Cannes Film Festival 2025: the best and worst films

Joaquin Phoenix, Ari Aster, Austin Butler, Emma Stone and Pedro Pascal at the Eddington premiere at the Cannes Film Festival - Pascal Le Segretain

Urchin ★★★★☆

Harris Dickinson hasn’t played it safe in his choices as an actor so far – from furtively cruising older men in Beach Rats to debasing a Nicole Kidman on all fours in Babygirl.

As a writer-director, he comes in swinging with this tale of a homeless young Londoner getting back on his feet by confounding expectations for the gritty slice of life that we imagine we’re in for.

There are experimental flourishes few would risk in a debut. Some work better than others, but the overall effect is delightfully open-ended. Dickinson proves he’s intensely serious about this medium while deftly swerving the po-faced hallmarks of social realism as if they were traffic cones.

Harris Dickinson stars in Urchin - Devisio Pictures

The lead role was once earmarked for Barry Keoghan, then nearly occupied by Dickinson himself to rescue the production. It has wound up being a potentially star-making turn for Frank Dillane – hugely promising ever since Harry Potter when he played a young Tom Riddle, but underused lately in films anyone has actually seen. Urchin couldn’t have been better with anyone else.

Fidgeting and slouching with his scarecrow hair and puckish good looks, Dillane commands the screen with hapless ennui as Mike, a down-and-out in east London, who wakes up on the street nearly penniless, then loses his wallet to a treacherous fellow addict (a Dickinson cameo). One scene later, Mike has taken advantage of a Samaritan’s charity to mug this stranger in a road tunnel and steal his watch, leading to a prison stint we know isn’t his first.

We strongly suspect it won’t be his last, either. This is the main proposition of Urchin – does Mike have it in him to shape up? All the tools of rehab, counselling and so on are shoved in his lap, but he toys with them in a way that’s half-hearted, if not purely for show.

Put up at a hostel, he becomes a useless sous chef at a 3-star hotel, then a lazy litter-picker – something Dickinson himself used to do – and makes a semi-girlfriend (French actress Megan Northam) on the job. They sleep together in her awkwardly tiny camper van, get high, fantasise.

Director Harris Dickinson, producer Scott O’Donnell with cast members Frank Dillane and Megan Northam at the premiere in Cannes - Sarah Meyssonnier/Reuters

Mike is believably adrift: his existence is as shambling and episodic as the plot. Dreamlike, trippy interludes – a VFX sequence which plunges us into primordial soup; the curious repeated image of a dank cave – lend a distinctive stamp, but so does the comic observation of a feckless chancer trying to fib his way out of trouble. More poignantly, he agrees to a mediated session with the fellow he mugged, but on the day, would rather be anywhere else, clearly burning with a humiliation he can’t voice.

What bodes really well for further Dickinson joints is his eye for people: the film is idiosyncratically cast and well-played across the board, from smarmy counsellors to jaded kitchen staff to the many dozens, if not hundreds, of extras individually named – many just passers-by who glance at Mike a certain way, or try to ignore him when he’s begging for change. The scenario is so familiar it could have been the same old story, but the texture of all this street life gives it rather a special shine. TR

Cert tbc, 99 min. UK release tbc

Eddington ★★★☆☆

Ari Aster’s films to date (Hereditary; Midsommar; Beau is Afraid) have been treacherous, cruel, and rigged to explode. Eddington is his first one that doesn’t quite combust – which might seem a weird thing to say about a small-town political comedy-thriller featuring relentless conspiracy theories, gnarly head-shots and antifa firebombings, not to mention Joaquin Phoenix in the altogether. Somehow, the fuse is long, the burn slow, and the detonation at the end perfunctory.

Pivoting ever further away from horror towards panoramic social satire, Aster wants to diagnose the craziness of America at a particular moment – in May 2020 – when the confluence of Covid panic, BLM protests and polarised online discourse ignited a nationwide frenzy. He plonks us down in the fictional town of Eddington, New Mexico, an arid place on the edge of a pueblo, where sheriff Joe Cross (Phoenix) has had just about enough.

Joe thinks Covid fears are nonsense, and strides around mask-less, claiming that his asthma acquits him: a belligerent attitude that bugs most sensibly minded locals, and sees him square off against town mayor Ted Garcia (an enjoyable Pedro Pascal), who’s running for re-election and assuming he’ll face no contest.

Joe, though, has other ideas. His home life is stagnant in the extreme: he’s married to Lou (an underused Emma Stone), but she’s a depressive hermit with no sex drive, they’re childless, and his mother-in-law (Deirdre O’Connell) spends all day trawling the web for the most outlandish truther memes.

Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal in Eddington - A24

There’s a Three-Billboards-ness to Eddington’s whole set-up, which proves a hard comparison to shake off. Embroiled in Joe’s murky schemes are a pair of police deputies, one given to racist assumptions (Luke Grimes) and the other black (Micheal Ward) with a shruggingly neutral point of view.

Aster is out to prove that the loudest voices are often the least sincere: this goes for most of the young, white placard-wielders who take to the streets after George Floyd’s death, one of them an incel named Brian (Cameron Mann) who poses as anti-racist purely to try and get laid. It’s very much this director’s style to cast a skinhead as the person to yell “Nazi!” at an elderly shop-owner.

Phoenix helps the film along by meeting Joe on the level, not overdoing his stupidity, even though he’s wrong about most things. His animus against Ted promises a western stand-off – quick-drawing at a crossroads, we imagine – but gets curtailed. It might have been better to sacrifice Austin Butler, who rocks up for a succinct, not particularly inspired section as a cult leader called Vernon Jefferson Peak, who has set about brainwashing Lou with the goal of whisking her away.

Eddington makes too many sharp points to be at all abject – it’s just underwhelming. The shot of Joe scrolling through his Instagram feed, to find black squares interspersed with Maga rants, crisply spoofs the lemming mentality defining both ends of America’s culture wars.

This sheriff, who Phoenix does play with rather a winning straightforwardness, thinks he can pull off a Gary Cooper routine without scrutinising his own morals in the least. So what we get is an inverse High Noon, with Joe armed and waiting, corrupt to the core, and out purely for number one. It’s clever, serrated, and not bad, but you wouldn’t call it Aster at full mad tilt. TR

Cert tbc, 145 min. UK release tbc

The Chronology of Water ★★★★☆

The Chronology of Water

“I’m not trying to creep you out,” insists Lidia (Imogen Poots), while recounting a typically unsettling chapter of her life. “I’m just trying to be precise.” Cinema managers might think about nailing that sentiment above the screen during showings of this equal-parts ravishing and bloodcurdling new film from Kristen Stewart – the first feature to be directed by the Twilight starlet turned indie queen, which adapts a 2011 memoir by the American writer Lidia Yuknavitch.

Like Yuknavitch’s book, the film is a memory piece that behaves exactly as memory does. One moment it’s blocked, or looping, or fixated on a snaggy detail, then the next everything – maybe too much – tumbles out in a spluttery rush. Some sequences are blissed-out baths of pleasure, while others are jaggedly painful bits of self-excavation, with Stewart and Poots digging away at the surface details with their scalpels, determined to get to the meat underneath.

The plot is both complex and simple. As a teenager, Lidia escapes her sexually abusive father (Michael Epp) through competitive swimming: this secures her a university place, which soon evaporates as she loses herself in drink, (bi)sexuality and drugs. Love and loss follow, as does a fruitful creative writing course led by the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest novelist Ken Kesey – played, in a stroke of inspiration, by the comedian Jim Belushi.

Lidia’s literary talent allows her to come to terms with her past – which keeps commingling with the present in that baleful Faulknerian way. Opening a letter about a prose prize as an adult, she’s suddenly back at the dinner table in her childhood home as her father sneers at her merely partial college scholarship offers. Rather than shaking her experiences into order, her writing allows them to arc through time more freely, and in the back-and-forth a narrative slowly coheres.

Imogen Poots and Kristen Stewart at Cannes Film Festival - Samir Hussein

All of this New-Wavey flicker and bounce won’t wash with everyone, and Stewart is clearly working with an audience of Twilight-generation junior cinephiles in mind. (Nothing wrong with that.) But there is real maturity in her treatment of some phenomenally tricky subjects. Horrors of the past shape desires of the present. Baby loss is addressed with a delicacy and honesty which, in cinema or anywhere else, is almost invisibly rare. Lidia’s father’s abuse, though harrowing, is shorn of all shock value: that it’s going on at all is something we absorb more than witness.

Stewart’s greatest asset in all of this is the 35-year-old Poots herself, whose performance here is career-best work: utterly fearless and ferociously real. Playing Lidia from her teens well into adulthood, she convinces at every age and juncture, and steadies the film during its more idiosyncratic moves.

“What are you, some kind of mermaid?” Kesey jokingly asks when he witnesses Lidia’s swimming talent first-hand. Her reply is freighted with so much, from suppressed grief to self-amusement, and it’s just the word “yup”. If cinema could come up with ten yups of that calibre per year, it would be doing well. RC

Cert tbc, 128 mins. UK release tbc

Bono: Stories of Surrender ★☆☆☆☆

Bono: Stories of Surrender - Apple TV+ via AP

Bono may be his own worst enemy in the one-man show Stories of Surrender, but only just. His second worst is Blonde director Andrew Dominik, who has turned it into a more excruciating film than you might even have surmised.

