All posts tagged: Cannes 2026

Odessa A’zion Talks Cannes, Jewelry, ‘Deep Cuts’ and Music Career

Odessa A’zion Talks Cannes, Jewelry, ‘Deep Cuts’ and Music Career

Published by Daniella Wilson

Odessa A’zion is a hugger. The 25-year-old springs from a sofa on the rooftop terrace of the Chopard Suite at the Hôtel Martinez for a welcome embrace amid a dizzying 24 hours at the Cannes Film Festival. The night before, A’zion made her Cannes debut by hitting the Palais red carpet to face a crush of photographers while standing alongside actor Connor Swindells, French legend Isabelle Huppert and Chopard’s Caroline Scheufele. They then made their way to Carlton Beach for a late night Chopard Trophy ceremony during which A’zion and Swindells were honored by Huppert as next-generation talents in front of Demi Moore, Chloe Zhao, Stellan Skarsgard, Ruth Negga, James Franco, Riley Keough, Nicky Hilton, Xavier Dolan and others. A’zion gave a speech — describing the experience as “really weird, crazy and surreal” — stayed for dessert and ducked out for a cameo at the hottest party in Cannes for her I Love LA co-star Jordan Firstman’s directorial debut Club Kid. Then it was time for bed to get few hours of rest ahead of a …

Na Hong-jin’s Hope Set for September Theatrical Release

Na Hong-jin’s Hope Set for September Theatrical Release

Published by Daniella Wilson

Na Hong-jin‘s Hope now has a date. Neon will open the cult South Korean director’s sci-fi feature — one of the buzziest titles in competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival — exclusively in U.S. theaters on Sept. 9. Hope premiered at Cannes in May to a six-minute standing ovation and a wave of sharply divided critical reaction, ranging from rapture to notes of bafflement. The Hollywood Reporter‘s chief film critic David Rooney weighed in strongly on the positive side, describing the film as a “rip-roaring sci-fi creature feature” that “has instant cult classic written all over it.” “It’s a great feeling to know from a movie’s first frames that you’re in the hands of an assured genre auteur,” wrote Rooney in his review from the festival. “The rare action thriller that takes place almost entirely in broad daylight, Hope pulls you in immediately with its virtuoso camerawork, pulse-pounding score, adrenalized pacing and sharply drawn characters.” “Hope, a title whose meaning becomes clear only in the final scenes, is a superbly sustained pedal-to-the-metal experience that’s …

Cannes Jury Prize Winner ‘The Dreamed Adventure’ in Janus US Film Deal

Cannes Jury Prize Winner ‘The Dreamed Adventure’ in Janus US Film Deal

Published by Daniella Wilson

Janus Films has acquired all North American rights to German filmmaker Valeska Grisebach‘s (Western) new film, the Cannes Film Festival competition title The Dreamed Adventure (Das Geträumte Abenteuer), which was awarded the jury prize on the Croisette. The deal was negotiated between Janus Films and The Match Factory. Janus will unveil its theatrical release plans in the coming weeks. The Dreamed Adventure was produced by Komplizen Film and co-produced by Grisebach, Kazak Productions, Miramar Film, Panama Film, New Matter Films, ARTE France Cinéma and ZDF/ARTE. “In Svilengrad, a small town on the Bulgarian border, Veska (Yana Radeva) crosses paths with Said (Syuleyman Letifov), an old acquaintance whose car has been stolen,” reads a synopsis for the film. “Offering her help, she brings him along to the excavation site where she is working as an archaeologist. As they reconnect, Veska is pulled more into the shady world that Said has emerged from, soon embarking on her own exploration of the criminal ties that lurk beneath the surface of this seemingly innocent town at the outskirts of …

