“The Man I Love”
Ira Sachs is the rare American filmmaker in the main competition this year, and “The Man I Love” sounds like one of his most ambitious swings. Rami Malek, Tom Sturridge, Luther Ford, and Rebecca Hall star in what has been described as a musical fantasia set in late-1980s New York, a city under pressure from art, illness, desire, and crisis. Sachs’ best films are intimate, bruised, and clear-eyed about love’s limits, but this premise suggests a broader canvas than usual. The AIDS-era New York setting carries obvious emotional weight, and the musical element could either heighten the ache or risk stylization. Either way, it is the kind of Cannes gamble worth watching.
Cannes Section: In Competition.
“Fjord”
Cristian Mungiu, who won the Palme d’Or for “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” returns with “Fjord,” starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as a Romanian-Norwegian couple whose move to an isolated Norwegian town brings their parenting under suspicion. Mungiu’s work often turns social systems into moral traps, and this premise sounds like a perfect pressure chamber: private family choices, public judgment, cultural suspicion, and the thin line between care and control. Stan and Reinsve are both good at playing characters whose surfaces conceal complicated internal weather. In Mungiu’s hands, a domestic relocation can easily become an interrogation of freedom, belonging, and the violence of consensus.
Cannes Section: In Competition.
“Moulin”
László Nemes makes his French-language debut with “Moulin,” starring Gilles Lellouche as Jean Moulin, the French Resistance figure who helped unify major resistance networks during the Nazi occupation of France. Nemes’ “Son of Saul” won the Grand Prix at Cannes and remains a staggering exercise in restricted perspective, historical terror, and moral pressure. A Jean Moulin film could easily become solemn biopic material, but Nemes is not a pageant filmmaker. His interest in history is tactile, claustrophobic, and experiential, which makes the Resistance setting potentially more immediate than commemorative. With Lars Eidinger also in the cast, “Moulin” looks like one of the festival’s major historical dramas.
Cannes Section: In Competition.
“The Unknown”
Arthur Harari steps into competition with “The Unknown,” starring Léa Seydoux and Niels Schneider in a body-swap premise that sounds stranger than the usual Cannes prestige lane. Schneider plays a photographer who sees a woman he cannot stop watching and, the next morning, wakes up inhabiting her body. Harari is still best known internationally for co-writing “Anatomy of a Fall” with Justine Triet, but “Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle” proved he can handle obsession, duration, and psychological dislocation. Seydoux has built a career on turning opacity into charge, and this premise gives Harari a genre hook that could become something thornier about looking, wanting, and losing the borders of the self.
Cannes Section: In Competition.
“The Beloved”
Rodrigo Sorogoyen has become one of Spain’s most forceful contemporary filmmakers, and “The Beloved” puts Javier Bardem at the center of an intimate, potentially volatile filmmaking story. Bardem plays an acclaimed director who casts his daughter, played by Victoria Luengo, in his latest project. Sorogoyen’s “The Beasts” and “Riot Police” made pressure feel physical, and this premise brings the conflict inside the family and inside the creative process. Cannes has no shortage of movies about directors, but the father-daughter dynamic gives this one a sharper edge than simple industry self-reflection. Bardem playing artistic authority, paternal control, and professional vanity is a promising setup on its own.
Cannes Section: In Competition.
“Coward”
Lukas Dhont returns to Cannes competition with “Coward,” a World War I drama centered on a young Belgian soldier. Dhont called it his most ambitious film to date, and after “Girl” and “Close,” ambition here likely means emotional exposure as much as scale. His work can be polarizing, but there is no denying his interest in vulnerability, shame, bodies under pressure, and the violence of social expectation. A war film from Dhont is intriguing because the battlefield may be only half the point. The title suggests a story less about combat spectacle than fear, masculinity, judgment, and the terrible cost of being seen as weak in a system built to crush hesitation.
Cannes Section: In Competition.
“The Black Ball”
Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi bring “The Black Ball” to competition, with a cast that includes Penélope Cruz, Glenn Close, Lola Dueñas, Miguel Bernardeau, and Carlos González. Inspired by an unfinished work by Federico García Lorca, the film tracks the interconnected lives of three gay men across time. That alone gives it one of the most intriguing literary and queer hooks in the lineup. Calvo and Ambrossi have often worked in a heightened emotional register, and Lorca’s shadow brings history, desire, repression, and unfinished art into the frame. The risk is sprawl. The promise is a Spanish melodrama that treats queer life not as marginal history, but as an unfinished epic.
Cannes Section: In Competition.
