This Year, Cannes Was All About the Movie Stars

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

Former spouses Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise had been the unofficial monarchs of the pageant, even though simplest the latter had a movie screening. In Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, Cruise is simply chargeable 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 ladies administrators. In 2017, when she used to be in Cannes for Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled, Kidman pledged to paintings with a minimum of one lady 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 ladies filmmakers in pageant this 12 months (an strangely excessive ratio for Cannes), a minimum of two were given divisive important 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, audiodistortion, 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 person talks about how exhausting 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 used to be aiming for an American Western model of Monica Vitti in Red Desert, however finally ends up extra like a sequel to Aronofsky’s mom! with a dive bar juke field soundtrack. With its dependence on song to set the temper, Die, My Love is paying homage to Ramsay’s 2002 vintage, Morvern Callar, however extra competitive, as though anyone having a anxious breakdown made a mix-tape of 1 music, again and again, every time louder and extra distorted. So you higher love that one music. I did.

Die, My Love looks like a car for famous person 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 offers probably the most funniest performances in a fest filled with jokes that didn’t fairly land. He performs former dangerous boy movie director Gustav Berg, perhaps in search of redemption thru his actress daughter Nora (Renate Reinsve, in an overly 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 along with his simplest daughter, a nun performed by way of Mia Threapleton. The true revelation in that movie is the clearly hilarious Michael Cera as a tutor known as Bjorn. In the click 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 had 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, used to be easiest within the two-hander scenes between Mayers and Denzel Washington. Watching the 2 face-to-face, they’re obviously similarly stunning and deep. It used to be a welcome marvel that Mayers may hang equivalent weight on display with probably the most easiest residing American actors. Washington used to be celebrated for this reality on the pageant by way of receiving an honorary Palme d’Or in a transferring marvel rite prior to the premiere of the movie.

One of essentially the most unexpected and thrilling motion pictures on the pageant used to be directed by way of a film famous person, or extra correctly, an actor and picture famous person within the making, Harris Dickinson. His directorial debut is set a tender guy named Mike (Frank Dillane) suffering with homelessness in East London. This sounds vital however dour, like one thing we’ve noticed prior to. Instead, it used to be humorous, summary, and extra empathetic than sympathetic. The characters all the time felt like greater than their instances. When Mike works at low-wage jobs in a “shithole” lodge and trash amassing, he and his co-workers fill the time by way of speaking about intercourse, lifestyles, magnificence, and the which means of all of it. This is the type of accuracy that might simplest come from anyone who has labored menial jobs for greater than a summer time, a rarity for administrators within the bourgeois movie trade.

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 12 months the emphasis used to be on actors and rising administrators. Dickinson is each, and expectantly on his method to changing into a returning auteur.