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The 2025 Cannes Film Festival officially opens on Tuesday, and this year’s edition promises to be as bold and star-studded as ever – and I cannot wait.
From Tom Cruise debuting Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning on the Croisette to returns for the likes of filmmakers Wes Anderson, Spike Lee and horror auteur Julia Ducournau – and a first-time appearance for Ari Aster – there’s lots of buzzy titles to watch.
We’re talking Highest 2 Lowest, Eddington, Die, My Love and The Phoenician Scheme, as well as three major Hollywood actors making their directorial debuts with Scarlett Johansson’s Eleanor the Great, Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water and Harris Dickinson’s Urchin.
Other stars opening movies include Pedro Pascal and Emma Stone, Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Lawrence and Josh O’Connor and Paul Mescal – as well as A$AP Rocky.
Cannes has also never seemed so well positioned in terms of being an awards season tastemaker – last year, it was Cannes where Sean Baker opted to roll out eventual best picture winner Anora and Demi Moore launched an incredible comeback via Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance.
I already know there won’t be enough time to see everything I want to, but, after much agonising, here are the seven films I’m most excited for at Cannes 2025.
Eddington
Directed by Ari Aster, the filmmaker behind Midsommar and Hereditary, Eddington boasts a starry cast featuring Pascal, Joaquin Phoenix, Stone and Austin Butler.
Billed as a contemporary Western, this was almost Aster’s debut feature, but he came back to it later and updated it, setting it in May 2020 at the height of the Covid pandemic.
The story concerns Phoenix’s sheriff, who faces off against Pascal’s mayor running for re-election and apparently ‘sparks a powder keg, as neighbour is pitted against neighbour’ in their New Mexico town.
Another A24 film for Aster – now seen as a hallmark for quality movie-making – the trailer has given very little away with its tease of news snippets on social media offering mere glimpses at its characters. As with some of the best experiences at Cannes, that means I’m going in with very little prior knowledge.
I truly don’t know what a Western about Covid will be like, but I’m intrigued to find out!
The Phoenician Scheme
Speaking of starry casts, Wes Anderson’s latest wild movie ensemble competes with the last for Asteroid City – but The Phoenician Scheme probably tops it.
Alongside the returns of Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Benicio del Toro, Willem Dafoe, Bill Murray, Jeffrey Wright, Bryan Cranston and Benedict Cumberbatch, there’s also Anderson debuts for Riz Ahmed and Michael Cera.
The Phoenician Scheme concerns del Toro’s tycoon Zsa-zsa Korda, who appoints his only daughter – played by Kate Winslet’s real-life daughter Mia Threapleton – as sole heir to his estate. And she’s a pipe-smoking nun – I’m in already.
The bonkers, vibrant trailer for this dark makes me think this could be Anderson’s strongest movie since 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, which was nominated for nine Oscars – including best picture – and won four.
It’s giving the suggestion of a chaotic dark comedy caper with lots of absurdist humour and a stirring musical soundtrack, all of which please my brain.
Highest 2 Lowest
A$AP Rocky makes his unexpected acting debut here as Denzel Washington’s son, which is not a sentence I anticipated writing.
The revered Oscar-winner also has Tenet actor John David Washington for a son, but Rocky’s inclusion makes sense when you learn he’ll be playing aspiring rapper Yung Felon, who’s desperate to be noticed by this music mogul father (Washington).
Lee also revealed he was swayed towards Rocky after seeing comments on Instagram about how much he resembled Washington, with whom he’s collaborated on five films now.
Highest 2 Lowest is Spike Lee’s English-language ‘reinterpretation’ of Akira Kurosawa’s famous 1963 Japanese film High and Low, a kidnap police thriller.
The trailer is out for this one too, and the movie looks as effortlessly cool as I hoped, with Washington asking in the voiceover of the consequences of fame: ‘So can you handle the mayhem? Can you handle the money? Can you handle the success? Can you handle the failure? Can you handle the lovers? Can you handle the memes? Can you handle everything that there is in between?’
BlacKkKlansman Oscar-winner Lee is such a singular filmmaker that I’m curious to see his take on a classic piece of cinema – and Rocky’s acting.
