The Best Movies at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival

“Drunken Noodles” (dir. Lucio Castro)

From IndieWire’s earlier coverage: “End of the Century” and “After This Death” director Lucio Castro is back with another gay quasi-romance, this time in New York City, with the scrappy and sexy and subtly supernatural “Drunken Noodles,” which feels like Apichatpong Weerasethakul directing an early ’90s New Queer Cinema indie. It has a lo-fi, shot-on-film aesthetic mixed with mystical elements, and it premiered in the Cannes Film Festival ACID parallel section. 

“Drunken Noodles” takes place over two summers, in both the city streets and the forest paths of upstate New York, as art student Adnan (Laith Khalifeh) has a series of unexpected, intimate, and even otherworldly, time-and-space-warping encounters.

The movie follows Adnan, a young art student who arrives in New York City to flat-sit for the summer. He begins interning at a gallery where an unconventional older artist he once encountered is being exhibited. As moments from his past and present begin to intertwine, a series of encounters — both artistic and erotic — open cracks in his everyday reality that lead to an intoxicating cinematic experience. —Ryan Lattanzio

“Eddington” (dir. Ari Aster)

From IndieWire’s review: The first truly modern American Western, or at least the first one that has the nowness required to mention Pop Crave by name, Ari Aster’s “Eddington” is also the first major Hollywood movie that’s been willing to see the COVID pandemic for the hellacious paradigm shift that it was — as the moment when years of technologically engineered polarization tore a forever hole in the social fabric of a country that was already coming apart at the seams.

Few other filmmakers would have the chutzpah required to make a “No Country for Old Men” riff that hinges on mask mandates and the murder of George Floyd, and we should probably all be grateful that none of them have tried. But Aster, who’s exclusively interested in making the kind of films that should be reviewed straight onto a prescription pad, is too beholden to his neuroses for his latest movie to play like a cheap provocation. This time, however, there’s a good chance those are your neuroses, too.

Stemming from a collective sickness to the same degree that “Beau Is Afraid” was born from some very personal trauma, “Eddington” — the tagline for which reads: “Hindsight is 2020” — only wields its what’s the opposite of nostalgia? specificity as a means to an end. It might set the scene with a little “remember how it felt to wait in line outside the pharmacy?” fun, but Aster’s bleakly funny and brilliantly plotted assessment of how fucked we’ve become since then soon leverages those fun memories into a far more probing story about the difficulties of sharing a town between people who live in separate realities. —David Ehrlich

“Heads or Tails?” (dirs. Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis)

From IndieWire’s review: Italy’s love of American cowboys provides the backdrop for “Heads or Tails,” the new film from “The Tale of King Crab” directors Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis that once again feels like it was ripped from the yellowing pages of a beautiful old storybook. It’s the turn of the 20th century and legendary entertainer Buffalo Bill Cody (John C. Reilly) has brought his blockbuster Wild West show across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe. His traveling circus of lassoing, sharpshooting, and cowboy crooning has turned into a hot ticket among Italy’s elite, with his carefully curated stage presence giving these aristocrats the sense that they’re interacting with a real live cowboy. —Christian Zilko

“It Was Just an Accident” (dir. Jafar Panahi)

From IndieWire’s review: In his first project since the Iranian regime ostensibly lifted its restrictions on his art, filmmaker Jafar Panahi draws from his different experiences as a dissident prisoner for a raw and blistering moral thriller about a hard-working Azeri man whose most tormented memories come rushing to the surface when he hears someone walk into his place of business with the same haunting squeak of his former torturer’s prosthetic right leg. Played by Vahid Mobasser, a TV station programmer and part-time cab driver, Vahid impulsively abducts the man (Ebrahim Azizi, the only professional actor in this extraordinary cast), drags him into the middle of the desert, and digs a hole big enough to bury his pain alive.

But — as he begins to suffocate the hostage under a small mountain of dry earth — Vahid is confronted with a stab of doubt. The man insists that he doesn’t have any idea what Vahid is talking about; that he never worked in a prison, and only lost his leg in an accident the previous year. And so, however cathartic it might be to simply commit murder and call it vengeance, Vahid feels as though he has no choice but to stuff the man into a wooden crate, load him into his minivan, and drive around Tehran in search of other ex-prisoners who might be able to help verify the captive’s identity.

