“John Lennon: The Last Interview”
Steven Soderbergh brings “John Lennon: The Last Interview” to Cannes as a Special Screening, presenting elements of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s final recorded interview for the first time. The documentary centers on the December 1980 RKO Radio interview, recorded hours before Lennon was killed, and frames it with reflections from people who were present. Soderbergh has also drawn attention for using generative AI imagery in the film, which he has described as visible and illustrative rather than an attempt to resurrect Lennon or mislead the audience. At 100 minutes, it is one of Cannes’ higher-profile documentary events, pairing a legendary subject with one of American cinema’s most restless formal experimenters.
Cannes Section: Special Screening.
“The Dreamed Adventure”
Valeska Grisebach has only made a handful of features, but “Western” was enough to turn her into a major arthouse name, and “The Dreamed Adventure” arrives as her long-awaited fourth film. Set in a border region between Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey, the film follows a woman who agrees to help an old acquaintance with a plan to commit a crime. Grisebach’s cinema thrives on ambiguity, landscape, power, and the subtle codes people use to read one another. A crime setup in her hands is unlikely to behave like a thriller in any conventional sense. The anticipation comes from the friction between genre mechanics and Grisebach’s precise, wary attention to human behavior.
Cannes Section: In Competition.
“Minotaur”
Andrey Zvyagintsev returns with “Minotaur,” a loose riff on Claude Chabrol’s “The Unfaithful Wife,” centered on a successful company director facing personal and professional collapse. Zvyagintsev’s “Leviathan” and “Loveless” were severe, punishing portraits of moral rot, family breakdown, and institutional failure, and the Chabrol connection suggests a story of marriage, suspicion, and guilt filtered through a colder, more existential lens. The title alone points toward a labyrinth, but Zvyagintsev rarely needs symbolic overstatement to make people feel trapped. He is one of cinema’s great chroniclers of spiritual corrosion. The Cannes competition is the right place to find out whether “Minotaur” marks a return to full force.
Cannes Section: In Competition.
“Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma”
Jane Schoenbrun opens Un Certain Regard with “Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma,” a slasher-franchise fever dream starring Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson. Schoenbrun’s “I Saw the TV Glow” proved they could turn pop-culture obsession into identity horror, and this premise sounds like a natural next mutation: a young filmmaker trying to revive a horror property and finding something unstable inside its legacy. The title is loud, but Schoenbrun’s best work is emotionally precise beneath the surface of the genre. Cannes can sometimes treat horror as sidebar eccentricity, but this feels like one of the festival’s most conversation-ready selections.
Cannes Section: Un Certain Regard.
“Victorian Psycho”
“Victorian Psycho” gives “Sanctuary” filmmaker Zachary Wigon a gothic horror-thriller set in 1858, with Maika Monroe as Winifred Notty, an eccentric governess who arrives at a remote manor as the household around her grows increasingly violent and suspicious. Thomasin McKenzie and Jason Isaacs co-star, and Virginia Feito adapts her own novel. Monroe has become one of modern horror’s most reliable faces without letting herself get trapped in one register, and Wigon’s “Sanctuary” showed his taste for power games in confined spaces. A Victorian governess story with psychological rot, class tension, and Monroe at the center is exactly the kind of genre title that could break out from Un Certain Regard.
Cannes Section: Un Certain Regard.
“Her Private Hell”
Nicolas Winding Refn has been away from Cannes features for a while, which makes “Her Private Hell” one of the lineup’s most combustible unknowns. The film stars Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton in a Tokyo-shot thriller involving a mysterious mist engulfing a major city, and the early descriptions have promised glitter, sex, drugs, and violence. That sounds like Refn bordering on self-parody, but also very much like Refn operating in his preferred bloodstream. At his best, he turns surfaces into toxins: neon, bodies, music, and violence arranged like a beautiful trap. Out of Competition is the right place for something too stylized, lurid, or unstable for polite consensus.
Cannes Section: Out of Competition.
“Full Phil”
Quentin Dupieux has made absurdity into a renewable resource, and “Full Phil” sounds like another elegant bad idea. Kristen Stewart and Woody Harrelson star in the Midnight Screenings selection, in which Harrelson plays a wealthy American industrialist trying to reconnect with his daughter during a disastrous trip to Paris. Dupieux has described the film as a nightmare variation on “Emily in Paris,” which is either a warning or a sales pitch. His movies can be thin when the joke runs out of oxygen, but when the conceit clicks, nobody else makes comic reality feel quite so casually diseased. A Stewart-Harrelson Paris meltdown at midnight is very Cannes, in the best and worst ways.
Cannes Section: Midnight Screenings.
