This article appeared in the May 14, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Photo by Christophe Boullion / FDC

What are we talking about when we talk about Cannes? While the same question applies to other major festivals, it takes on a particular meaning and intensity with this annual event: none of the others play out on so many levels at once. And that is what has made it, at least for the last 50 years, the world’s most important film festival, and a showcase that attracts exceptional media coverage and professional expectations.

Cannes is, among other things, the source of the most coveted festival prize, the Palme d’Or. Besides the Official Competition, the festival includes three other selections (Out of Competition, Un Certain Regard, Cannes Premiere) and three autonomous sidebars (Directors’ Fortnight, Critics’ Week, and ACID), as well as shorts and revivals programs. Cannes is also an artistic gathering place where the world’s greatest auteurs often emerge or are affirmed, a glamorous showcase of first-rate talent, the most important film market (whether for existing productions or those in the pipeline), an opportunity to promote various political or social agendas with particular visibility, and a venue for hundreds of meetings among professional organizations, festival directors, lobbies, and think tanks. At once a commercial Rubik’s Cube, a 2001: A Space Odyssey–style ominous monolith, and a sparkling, multifaceted diamond, the Cannes Film Festival has many moving parts but thrives on this very complexity.

The 78th edition, which commenced last night, boasts a selection of 110 new feature films and involves a number of notable changes, starting with a clear retreat from what had become one of its most criticized trends: the overrepresentation of French filmmakers. The fact that there are only three in the Official Competition is an important sign, and it is significant that two of them are women who are still in the relatively early stages of their careers—Hafsia Herzi and Julia Ducournau. Regarding the organizers’ recent efforts to increase the number of female directors in the selection, we must either consider the fact that, with female artists responsible for just over 30 percent of this year’s Competition titles, we are still a long way from parity, or else acknowledge that the selection simply reflects the state of a global production environment in which women remain a minority.

The #MeToo shock wave is still very much being felt in France, with several high-profile trials underway, so there’s no doubt that Artistic Director Thierry Fremaux is keen to send out positive signals, with a woman-directed film opening the festival: Leave One Day, by Amélie Bonnin in her theatrical-feature debut (an Out-of-Competition selection, as usual). Un Certain Regard also opens with a film by a woman (Promised Sky by Erige Sehiri), as do Critics’ Week and ACID (Adam’s Interest by Laura Wandel and L’Aventura by Sophie Letourneur, respectively).

Of course, the Official Competition still welcomes regulars of the Croisette and major international festivals: the Dardenne Brothers, Jafar Panahi, Sergei Loznitsa, Richard Linklater, and Wes Anderson; and let’s not forget Kelly Reichardt, whom I hope, with her new film The Mastermind, might finally receive the Palme d’Or she has long deserved. But this year’s slate also includes lesser-known names such as Spanish director Oliver Laxe, South African filmmaker Oliver Hermanus, Japan’s Chie Hayakawa, and Germany’s Mascha Schilinski, while Ari Aster makes his Cannes debut with Eddington. For the past two editions, Un Certain Regard has been dedicated to emerging talents; this year nine of the 20 selections are debut features. In France, the past year has seen a large number of high-quality feature debuts (Holy Cow, The Kingdom, Dog on Trial, and Niki), all of which were discovered in 2024’s Un Certain Regard section—so expectations are high. The Directors’ Fortnight is also heavily weighted toward first-timers, with the notable exceptions of Christian Petzold and Nadav Lapid as well as its opening, a tribute to director Laurent Cantet, with a film he conceived but could not direct, Enzo, since he tragically passed away just before shooting. The film is directed by his longtime friend Robin Campillo, but under Cantet’s signature.

Another side of Cannes is dominated by glitz, glamour, and celebrity. The presence of the new (and supposedly final) entry in the Mission: Impossible series—along with its star Tom Cruise—is, for me, the highlight of this year’s stacked Out-of-Competition slate, which also features Spike Lee’s Kurosawa remake Highest 2 Lowest, Ethan Coen’s Honey Don’t!, Isabelle Huppert starring in Thierry Klifa’s The Richest Woman in the World, and Jodie Foster in Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life. Heaping even more star power onto the red carpets, Scarlett Johansson and Kristen Stewart make their feature filmmaking debuts in Un Certain Regard with, respectively, Eleanor the Great and The Chronology of Water. Here Cannes’s three points of emphasis—gender parity, new talent, and celebrity—all intertwine efficiently.

One of the many equations a Cannes selection must solve is its relationship with current events. After a 2023 edition marked by numerous political statements made by filmmakers, actors, and activists, the 2024 festival took place under a blanket of surveillance intended to prohibit any actions or statements likely to cause controversy; it took a subtle fashion ruse by Cate Blanchett to ensure that at least one Palestinian flag was seen on the steps of the Palais des Festivals. This year, a Palestinian film, Tarzan and Arab Nasser’s Once Upon a Time in Gaza, will screen in Un Certain Regard, and Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi’s Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, a documentary about a young photographer from Gaza, will be shown in the ACID section. The day after the selection of Farsi’s film was announced, its 25-year-old subject and 10 members of her family were murdered by the Israeli army. It will be interesting to see if the festival will manage to evade or suppress political statements this year, given this tragic context.

Two Iranian films are entered in Competition, including It Was Just an Accident, the eagerly awaited new work by Panahi, who is expected to attend a festival screening for the first time since his imprisonment in 2010. While a number of contemporary political issues will also be addressed across other films (immigration with Sehiri’s Promised Sky; police violence with Dominik Moll’s Case 137; the war in Ukraine with Alina Gorlova, Simon Mozgovyi, and Yelizaveta Smith’s Militantropos; the environment with Momoko Seto’s animated film Dandelion’s Odyssey), the multiple tragedies affecting the world today are barely present—or downright invisible if we think of the Congolese, the Uyghurs, the Burmese, and Indigenous peoples. This shortcoming is accompanied by a marked drop in the number of documentaries at the festival from the plethora seen in previous years.

The Cannes Film Festival may be a large-format photo of the cinematic planet, but it is not a map of the world. China and India, the two biggest nations in terms of production volume and audience numbers, are marginally represented, even with the last-minute addition of Bi Gan’s Resurrection to the Competition lineup. No surprises here: we’ve known for a long time that cinema does not reflect the world—at best it translates it, more or less faithfully, and it is often all the better for being indirect or allusive. To find out whether the realities of our time nevertheless manage to make their way onto the big screen, one will have to go and see for oneself, film by film, during the 12-day event in the city of Cannes.

Jean-Michel Frodon is a journalist and film critic who has been covering the Cannes Film Festival for 42 years. He is a former senior editor at Le Monde and a former editorial director of Cahiers du cinéma, and currently writes for Slate.fr and many print and online publications worldwide. He is also a professor at Sciences Po Paris; an honorary professor at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland; and the author or editor of more than 30 books about cinema.