Film
This year’s Cannes Film Festival finds room for dissidence, divisive films and a lot of clapping. By Andy Hazel.
The best of Cannes Film Festival 2025
The popular image of the Cannes Film Festival is a blitz of flashbulbs, standing ovations and celebrities gliding down a red carpet. Behind the glitter, David Strattons of all ages and genders discuss movies with earnest seriousness, while aspiring film professionals network and everyone hopes for an invitation to a party on a boat. Honestly, that’s not far from the reality, but perhaps the most important thing is that for 10 days, the city treats cinema with a reverence that feels almost radical.
One of the stranger expressions of this appreciation is pre-film applause. Each Cannes screening begins with an animation of red-carpeted stairs rising from the ocean floor to the stars. It’s crowned by the festival’s golden emblem, which sparks a polite smattering of claps. Then come the producers’ logos, each triggering another burst of applause and occasional whoops of recognition. By the time the credits roll, standing ovations often feel like a continuation of this ceremony.
To ensure the world was watching, the festival’s first day culminated in its longest and most expensive film, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. Reviews were tepid for what may be the last film in one of Hollywood’s most reliable franchises. The opening ceremony featured Leonardo DiCaprio presenting an honorary award to Robert De Niro, who made headlines for criticising the United States administration, so everyone was happy. “Art is inclusive,” said a glassy-eyed De Niro. “It brings people together tonight. Art looks for truth. Art embraces diversity. And that’s why art is a threat.”
The morning after the first-night parties, word spread about early screenings. German director Mascha Schilinski’s ambitious Sound of Falling interweaves the lives of four girls and their families, each living in the same farmhouse in a different part of the 20th century, each sharing a fascination with death. Schilinski employs an array of cinematic techniques to explore her subjects’ interiority, with dazzling results.
Also winning glowing reviews early in the festival was Sergei Loznitsa’s Two Prosecutors. Set during Stalin’s reign of terror in 1937, the tightly plotted film follows a young lawyer who discovers a letter from a wrongly imprisoned man and uses it to challenge the Soviet justice system. It was the first of many films – including Dominik Moll’s police procedural Case 137, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s beguiling noir The Secret Agent and Saeed Roustaee’s potent melodrama Woman and Child – in which systems of justice prove painfully inadequate.
Ari Aster’s Eddington was one of the most hotly anticipated titles of the festival. The director of stylish horror films Hereditary and Midsommar confines his new film to a small New Mexico town in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Pedro Pascal plays a vain but well-meaning mayor and Joaquin Phoenix the perpetually tense sheriff who wants his job. Aster’s film is a chaotic yet superficial ride through conspiracy theories and Covid paranoia, recent history that, as it transpired, few in Cannes were eager to revisit.
More popular premieres from the opening week included Oliver Laxe’s Sirat, about a father’s search through Morocco’s illegal desert parties for his lost daughter, Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, a hangout film set around the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, and Lynne Ramsay’s Die, My Love. Best known for her adaptations, including Morvern Callar and We Need To Talk About Kevin, Ramsay’s latest film is an unsettling account of postpartum psychosis that stars Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Lawrence. The latter’s performance won near-universal acclaim and positions her as a frontrunner for the Academy Award for Best Actress.
Not all recognition comes in the form of awards. When a film doesn’t win a prize, a lengthy standing ovation can be spun into headlines, even if the metric is a measure of atmosphere more than quality. This year, I made it a personal mission to track down one of the stopwatch holders and found a journalist who had recently discharged his ovation duties.
“God, I hated that job,” he said over a pint of Guinness in one of Cannes’ two Irish pubs. “But readers love it – more ovations, more clicks. The worst one I ever did was for Maestro, Bradley Cooper’s film about Leonard Bernstein. A few minutes in, Bernstein’s children – who are all in their 60s – come out and start ‘conducting’ the applause. They milked it relentlessly. It was shameless.”
Even with that “engineering”, Maestro’s standing ovation ran for only seven minutes, one minute shorter than this festival’s funniest film, Michael Angelo Covino’s romantic comedy Splitsville. The audience laughter was reportedly loud enough to be heard in the adjacent cinema, where Spike Lee’s stylish Kurosawa remake, Highest 2 Lowest, was premiering. Julia Ducournau’s Alpha, an AIDS allegory about addiction and a virus ravaging Paris that turns people into marble statues, received a 12-minute ovation and, to underline the disparity between applause and quality, mostly critical reviews.
Few Australians had films in this year’s festival. Sean Byrne’s shark-focused horror Dangerous Animals, starring Jai Courtney and Josh Heuston, gathered strong reviews in the Midnight section, and Louris van de Geer made an assured debut with her short film The Body in Director’s Fortnight.
For the first week of the festival, the lack of a broadly popular film was a recurring topic of conversation. Where was this year’s Parasite, Anora or Anatomy of a Fall? It wasn’t until the final days that two arrived at once: Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident and Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value.
In Trier’s film, two sisters, Agnes and Nora, reunite with their estranged father, a once-famous director who hopes his new autobiographical script will serve as both a career comeback and an olive branch to his children. When Nora, a stage actress, rejects the lead role, it is handed to a rising Hollywood starlet, which results in some expertly crafted domestic drama. Sentimental Value received a palm-punishing 19-minute standing ovation, the longest of the festival, and its runner-up prize, the Grand Prix.
Besides the symbolic collapse of a palm tree on the Croisette boulevard, which seriously injured a film producer, the most memorable event this year is the return of Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi. In 2010, the Iranian government banned Panahi from filmmaking after he refused to submit his scripts for approval, a condition he continues to defy. Following seven months in prison for supporting anti-government protests and creating “propaganda against the system”, Panahi drew on those experiences for It Was Just an Accident, a film made in secret about a former prisoner who kidnaps the man he believes was his torturer. With a potent rage that ties the personal to the political, Panahi asks what is justifiable when the oppressed have power over their oppressor.
“The main issue of the film is, what is the future going to be like?” Panahi told The Saturday Paper, shortly before accepting the festival’s highest honour, the Palme d’Or. “Of course change needs to take place – whether it comes from growing awareness or from forgiveness, that’s all to be seen.”
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