With the 2026 Cannes Film Festival in the rearview, let’s look at IndieWire’s favorite movies of the festival beyond simply what won the awards.
To refresh, Cristian Mungiu’s “Fjord” won the Palme d’Or, and that film, starring Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan as religious fundamentalists who emigrate from Romania to Norway and meet progressive persecution, did make IndieWire’s list. But we also want to highlight hidden gems from a festival that also gave out awards to Netflix acquisition “The Black Ball,” Neon titles including “All of a Sudden,” as well as several films that are still looking for a buyer.
The below list includes highlights of IndieWire Critic’s Pick reviews as well as other under-the-radar movies across sections beyond the main competition.
Lé Baltar, David Ehrlich, Marya E. Gates, Ritesh Mehta, Sophie Monks Kaufman, Chris O’Falt, Vadim Rizov, Anne Thompson contributed to this list.
“All of a Sudden” (dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
A talky, female-driven, 196-minute drama about the infinitely braided relationship between care and capitalism that’s prone to Wiseman-like meeting scenes and frequent detours into the world of avant-garde theater? It almost feels redundant to say that Ryusuke Hamaguchi has returned.
And yet, for a movie that offers such an obvious continuation of his previous work (e.g. “Drive My Car,” “Happy Hour”), the sweet and stirring “All of a Sudden” also takes Hamaguchi to places his work has never gone before. Namely: Paris, where most of the Japanese filmmaker’s latest feature is set, but also — in an abrupt, almost contrite about-face from the environmental fatalism of 2023’s “Evil Does not Exist” — a palliative realm of pure comfort.
There is much to mourn in this epic two-hander, which was inspired by the letters shared between terminal breast cancer patient Makiko Mayano and medical anthropologist Maho Isono, but few recent movies, or few movies at all, have been so rigorously insistent upon the reasons for hope. Indeed, “All of a Sudden” is centered around a scene in which the beautifully dying Mari — played by model and “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice” actress Tao Okamoto, whose presence here at long last brings Hamaguchi’s films into the Snyderverse — literally diagrams the state of the world on a whiteboard. Her impromptu Ted Talk doesn’t solve for capitalism’s insatiable appetite, but it illustrates the problem with a clarity that makes a workable solution feel possible within our own lives, if maybe not in Mari’s own lifetime. And that is ultimately where Hamaguchi’s attention lies: In the pain and promise of conceding to the fact that so much is still possible for this world and its people, no matter how grim the prognosis. —DE
“Atonement” (dir. Reed Van Dyk, Sales Title)
For his feature debut, American director Reed Van Dyk adapts Dexter Filkins’ New Yorker article, “Atonement After Iraq” published in 2012. This intimate and psychologically astute portrait of the human cost of U.S. imperial violence draws a precise focus from what cinema is built for: putting us in a character’s skin.
This is a war film less ordinary, for it is imbued with the emotional acuity of a life-changing therapist. Following the lead of Filkins’ source material (“I remember reading this piece because I cried all the way through it,” Van Dyk told the audience at a Directors’ Fortnight screening) “Atonement” is not interested in establishing a warzone by showing peripheral acts of violence. Indeed, the only shooting victims shown (in several devastating flashes) are the heart of the film’s insoluble sorrows.
This shooting in the Baladiyat district of Iraq likewise shapes the storytelling focus. Nothing is included that does not relate to its build-up, execution, or aftermath. Narrative is intertwined with character, so that every dramatic development reveals something about the people forever trapped in the crosshairs of April 8, 2003. —Sophie Monks Kaufman
“The Black Ball” (dirs. Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, Netflix)
While it is technically accurate to say that “The Black Ball (La Bola Negra)” is a single feature film from Spain’s beloved creative duo, Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi (collective moniker Los Javis), it feels truer to say that they have made four films and magically contained them within the form of one. It is nearly impossible to grasp the structural effort required to fluidly create one perfectly coherent story using three narratives told across three timelines, each with a distinct visual identity.
