Can you believe a full year has ed since Francis Ford Coppola’s long-awaited ion project, Megalopolis, and Coralie Fargeat’s history-making The Substance first met audiences at the Cannes Film Festival? Time flies, and here we are again, about to meet a fresh crop of films we are certain to be talking about all year long. It’s Cannes season, my friends!

While rumors swirled that Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme might kick things off at this year’s festival, Cannes will open with a rare feature debut in French filmmaker Amélie Bonnin’s Bye Bye, based on her short of the same name, while the American director slotted his way into the prestigious Competition section. Benicio del Toro leads a typically stellar Anderson cast that also includes Tom Hanks, Michael Cera, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Willem Dafoe and Scarlett Johansson. Speaking of Johansson: the actor will bring her June Squibb-led directorial debut Eleanor the Great to Un Certain Regard, keeping company in the sidebar with fellow actors-turned-directors Harris Dickinson (Urchin) and Kristen Stewart (The Chronology of Water). Actors stepping behind the camera is no new thing, but 2025 is bringing a particularly bountiful crop of converted performers.

Meanwhile, a slate of greatly anticipated titles s The Phoenician Scheme in Competition, including previous 2021 Palme d’Or winner Julia Ducournau with Alpha, Lynne Ramsay’s Die, My Love (ready for this year, against all odds), The Worst Person in the World director Joachim Trier’s reunion with former Cannes Best Actress winner Renate Reinsve in Sentimental Value, and another repeat collaboration with Joaquin Phoenix leading Ari Aster’s Eddington, marking Aster’s first Cannes. Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi brings his latest mystery, A Simple Accident, to the Croisette, examining the escalating consequences that arise from a seemingly minor incident. Richard Linklater swiftly follows up his Berlinale Competition entry Blue Moon with another love letter to a great creative in New Wave, chronicling the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless.

Josh O’Connor is on double duty in Cannes, with Kelly Reichardt’s crime drama The Mastermind (also starring Alana Haim and John Magaro) and Oliver Hermanus’s historical romance The History of Sound. The latter sees Paul Mescal return to the festival for the first time since his career-making turn in Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun in 2022, which played the Critics’ Week sidebar—it’s also Mescal’s first outing as a producer.

With so much on offer across Official Selection and the festival’s many sidebars, we’ve gathered a list of our eleven most anticipated titles to populate your ever-growing watchlist.

Die, My Love

Written by Ariana Harwicz, Lynne Ramsay, and Enda Walsh, directed by Lynne Ramsay
Section: Competition

Soldiers, it has been eight long years and countless new projects speculated, added to Letterboxd, and then dead in the water, but it’s official: Lynne Ramsay is back! The lauded Scottish filmmaker behind Morvern Callar and We Need to Talk About Kevin returns to Cannes, almost a decade after You Were Never Really Here wowed the festival, winning Best Screenplay and Best Actor for Joaquin Phoenix, with a terse drama about the early days of motherhood.

Adapted from Ariana Harwicz’s eponymous novel, Die, My Love sees a woman (played by Jennifer Lawrence) struggle to keep a grip on reality as psychosis sets in postpartum. Set in a remote rural area, the drama also features Robert Pattinson as Lawrence’s husband and LaKeith Stanfield as her lover, as well as Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte as part of the wider cast. It’s been a minute since the great, Oscar-winning Lawrence has worked with an established auteur capable of harnessing her talent. If anyone can do it, it’s Ramsay. 

Sound of Falling

Written by Louise Peter and Mascha Schilinski, directed by Mascha Schilinski
Section: Competition

Very few films arrive in Cannes this year with the level of industry buzz of Mascha Schilinski’s sophomore feature—ask a programmer, sales agent, critic, or distributor what they are most looking forward to at the festival, and Sound of Falling will most likely be on that list. The film, previously titled The Doctor Says I’ll Be Alright, But I’m Feelin’ Blue, follows four girls from different time periods over a century as they come of age on a German farm in the Altmark region. The girls’ lives are subtly intertwined, their presents gradually revealing traces of an elusive shared past.

While plot details are scarce, expectations are high. Schilinski’s debut, 2017’s Dark Blue Girl, first brought to the screen System Crasher breakout Helena Zengel, so we know the German director has a keen eye for young new talent.

Alpha

Written and directed by Julia Ducournau
Section: Competition

It feels like a decade has ed in the four years since Julia Ducournau became the second woman to win the Palme d’Or for Titane in 2021, and now the French filmmaker is back in Cannes with Alpha. Plot details have been kept largely under wraps, but we know the film takes place in a small French town in the 1980s and looks at the titular girl, shunned by classmates once rumors spread that she has contracted a strange, mysterious new illness.

While ostracized young women are a staple of Ducournau’s filmography, Alpha promises to present the director at her most vulnerable yet, with people involved in the project describing her third feature as her “most personal, profound work.” With a cast led by Paterson’s Golshifteh Farahani and A Prophet’s Tahar Rahim, as well as Sex Education breakout Emma Mackey (acting in French!), and a locked distribution deal with US major NEON—the history-making distributor behind the past five Palme d’Or winners—Alpha is sure to be one of the most talked-about titles of the year.