Pillion
Dudley Dursley actor Harry Melling continues his amazingly diverse career post-Harry Potter with another amazing leftfield move.
He’s been in The Queen’s Gambit for Netflix, the Coen brothers’ Western anthology film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and played a young Edgar Allen Poe in The Pale Blue Eye.
But Pillion, the directorial debut of British filmmaker Harry Lighton, could be another breakthrough moment for the 36-year-old.
He stars as weedy wallflower Colin, who is letting life pass him by until he meets handsome Ray, played Alexander Skarsgård, the leader of a kinky, queer motorbike club, who takes him on as his submissive.
The film is described as a ‘fun and filthy romance with heart’, with only one image released so far of the two characters walking side by side.
Penned by Lighton himself as a loose adaptation of Adam Mars-Jones’ 2019 novel Box Hill, it feels like an exciting move for both actors into potentially risqué territory. I’ve been anticipating this since its announcement last May.
The History of Sound
This film stars two of the internet’s boyfriends, Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor, in a gay period drama.
I needn’t say anything else to sell it really, but it’s actually an intriguing time period and storyline, as their student characters travel around New England in 1919 together, recording folk songs from their fellow World War One veterans.
Adapted by Ben Shattuck from his own short story, and directed by Living filmmaker Oliver Hermanus, The History of Sound is a project O’Connor and Mescal have been attached to for years – since they both became shiny new TV stars thanks to The Crown and Normal People.
‘It’s not just about sex and the intensity of falling in love. It’s deeper than that,’ Mescal told Vanity Fair about the film’s central romance, with Hermanus adding: ‘I didn’t want the sex of it to be the transgression, or the big idea, like, “Oh, it’s 1917, and these two men are taking the risk of being sexual”. Ben wrote it in a way where there was no hesitation, no moment of fear.’
I expect this one to be a deeply emotional and poignant film – and it feels like it’s absolutely going to be made of Oscars material.
It’s also a natural fit for Cannes, seeing as Hermanus won both the Queer Palm and Prize Un Certain Regard with Beauty at the festival in 2011.
Exit 8
Exit 8 sounds like it could be the most stressful film I ever watch, which I know a lot of horror fans will be chomping at the bit for.
An adaptation of the popular 2023 video game, this psychological horror is about a man trapped in an endless looping subway passage trying to find his escape via exit 8.
To proceed on his quest, he must keep an eye out for any anomalies and turn back immediately if he sees them – otherwise, he should carry on. But any mistake and he will be sent right back to the beginning.
Directed and co-written by Genki Kawamura, a newly released trailer for the movie appears to have nailed an eerily tense atmosphere as you wait to see what kind of ‘anomalies’ could be in store – with one popping up right at the end.
Kawamura is a filmmaker and author who is also working alongside JJ Abrams on the live-action adaptation of 2016 anime triumph Your Name and feels on the cusp of a major international breakthrough.
Exit 8 could just prove that – it also may push me over the edge, but I’ll take the risk for what might be a potential genre classic.
Alpha
French filmmaker Julia Ducournau is a darling at Cannes, having premiered both her previous feature films at the festival, 2016’s Raw and Titane in 2021.
A body horror connoisseur, Titane actually caused reported walkouts and multiple fainting fits when it screened at Sydney Film Festival after Cannes with its violence – in one scene, its protagonist has sex with a car.
However, it won the Palme D’Or at Cannes, meaning expectations are high for Alpha and Ducournau’s return.
There’s just one image released so far from the movie, which is about a troubled girl whose world collapses when she returns home from school one day with a tattoo on her arm.
It’s reported to be set in the 1980s in a fictional version of New York City as the AIDS epidemic unfolds and has been described as the director’s ‘most personal and profound work yet’.
Other descriptions attached to it so far? ‘Genre-bending’ and ‘utterly divisive’, all of which sounds promisingly par for the course from a filmmaker like Ducournau.
I might be bracing myself ahead of the screening, but I know Alpha is sure to be one of the most talked about films at Cannes this year – and beyond.
The Cannes Film Festival runs from Tuesday May 13 – Saturday May 24, 2025.
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