“The Black Ball” comprises a neorealist tale of a closeted young man seeking membership at a casino in 1932, a tragic wartime romance set in 1937, and a lo-fi drama about a historian prompted to investigate all of this in 2017. The fourth element, which serves as the connective tissue for everything, is a timeless poetic expression of love for all the queer storytellers who died before they could truly live.
An unfinished play, “La Bola Negra” by the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, is the basis of the themes explored across all timelines. Lorca was murdered in 1936 by right-wing militias amid the rising nationalism that led to the Spanish Civil War of 1936-9. In an act of fantastical baton-passing, Los Javis collaborate with Lorca’s spirit to finalize this play, infusing it with details, moods and lyricism from his life and work. Choice lines from his poem “Love Sleeps in the Poet’s Breast” serve as a time-collapsing flash of lightning, reanimating lost souls so that they are briefly, vividly here. —Sophie Monks Kaufman
“Clarissa” (dirs. Arie Esiri and Chuko Esiri, Neon)
The parallels between post-WWI British society and the upper crust of modern-day Nigeria are more similar than you might imagine, making twin brothers Chuko and Arie Esiri’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs Dalloway” a fascinating exercise. The story of thwarted dreams – the Esiris drifting back and forth between their characters in their Idyllic early 20s on holiday in peaceful Abraka, to Clarissa’s swanky party at her home in present-day Lagos — is inseparable from the turmoil and complex history of Nigeria.
This is patient, observant storytelling, with brilliant casting choices (casting director Nina Gold) and performances that speak volumes about how the characters have changed over the decades — the jump from a buoyant Toheeb Jimoh to a despondent David Oyelowo is particularly heartbreaking. One of the joys of the film is being able to see the beauty of Nigeria, and enter the story of a country whose future means constantly grappling with its past, as the brothers continue (their first film “Eyimofe” capturing the cyclical nature of Nigerian poverty) to lift the cinematic veil on a part of the world we never see on our screens. Let’s hope Neon can work its magic to get this film seen by a wider global audience. —CO
“Club Kid” (dir. Jordan Firstman, A24)
Because the filmmakers screened the crowdpleaser ahead of the festival, the buzz around it was loud even before its well-received debut in Un Certain Regard. Comedian Jordan Firstman wrote, directed, and stars in the indie film about Peter, a gay club promoter who finds out he sired a son, Arlo (Reggie Absolom), in a druggy haze ten years ago. At first, Peter has no intention of coming through as a new parent, but circumstances force his hand, and he turns out to be a more sober and caring father than you’d expect. Authentic, edgy, funny, unpredictable, and heartwarming, “Club Kid” is a winning combination. A bidding war drove up the price A24 had to pay to get it ($17 million). It will do well on the fall circuit and could land an original screenplay Oscar nomination, for starters. —AT
“Fatherland” (dir. Pawel Pawlikowski, Mubi)
Paweł Pawlikowski delivers another black-and-white, Academy ratio, post-World War II stunner in the story of exiled writer Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika’s (Sandra Hüller) road trip through divided Germany in 1949. The elder Mann’s determination to make the controversial trip triggers a slew of conflicting and complex emotions, opening old familial wounds that sit on the surface but go largely unspoken. Similar to “Cold War” and “Ida,” Pawlikowski and cinematographer Łukasz Żal create compositions that are not only stunningly elegant, but masterfully precise in how each brings to life the raw turmoil brewing inside the restraint of Hüller and Zischler’s performances. The image does more than words ever could in this 82-minute film, which is anything but slight or cold, as it builds toward a final scene that is one of the most beautiful emotional releases in modern cinema. —CO
“Fjord” (dir. Cristian Mungiu, Neon)
Intolerance assumes a more progressive sheen with Cristian Mungiu’s “Fjord,” a characteristically fraught and tangled drama in which the “R.M.N.” filmmaker continues to vivisect the reactionary pitfalls of globalization — this time in Norway, which the annual World Happiness Report consistently lists as one of the happiest countries in the world.