My Father’s Shadow

Written by Akinola Davies Jr. and Wale Davies, directed by Akinola Davies Jr.
Section: Un Certain Regard

His House and Mothering Sunday star Ṣọpẹ Dìrísù leads Akinola Davies Jr.’s semi-autobiographical feature debut, written in collaboration with his brother Wale, following two young brothers spending a day with their father in Lagos. It’s the first time the boys get to see the Nigerian capital in all its immensity, and the outing is made even more momentous as it takes place over a pivotal day in 1993 as the country undergoes historical presidential elections.

My Father’s Shadow already made history, even before its world premiere: it is the first Nigerian film to play in Official Selection at the Cannes Film Festival, and it has already landed a wide distribution deal with MUBI, who organized a powerful awards campaign that skyrocketed The Substance, their Cannes breakout last year, to the Oscars. The film’s first still is a thing of beauty, a father looking still while his two sons look ahead, their faces capturing both the thrill of expectation and the trepidation of the unknown.

Pillion

Written by Harry Lighton and Adam Mars-Jones, directed by Harry Lighton
Section: Un Certain Regard

Look, I’m a simple girl: you put Harry Melling in a film and I am there, but I am spoiled for riches with Pillion, a movie that not only features the great Melling—whose striking, sensitive turn in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs still makes me weep at just the memory of it—but also sees him play opposite Alexander Skarsgård in what is described as a “funny, filthy” romance in the synopsis.

A loose adaptation of Adam Mars-Jones Box Hill and Harry Lighton’s feature debut, following his BAFTA-nominated short Wren Boys, Pillion sees Melling’s timid Colin plucked from his tepid suburban life by Skarsgård’s leather-donning Ray, the leader of a raucous gang of kinky, queer bikers. As Colin gets deeper and deeper into Ray’s world, he begins wondering whether a life of submission is what he truly seeks. I, for one, simply cannot wait.

Miroirs No. 3

Written and directed by Christian Petzold
Section: Directors’ Fortnight

Usually a Berlinale staple, renowned German auteur Christian Petzold makes a surprise Cannes debut in the Directors’ Fortnight, two years after winning Berlin’s Silver Bear for Afire. The director’s latest reunites him with muse Paula Beer as Laura, a young woman involved in a car accident resulting in the death of her boyfriend. She miraculously survives the fatal accident unharmed, wandering into the house of a family of strangers who promptly offer to take care of her as she recovers. Slowly, however, Laura begins to realize that the family’s goodwill hides a secret.

The Transit director enlists other frequent collaborators in Enno Trebs, Matthias Brandt and Barbara Auer, so despite arriving into new territory on the Croisette, we can almost certainly expect classic Petzold with Miroirs No. 3.

Left-Handed Girl

Written by Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou, directed by Shih-Ching Tsou
Section: Critics’ Week

Fresh out of making history as the first-ever filmmaker to win four Oscars for a single film with his Best Picture-winner Anora, Sean Baker returns to where his lauded film premiered last year in a different, more discreet capacity: as the co-writer, producer and editor of his Tangerine, The Florida Project and Red Rocket producer Shih-Ching Tsou’s feature debut.

The film is set in Taipei, where a single mother and her two daughters return home after years of living in the countryside to open a stand at a popular evening market. The trio needs to find individual ways of adapting to such a big change and make ends meet, without letting their familial structure crumble. The task is made even trickier, once generational secrets come to light when a traditional grandfather tells the youngest daughter, our titular left-handed girl, that she can never use her “devil hand.”

During the line-up announcement for Directors’ Fortnight, artistic director Julien Rejl said that Jinghao Zhou’s feature debut “echoes Aronofsky’s Black Swan set in the world of figure skating” as well as calling it a “masterful first feature and, above all, a Chinese film that stands out from the Chinese cinema we’re used to seeing at major festivals.”

Zhou’s thriller trails Jiang Ning, who grew up in a single-parent family and is amidst grueling training for the final chance of his figure skating career. His preparation begins to go off the rails when a young, talented opponent begins taking the favor of Zhou’s mother-slash-coach, the relationship between the trio morphing and twisting into a complicated preamble as a fatal accident takes place. As someone who still has reoccurring nightmares about Aronofsky’s searing encapsulation of ambition turned madness, I shall walk into this one eagerly—but wearily, too.

Put Your Soul On Your Hand And Walk

Written and directed by Sepideh Farsi
Section: ACID

Sepideh Farsi, whose beautifully animated war drama The Siren, focusing on the Iran-Iraq war, played at the Berlinale two years ago, returns to the festival circuit with a documentary about Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna. In the intimate, urgent documentary, Fatima walks Farsi through her life in Gaza during the ongoing Israeli assault, captured through video calls between the director and her subject over almost a year.

Tragically, the day after the film’s world premiere in the ACID sidebar was publicly announced, Fatima and nine of her family were killed by an Israeli air strike. In a deeply moving press release, the ACID team paid homage to Fatima and her family, stating, “We had watched and programmed a film in which this young woman's life force seemed like a miracle. This is no longer the same film that we are going to and present in all theaters, starting with Cannes. All of us, filmmakers and spectators alike, must be worthy of her light.”