The Best Films at Cannes 2025

Wes Anderson, The Phoenician Scheme, 2025

No one finds as much joy in the quotidian detail of everyday professions as Wes Anderson. Unlike Adam Stockhausen’s grand production designs (and there are plenty here to catch the breath), no imitator (artificial or human) can compete with Anderson’s fascination with how workplaces operate. Until now, his subjects have tended towards the whimsical – boy scouts, marine researchers and, God help us, a print magazine – but The Phoenician Scheme takes place amid the sharp-edged world of early 20th-century business moguls. The plot follows Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro), a wealthy Industrialist whose latest venture forces him to negotiate with four rival tycoons. This setup allows the director to imagine a world of new locations (including French colonial North Africa and even Heaven) while paying homage to classic adventure-explorer movies. There’s also fresh air in the casting: with his usual rolodex of A-listers appearing in small cameos, Del Toro gets to enjoy a rare lead and is flanked by newcomers Mia Threapleton (Kate Winslet’s daughter, stealing every scene) and Michael Cera (astonishingly, a first-time Anderson collaborator). For the first time in years, Anderson feels re-energized.

Ari Aster, Eddington, 2025

Few filmmakers get to make their financially risqué passion project these days. With Beau is Afraid (2023) and now Eddington, Ari Aster has somehow convinced A24 – a studio his successes helped build – to let him make two in a row. Originally conceived as a contemporary Western, but updated to the tumultuous summer of 2020, Aster (the horror director turned anxiety auteur) has created a period piece about an era that most people are – at best – still trying to process. Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe Cross, the anti-masker sheriff of a New Mexico town where the charismatic mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), is attempting to build a data centre. Resentful of Garcia’s COVID-19 restrictions and a simmering Black Lives Matter uprising, Cross decides to run against him. Politically ambivalent – at times to the point of seeming cruel and nihilistic – Eddington is recklessly unclear in what it’s trying to say. Yet, Aster knows a thing or two about getting under an audience’s skin and the scope of his imagination (captured here by the great cinematographer Darius Khondji) remains something to behold.

Oliver Laxe, Sirât, 2025

The French-Spanish director Oliver Laxe has been gathering awards in the festival’s various sidebars since his 2010 debut, You All Are Captains. With his adventurous new film Sirât, Laxe confidently steps onto the big stage, joining seven debutants breathing fresh life into the main competition. Set amid the Atlas Mountains of Morocco (shot here in breathtakingly beautiful 16mm), Sirat follows a father’s search for his missing daughter, who left to explore the North African illegal rave scene and never returned. Early in the journey, the father (Sergi López) meets a colourful group of fellow Spaniards. Clinging to them with dogged desperation, he trails their enormous trucks in his modest hatchback, accompanied by his teenage son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), as they head to the next party. There is a hint of Paul Schrader’s Hardcore (1979) to Sirât’s central theme of following a loved one into spiritual oblivion, but Laxe’s film is more in line with the likes of Sorcerer (1977) and Mad Max (1979): a cinema of otherworldly landscapes, pulsating music and the primal thrill of watching formidable machinery traverse tough terrain.

Laurent Cantet, Robin Campillo, Enzo, 2025

When Palme d’Or winning filmmaker Laurent Cantet passed away last year at the age of 63, his long-time collaborator – co-writer and editor Robin Campillo – stepped in to direct this coming-of-age tale of uneasy privilege and aching desire. Newcomer Eloy Pohu stars as Enzo, the youngest son of a bourgeois family who decides to thread his own path by working on a building site. There, between the bricklaying, he forms a bond with Vlad (an electric performance by Maksym Slivinskyi), a Ukrainian co-worker whose proximity to war only adds to Enzo’s growing class awareness. These simmering emotions soon boil over at home, where his father’s bewildered empathy (brilliantly played by veteran actor Pierfrancesco Favino) soon gives way to frustration and anger. While the depictions of hard graft are rote by comparison, the filmmakers do wonders with the glass walls and glorious vistas of Enzo’s family’s chic Côte d’Azur home. Combining their nous for young characters (The Class, 2008, and The Workshop, 2017) and queer storytelling (120 BPM, 2017) Cantet and Campillo deliver one final, heart-wrenching collaboration.

Mascha Schilinski, Sound of Falling, 2025

Opening the competition last Wednesday afternoon, Mascha Schilinski instantaneously skyrocketed to the forefront of contemporary German cinema with this dense, literary film about how a century of echoed sorrows can continue to ache like a phantom limb. Sound of Falling stretches and contracts across time – from the First World War to the age of the iPhone – sifting between eras and narrators, though always from an adolescent’s point of view. It tells the story of a farmhouse in northeastern Germany through the lives and deaths of four generations of women – two from the distant past and two from more recent decades – each a worrying reminder of history’s propensity to rhyme. There’s no shortage of trauma on screens these days, but Sound of Falling earns its mournful tone. Through its distinct style and unfolding revelations, the film rewards patient viewers and announces the arrival of a bold new voice.

_{Main image: Wes Anderson, The Phoenician Scheme, 2025, film still. Courtesy: Cannes Film Festival}