Perhaps that explains why Romanian software engineer Mihai Gheorghiu (a bald Sebastian Stan, looking more like Damon Lindelof than the Winter Soldier) was so quick to move his brood from the middle of Bucharest to a scenic fjord in Stranda after his parents died; Mihai’s wife Lisbet (Renate Reinsve, her performance like a shaken willow) was raised in the area, and her mother is supposedly still around to help care for the couple’s five kids. The religiously conservative Gheorghius might not mesh right away with the ultra-liberal utopianism of their new home, but Jesus didn’t have a problem with good schools and excellent healthcare. He said “thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” and for the most part the Gheorghius appear to live by that credo as they settle into a secular community by the sea. Their progressive Nordic neighbors, not so much.
If that sounds like the recipe for a faith-based persecution drama, rest assured that Mungiu is much less interested in defending biblical values than he is in interrogating the nuclear friction at the root of even the “nicest” culture clash. “You need to learn to apologize when you’re wrong,” Mihai instructs his kids during the opening scene, which takes place in the immediate aftermath of an unseen punishment. But none of the adults in this movie — Mihai included — are able to practice what they preach, a failure of perspective that allows the divides between them to grow as thick as the walls that protect the local school from the avalanches that crash down upon it whenever the drama gets too intense. “What does it mean to be a good neighbor?”, “Fjord” wonders in Mungiu’s usual tones, its probing handheld wide shots infused with the callous indifference of the gods. And why is that so rarely a question that people feel required to ask of themselves? —DE
“I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning” (dir. Clio Barnard, Sales Title)
Like the British young adult series “Skins” but all grown up — or at least grown up into their 30s — Clio Barnard’s affecting, punchily edited and directed friendship saga “I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning” tracks a pivotal turning point in the lives of a group of five pals in Birmingham. Other than Rian (Joe Cole), who’s made rich via his knack for flipping affordable-housing-like apartment buildings, the other four are working class, but all in the quintet are facing some kind of internal or external emotional hardship.
There are buried secrets and betrayals that come to light as this melodrama from the director of “The Arbor” unfolds, punctuated by bravura, kinetic musical sequences, and demolition montages. All the drama onscreen among beautiful people — with a cast including Anthony Boyle and Lola Petticrew — should make this an addictive watch for younger audience but one that even older ones can see themselves in. —RL
“I’ll Be Gone in June” (dir. Katharina Rivilis, Sales Title)
In Katharina Rivilis’ sure knockout of a film “I’ll Be Gone in June,” two worlds of stifling teenage solitude collide at the same time as America mournfully recovers from the jihadist hijacking of four commercial airliners in September 11, 2001, which led to the leveling of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers and the U.S. government’s colonial “war on terror” in Afghanistan, among other atrocities.
A widely televised violence, the images of 9/11 are among the most shocking and enduring images the world has ever seen, sadly to the point of heightening America’s messianic complex and the anti-Muslim rhetoric across the globe — and perhaps what made most Americans, and white people at large, so inured to livestreamed genocides. In this way, “I’ll Be Gone in June” converses with the current terror even as the film is set in the past, capturing what it’s like to witness a violence of this scale play out in real-time, especially for not-so-clueless young people at the turn of the millennium.
Shot for over 50 days, the result is a poetically probing movie that features the teenager protagonist Franny (Naomi Cosma, in a breakout leading role) as the German-Russian filmmaker’s self-insert in an effort to belatedly wrestle with some of her own history as an exchange student from Germany in 2001 chasing the American Dream by first settling in the sleepy town of Las Cruces, New Mexico before setting out for either New York or California to embrace all the incredible things it has to offer. Except none of the latter would pan out as Franny (and the director’s teenage self) aspired to. With a botched future ahead of her, Franny has to grapple with the new reality around her, at least until June, until she moves back to Germany for good.
