22 Most Anticipated Movies at Cannes 2026

By David Fear

David Fear

A black-and-white biopic on Thomas Mann that doubles as a father-daughter road-trip flick. Documentaries on Richard Avedon’s early career and John Lennon’s last interview, respectively. A South Korean thriller starring several of the country’s biggest stars, as well as the guy who played young Magneto in the X-Men films. A cryptic tale of xenophobia, paranoia, and the way that rumors lead to violence, featuring a bald Sebastian Stan. A drama about the early days of an epidemic in the 1980s, featuring a singing Rami Malek. A period-piece murder mystery set in feudal Japan involving a samurai and a prisoner, titled [checks notes] The Samurai and the Prisoner.

These are just a few of the films set to premiere at the 79th annual Cannes Film Festival starting May 12, as well as the latest works from bona fide auteurs like Pedro Almodóvar (Bitter Christmas), Nicolas Winding-Refn (Her Private Hell), Hirokazu Kore-eda (Sheep in a Box), Asghar Farhadi (Parallel Tales), and James Gray (Paper Tiger). There’s a lot of catnip for cinephiles in this year’s lineup, in other words. And after poring through the competition titles, the big-title galas, the Un Certain Regard sidebar and the affiliated fests that run alongside the Big Show, we’ve come up with a breakdown of the must-see movies playing Cannes 2026. Here are the 22 films we can’t wait to see.

• ‘All of a Sudden’

  

  Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car) makes his French-language feature debut with this drama about the growing bond between a nursing-home director (Virginie Efira) and a playwright (Tao Okamoto) dying of cancer. Based loosely on the book You and I — The Illness Suddenly Got Worse, which collected correspondence between a philosopher and medical anthropologist as they waxed poetic on life, death, and love, this sounds like the ideal project for the meditative filmmaker. It’s tempting to point out the irony of a nearly three-and-a-half-hour-long film being titled All of a Sudden, but what’s that old saying about no bad movie being too short and no cinematic masterpiece being too long?