So begins a gripping and tightly scripted misadventure that unfolds like something of a cross between Park Chan-wook’s “Lady Vengeance” and Panahi’s own “Taxi” (with a little “Waiting for Godot” thrown in for good measure), as Vahid’s one-man truth and reconciliation commission grows to include a handful of other people whose skin carries the scars of “Peg Leg’s” violence. From the plot description alone, it’s obvious that “It Was Just an Accident” finds Panahi working in a very different register than he had to while “banned” from making films. This one still had to be shot in secret in order to skirt government approval, but it takes great pleasure in replacing the self-reflexivity of Panahi’s illegal work with a slightly more formal sense of composition, even if it remains impossible to separate the final product from the personal experience that informed it.

Truth and fiction exist side-by-side in this movie to much the same degree, as Vahid and his team are made to live among the men who so brutally dehumanized them as enemies of the state. Panahi’s tense and woundingly distressed new film draws so much of its climactic power from the sense that hell will always follow Vahid like a whistle ringing in his ears, no matter what becomes of the man he’s abducted. And even more of it from the implication that heaven must therefore be hiding somewhere close by. —David Ehrlich

“My Father’s Shadow” (dir. Akinola Davies Jr.)

From IndieWire’s review: June 24, 1993 will become known as one of the most consequential days in the brief history of post-colonial Nigeria, but — for the two young boys at the heart of Akinola Davies Jr.’s semi-autobiographical drama “My Father’s Shadow” — that date is destined to be remembered for considerably more personal reasons. It was on June 24, 1993, this poignant and vividly realized film invites us to imagine, that brothers Akin and Remi were invited on a rare trip to Lagos with their dad, Folarin, a strong but mysterious figure in their lives who was often away from their family for months at a time.

Over the course of their wistful and chaotic journey into the big city, the boys will come to see their father in a brilliant new light — one that will light up their dreams for decades to come. Set at a moment when Nigeria seemed to be on the precipice of a new dawn, “My Father’s Shadow” tempers a nascent sense of hope with a lingering air of hauntedness. The horrors of a recent massacre are splashed across newspaper headlines, but men like Folarin (“Gangs of London” star Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù, entrancingly tough and tender all at once) are eager to move forward and invest in their children’s future — to steal it back from the military.

“Nigeria is hard,” Folarin laments, but he’s resolved to do whatever he can to make it easier for his sons, and also somehow lighter by the grace of his shadow. This heartfelt debut keeps it all in the family, and by the time the film arrives at its touching final moments we’re left with the simple truth that — whatever his flaws as a father — Folarin cared deeply about his children’s future, and in doing so gave them all the reason they needed to cherish their memories of the past. —David Ehrlich

“Pillion” (dir. Harry Lighton)

From IndieWire’s review: Dick-sucking, boot-licking, and ball-gagging are de rigueur for a movie like writer/director Harry Lighton’s wildly graphic and strangely moving BDSM romance, “Pillion.” But for a British queer film that puts the particulars of a gay dominant-submissive affair (or arrangement, better yet) up front and up close, actors Alexander Skarsgård and Harry Melling find the sweet center of a story marked by clamps, cages, and assless unitards. No doubt comparisons will arise to another A24 movie, “Babygirl,” which last year put Nicole Kidman on all fours, crying out to Harris Dickinson that “I’m gonna pee!” when actually she was just having an orgasm with another person for the first time.

Lighton, adapting Adam Mars-Jones’ book “Box Hill,” really does take us there in the delightful “Pillion,” with Skarsgård getting more emotionally naked than ever and almost physically more than he ever got as Eric Northman on TV’s “True Blood.” But not without, at first, this leather-clad biker, who seeks a submissive with seemingly disinterested vibes, radiating aloof energy when he first meets barbershop quartet singer Colin (Melling, in a truly special and wonderful breakout performance). A parking garage attendant by day and dandied-up singer by night who’s just a bit too old to still be living with his parents — though his mum (Lesley Sharp) is dying of cancer, which in part keeps him home — Colin isn’t so much looking for love or companionship or sex as much as he finally happens to fall into it when on Christmas Eve he’s asked for a date, of sorts, by Ray (Skarsgård, who looks and sounds more and more like his father with each day). —Ryan Lattanzio

“The Plague” “(dir. Charlie Polinger)

From IndieWire’s review: In his debut feature, filmmaker Charlie Polinger plays with broad riffs on coming-of-age, body horror, and bullying genres before paring these themes back to reveal that two 12-year-old boys — and their contrasting approaches to being different — are really the heartfelt preoccupation of the film.