Essentially a dramatic recital, in black-and-white, of segments from Bono’s 2022 memoir Surrender, this is 86 minutes of existential hell: “the tall tales of a short rock star”, if you will, who has heard all the uncomplimentary things ever said about him, and wants to revel in them. TR Read the full review

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning ★★★★★

Even by the series’ own now well-established standards, this widely presumed last entry in Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible franchise is an awe-inspiringly bananas piece of work. Over the course of its near-three-hour run time, Hunt essentially becomes Secret Agent Jesus: there is a descent into the underworld, a death and resurrection, even a battle of wills in the desert with Satan himself. Or at least his fiendish digital equivalent – a malign artificial intelligence construct called The Entity, whom Hunt refers to as “the Lord of Lies” with a preacherly glint.

The sheer last-hurrah loopiness of the above meant it took me a good 45 minutes to realise that not only was The Final Reckoning working – and well – but that I was watching one of the most dazzlingly ambitious, exactingly crafted studio projects of our time. RC Read the full review

Leave One Day ★☆☆☆☆

The French chanteuse Juliette Armanet is perhaps best-known in the UK for her role in the Paris Olympics opening ceremony last year. Readers may recall her singing John Lennon’s Imagine while gliding down the Seine on a polystyrene meteorite, as her accompanist’s grand piano, also on board, was set on fire.

Anyway, this spectacle turned out to neatly foreshadow the diabolical opening film at Cannes this year, in which Armanet, making her acting debut, plays the lead role. A “realistic musical” that is in fact neither of those things, Leave One Day is such a haplessly cobbled fiasco that it could almost serve as a sort of Viking funeral for the entire musical genre, which it sends bobbing off into the night as it burns to a crisp.

Armanet plays Cécile, a famous TV chef on the cusp of a high-profile restaurant opening, who returns to help out at her parents’ humble roadside cafe due to her father’s ill health. Dad (François Rollin) is drily unimpressed by his daughter’s ascent, and keeps a notebook containing all of her quips about her working-class upbringing, which he pulls out and reads from at the slightest excuse.

But inevitably Cécile’s overdue reconnection with her roots leads to a zing-pow Ratatouille Moment in which inspiration for a new signature dish strikes. She’s also secretly pregnant by her boyfriend and colleague Sofiane (Tewfik Jallab), which adds a bittersweet note to a reunion with high school sweetheart Raphael (Bastien Bouillon) – a local fisherman-slash-motocross biker who has himself since settled down, but clearly still carries a torch.

Cannes 2025’s opening film Leave One Day

This stupefyingly bland plot is shored up by regular musical numbers: all lyrically tweaked covers of French karaoke favourites. And it is hard to capture just how mortifying it is when the first one kicks in; at the critics’ screening earlier today, it felt as if the roof of the Salle Bazin was descending on the audience like the burst guts of a hot air balloon. Cécile and Sofiane are talking shop in their office, when the former suddenly hops up a small staircase and breaks into a tuneless rendition of Stromae’s Alors on Danse while flapping his arms around, panic flashing in his eyes.

First-time feature director Amélie Bonnin (the film is an expanded version of her prize-winning short) clearly wanted these sequences to reflect how her characters would actually sing and dance in these situations. And that collision of theatrically and naturalism can, if handled properly, be thrilling – it worked out pretty well for Jacques Demy. But realism isn’t the same thing as clumsiness, and the biggest moments here look either simply under-rehearsed, or as if their participants have yet to be sold on the gimmick. A nightclub brawl which opens with Raphael and his cronies belting out December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night) is such a mess that I lost track of where the singing stopped and the fighting began.

Cannes has had its share of opening-night turkeys over the past decade or so (2014’s Grace of Monaco was a memorable one), but for sheer unabating feebleness this must take the biscuit. Things Can Only Get Better, The Only Way Is Up: insert your preferred please-let-this-be-as-bad-as-it-gets anthem here. RC

Cert tbc, 94 min. UK release TBC

Sirat ★★★★★

Sirat

This sun-torn survival thriller from Oliver Laxe doesn’t merely rack its audience’s nerves but stretch them out to banjo-string tightness: if you’d strummed my forearm while I was watching, I swear it would have played a high E.