Pawel Pawlikowski, Ruben Östlund Set for Slano Film Days 2026

Pawel Pawlikowski, Ruben Östlund Set for Slano Film Days 2026

Published by Daniella Wilson

Pawel Pawlikowski and Ruben Östlund will be among the creatives featured at the Slano Film Days in Croatia next month. Polish Oscar winner Pawlikowski (Ida) will arrive at the event with his new film Fatherland, starring Sandra Hüller, which just won the best director award at the Cannes Film Festival, where it had its world premiere. The film will have its Croatian premiere at the Villa Riva Open-Air Cinema in Slano.  THR‘s review called Fatherland “a masterful exploration of family, history and angst,” lauding it for being “immaculately performed by Hanns Zischler and especially Sandra Hüller, grounding the film throughout with an uncanny, expressive stillness.” Pawlikowski will also take part in a Film Talks session with participants of Slano Film Days, where he will speak about his new film in a conversation moderated by Östlund. As part of the Slano Film Days program, another film by Pawlikowski will be shown, namely Cold War, with star Joanna Kulig also attending the event and participating in a film talk.  Meanwhile, Östlund will present a selection of his short films in Slano, including Autobiographical Scene Number 6882, which follows a group …

A German Exchange Student in New Mexico

A German Exchange Student in New Mexico

Published by Daniella Wilson

German teenager Franny (newcomer Naomi Cosma) arrives in New Mexico to spend the 2001-02 academic year at a high school in Las Cruces, living with a local family, just before the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in writer-director Katharina Rivilis’ wispy but engaging debut feature. Even if you didn’t know that this was inspired by Rivilis’ own teenage experience as an exchange student back in the day you would probably guess from the way nothing really happens, apart from friends getting made, places being seen and hearts being negligibly fractured. Nevertheless, as befits a film partly backed by Wim Wenders’ Road Movies, this deploys an eclectic soundtrack and lashings of backlighting and magic hour cinematography to help capture the uncanny feeling of being a European stranger in a strange land of enchantment out west. Rivilis also coaxes confident, naturalistic performances from her non-professional cast, who largely improvised their dialogue, making this a good fit for festivals with young audiences.   I’ll Be Gone in June The Bottom Line Just like the old days. Venue: Cannes Film …

Rebecca Hall in Quirky Sci-Fi Dramedy

Rebecca Hall in Quirky Sci-Fi Dramedy

Published by Daniella Wilson

The always eminently watchable Rebecca Hall (The Man I Love, TV’s The Beauty) both anchors and buoys the tonally irregular but consistently thoughtful and compelling sci-fi comedy-drama The End of It, a feature debut for Catalan writer-director Maria Martinez Bayona. Offering a near future that’s creepily plausible, resonant with recent headlines and nicely underplayed in terms of design, this posits Hall as Claire, a 250-year-old artist who’s kept looking like an elegant 30something thanks to sophisticated blood dialysis techniques and other kinds of high-tech, vaguely defined wizardry, available to a very select few. The End of It The Bottom Line Augurs a potentially interesting career. Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Cannes Premiere)Cast: Rebecca Hall, Gael Garcia Bernal, Noomi Rapace, Beanie FeldsteinDirector/screenwriter: Maria Martinez Bayona 2 hours 22 minutes However, when Claire grows bored with an effectively immortal life and chooses to die, her husband Diego (Gael García Bernal), 180-year-old daughter Martha (Noomi Rapace), and android personal assistant Sarah (Beanie Feldstein) react in various ways, ranging from supportive to angry. Running an attenuated 142-minutes, this feels slightly …