Set in the sealed world of a water polo training camp for boys during the summer of 2003, “The Plague” is both stylized and ascetic. Big, bold swings in the visual language and sound design department alternate with stillness and silence. This interplay between sensual overwhelm and sudden loneliness reflects the condition that watchful newbie Ben (Everett Blunck) feels as he processes the stressful social rules that may lead to his ostracization.

Shot on 35mm by cinematographer Steven Breckon, the intention to create a striking, mysterious, and uneasy atmosphere is evident from the first frame. We begin underwater, below the surface of a swimming pool. The surface is broken as a body cannonballs down to the bottom, followed by a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth … until there are too many to track. 

This introduction to a group of 12- and 13-year-old boys as faceless forces of nature will prove apt in certain ways, although Polinger is careful not to make any of them one-dimensional. While there are echoes of “Lord of the Flies” in the society these boys make for themselves — especially in terrifying and smart ringleader Jake (Kayo Martin) — shifts in perspectives and comic vignettes mean that “The Plague” never settles into one groove. It flirts with being a more cruel story than it is. —Sophie Monks Kaufman

“A Poet” (dir. Simón Mesa Soto)

From IndieWire’s review: Oscar Restrepo (Ubeimar Rios) is a bum. Call him a lush, a louse, a putz, a schmuck, a sad-sack, and a dumb-SOB and all would apply. He can take them, and then some. He is, after all, a man of words — poor Oscar’s a poet, and woe unto all those who know him. 

But good news for all those that take in “A Poet” (“Un Poeta”), director Simón Mesa Soto’s immensely appealing and often caustic character study-turned-social-satire premiering out of Cannes’ Un Certain Regard sidebar. Put together with impressive efficiency — the film only started shooting in January — this art-world send-up explores the many fears and frustrations the acclaimed director felt in the decade since making the 2014 short film Palme d’Or winner “Leidi,” channeling them into a darkly-funny burlesque that speaks of verse while playing like a Dan Clowes comic brought to manic life.  —Ben Croll

“The Secret Agent” (dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho)

From IndieWire’s review: In his 2023 essay film “Pictures of Ghosts,” a haunted cine-memoir that uses Recife’s once-glorious movie palaces as a lens through which to examine — and to mourn — the cultural amnesia of a country so determined to forget itself, Brazilian auteur Kleber Mendonça Filho somewhat counterintuitively observes that “Fiction films are the best documentaries.” If Mendonça had to make a documentary in order to illustrate that idea, the sober but gripping thriller that it inspired him to shoot next proves the point with gusto.

The focused but sprawling story of a wanted man named Marcelo (Wagner Moura) who travels to Recife in the hopes of collecting his son and escaping the country, the director’s 1977-set period piece is absolutely teeming with the music, color, and style of the “Brazilian Miracle” that marked the height of the country’s military dictatorship. Far from the high-octane spy picture that might be suggested by its title (a title that’s easy to imagine written in giant letters across the marquee of Recife’s São Luiz Cinema), “The Secret Agent” only bumps into espionage tropes as if by accident, and its protagonist seems to be as confused by them as we are. On the contrary, Mendonça’s movie operates at the pace and tenor of a drama in exile, albeit one that’s fringed with B-movie fun and stalked by a pair of unscrupulous hitmen.

“The Secret Agent” is ultimately a tale of “mischief” more than anything else. That’s the word Mendonça uses to identify the time period in the film’s opening title card, and it accurately sets the scene for a story less rooted in the terror of Walter Salles’ “I’m Still Here” than in the wistful barbarity of Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” The joy it takes in exhuming a semi-erased time allows Mendonça to argue that movies can manufacture a meaningful history of their own — one powerful enough to cut through the erosion of truth, and the official record of a country that might be too ashamed of its own reflection to honestly look itself in the mirror. With “The Secret Agent,” Mendonça exhumes the past as the basis for a purely fictional story, and in doing so articulates how fiction can be even more valuable as a vehicle for truth than it is as a tool for covering it up. —David Ehrlich

“Sentimental Value” (dir. Joachim Trier)

From IndieWire’s review: “It’s hard to love someone without mercy.”

