Hello from sunny Cannes! Well, actually, I’m writing this in rainy Paris, but I’m assuming I will be in Cannes and it will be sunny by the time you’re reading this. Thank you for these questions! And please don’t hesitate to ask me more in the future. My inbox is always open! [email protected]

I enjoyed the "What is a Sundance movie?" discussion from Critical Darlings a while back. In that spirit: "What is a Cannes movie?" And more specifically, or perhaps provincially, "What type of American movie goes to Cannes?" —Whitney

What do you make of the relatively low star wattage — among actors and directors alike — in competition? —Iris

I’m going to answer these questions together because they’re somewhat related. This is indeed not the flashiest Cannes lineup, from an American (or, I guess, English-language) perspective. Last year’s competition had a star-studded Wes Anderson movie; two internet boyfriends du jour (Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor) playing boyfriends of yesteryear; Josh O’Connor was also in The Mastermind; Ari Aster’s Eddington was full of stars; and Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love had YA idols turned serious actors Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson. There were also high-profile out-of-competition titles from the States: Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest and Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning. 

This year, in contrast, there is no splashy commercial Hollywood movie. On the indier side of things, A24 has glaringly avoided this year’s festival entirely. Ira Sachs’s The Man I Love stars Oscar winner Rami Malek, and James Gray’s Paper Tiger features Adam Driver, Miles Teller, and Scarlett Johansson. So it’s not a total wash, movie-star wise. (There are others lurking elsewhere on the lineup, too.) But the slate is definitely light in terms of that kind of celebrity. It may just be a fluke year, or there’s something more significant happening. 

While Cannes has enjoyed a recent surge in American cultural clout—premiering a spate of international titles that have actually made an impact in the notoriously subtitle-averse United States, at the Oscars and beyond—American distributors seem increasingly wary of the festival. I’ve no doubt that some folks at A24 think Eddington should have avoided Cannes; it received a tepid reception last year, which basically killed its buzz ahead of release. Other festivals pose similar risks (look at the small pile of DOA misfires—Jay Kelly, A House of Dynamite, After the Hunt—that premiered at Venice last year) but Cannes failure seems to have a particularly lingering stench for whatever reason. Maybe it’s because there is just so much high-grade international auteurism to be closely compared to—unlike at Venice, where there is a much wider gulf between the star-driven, Oscar-aimed stuff and everything else. 

But I think a simpler reason for the dearth of American films this year is that there are just fewer movies to pick from, because fewer movies of Cannes-appropriate scale are being made in the States. “Cannes-appropriate” meaning director-forward, idea-driven, hefty pieces of work that represent a filmmaker working at full capacity—or doing an intriguing experiment. 

The few American films that do fit that bill every year are more likely to be held for the fall festivals, closer to their intended release dates, or have already played at Sundance. (This year, the Channing Tatum film Josephine premiered to raves at Sundance; it could have fared just as well at Cannes, but needed to court a US distributor, which is far easier to do in Park City.) Meanwhile, studios looked at how recent tentpole stuff like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny fared at Cannes and seemed to figure that the benefits, if there are any, are not worth the cost of shipping everyone over to France on a private jet and putting them up in very expensive hotels. 

But Cannes operates in cycles, so nothing is fixed forever. Maybe the next couple years will see a stronger North American showing. The ideal candidates—i.e. the ideal American Cannes movies—would be from idiosyncratic early-mid-career auteurs with some star backing. Maybe Jane Schoenbrun’s Un Certain Regard feature this year, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (with Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson), will play like gangbusters and their next film will then get selected for main competition. Un Certain Regard is where Cannes tends to incubate its future main-comp filmmakers (for example: Austrian director Marie Kreutzer had a well-received film in UCR, Corsage, in 2022; she’s now in main competition this year with Gentle Monster). The trouble is: not a lot of Americans premiere films in that section. 

The really promising talent tends to come up through Sundance instead (or get sucked into the maw of genre filmmaking), which makes them relative strangers to the Cannes programmers. Schoenbrun has now made the Sundance to Cannes leap, just as Ari Aster did before them. But we’re not seeing a ton of that these days. Sean Baker had to make four well-regarded films before he sneaked in the backdoor at Cannes—he premiered The Florida Project in Directors’ Fortnight, a sidebar that is not technically affiliated with the festival. Once that played well, the festival accepted Red Rocket four years later, which paved the way for Anora’s watershed success in 2024. 

I think that’s the path—diligent and slow—to getting more American representation at Cannes, not road-showing blockbusters for diminishing returns, not relying on the dwindling class of older American masters who might have a film worthy of the festival. Beyond Wes Anderson and James Gray, there aren’t too many well-established American directors who are Cannes mainstays in the way that Pedro Almodóvar or the Dardennes or Asghar Farhadi are. Maybe because they’ve never needed it as much, or maybe because the people holding the purse strings think marketing money is better spent elsewhere. Still, I hope that the great Cannes chance will be taken more in the future, and that 2026 is just an off year reflective of rattled American nerves.