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In all my years of coming to Cannes (2026 was the ninth), this was the first time that I’ve been asked if I had any cocaine, and also the first time that I’ve desperately wished that I did. That question was posed to me — by several different people in fact, all of them with such warm hope bulging from their eyes — at the beachfront soirée for Jordan Firstman’s sensational “Club Kid,” a major festival breakout about a gay Manhattan scenester who finally decides to grow up and stop doing endless amounts of party drugs after he learns that he has a 10-year-old British son who loves the Cocteau Twins and Elliott Smith (a not-so-duty-free souvenir from the one night in his life that Firstman’s character got so high on GHB that he wound up having sex with a woman).
The movie is funny and sweet, and it made everyone at the premiere cry happy tears about how beautiful it can be to face ourselves, sober up, and reckon with reality. Then everyone went across the Croisette to a private beach in the south of France and inhaled enough blow to stay awake through Asghar Farhadi’s “Parallel Tales.”
Well, I shouldn’t say all — some of us are “not supposed” to “snort illegal substances” at our “jobs,” whatever that means, and even after watching “Club Kid,” I’m still not sure if I could tell my “kundles” from my “gundles” anyway. But the fact remains that Cannes often seems like the last place on Earth where anyone should take movies seriously, and the last place on Earth where anyone does. It’s neither of those things, of course, but the friction between what Cannes represents and what it actually is was more pronounced than usual this year — the byproduct of a festival where the worst movies felt like they had little bearing on reality, and even the best ones chose to comment upon it from a critical distance.
Epitomizing the latter category was Jane Schoenbrun’s heady and hyper-literate “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Mishima” (iykyk), which kicked off the Un Certain Regard sidebar with a fingerbang by collapsing the history of slasher movies into a self-reflexive but unambiguously sincere meditation on the relationship between shame, violence, and sexual identity. The most fun and layered of Schoenbrun’s films to date, “Camp Miasma” further dimensionalizes their peerless gift for transforming screens into mirrors, and its popcorn spectacle — despite being more inspired by “Kwaidan” than “Spider-Man” — sets an impossibly high bar for the summer movie season to come.
On the other extreme was Farhadi’s aforementioned “Parallel Tales,” which soured Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “A Short Film About Love” into a long film about nothing, its tale of a voyeuristic novelist so devoid of purpose that it made fiction itself feel like a frivolous waste of time. The best thing I can say about such a dismal misfire is that it made Pedro Almodóvar’s “Bitter Christmas” — an even more navelgazing melodrama about the morality of flattening strangers into stories — seem like a vital masterwork by comparison. I thoroughly enjoyed it as a vivid and self-excoriating piece of autofiction, but Almodóvar’s film is ultimately about nothing so much as Almodóvar himself (to the point that its punchline depends on a certain familiarity with his previous work), and I was more than a little dismayed to look back at the end of the fest and realize it was one of the more amusing things I saw there.
While I’d argue that even a bad Cannes is better than just about anything else in the world, it’s also true that the heightened mania and manufactured importance of the festival has a singular way of exposing the weaknesses of the films that play there (standing ovations be damned), and there’s no denying that this was the weakest lineup that I’ve had the privilege of experiencing first-hand, at least so far as the Competition is concerned. Usually the movies are the drugs at Cannes, and this year Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Minotaur” was the only thing that left me feeling like I had lightning in my veins when it was over — the only thing that gave me the same I can run through a brick wall high that I chase across the Croisette every year. (It turns out that seeing “Parasite” and “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” on the same day is the kind of experience that can do some irreparable damage to your brain.)
But I’d also argue that even a bad Cannes has the tendency to improve as it goes along, and while morale was low until the minute I left, I did come to appreciate how the rest of the lineup functioned in the residual context of Schoenbrun’s film. At its most basic level, “Camp Miasma” is about reconciling mind and body, inside and outside, fantasy and reality, and its premiere set the stage for a festival whose films were unusually preoccupied with mapping the space between such opposite dimensions. “Club Kid” is one such example, the desiccated post-war requiem of Pawel Pawlikowski’s anemic “Fatherland” is another, and even Marie Kreutzer’s largely dismissed “Gentle Monster” — which stars Léa Seydoux as a woman who struggles to accept that her husband might be a pedophile — could be argued to fit the bill.