Sitting across the dinner table from his actress daughter after sweeping back into her life with a high-concept plan for reconciliation, acclaimed filmmaker and absent father Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) offers that wisdom to Nora (Renate Reinsve) as if directing her on how to forgive him. And in the wake of his ex-wife’s death, that’s precisely what Gustav intends to do — not by apologizing for his decision to leave their family when Nora was still just a child, but rather by casting her in an autobiographical Netflix drama about his own life.

Exploitative as that sounds, Gustav isn’t just hoping to make Nora say the words he’s always longed to hear from his firstborn daughter in exchange for a cut of Ted Sarandos’ money. On the contrary, his plan — like everything else in the transcendently moving “Sentimental Value,” a layered masterpiece that “The Worst Person in the World” director Joachim Trier has been working toward for his entire career — is layered with a delicate sense of personal history. Because the (once) great auteur Borg doesn’t intend for Nora to play a version of herself in his movie. No, he insists on using her as a stand-in for his mother, who committed suicide in the sun-bathed Oslo house that has belonged to their family since at least the start of World War II.

From that premise, Trier spins the richest and most emotionally overflowing film that he’s made so far — one that comes to involve a bit of “Vertigo” when Nora rejects her father’s offer, only to watch him cast an American starlet (Elle Fanning) to play the role Gustav had written for her. Few recent movies have more elegantly literalized how the love that parents are able to share with their children — and vice versa — can be limited by their ability to express it. And by the time that “Sentimental Value” arrives at its soul-melting final sequence, almost none have more beautifully explored the role that making art can play in facilitating that process. —David Ehrlich

“Sîrat” (dir. Oliver Laxe)

From IndieWire’s review: Filmmaker Oliver Laxe brings a kind of humbling brilliance to “Sirât,” his inaugural Cannes competition entry, after catching attention in sidebars for his previous films. It’s the kind of film that Cannes attendees from far and wide come to the festival for: sui generis and evading any classification, emanating from a wholly personal vision of cinema while not resisting galvanizing, and sometimes crowd-pleasing, pleasures.

Born in France to Galician parents, and shooting the majority of his work to date in Morocco, Laxe’s work operates in the interstices of borders and cultures, but wholly bypasses appropriation. It’s always visually transportive and grimly sublime, focusing on simple plots and conflicts that provide ample space for philosophical and existential contemplation. And “Sirât” is undoubtedly his most fully realized work in his regard, notable too for folding in the visceral pleasures of contemporary genre and even blockbuster cinema.

The world Laxe creates is finely rendered in both the fore- and background, revealing much greater scope than its initial set-up lets on. Luis (Sergi López, in another powerful performance) is another variety of a recurrent character in cinema and television now: the stricken father, forced to bring his emotions further to the surface than he’s typically comfortable with, and responding in disbelief to his offspring’s opposing values. —David Katz

“Sound of Falling” (dir. Mascha Schilinski)

From IndieWire’s review: Unfolding like 100 years of home video footage that were shot by the family ghosts, Mascha Schilinski’s rich and mesmeric “Sound of Falling” glimpses four generation of young women as they live, die, and suffuse their memories into the walls of a rural farmhouse in the north German region of Altmark.

Somehow both hyper-subjective and hauntingly disembodied all at once, Schilinski’s recursive second feature floats through the decades like an errant thought hoping to find someone who might recognize it as one of their own. The film lopes forwards and backwards in time without notice or warning, Fabian Gamper’s camera often peering through keyholes and floorboards in order to reconcile the tunnel vision of being alive with a quietly Teutonic awe at the vastness of having lived. Some eye-level shots are clearly tethered to the perspective of a certain character, while others seem to stem from the POV of an invisible spirit crouching next to them, as if assigning physical dimension to the third-person of our remembered pasts.

