Tales of war, grief and artificial intelligence join a race for the 2026 Cannes Film Festival’s top prize from Tuesday.
According to Reuters news agency, the glitzy festival, long a launch pad for Hollywood franchises such as Indiana Jones and Top Gun, will not host any blockbusters this year, nor the large-scale red‑carpet rollouts that typically accompany them, as risk‑averse studios grow more cautious.
There will still be plenty of big names on show, among them Barbra Streisand, winning a lifetime achievement award, and John Travolta, making his directorial debut.
There are 22 films in competition for the Palme d’Or prize awarded at the closing ceremony on May 23, with independent cinema heavyweights including Pedro Almodovar and Laszlo Nemes.
Iran’s Asghar Farhadi and Japan’s Ryusuke Hamaguchi of “Drive My Car” fame both have French-language family dramas: “Parallel Tales,” with Isabelle Huppert as a nosy neighbour, and “All Of a Sudden,” about elderly care, respectively.
From the U.S., “Paper Tiger,” directed by James Gray, will bring Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver back together after 2019’s “Marriage Story,” while Rami Malek stars in a drama about HIV/AIDS in 1980s New York City in Ira Sachs’ “The Man I Love.”
Two past winners, Romania’s Cristian Mungiu and Japan’s Hirokazu Kore‑eda, are vying for a second Palme d’Or.
Kore-eda, who won with “Shoplifters” in 2018, will explore grief and artificial intelligence in “Sheep In The Box.”
Mungiu returns with “Fjord,” a family drama set in a remote Norwegian village starring Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan. For the Romanian director, selection alone was already a prize.
