At Cannes 2025, Hollywood’s Top Stars Aligned Onscreen, Offscreen, & Behind the Camera

The Cannes Film Festival in 2025 was once all concerning the film stars. Dakota Johnson and Emma Stone have been at a seashore membership with Austin Butler, Joaquin Phoenix, and Robert Pattinson. Alexander Skarsgård was once strolling round in thigh-high boots and sequinned trousers, inciting model chaos. Scarlett Johansson and Kristen Stewart have been in new roles as administrators. Even Angelina Jolie was once at the pink carpet, praising smaller motion pictures.

Former spouses Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise have been the unofficial monarchs of the competition, despite the fact that simplest the latter had a movie screening. In Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, Cruise is simply liable for saving the sector (and cinema, it’s implied) by way of eliminating AI and tech and bringing again analog. Kidman, in the meantime, gained the Kering Women in Motion Award for her paintings supporting girls administrators. In 2017, when she was once in Cannes for Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled, Kidman pledged to paintings with no less than one girl director each and every 18 months. Since that declaration 8 years in the past, she’s labored with a staggering 27. In a public communicate, she addressed the significance of administrators, particularly feminine ones, having the ability to experiment and “take the hits and the judgment and still keep pushing forward” to make extra motion pictures.

Of the seven girls filmmakers in festival this yr (an surprisingly excessive ratio for Cannes), no less than two were given divisive essential responses for terribly experimental motion pictures. Julia Ducournau adopted up her 2021 Cannes prize-winning horror Titane with Alpha, a transferring sci-fi movie about AIDS and mourning within the 1980s and ‘90s. Scottish legend Lynne Ramsay showed Die, My Love, which starred Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek, and an intense soundscape of guitar-heavy songs, audio distortion, and buzzing bugs. With both films, you were either on their wavelength or bodily rejected them. I embraced both.

Die, My Love begins with an animalistic sex scene between Lawrence and Pattinson in their newly inherited fixer-upper house in the country. The film is about how that feral sexuality leads to a child, and then how household expectations crush that energy. Lawrence, in a fantastically instinctual and funny performance, refuses to be domesticated. The film is more abstract than realist, but is ostensibly about post-partum depression and psychosis. In one scene, a concerned neighbor tells Lawrence’s Grace that no one talks about how arduous it’s after you’ve had a child. “That’s all anyone talks about,” she responds.

Wandering round in disaster together with her blonde bangs, Lawrence turns out like she was once aiming for an American Western model of Monica Vitti in Red Desert, however finally ends up extra like a sequel to Aronofsky’s Mother! with a dive bar juke field soundtrack. With its dependence on track to set the temper, Die, My Love is harking back to Ramsay’s 2002 vintage, Morvern Callar, however extra competitive, as though any individual having a anxious breakdown made a mix-tape of 1 music, over and over again, each and every time louder and extra distorted. So you higher love that one music. I did.

Die, My Love seems like a automobile for superstar performances, particularly from Lawrence and Spacek, however so did two motion pictures about alpha fathers and their daughters: Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value and Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme. In the previous, Stellan Skarsgård provides some of the funniest performances in a fest stuffed with jokes that didn’t slightly land. He performs former dangerous boy movie director Gustav Berg, in all probability on the lookout for redemption thru his actress daughter Nora (Renate Reinsve, in an excessively other, extra grounded comedian efficiency of a lady in a disaster). In Anderson’s movie, Benicio del Toro is charismatic as shady businessman Zsa-zsa Korda, who faces his mortality by way of reconnecting together with his simplest daughter, a nun performed by way of Mia Threapleton. The true revelation in that movie is the hilarious Michael Cera as a tutor known as Bjorn. In the clicking convention for the movie, co-star Benedict Cumberbatch stated of Anderson, “Watching him discover and use Michael felt like watching God discovering water. It seemed like an obvious natural element for him to have in his arsenal as a filmmaker.”

Movie stars have been additionally made on this version of Cannes, maximum significantly Rakim Mayers (aka A$AP Rocky). Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, a New York-set remake of Akira Kurosawa’s High to Low, was once very best within the two-hander scenes between Mayers and Denzel Washington. Watching the 2 face-to-face, they’re obviously similarly stunning and deep. It was once a welcome wonder that Mayers may just hang equivalent weight on display screen with some of the very best dwelling American actors. Washington was once celebrated for this reality on the competition by way of receiving an honorary Palme d’Or in a transferring wonder rite sooner than the premiere of the movie.

One of probably the most unexpected and thrilling motion pictures on the competition was once directed by way of a film superstar, or extra as it should be, an actor and picture superstar within the making, Harris Dickinson. His directorial debut is ready a tender guy named Mike (Frank Dillane) suffering with homelessness in East London. This sounds essential however dour, like one thing we’ve observed sooner than. Instead, it was once humorous, summary, and extra empathetic than sympathetic. The characters at all times felt like greater than their cases. When Mike works at low-wage jobs in a “shithole” resort and trash amassing, he and his co-workers fill the time by way of speaking about intercourse, existence, magnificence, and the which means of all of it. This is the type of accuracy that might simplest come from any individual who has labored menial jobs for greater than a summer time, a rarity for administrators within the bourgeois movie business.

Dickinson is discovering his taste on this first movie, but if he’s no longer obviously aping the Safdies or Mike Leigh, what’s published to be his personal imaginative and prescient is heat, bizarre, fascinating, and actual. Unlike previous years, when Cannes perceived to focal point extra on established administrators, this yr the emphasis was once on actors and rising administrators. Dickinson is each, and with a bit of luck on his method to changing into a returning auteur.