The 14 Most Anticipated Films

After making his English-language feature debut in 2024 with the Golden Lion-winning The Room Next Door, starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, Pedro Almodóvar returns to his native Spanish with Bitter Christmas (Amarga Navidad). The premise—a successful advertising director (Bárbara Lennie) traveling from Madrid to the island of Lanzarote to grieve her mother’s death, while a filmmaker named Raúl mines her story for inspiration—hints at autobiographical territory. Expect another dip into the auteur’s color-drenched world.

Ron Howard turns his lens on Richard Avedon in a new documentary tracing the photographer’s groundbreaking career through never-before-seen archives, footage, and interviews with his close collaborators and confidants. Avedon’s influence on fashion, photography, and the 20th-century American aesthetic is hard to overstate, and Howard—whose recent docs have tackled The Beatles, Jim Henson, and Luciano Pavarotti—is an ideal director to take on the scale of his prolific legacy.

Ira Sachs has been on a roll, with Passages (2023) and Peter Hujar’s Day (2025) confirming his standing as one of queer cinema’s most distinctive voices. He’ll present The Man I Love, a musical fantasy about an artist in late-’80s downtown New York (Rami Malek) preparing for the biggest work of his career after a terminal AIDS diagnosis. The cast also includes Rebecca Hall, Tom Sturridge, The Bear’s Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and The Crown’s Luther Ford.

The biggest draw of Fatherland is its star: German actress Sandra Hüller, who had a breakout 2023 with Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest. This year hasn’t been quiet for Hüller either: she stars in the blockbuster Project Hail Mary and won the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at Berlin for Rose. In Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski’s latest, shot in his signature black-and-white, she plays Erika Mann, daughter of the Nobel Prize-winning anti-Nazi writer Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler), as the two return to their native Germany at the height of the Cold War.

The first night of Un Certain Regard opens with Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, the follow-up to cult filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun’s 2024 film I Saw The TV Glow . Like its predecessor, the new film traffics in horror, fantasy, and ’90s nostalgia. Hacks star Hannah Einbinder plays a director tasked with rebooting the fictional Camp Miasma slasher franchise, but when she becomes obsessed with the original final girl (Gillian Anderson), things turn bloody. Sorry, Baby breakout Eva Victor also stars.

Steven Soderbergh’s John Lennon: The Last Interview is built around the never-before-released-in-full conversation Lennon and Yoko Ono gave to an RKO Radio team at home on December 8, 1980, a wide-ranging discussion of their album Double Fantasy, partnership, parenthood, and hopes for the future, recorded hours before Lennon was shot and killed that night. Soderbergh pared the nearly three-hour interview down, paired it with archival footage, and, for roughly 10% of the film’s runtime, AI imagery—a choice that’s sure to spark a conversation of its own.

A late addition to the lineup, James Gray’s Paper Tiger (the director’s follow-up to films like Armageddon Time and Ad Astra) brings extra star power to the festival. Miles Teller and Adam Driver play brothers in 1980s New York whose attempts to make their fortunes pull them into the orbit of the Russian mob. Scarlett Johansson plays Teller’s wife.

Comedian Jordan Firstman makes his directorial debut with Club Kid, in which he writes, directs, and stars as a New York club promoter who discovers he’s the father of a 10-year-old son. Until now, Firstman has been best known for his viral social media impressions and a starring role on Rachel Sennott’s HBO comedy I Love LA. He’s joined by Diego Calva (On Swift Horses) and Cara Delevingne in her first major role in years.

Na Hong-jin returns with his first feature in a decade, Hope, a 2-hour-40-minute sci-fi thriller competing for the Palme d’Or. The story centers on a village near the North Korean border in the aftermath of a tiger sighting, with Squid Game breakout Hoyeon, Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbender, and Taylor Russell rounding out a striking international ensemble. Michael Abels (Get Out, Us, Nope) provides the score.

Nicolas Winding Refn, who won Best Director at Cannes in 2011 with the Ryan Gosling-starring Drive, returns with Her Private Hell, his first feature in a decade. The film weaves multiple storylines through a future metropolis where actresses gather at a glamorous hotel to shoot a Barbarella-style production, while a killer known as Leather Man stalks women across the city. The Danish auteur has assembled a who’s-who cast of in-demand young actors to tell the story: Charles Melton, Sophie Thatcher, Kristine Froseth, and Havana Rose Liu.

Quentin Dupieux described Full Phil to Variety as “Emily in Paris in hell—a fever dream, a nightmare version of it.” Woody Harrelson plays a widowed American industrialist on a lavish Paris trip with his daughter (Kristen Stewart), with whom he’s trying to reconnect, until things slip, in characteristic Dupieux fashion, into something strange involving French cuisine, an invasive hotel employee, and a 1950s horror film within the film. The cast also includes Charlotte Le Bon, Emma Mackey, Nassim Lyes, and Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim.

Fresh off her Oscar-nominated turn in Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, Renate Reinsve returns to Cannes as the star of Fjord, the English-language debut of Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, who won the 2007 Palme d’Or for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Reinsve plays a Norwegian mother who returns with her Romanian husband (Sebastian Stan) and their children to her remote birthplace village. After bonding with the family next door, the family becomes the target of suspicion when they’re accused of disturbing behavior.

Andy Garcia (Ocean’s Eleven, Father of the Bride) wrote, directed, and stars in Diamond, his Out of Competition Cannes world premiere, and a passion project nearly 15 years in the making. Garcia plays Joe Diamond, a present-day investigator with the bearing of a classic noir detective, who works the cases that LA’s police can’t crack. The heavyweight ensemble includes Vicky Krieps, Brendan Fraser, Rosemarie DeWitt, Demián Bichir, Danny Huston, and Yul Vazquez, with Bill Murray and Dustin Hoffman reuniting with Garcia after 2005’s The Lost City.

The Unknown is the third film from Arthur Harari, who shared the 2024 Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Anatomy of a Fall with partner Justine Triet. This time, he co-wrote with his brother Lucas Harari, adapting Lucas’s graphic novel Le cas David Zimmerman, a literary, Kafka-influenced spin on the body-swap genre. Léa Seydoux and Niels Schneider star in the story about a photographer who has a one-night stand with a stranger and somehow wakes up in her body.