Pillion, Phoenician and Panahi: superb lineup set to extend Cannes’ Oscar-sweeping streak

TheCannes film festivalselection has been unveiled by its director Thierry Frémaux, with all its auteur heavyweights and cineaste silverback gorillas, including new work by Kelly Reichardt, Julia Ducournau, Ari Aster, Wes Anderson, Joachim Trier and Carla Simón. Tom Cruise’s final Mission: Impossible movie is showing out of competition; Robert De Niro is getting an honorary Palme d’Or – and probably treating audiences to a characteristically tightlipped onstage interview – and Bono arrives at the red carpet for Andrew Dominik’s documentary Bono: Stories of Surrender. Actor turned director Scarlett Johansson comes to Cannes with her Eleanor the Great, a quirky New York tale starring veteran player June Squibb.Scarlett Johansson, Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor set for Cannes 2025 as lineup announcedRead moreThere is also, of course, an appearance from the Belgian social-realist masters and Cannes icons the Dardenne brothers, whose appearance here with The Young Mother’s Home coincides with a mood of sadness, rememberingthe recent death of their totemic actor Émilie Dequenne, who starred as a teen in their film Rosetta, which won the Palme d’Or and best actress award.As far as the British go … nothing in competition, but Harris Dickinson, recently announced as John Lennon in Sam Mendes’ Beatles tetraology, is presenting his own feature directorial debut, Urchin, in the Un Certain Regard sidebar. And writer-director Harry Lighton has his own film in the same section: Pillion, a homoerotic biker tale, based on the novel Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones.The mood in the world’s pre-eminent film festival could hardly be more bullish and upbeat. Mutterings some years ago that Cannes’s opposition to the streamers’ non-theatrical content would render it irrelevant have been swept aside. So too have comments that it’s Venice and Toronto which set the pace for the award-winners. With the huge Oscar success of last year’s Anora, The Substance and the much-disputed Emilia Pérez, Cannes films are at the heart of the conversation – though they can’t hope to match the huge box office firepower of films such as The Super Mario Bros Movie and A Minecraft Movie.The festival is presenting us with its keynote themes and approaches. As so often, it tackles Iranian cinema and Iranian dissident politics by including the new, secretly filmed movie by Iranian auteurJafar Panahi: A Simple Accident – as ever, testing the attitude of the Iranian authorities who detest Panahi’s campaigning but are aware of his huge international prestige. Cannes is again challenging Vladimir Putin with a new film from Russia’s prominent dissident film and theatre director Kirill Serebrennikov (he had a film in Cannes just last year). This new one is called The Disappearance of Josef Mengele with August Diehl as Mengele. Ukrainian auteur Sergei Loznitsa comes to Cannes too with his anti-Soviet period drama Two Prosecutors.View image in fullscreenInternational prestige … Iranian film director Jafar Panahi in 2022.Photograph: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty ImagesAs far as the gender issue goes, Cannes is not to be cowed. It has a female director on its opening night gala, Amélie Bonnin’s Leave One Day – a gender-switched version of her short film about someone returning to their home town – and out of competition there is Rebecca Zlotowski’s drama Private Life, about a psychiatrist, played by Jodie Foster, investigating the death of one of her patients.In competition, there is the hugely admired Reichardt who intriguingly is giving us The Mastermind, an old-school 70s crime drama with Josh O’Connor, John Magaro and Alana Haim; Palme laureate Ducournau is there with Alpha, a meditation on the Aids crisis; Hafsia Herzi presents The Last One about the Algerian immigrant experience in France and the widely admired Japanese auteur Chie Hayakawa directs Renoir, about an 11-year-old girl negotiating a bewildering adult world. The superb Spanish film-maker Simón,a Golden Bear winner in Berlin, comes to Cannes with Romería about a young woman’s quest to discover her family identity. German auteur Mascha Schilinski is in competition with her much-anticipated title Sound of Falling.I sense some of the male big hitters might divide opinion.Aster will be a hot ticket with his contemporary western black comedy Eddington starring Joaquin Phoenix. But I was not a fan of his previous film, the clunkingly phantasmagoric freakoutBeau Is Afraid. This could be more of the same, but Aster always commands attention. Richard Linklater comes to Cannes with his Nouvelle Vague, about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. It wasn’t all that long ago that Michel Hazanavicius was in Cannes with his Redoubtable, a slightly underwhelming film about the making of Godard’s La Chinoise which Godard himself denounced as a “stupid idea” – I wonder if his new film could be the same kind of quirky/ironised ancestor-worship.Anderson is back with his comedyThe Phoenician Schemeand it is almost by the way to complain or even notice that his style is unvarying – for fans, that is the point, and it is arguably no more unvarying than those of other bland directors whose work all resembles everyone else’s. But Anderson is always in danger of reaching saturation point.Danish-Norwegian film-maker Trier blew us all away in Cannes a few years ago with his romantic comedy-drama The Worst Person in the World with its wonderful lead and Cannes best-actress-winning performance from Renate Reinsve – now he is back with Sentimental Value (also starring Reinsve), an emotional family drama.French veteran Dominik Moll is there with Dossier 137, a tough cop procedural – Moll is always good value, although Cannes has a habit of including solid but unexciting French titles in competition to ensure its own industry is represented. South African film-maker Oliver Hermanus is in competition with The History of Sound, a queer drama about two lovers in early 20th-century New England played by Paul Mescal and O’Connor.Brazil’s critic turned auteur Kleber Mendonça Filho returns us to the grim world of the military dictatorship of the 70s with The Secret Agent. Óliver Laxe is a visually driven director (who has worked with British film-maker Ben Rivers) and his Sirat, a mystery about a music festival in north Africa, looks intriguing. Mario Martone’s Fuori is a movie from the Italian director who made Nostalgia and this is about post-prison life and Tarik Saleh’s Eagles of the Republic is the last of his Cairo trilogy about post-Arab spring Egypt.As ever, it’s a mouthwatering lineup of auteur-led cinema.