Arthur Harari’s hyper-polarizing “The Unknown” was either the most vile or beguiling film at Cannes depending on who you asked, but even its biggest haters might concede this vertiginous body-swap thriller gave crucial shape to a Competition slate that hinged on locating the self in a world where who we are means everything and nothing all at once. Cristian Mungiu’s “Fjord” is more limited in scope than his previous work, its thorniness softened by the specificity of its attacks on Nordic progressivism, but the characteristically spiraling moral drama offers a clear and unresolvable consideration of how dangerous it can be when who people are is allowed to take precedence over what they actually do.
That made Mungiu’s film both a natural complement and contrast to James Gray’s masterful “Paper Tiger,” a period crime thriller in which a Queens family is completely undone by a man’s abject failure of self-definition, as well as to Emmanuel Marre’s clear-eyed but stultifying “A Man of His Time,” in which a snakey opportunist played by Swann Arlaud likewise surrenders any claim to his own moral code in a bid to survive Vichy France. Such films, along with Jeanne Herry’s rambling “Another Day,” Hirokazu Koreeda’s “Sheep in the Box” (heartbreaking for all the wrong reasons), and even Koji Fukada’s lovely “Nagi Notes,” drilled into what it feels like to live apart from the world around us, but most of them were content to illustrate that feeling by virtue of their own irrelevance. As for Lukas Dhont’s “Coward,” it was definitely another film that I saw.
And then there was Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “All of a Sudden,” a talky but sprawling eldercare drama so concerned with the dynamic between the personal and the collective that it devotes a good chunk of its 196-minute running time to a veritable Ted Talk on the macro-divisiveness of capitalism (complete with a white board for illustrative purposes), and how our only hope for survival is to gradually chip away at the defining stratifications of modern society. Present and future. Patient and provider. Performer and audience. While I wasn’t quite as bowled over by it as most of the other critics (Hamaguchi’s intellectual and emotional interests remained frustratingly separate for me), it was easy to appreciate why a film that so forcefully argued in favor of personal agency seemed to tower over much of the Competition; it was an invaluable corrective to a festival where so many of the movies felt resigned to a world they’d lost confidence in their ability to shape, or at least shake up.
Maybe that’s why I was so bitterly disappointed by Na Hong-jin’s “Hope,” which seemed determined to elevate blockbuster filmmaking to new heights before abruptly pivoting into an endless piece of drivel that embodies the worst and most cynical aspects of modern Hollywood slop. I’m all in favor of having more movie movies in the Official Selection at Cannes (as evidenced by my enduring love for “The Substance” and “Eddington”), but nothing that ends with someone turning to camera and setting up a sequel — the usual “the battle is over, but the real war has just begun” routine — deserves to be included in the film world’s most prestigious competition.
And just in case that argument didn’t seem elitist enough on its face, it doesn’t help that the only true masterpiece in Competition this year was as Cannes as it gets: an ultra-austere work of auteur cinema whose every shot is freighted with geopolitical importance. Transposing the familiar story of Claude Chabrol’s “The Unfaithful Wife” onto the widescale amorality of modern Russia, “Minotaur” watches from a clinical remove as a medium-rich business owner tries to juggle the strain of a marital crisis with the stress of the war in Ukraine. On the one hand, his wife is fucking a hot young photographer. On the other hand, he has to select 14 employees to be sentenced to death via involuntary enlistment. These are not co-equal problems, but they become increasingly braided together over the course of Zvyagintsev’s film, until generational catastrophe becomes the solution to the protagonist’s domestic crisis. The film’s unspeakably haunting final shot typifies Cannes 2026 to a tee, its free-floating detachment from reality doubling as a revelatory expression of our own relationship to it.
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