Hollywood’s hold on the Cannes Film Festival used to anger some film critics and journalists. Cannes was the place, they argued, to discover great films and filmmakers from other countries, not celebrate Tom Cruise or Harrison Ford on the red carpet. (In recent years, both of those stars appeared in Cannes to support films like Top Gun: Maverick, Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.) Cannes has always loved its Hollywood movie stars, but perhaps out of necessity more than anything, it’s now helping to make them rather than just import them. This is the age of the new international movie star, and Cannes is one of the major launchpads.
Reinsve and Stan, top left and right, in Fjord —Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival
Reinsve may make another showing in the Oscar nominations this year: She’s one of the stars of Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, which won the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or. But the movie may prove to be a better showcase for her co-star Sebastian Stan, a Romanian-born actor who has already starred in several Marvel movies (as Bucky Barnes, or the Winter Soldier) and will appear in the forthcoming Batman II. Even more significantly, he gave a terrific, nuanced performance as the young Donald Trump in Ali Abbasi’s 2024 Cannes competition film The Apprentice. Stan is an actor who takes chances. Fjord is a somber movie about an ultra-religious couple who move with their family of five from Romania to Norway, only to have the citizens of their new town accuse them of child abuse. It’s an intentionally incendiary “issues movie,” and even as it purports to be even-handed, it may be a little too eagerly embraced in the States by the noisy contingent who believe that Christians are an oppressed minority.
Another international yet non-Hollywood star who may get a boost from this edition of Cannes is the French-Belgian actor Virginie Efira, terrific in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden, playing a burned-out care-home administrator who builds a new framework for her life, and her life’s work, when she bonds with a terminally ill experimental playwright, played by Tao Okamoto. The two shared the festival’s prize for Best Actress, but there were no shortage of wonderful performances, particularly from women: Léa Seydoux plays an individual bewildered to find herself trapped in another person’s body in Arthur Harari’s haunting horror drama The Unknown. Adèle Exarchopoulos is a standout as a functional alcoholic in Jeanne Herry’s Another Day. And Sandra Hüller gives a superb performance in Pawel Pawlikowski’s astonishing, compact film Fatherland, as the daughter of, and assistant to, Hanns Zischler’s Thomas Mann, though the performance is probably too muted to draw Oscar attention.
Sandra Hüller, left, in Fatherland —Courtesy of Cannes Film FestivalIn the end, this year only two American films, James Gray’s Paper Tiger (starring Adam Driver, Miles Teller, and Scarlett Johansson) and Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love (with Rami Malek and Rebecca Hall) earned slots in the official Cannes competition. Apparently, the festival’s selection committee didn’t see many American films it deemed worthy. Maybe the potentially great films of 2026 just weren’t ready in time—or maybe they’re not being made at all.
The focus these days is, after all, on streaming. The upcoming season of The White Lotus is being filmed in Cannes, with the festival as its backdrop, though you wouldn’t have seen its stars—among them Laura Dern and French actor Vincent Cassel—just walking around the Croisette. (Dern did walk the red carpet with her father, Bruce Dern, the subject of a documentary that played in the festival.) Yet their invisible presence was a reminder that Hollywood still craves, and needs, Cannes glamour, and vice-versa. The Cannes Film Festival is many sometimes conflicting things at once: a symbol of glamour, a showcase for that nebulous thing we call quality, and, most important of all, a place where the movies refuse to be shrunk down to fit our increasingly compartmentalized lives. And as for stars: If Cannes can’t get them the old-fashioned way, by bringing them over from Hollywood—well, it will just make some new ones, on its own terms. The French and American film industries have always been symbiotic, if also a little antagonistic. And so, even if Hollywood as we knew it is dead, it’s not over. Cannes is on standby with the electrodes, ready to jolt the corpse back to life, even if we’ve neglected it ourselves.
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