“It’s too bad you never know when you’re at your happiest,” one of the girls laments, and it’s true that none of these characters may ever be able to contextualize their emotions with the perspective necessary to survive them. But Schilinski’s arrestingly prismatic film — so hazy and dense with detail that it feels almost impossible to fully absorb the first time through — keeps sloshing its way through the years until those blind spots begin to seem revelatory in their own right. These girls can only see so much of themselves on their own, but “Sound of Falling” so vividly renders the blank space between them that it comes to feel like a lucid window into the stuff of our world that only the movies could ever hope to show us. —David Ehrlich

“Urchin” (dir. Harris Dickinson)

From IndieWire’s review: “Babygirl” star Harris Dickinson is a little too young, a little too handsome, and a little too hot right now for critics to pretend as if his directorial debut exists in a vacuum, and yet the raw and raggedy “Urchin” — which would command our attention regardless of who made it — is only a few seconds old before it’s locked into the thrall of a different actor altogether.

Best known for playing the young Tom Riddle in “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” Frank Dillane awakens into this movie with the ache and neediness of an open wound. His character’s name is Mike, he’s been living on the streets of London for the last five years, and he resents anyone who offers him the help that he doesn’t know how to accept. He mugs a man who tries to feed him, serves another stint in jail, and then tries to live clean on the other side.

But Dickinson’s lithe and tetchy script only feigns at a clean hero’s journey in order to undercut it with the chaos of human behavior, and what might have been a nice three-act story about a moppet on the mend sours into something far less digestible or instructive. Where a broadly similar film like Mike Leigh’s “Naked” tethered itself to the mania of a mad philosopher, “Urchin” is bound to an unbreakable innocence that persists long after Mike has disabused us of our sympathy; he’s the victim of a cruel world, but also an unfeeling agent of its callousness. Dickinson clearly hopes this story will make it that much harder for people to dehumanize the homeless population, but the power of his film — and the promise of his intelligence as a filmmaker — is that it recognizes how a portrait of mottled ambivalence might better accomplish that goal than a million cheap sops for empathy. —David Ehrlich

“Yes” (dir. Nadav Lapid)

From IndieWire’s review: Horrified by the country of his birth and heavy with the weight of its sins, Nadav Lapid has created modern cinema’s most splenetic filmography by fighting his Israeliness as if it were an incurable virus infecting his body of work. That trend continues with the deliriously provocative “Yes,” a veritable orgy of self-loathing surrender that reaffirms Lapid as the world’s most visceral director on a shot-by-shot basis.

In a movie that unfolds like an Ecstasy-addled cross between Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom” and the Jim Carrey comedy “Yes Man,” Lapid doubles down on the frenzied violence of his filmmaking at the same time as he fully embraces his growing appetite for submission.

Here, in a movie about a struggling jazz musician and his dancer wife who afford a life for their newborn by acquiescing to every demand made of their talent and bodies by Tel Aviv’s militaristic ruling class, Lapid doesn’t rage against the worst monstrousness of the modern age by speaking truth to power, but rather by volunteering his characters to get crushed under the heel of its boot. And then — with a literalness no one else would dare — by forcing them to lick that boot so clean the whole world can see the dehumanizing nature of Israel’s crimes reflected in its leather. Needless to say, the underside of its sole leaves a memorable impression. —David Ehrlich

“Young Mothers” (dirs. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)

From IndieWire’s review: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes have settled into a comfortable niche over the course of 13 feature films. Well-researched social-realist depictions of marginalized people butting up against intransigent institutions is the way the record goes. To be fair to les frères Dardennes, there is a reliable level of unshowy competence as well as an integrity to their insistence on embedding with unglamorous, recognizable people.

All the while, they facilitate other filmmakers in bringing related French and Belgian slice-of-life visions to fruition. They helped to produce one of the best debuts of last year, “Julie Keeps Quiet” by Leonardo Van Dijl. At this edition of Cannes alone there are two films to bear their names as producers: “Enzo” by Laurent Cantet and Robin Campillo opened Directors Fortnight and, neatly enough, “Adam’s Sake” by Laura Wandel opened Critics’ Week.

Earnest force-for-cinema credentials established, how does “Young Mothers” fit into their body of work? Pivoting around a shelter for teenage mothers in the Belgian city of Liège, this modest offering does not deliver the immense emotional returns of “Two Days, One Night” (2014) — arguably their last heavy-hitter. Nonetheless, there is a satisfying, compact completeness to their handling of the storylines of four different young mothers and sufficient grace notes are enabled in each case to stave off the cliches that occasionally threaten to engulf events. —Sophie Monks Kaufman