It centres on an anxious but determined father, Sergi Lópes’s Luis, who is scouring Morocco for his elder daughter Marina, who has vanished while following the local desert party scene. His younger son Esteban (Bruno Núñez) and their cute dog Pipa have been brought along for support, and when we join the trio the search is already well underway. But as Luis joins up with a band of straggly ravers, the routine missing person mystery taking shape swerves drastically off track – out into the sandy wastes, and notionally towards the site of the next party, where Marina might be found.

Laxe’s stunning images, captured on appropriately grainy 16mm film stock, often playfully evoke the likes of George Miller’s Mad Max films and William Friedkin’s Sorcerer – all the deadly convoy classics. But the real showpiece disasters, of which there are a few, are shot with nightmarish simplicity: they’re the sort of scenes that replay themselves whenever you close your eyes, which is something Sirat may have you doing quite a bit. Its title refers to the mythical Islamic bridge across hell, on which one false step leads to damnation. The path trodden by the film itself is no less risky, but it styles out the crossing astonishingly. RC

Case 137 ★★★★☆

Case 137 - Fanny de Gouville

French writer-director Dominik Moll has a growing list of top-notch thrillers to his name – Harry, He’s Here to Help; Lemming; Only The Animals; The Night of the 12th. His latest, a rattlingly good yarn ripped from the headlines, tackles bitter attitudes to policing within France, forensically picking over the aftermath of the so-called “yellow jacket” demonstrations in Paris, in December 2018.

As the dust settles, the near-fatal shooting of a peaceful protester in the head is in danger of being swept under the carpet. But that would be reckoning without the nagging zeal of Stéphanie Bertrand (Léa Drucker), an internal affairs investigator who won’t let the evasions of riot police slide.

With her team, she pores over CCTV footage to pin down the culprits, while stuck with the daily burden of a profoundly unpopular job: the police hate her, and the public do too, assuming she’s just a laundering service for the institution.

Drucker does a beautiful job, which will make her a prime contender for all this year’s Best Actress prizes in France; a crisp supporting role for Saint Omer’s wonderful Guslagie Malanda, as a tight-lipped maid who may have witnessed the whole thing, adds a necessary racial layer. It’s a rock-solid procedural, edited with assurance, not to mention a millefeuille commentary on the breakdown of civic trust. TR

Two Prosecutors ★★★★☆

Two Prosecutors

Cannes favourite Sergei Loznitsa (My Joy, A Gentle Creature) returns with a jet-black bureaucratic nightmare set at the peak of the Stalinist terrors, in 1937 Bryansk. The purge being conducted by the NKVD has landed thousands of purported dissenters in custody, where false confessions are beaten out of them. One young man who doesn’t see the whole picture is idealistic party loyalist Kornyev (marvellous Alexander Kuznetsov), who sets out on a crusade to expose what he assumes (very, very wrongly) is purely local skulduggery. He doesn’t see the walls closing in.

The claustrophobia is total – we’re theatrically trapped in cells and offices, click-clacking down corridors – but the superb Romanian cinematographer Oleg Mutu lights everything like Vermeer doing Borat. The film is a steel trap Kornyev certainly can’t escape, and our dread for him powers it through – he’s humoured with everything from impatience to sickening good cheer by a rogues’ gallery of minions we don’t trust in the slightest. TR

Enzo ★★★★☆

Enzo

Some sensitive British teenagers read Camus; some sensitive French ones apparently live it. There is more than a morsel of Meursault in the young protagonist of the late Laurent Cantet’s last film – a coming-of-age tale set in the sunstruck French south which strays into quietly thrilling existential terrain.

Played with delicacy by newcomer Eloy Pohu, 16-year-old Enzo is uneasy with his privileged lot. This son of a charismatic (and visibly successful) lecturer works shifts for a local building contractor – walls will outlive us all, he tells his parents over a fraught evening meal – though on site he’s less interested in the job itself than Maksym Slivinskyi’s Vlad, a strapping, cocky Ukrainian co-worker with whom he strikes up a muttery rapport.

Is this the first stirring of a sexual realisation, or part of the lad’s broader struggle to define himself against his breezy bourgeois upbringing? As the pair’s relationship develops, Enzo draws no firm conclusions, wisely making the exploratory uncertainty itself the point of the piece.

Cantet, the perceptive and humane director of 2008’s Palme d’Or winner The Class, died last year shortly after casting the film: the shoot itself was overseen by Robin Campillo, his longtime collaborator and friend. The opening credits still describe Enzo as ‘A Laurent Cantet film’, and it certainly feels like one: ‘directed by’ is how the subtitles translate Campillo’s role. The original French term fits far better, though: réalisé. RC

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