This article appeared in the May 16, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Enzo (Robin Campillo, 2025)

Cannes has traditionally opened with various eminences publicly hymning the glories of cinema, occasionally sounding a note of social responsibility—but without distressing the gowns-and-glamour red-carpet crowd. This year, as has been the case since the invasion of Ukraine, Cannes opened on a somewhat harder-edged note, with Robert De Niro—stepping up to receive a Lifetime Achievement Palme d’Or—issuing a resonant warning about the abuses of the Trump regime and its implications for the world and for cinema (although the president’s proposed tariffs on non-U.S. films are hardly the most grievous of the globe’s current problems).

A mood of tight-jawed pragmatism has clearly affected the 2025 festival, since this year, all the major sections kicked off with films that, one way or another, were very much rooted in straight-down-the-line realism. The opening-night selection brought its own tweaks to that formula, although they couldn’t overcome its mundanity. Amélie Bonnin’s Leave One Day is a slight coming-home story about a celebrity chef (Juliette Armanet) who returns to the roadside café run by her parents, where she once learned the art of solid trad French cuisine. She also reunites with her supremely irritating bro buddies from high school, including an old admirer who still carries a torch for her (an affable but somewhat insipid Bastien Bouillon). The action is spiked with French pop hits of assorted vintage, none of them exceptional, and rarely performed with much real intensity by the cast (Armanet is widely known as a singer; the others have sometimes affectingly amateur deliveries). It’s hardly Jacques Demy—in fact, it’s barely even Christophe Honoré’s Love Songs (2007), to name one example of the post-Demy French comédie musicale tradition.

It’s arguably a bold move (indeed, unprecedented in the history of the festival) to put a film by a first-time feature director in the big opening slot, especially starring actors who have little resonance outside France (Dominique Blanc, playing the heroine’s mother, will be most familiar to cinephiles). But it also seems a little callous to put Bonnin in the critics’ firing line with something so slight.There was a more straight-ahead opener in the Un Certain Regard sidebar: Promised Sky by Erige Sehiri, the Tunisian director of Under the Fig Trees, a discovery here in 2022. Unfortunately, Sehiri’s new film lacks the magic of that ensemble gem: it’s a solid, downbeat piece about three sub-Saharan women in Tunis whose immigrant community faces increasing hostility. Aïssa Maïga is at the forefront as a journalist-turned-pastor, but the standout discovery is Debora Lobe Naney, as an ebullient independent spirit who gets by on vigorous hustling. The character depiction is vivid, but the film is dramatically lackluster, never quite transcending the impression of a well-researched depiction of this particular problem faced at this particular moment by this particular community.

A bracing surprise, if a minor one, was Directors’ Fortnight opener Enzo, credited as “A film by Laurent Cantet”—the director of Time Out (2001) and the Palme d’Or–winning The Class (2008), who died last year. His final film was completed by his longtime co-writer and editor Robin Campillo, who gets the directing credit here, so that Enzo very much fits into Cantet’s cycle of youth-in-crisis movies, including 2017’s The Workshop, while also pursuing the queer themes of Campillo’s films. Newcomer Eloy Pohu plays a teenager from a wealthy, high-achieving family who refuses the classic bourgeois career path to work instead, clumsily, as an apprentice on a building site—where he finds himself falling for a Ukrainian laborer (Maksym Slivinskyi). It’s an elegantly executed film, strongly acted, with a very tangible feel of Mediterranean summer heat. Its various themes (adolescent trauma, sexual identity, exile) don’t quite gel, and the background of the Ukrainian war never feels properly integrated, but Enzo is a more-than-solid swan song for Cantet, and a continuation of Campillo’s always-interesting career, following 2023’s inventively personal Red Island.

Undiluted realism came at its most determined and stripped-down in Critics’ Week opener Adam’s Sake, from Belgian director Laura Wandel, who made her mark with the hyperconcentrated school-bullying drama Playground (2021). Wandel is a self-confessed acolyte of the Dardenne Brothers (indeed, Luc Dardenne was a script advisor here), and once again, she wholeheartedly adopts their style: a handheld camera breathing down characters’ necks as they pelt purposefully down corridors. But Wandel puts that style very much to her own tautly focused end. Léa Drucker, as impressive as she has ever been, plays Lucy, a senior nurse in a pediatric ward. The film follows her through her workday in a sparsely staffed hospital unit, in particular as she tries to care for an undernourished 4-year-old, whose troubled mother (Anamaria Vartolomei, from Audrey Diwan’s 2021 Happening) has her own dangerously confused beliefs about what is best for the boy. This is a no-frills procedural film about a character doing her job as though her life—or more to the point, other people’s lives—depended on it. It’s hugely claustrophobic, the action only occasionally straying from the ward and into the hectic labyrinth of the wider hospital. Adam’s Sake hardly breaks any familiar formal molds, but it’s nevertheless a genuinely formidable achievement.

But in the Official Competition there has already been one distinctive mold-breaker, an alluringly strange offering that will certainly require some reflection and rewatching. Sound of Falling, the second feature by German writer-director Mascha Schilinski, is set over roughly a century around a farmhouse in northeast Germany, and told from the perspectives of a series of girls and young women of different generations. Its time frame stretches from the run-up to World War I until the present via the 1980s, when the calm local stretch of the river Elbe had become the political dividing line between two Germanies. The construction is fragmented, periods and episodes flowing into each other in a liquid fashion that feels almost free-associative, although there’s clearly a well-conceived design at work. This is an intensely imagistic film, with rhythmically recurring motifs—flies, eels, voyeuristic glances through windows and keyholes, the glaring summer sun. The sound design is just as extraordinary: highly textured dynamics, from blasts of silence to an indefinable, fortissimo rumble that recurs throughout, with the narrative similarly ranging from bucolic euphoria to eruptions of catastrophe, violence, and trauma. It’s unlikely we’ll see much else here that’s as inventive, or as haunting—and one suspects that it’s fated to be quite influential, too.

Jonathan Romney is a critic based in London. He writes for The Observer, Sight and Sound, Screen Daily, The Financial Times, and other publications, and teaches at the U.K.’s National Film and Television School.