While the desert town seems so far removed from the big city, it makes for a perfectly fertile terrain for a semi-autobiographical movie, whose characters aren’t exactly itching to ditch the last vestiges of their youth, even as they contemplate their identities amidst a world still reeling from a massive tragedy, the trauma of which is not lost on Franny after having lived and struggled in Berlin Wall-era Germany, except now she’s an outlander. It’s a lived experience that readily crystallizes whenever fellow teens teasingly take a swipe at her identity, including such remarks as “Nazi girl.” —Lé Baltar
“La Gradiva” (dir. Marine Atlan, 1-2 Special)
Cinematographer Marine Atlan‘s feature film directorial debut “La Gradiva” takes a simple premise — teenagers on a class trip — and uses it to explore the vast worlds of their individual interiority with insight, empathy, and grace. Mercifully free of typical high school movie tropes, the teenagers at the heart of Atlan’s film are fully realized people, whose fears and desires and ambitions and loneliness and dreams, as well as the intensity of their messy teenage feelings, are treated utmost respect by Atland and co-writer Anne Brouillet, allowing their work to reach toward the sublime.
The film’s title alludes to Wilhelm Jensen’s 1902 novel “Gradiva: a Pompeian fantasy,” which tells the tale of an archaeologist obsessed with the bas-relief of a woman he sees in an Italian museum. Imagining she was among those who died in Pompeii after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, he names her la Gradiva (or “she who walks”). Jensen’s novel led to a psychological reading by Freud and became a popular subject of Surrealist art.
Like the novel and the works it inspired, Atlan’s film is about the layers below our consciousness, where our desires and our fears and our anger boil until we can no longer contain them. But it’s also about the way that we project a version of ourselves to others, and the dangers of allowing our surface-level understanding of people to affect our judgments of them. —Marya E. Gates
“La Libertad Doble” (dir. Lisandro Alonso, Sales Title)
In some respects, “La Libertad Doble” is a classic sequel that restages the first installment’s greatest hits before introducing new characters and raising the stakes — but in this case, “greatest hits,” “new characters,” and “raising the stakes” are all a little different.
Premiering when writer/director Lisandro Alonso was all of 26, 2001’s “La Libertad” was the most ascetic gauntlet thrown down during the turn-of-the-millennium slow cinema boom. The film eliminated even a gesture toward a plot while showing solitary nonprofessional and real-life ranch-hand Misael Saavedra chopping and hauling logs in the Argentinian hinterlands (in actuality, Alonso’s family’s ranch). It was a strong introduction to arguably most severe filmmaker of his generation, without the violent punctuations and levitations of Bruno Dumont or the supernatural and sexual eruptions of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, two contemporaries whose slightly-less-withholding works are also regularly staged in deeply personal homeplace landscapes.
As with David Lynch delivering on Laura Palmer’s promise to “see you again in 25 years” with “Twin Peaks: The Return,” Alonso has likewise returned 25 years later with an unexpected and demanding follow-up. Arriving at a moment when the pope has called for films to be more attentive to D.W. Griffith’s oft-cited “beauty of the moving wind in the trees,” this textbook piece of slow cinema is precisely on schedule. —Vadim Rizov
“The Man I Love” (dir. Ira Sachs, Sales Title)
Ira Sachs directs Rami Malek in the melancholy, sexy, and piercingly sad “The Man I Love,” which is elusive to think about and to hold in your hand but nonetheless makes a scarring impression because of how it shirks the cliches related to the AIDS movie genre.
Malek plays a New York performance artist named Jimmy George in the 1980s, who has an affair with the cute ginger twink who’s just moved in downstairs as a sort of last grab at joie de vivre before the disease inevitably takes him down. There are no Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions on display, or tearful bedside vigils, and there’s only one scene in a hospital that’s instead focused entirely on Jimmy’s partner Dennis (Tom Sturridge) and how he reacts to his boyfriend’s worsening and critical condition.
