Cannes loves a returning master, and the 2026 lineup is packed with them: Pedro Almodóvar, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Asghar Farhadi, Paweł Pawlikowski, Cristian Mungiu, László Nemes, Andrey Zvyagintsev, and more are all heading back to the Croisette with new work. But the festival’s 79th edition also has a slightly different charge this year. Hollywood studio muscle is mostly absent, the competition leans heavily international, and the sidebars are doing plenty of lifting, from Kantemir Balagov’s long-awaited English-language debut to Jane Schoenbrun’s slasher-world fever dream, Radu Jude’s chambermaid riff, Nicolas Winding Refn’s glittery return to provocation, and Quentin Dupieux’s midnight descent into Parisian absurdity. With Park Chan-wook presiding over the jury, Cannes 2026 looks like an auteur-heavy edition built around old masters, restless festival regulars, and a few unpredictable left turns that could either dominate the conversation or detonate on contact.
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Below are 25 of the most anticipated films from this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
“Paper Tiger”
James Gray has always been drawn to family, class, moral compromise, and the American dream curdling into something tragic, so “Paper Tiger” sounds almost suspiciously tailored to his strengths. Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, and Miles Teller star in the crime drama, which follows two brothers who pursue a better life and get pulled into a scheme that turns dangerous. Gray’s last Cannes competition title, “Armageddon Time,” was one of his most personal films, and this one appears to push him back toward a more outwardly genre-facing mode without leaving his core obsessions behind. Cannes loves a major American auteur when the movie feels bruised, personal, and unruly.
Cannes Section: In Competition.
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“All Of A Sudden”
After “Drive My Car” and “Evil Does Not Exist,” Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s return to the Cannes competition would be enough on its own. “All Of A Sudden” adds a new wrinkle: a French-language drama shot in Paris and Kyoto, starring Virginie Efira as the director of a nursing home whose life is altered by watching a terminally ill playwright, played by Tao Okamoto, develop a new project. Hamaguchi’s cinema often begins with conversation and gradually reveals emotional trapdoors beneath the surface. The nursing-home setting and artistic-process hook suggest another film about performance, intimacy, care, and the stories people use to approach what they cannot say directly.
Cannes Section: In Competition.
“Hope”
Nearly a decade after “The Wailing,” Korean filmmaker Na Hong-jin finally returns with “Hope,” and that alone makes it one of the festival’s biggest question marks. The film stars Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung, Jung Ho-yeon, Michael Fassbender, and Alicia Vikander, set in a remote harbor village where reports of a tiger on the loose trigger panic, and something stranger begins to take shape. Na’s best work turns dread into a social contagion, letting mystery, violence, and spiritual terror bleed into one another until certainty breaks down. Cannes can be wary of genre unless the filmmaker brings pressure, control, and madness. Na does.
Cannes Section: In Competition.
“Sheep In The Box”
Hirokazu Kore-eda has spent much of his career exploring families built by choice, fracture, accident, and necessity, so “Sheep In The Box” sounds like a slyly futuristic extension of one of his deepest subjects. Set in a near future where it is no longer unusual for couples to bring state-of-the-art humanoids into their homes, the film stars Haruka Ayase and Daigo Yamamoto as parents who welcome one into their home as their son. Kore-eda’s “Shoplifters” won the Palme d’Or because it treated family not as biology, but as arrangement, need, and moral ambiguity. Artificial intelligence could easily flatten that terrain. Kore-eda is exactly the filmmaker who might make it hurt.
Cannes Section: In Competition.
“Bitter Christmas”
Pedro Almodóvar arrives with “Bitter Christmas,” his 24th feature, and even by his standards, the premise sounds self-reflexive. Bárbara Lennie stars as Elsa, a commercial director writing a screenplay in 2004 inspired by the painful lives of her friends, only for that story to become part of another screenplay being written years later. Almodóvar has described the film as one of his most personally cruel works, and that is not casual language from a filmmaker who has spent decades turning desire, guilt, motherhood, death, and performance into melodrama of the highest order. Cannes may be catching the film after its Spanish release, but Almodóvar in competition is still a major event.
Cannes Section: In Competition.
“Fatherland”
Paweł Pawlikowski returns to Cannes competition with “Fatherland,” a Cold War-era road movie starring Sandra Hüller and Hanns Zischler as Erika and Thomas Mann traveling through a divided Germany in a black Buick. Pawlikowski’s best films compress history into intimate, formally controlled images, and “Cold War” remains one of the great recent examples of personal and political fracture rendered with severe beauty. The Mann family hook gives “Fatherland” literary prestige. Still, the more interesting promise is emotional: a father and daughter moving through ruins, ideology, exile, and memory while a country itself is split in two. Pawlikowski rarely wastes a frame, and this material seems built for his restraint.
Cannes Section: In Competition.
“Parallel Tales”
Asghar Farhadi brings a French star pile-up to Cannes with “Parallel Tales,” led by Isabelle Huppert, Vincent Cassel, Virginie Efira, Pierre Niney, and Catherine Deneuve. Farhadi’s best dramas turn moral pressure into architecture: a lie, a misunderstanding, or a withheld truth gradually reorganizes an entire community. The title suggests interlocking stories, and the cast alone gives the film serious red-carpet voltage. Farhadi’s recent work has been more contested than his peak, but Cannes remains the kind of place where a filmmaker of his stature can reset the conversation if the material lands. With Huppert and Deneuve in the same Farhadi machine, tension is not exactly in short supply.
Cannes Section: In Competition.