‘The Samurai and the Prisoner’ Review: Kiyoshi Kurosawa Feudal Mystery

‘The Samurai and the Prisoner’ Review: Kiyoshi Kurosawa Feudal Mystery

Published by Daniella Wilson

Japanese genre maven Kiyoshi Kurosawa is mostly known outside his homeland for eerie, visually inventive films like Cure, Pulse and Loft that brought the J-horror trend into the arthouse. But he’s also made psychological thrillers (Creepy), serial killer flicks (Serpent’s Path), science-fiction movies (Before We Vanish), a darkly comic anti-capitalist actioner (last year’s Cloud) and at least one great drama (Tokyo Sonata). The auteur can now cross another genre off his bucket list with The Samurai and the Prisoner (Kokurojo), a stately and rather stagy historical mystery set during the 16th century, at a time when warring clans fought and outmaneuvered each other for control of the land. Kiyoshi Kurosawa The Bottom Line Katanas Out. Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Cannes Première)Cast: Masahiro Motoki, Masaki Suda, Yuriko Yoshitaka, Munetaka Aoki, Bando ShingoDirector, screenwriter: Kiyoshi Kurosawa, based on the book by Honobu Yonezawa 2 hours 27 minutes Based on the prizewinning 2021 novel by Honobu Yonezawa, the film tells a story that will probably be familiar to anyone who grew up in Japan. It then takes that …

2026 Cannes Film Festival 5 Takeaways: AI, Queer Cinema

2026 Cannes Film Festival 5 Takeaways: AI, Queer Cinema

Published by Daniella Wilson

Quiet on the surface, Cannes 2026 exposed the fault lines reshaping cinema — from the evolving indie ecosystem and the studios’ festival retreat to the industry’s uneasy embrace of AI. Published on May 23, 2026 (L to R): Competition favorite ‘The Black Ball,’ ‘Club Kid’ director Jordan Firstsman, Vin Diesel at ‘The Fast and The Furious’ screening, humanoid robot at Cannes. Cannes Film Festival, Mustafa Yalcin/Anadolu,Rocco Spaziani/Archivio Spaziani/Mondadori Portfolio, Anna KURTH / AFP The 79th Cannes Film Festival was, on the surface, a more subdued edition. No studio films, fewer stars and a lineup more meh than magnifique. But that relative calm was deceptive. Beneath it, Cannes 2026 functioned less as a showcase of immediate hits than as a seismic map of the indie film industry, revealing shifting tectonic plates in the transformation of the indie sector, the changing role of studios on the festival circuit, and the accelerating impact of AI across production and marketing. What followed on the Croisette was not noise, but signal. Hollywood Stayed Home — and Everyone Noticed Image Credit: …

The AI Debate Dominates Cannes 2026, With Stars Praising and Condemning Its Use

The AI Debate Dominates Cannes 2026, With Stars Praising and Condemning Its Use

Published by Sam Flores

Soderbergh was openly talking about AI at the festival—a position that isn’t easy to take when there’s still so much backlash. “I was going to have to wear this. I’m going to be expected to speak for them or about this technology,” he says. “That’s the trade off to make the best version of this.” Others may have not been so keen to discuss it, but were forced to do so at press conferences. Jury member Demi Moore kicked it off on the first day, saying, “AI is here. And so to fight it is to fight something that is a battle that we will lose. So to find ways in which we can work with it, I think, is a more valuable path to take.” She incurred plenty of wrath on social media for it. Seth Rogen, in town for the animated film Tangle, went the other direction in his comments: “If your instinct is to use AI and skip that creative process, you shouldn’t be a writer, because you’re not writing.” Guillermo del …

Cannes Palme d’Or Goes to Renate Reinsve, Sebastian Stan Starrer Fjord

Cannes Palme d’Or Goes to Renate Reinsve, Sebastian Stan Starrer Fjord

Published by Daniella Wilson

Cristian Mungiu‘s Fjord, the Romanian director’s English-language debut starring Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan as Romanian religious parents who relocate to a small Norwegian village and find themselves accused of child abuse, has won the Palme d’Or at the 79th Cannes Film Festival. With the win, Mungiu joins Cannes’ elite two-timer club, following his 2007 victory with 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, his searing account of illegal abortion in Communist-era Romania. For those keeping score, this marks the seventh year running that Neon has successfully picked the Palme winner. Tom Quinn’s indie outfit snatched up Fjord for domestic release ahead of this year’s festival. At the press conference right after the ceremony, South Korean director Park Chan-wook, head of the 2026 competition jury, joked he didn’t want to give the Palme d’Or to anyone, “because it’s an award that I myself have never gotten.” Then, after a long pause, and referencing his last film, he landed the punch line. “But I had No Other Choice.” Andreï Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur, a reworking of Chabrol’s The …