Sachs, co-writing the film per usual with Mauricio Zacharias, has a deep investment in the Manhattan arts scene of the period that pays off in terms of the drama’s immersiveness. The “Keep the Lights on” and “Peter Hujar’s Day” director makes period films that you can feel and touch, almost like stepping into an imagined dream of what that particular time in the past might’ve looked like. —RL
“Minotaur” (dir. Andrey Zvyagintsev, Mubi)
After recovering from a near-fatal illness, Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev (“Leviathan”) got back behind the camera after a decade with his sixth feature, Grand Prix winner “Minotaur,” an adaptation of Claude Chabrol’s 1969 thriller “An Unfaithful Wife.” Shot in Latvia in Russian, the movie is less a procedural investigation of a murder and more a portrayal of a corrupt society coping with a new war. The exiled filmmaker, now living in Paris, created believable Russian locations in Riga, Latvia, which still resembles its neighboring country. In one tour-de-force sequence, we follow the murderer for 20 minutes without any dialogue at all. Whatever the physical challenges the filmmaker may still be confronting, the joy he felt directing again is palpable on screen. —AT
“Nagi Notes” (dir. Koji Fukada, Sales Title)
A rural farm town some 630 kilometers west of Tokyo, Nagi is the kind of place where everybody knows each other. That makes it a wonderfully fertile setting for a film by rising Japanese auteur Koji Fukada (“Love Life,” “A Girl Missing”), whose characters often struggle to know themselves.
That potential is on full display from the first moments of Fukada’s characteristically probing ( if uncharacteristically sweet) “Nagi Notes,” in which a divorced architect Yuri (Shizuka Ishibashi) pays a visit to her former sister-in-law York — a sculpter — out in the sticks. The conversations they share in the artist’s barn are soft but searching, Yoriko carving a camphorwood bust of her model’s face as the two women slowly work themselves back to a familial intimacy on unfamiliar terms. Fukada has always been fascinated by how other people are used to map the fractures that form within ourselves, and it’s greatly rewarding to watch him apply that interest with a greater eye towards closeness than distance for once.
Inspired by a 1994 Oriza Hirata play called “Tōkyō Notes” (which was itself based on Ozu’s “Tokyo Story”), Fukada’s gentle adaptation is far too curious and clear-eyed to risk becoming a simple paean to the pureness of country living, but the film palpably taps into the kind of focus that’s only possible in a place so free of distractions, and to the freedom that comes with it — including the freedom to leave. —DE
“Paper Tiger” (dir. James Gray, Neon)
James Gray’s deft and devastating “Paper Tiger” is a Jewish-American tragedy in a teapot that — like all of the writer/director’s best films — is both sweepingly mythic and hauntingly personal all at once. That double effect, once a magic trick that Gray’s movies would manage to pull off by the time they ended, has since become the de facto starting condition of his singular auto-cinema, which continues to pick at his formative wounds by processing them through the classics.
As indebted to Aeschylus as “Ad Astra” was to Joseph Campbell, or “The Lost City of Z” was to Henri Rousseau, “Paper Tiger” begins with a telling quote from the ancient playwright’s most famous text: “Let there be wealth without tears; enough for the wise man who will ask no further.” Even more telling, however, is the opening shot that follows, which surveys the same reedy marshland — or at least one identical to it — from the end of “We Own the Night.” It’s no surprise that a project first conceived as a direct sequel to 2022’s “Armageddon Time” should point back to Gray’s previous work, but never before has it been so clear, so fast, that he’s trying to process his own, highly specific experience by assimilating it into the curriculum that first taught him how to make sense of the world. The more acutely self-referential his films get, the more broadly they speak to the soft and immortal agony that propels their characters forward.
It’s an agony that goes by many (sur)names, but is colloquially referred to as “family.” “Paper Tiger” is many things, chief among them a textbook parable about the American Dream, and a breathless thriller about a working-class schmuck (Miles Teller) whose brother (a career-best Adam Driver)gets mixed up with the Russian mafiya. But, at its most nuclear level, “Paper Tiger” is — to an even more explicit degree than “Little Odessa,” “The Yards,” and any of the other James Gray movies that it hungrily mulches into something all its own — a remarkably knowing and perceptive film about how family is, and has always been, the ultimate devil’s bargain. Our greatest strength and our heaviest cross to bear. The reason our most dangerous risks can seem worth taking, and the most valuable thing we risk by taking them. —DE
“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” (dir. Jane Schoenbrun)
Visionary filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun’s work is many things, but you wouldn’t up to this point have necessarily called it optimistic or accessible. The enthusiastically queer, genre-literate director used their feature debut “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” as not just a love letter to internet creepypastas and the scary stories we tell our young selves for comfort, but also as a coming-out missive.
