself, sometimes even one you didn’t think could happen. We’ve seen hundreds of movies about adults releasing the potential within children, but it can go both ways. Trust me, my kids inspire me every day. And I saw some of that heartfelt truth in this buoyant, funny movie. When people like Firstman jump into feature filmmaking across three fields, one almost always suffers, but this is the rare case when one would have tough time choosing whether Firstman’s writing, acting, or directing are his greatest accomplishment here.
“The Beloved”
A quick way to describe Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s riveting drama about filmmaking might be to call it “Unsentimental Value.” Much like the Joachim Trier Oscar winner, this is the tale of a filmmaker father (Javier Bardem, as good as he’s been in years) who tries to mend bridges with his estranged daughter Emilia (Victoria Luengo, also at Cannes in “Bitter Christmas,” and phenomenal in both). Sorogoyen opens his film with one of the best scenes in years: A 20-minute conversation between the leads that sets the foundation for the film to come as it devolves into conflicting memories and accusations. The film never quite reaches that peak again (although an on-set meltdown comes close) but it remains a searing character study for its entire runtime, grounded by not only two of my favorite performances of Cannes, but that I’ll see all year.
“Hope”
Widely acknowledged as the craziest film in Competition this year, Na Hong-jin’s action epic is the likeliest in the slate to find a big audience around the world. Wearing its James Cameron and Bong Joon-ho inspirations on its sleeve, “Hope” opens with one of the most impressive hours of action cinema I’ve ever seen. As a cop in a small village named Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) races to catch up to whatever is causing insane devastation around the region, Na Hong-jin’s camera can barely keep up with him. It’s a bravura sequence that the rest of the movie can’t quite catch up to, but a bookending bit of Big Chase chaos comes close. This is a ridiculously indulgent action movie (160 minutes!) with some admittedly janky VFX (that might get fixed before you see it), but what makes it memorable is its unapologetic ambition. While too many films at Cannes this year felt like auteurs playing it safe by exploring themes they had done more eloquently elsewhere, this one felt fresh, new, and borderline insane.
“Minotaur”
“Leviathan” director Andrey Zvyagintsev came to Cannes this year with a chilly remake of Chabrol’s “The Unfaithful Wife” (also made into “Unfaithful” with Diane Lane), told in a very Russian dialect. The acclaimed director uses the backdrop of the early days of the Russo-Ukrainian War to reveal what can happen when people are seen as disposable. A business executive named Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov) has been asked by the Russian government which of his employees are to be sent to war. At the same time, he discovers that his wife is having an affair. There’s a centerpiece sequence in “Minotaur” that is the reason it’s been so acclaimed, a feat of Hitchcockian direction that almost makes us feel like we’re in the room with a man covering up a crime. Like so much of the movie’s color palette, it’s icy, calculated, and chilling, a reminder of what can happen in broad daylight in a time when human life has lost so much of its value.
“The Man I Love”
There’s nothing chilly about Ira Sachs’ moving drama that successfully reclaims Rami Malek from years of blockbusters that didn’t know what to do with him. He gives arguably his best performance as a NYC actor in the ‘80s who is facing the inevitability of AIDS. Sachs has honed a delicate sense of realism in his last few films—this would make a fascinating double feature with “Peter Hujar’s Day” in the way it captures a very specific time—and it allows “The Man I Love” to sneak up on you. There are times when I felt like it was too purposefully reaching for poignancy, but the last fifteen minutes are devastating, especially a scene in which Malek’s character is pulled from a stage he doesn’t want to leave. So many men were pulled from that spotlight too young. Sachs has made a tribute to them all.
