Cannes 2025: 10 Films We’re Looking Forward To

A shiver of anticipation always descends on the Croisette this time of year — the sense that cinema, that most resilient of art forms, might yet find new ways to provoke, surprise, and even devastate. After Payal Kapadia’s rapturously received All We Imagine As Light won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival last year, she returns this year not with a film, but as a jury member. It feels like a full-circle moment.

The lineup this year includes Once Upon a Time in Gaza, by brothers Tarzan Nasser, Arab Nasser, excavating trauma with the precision of lived memory. Urchin, the directorial debut of internet heartthrob Harris Dickinson. And A Simple Accident by the indefatigable Jafar Panahi — who once smuggled a movie out of Iran on a USB stick hidden in a cake. Amid the new, Cannes 2025 finds room for the old: a restored screening of Satyajit Ray’s 1970 classic Aranyer Din Ratri will finally grace the festival for the first time, as a reminder that cinema’s past still casts its sharpest shadows forward.

Here are the 10 films we’re most looking forward to at this year’s festival:

1. Homebound
Dir: Neeraj Ghaywan

A still from 'Homebound'

Neeraj Ghaywan returns to Cannes nearly a decade after Masaan (2015), armed with a decade’s worth of emotional maturity and a Martin Scorsese executive producer credit. Homebound — starring Janhvi Kapoor, Ishaan Khatter, and Vishal Jethwa — promises the kind of layered familial drama that Ghaywan excels at: tender but unsparing. That it’s the most talked-about Indian entry this year is no surprise.

2. The Phoenician Scheme
Dir: Wes Anderson

A still from 'The Phoenician Scheme'

Wes Anderson, at this point, is less a director than a genre unto himself. His latest confection stars Benicio Del Toro as a tycoon and Mia Threapleton as his convent-curious daughter in search of one last deal. There are assassins. There is Bryan Cranston. There is Bill Murray as God.

3. Alpha
Dir: Julia Ducournau

A still from 'Alpha'

A child comes home with a tattoo. In most homes, that would spark a fight. In a Julia Ducournau film, it may very well spark a metaphysical rebirth. After Raw (2016) and Palme d’Or winner Titane (2021), the French provocateur continues her visceral quest, this time through the coming-of-age story of a 13-year-old girl. Don’t expect subtlety. Expect something stranger, sadder, and far more alive.

4. History of Sound
Dir: Oliver Hermanus

A still from 'History of Sound'

Oliver Hermanus has a gift for the fragile. In History of Sound, he adapts Ben Shattuck’s elegiac short story about two men (Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor, already giving off the chemistry of a bygone heartbreak) travelling across 1919 New England, preserving the voices of a country healing from war.

5. Highest 2 Lowest
Dir: Spike Lee

A still from 'Highest 2 Lowest'

Spike Lee remakes Akira Kurosawa's 1963 Japanese film High and Low and casts Denzel Washington. That’s a headline. But Highest 2 Lowest, which relocates Kurosawa’s moral pressure cooker to the glitz of the modern music industry, might be something wilder. Jeffrey Wright, A$AP Rocky, and Ice Spice also lend their wattage.

6. Chronology of Water
Dir: Kristen Stewart

A still from 'Chronology of Water'

Kristen Stewart steps behind the camera with this adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s unclassifiable memoir. Imogen Poots stars as a woman who writes and swims, and rages her way toward freedom.

7. Nouvelle Vague
Dir: Richard Linklater

A still from 'Nouvelle Vague'

Nouvelle Vague follows the scrappy, chaotic, half-rehearsed making of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 classic, Breathless, as a messy portrait of youthful revolution. With Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg and newcomer Guillaume Marbeck as the maestro himself.

8. Elenor the Great
Dir: Scarlett Johansson

A still from 'Elenor the Great'

There’s something subversive about Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut: a modest film about grief, intergenerational friendship, and the ways lives crisscross in New York City. June Squibb stars opposite Erin Kellyman. It’s an actor’s film, through and through.

9. Sentimental Value
Dir: Joachim Trier

A still from 'Sentimental Value'

If The Worst Person in the World (2021) was a film about fleeting love and fumbling selfhood, Sentimental Value is its haunted sibling — still shot through with aching humanity. Renate Reinsve returns, alongside Stellan Skarsgård and Elle Fanning, in a story about a family, a house, and the emotional clutter we like to call home.

10. Eddington
Dir: Ari Aster

A still from 'Eddington'

Ari Aster, who built horror films around grief and breakups, heads West. Eddington, set in New Mexico and starring Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal, is a contemporary Western. Sheriff vs. Mayor.