With the making of that film came Schoenbrun’s revelation of their own nonbinary transness. Next painting on an even grander, more metaphysical canvas, their second feature — the wounding and masterful metaphor-as-movie “I Saw the TV Glow” — used millennial nostalgia to construct a self-portrayal of their own gender dysphoria.
With Schoenbrun’s slippery latest film, the sapphic slice of cinema “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” comes a statement about what happens after gender dysphoria’s annihilation — a reflection on the sexual unease experienced once you’ve finally fit into your body but perhaps don’t know what to do with it. The ways in which we’ve gotten so far in our own heads that sex is now more concept than carnal, surrendering act sets the stage for an erotic explosion in this cerebral, pop-colored tale centered on 29-year-old filmmaker Kris (Hannah Einbinder, who’s internalized the role wonderfully).
Bookish and bright, she has been optioned to direct a “woke” 21st-century reboot of a piece of zombie IP, a transphobic ‘80s slasher movie franchise called “Camp Miasma.” But in this film, a for-hire industry assignment opens a portal into a sexual awakening with help from the franchise’s original final girl, played by Gillian Anderson. —RL
“The Unknown” (dir. Arthur Harari)
Certainly the most divisive film to premiere in the 2026 Cannes main competition, “Anatomy of a Fall” co-writer Arthur Harari’s directorial feature “The Unknown” feels as slippery as a lost Jacques Rivette movie from the 1980s, or as soul-searching as an Eric Rohmer one from the 1990s; shooting on film in Paris also helps the movie look out of recent arthouse past.
The usually enormously beautiful actor Niels Schneider whittles himself down into a dead ringer of John Hawkes at his rangiest, playing a photographer who, after an animalistic sexual encounter with Léa Seydoux in a trenchcoat, wakes up to find himself inside her body. With the sex change seemingly irreversible, David now aka Eva plays detective on themselves to uncover a potentially more vast network of people who’ve been afflicted by a body-swapping entity. “The Unknown” is a moody existential mystery that reflects on the materiality of the soul and whether a body is what makes you the person you are. —RL
“Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep” (dir. Rakan Mayasi, Sales Title)
Toward the start of Rakan Mayasi’s stirring debut feature, “Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep” — the only feature in this year’s Cannes official selection by a filmmaker of Palestinian descent — there’s a striking wide shot of women laboring in a fertile field amid the majestic snow-capped Anti-Lebanon mountains. As the still camera zooms in ever so slowly, our attention shifts from one of the film’s leads, Rim (first-time actor Rim Al Mawla), to the constant sound of a war drone in the distance.
Even if you didn’t know that Mayasi’s film — shot in March 2025 in eastern Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley, and an outgrowth of his short “Trumpets in the Sky” — is about a Bedouin family caught up in the country’s age-old intertribal blood feuds and cultural practices of honor and retaliation, you’d appreciate that contemporary Middle East and North African films that turn their eyes inward to their nations’ internal strife can’t avoid acknowledging the past century’s geopolitical cataclysms that have wrecked the region.
How landscape intersects with tribal relations is the narrative backdrop for the somber, surprising, darkly poetic “Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep.” When Yasser, the second son of the eight-member Al Mawla family (of the Mawali tribe), accidentally runs over and kills a man from the rival Jabour tribe, his two sisters, nurse Jawaher and fieldworker Rim are sent off to the Sheik of the other tribe as ritual honor offerings. During a fragile truce that is to last three days and a third, the Jabour men debate the sisters’ fate. Will they forcefully marry one to their sons? Will they kill one, or both? This mystery forms the crux of the film’s middle, even as surrealist scenes bring welcome tonal upheaval to the film’s last third. —Ritesh Mehta
