13 Terrific Movies That Rocked Cannes

13 films from the 2026 Cannes film festival, highlighting award-winning international cinema, unexpected gems, and restored classics that truly celebrated the art of filmmaking.

The Cannes film festival started with a lot of hope, as a number of new international films from the leading filmmakers were announced. There was very little representation of Hollywood and foreign language films were expected to compensate for the low presence of American cinema.

But then the disappointments set in.

Critics did not care much for the new films from three of the major international filmmakers, Asghar Farhadi (Parallel Tales), Pedro Almodovar (Amarga Navidad) and Hirokazu Koreeda (Sheep in the Box).

Word was out that this year’s Cannes film festival was rather weak, as far as the main competition section was concerned.

Things did pick up in the second half of the festival.

There were some surprises, like La Bola Negra from Spain, and many promising films by the masters like Cristian Mungiu (Fjord) and Lukas Dhont (Coward).

As always, there were stronger films in the Un Certain Regard section, as well as some wonderful opportunities for film lovers to revisit older restored films in the Cannes Classics section.

Many people in India only know of Cannes because of the celebrities and influencers walking the red carpets, some dressed in outlandish, garish costumes. A lot of wealthy Indians travel to Cannes just for that one red carpet picture.

To those confused by the plethora of red carpet pictures I can say this: The Cannes film festival is primarily an event to celebrate and discover cinema. All else is pure social media distraction.

Aseem Chhabra ranks the top 13 films at this year’s Cannes film festival.

13. Hope (Korea)

This year, the Cannes competition section programmers did something radical: They selected Korean action film Hope, directed by Na Hong-jin (The Wailing, The Chaser).

Many purist and old timers were rather upset with this selection, but younger critics loved the film.

I am not a part of the ‘younger critics’ group, but I found Hope thoroughly entertaining, a non-stop action film with some of the longest chase sequences, and nasty looking aliens desperate to kill humans.

Did Hope deserve to be included in the competition section? That question is debatable.

The film did not win any awards. But what is wrong with having fun in the middle of an otherwise serious film festival?

12. Amma Ariyan (India)

The Cannes Classics section programmed a number of restored films, some popular such as Top Gun and Pan’s Labyrinth, and others lesser known like the late director John Abraham’s last film Amma Ariyan (Report to Mother).

In Amma Ariyan, a young man accidentally sees a dead body of a man he knows. The man has committed suicide. So he sets out to inform the dead man’s mother about her son’s death. Along his journey, he meets another young man.

Other men join him in the mission after they have reported to their own mothers about where they are headed.

Restored in 4K by the Mumbai-based Film Heritage Foundation, 40-year-old Amma Ariyan was nearly lost except for a couple of poor-quality prints. FHF has given the film a new life and it will be great if it is rediscovered by the younger generation of film lovers in India.

11. Paper Tiger (US)

American filmmaker James Gray often makes period crime dramas and sets them in the Queens and Brooklyn boroughs of New York City.

Gray is of Russian Jewish descent and his narratives sometimes explore the Russian mafia in films such as Little Odessa (1994) and We Own the Nights (2007).

In Paper Tiger, a gripping thriller, Gray is back in the familiar territory — a middle-class Jewish family that by chance gets involved with the Russian mafia in Brooklyn.

Adam Driver plays Gary, a retired cop, who brings his engineer brother Irwin (Miles Teller) in contact with a Russian business group, that results in dangerous consequences. Scarlett Johnason is Hester, Irwin’s wife, who is facing her own personal challenges.

Gray’s characters in Paper Tiger are real, believable. They could be our neighbours, so their troubles seem immediate.

10. Congo Boy (Central African Republic/Democratic Republic of Congo)

Congo Boy will remind Indian viewers of Zoya Akhtar’s Gully Boy. But unlike Gully Boy, where Bollywood stars played roles of slum dwellers, sometimes unable to shed their celebrity image, Congo Boy‘s story is deeply rooted and feels a lot more authentic.

This is a part autobiographical story for Director Refiki Fariala. Like Congo Boy‘S protagonist Robert (Bradley Fiomona Dembeasset), Fariala was also born in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But civil war forced his parents to seek refuge up north in the Central African Republic.

As he grew older, Fariala became a prominent musician in his adapted homeland.

Robert’s life is riddled by major challenges: His parents are in prison and he has younger siblings to watch over. But Robert wants to succeed in school, and especially as a rapper. Congo Boy is a high energy inspiring story about a young man’s growth as a musician, despite all the odds against him.

Dembeasset was awarded the Best Actor award in the Un Certain Regard section. He accepted his award with a song, ‘I am a young Congolese! I am a refugee! I am a star!‘

9. All Of A Sudden (Japan/France)

In 2021, Japanese master Ryusuke Hamaguchi stunned Cannes with his film Drive My Car, a three hour-long meditation on life, struggles and letting go of the past. It won the Best Screenplay award at Cannes and went on to win the Oscar for Best International Film.

Hamaguchi has a penchant for making long films. His 2015 epic Happy Hours is five hours and 17 minutes long.

Now five years later, Hamaguchi is back with another opus All Of A Sudden, clocking three hours and 16 minutes. It is the story of two woman, Marie Lou (Virginie Efira), a French director of an old age care facility, and Mari (Tao Okamato), a Japanese theatre expert who is battling cancer.

A bond forms between the two women as they work on new and unconventional techniques to care for residents of the facility, most of who are suffering from dementia and Alzheimer’s.

All Of A Sudden is a quiet slow-burning film, although eventually it is deeply emotionally rewarding. The Cannes jury honoured Hamaguchi by awarding his two female stars a joint Best Actress award.

8. Elephants In The Fog (Nepal)

Set in a picturesque area in the south of Nepal, where wild elephants roam and often threaten humans, Abinash Bikram Shah’s debut feature focuses on the lives of members of the Kinnar community (trans or hijra), who live together in harmony.

Pirati (Pushpa Thing Lama), a senior member of the community, dreams of moving to Birgunj along the Indian border to live with the man she loves. But one of her ‘daughters’ goes missing and that changes her life focus.

Elephants In The Fog is gorgeously shot, sprayed with bright colours and special moments that define the Kinnar community. The sound design is exceptional especially the echoes of Kinnars clapping. For that, Shah’s film won the Best Sound Creation Award.

But the most wonderful surprise was when Elephants In The Fog won the Jury Award in the Un Certain Regard section. Shah went up on the stage to accept the award, and then invited his cast, some belonging the Kinnar community who broke into a spontaneous dance to the delight of the audience.

7. Sanshiro Sugata (Japan)

Before he would be known to the world for his masterpieces such as Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood and Ran, Akira Kurosawa was a scriptwriter.

In 1943, at the age of 33, he directed his first film Sanshiro Sugata, narrating the story about a young man who learns discipline by studying judo.

But World War II was on and the next year, the Japanese censor board deleted 12 minutes of the film without consulting Kurosawa and his producer. The footage was lost until it was found decades later in a film archive in Moscow.

The restored version of Sanshiro Sugata had its world premiere at Cannes in the Classics section.

The film is 83 years old, and yet breathtaking, and a clear indication of Kurosawa’s promising talent that would enthrall the world with his masterpieces.

6. Ben’Imana (Rwanda)

In 1994, over a span of 100 days, ethnic violence broke out in Rwanda during which nearly 600,000 members of the Tutsi tribal group, mostly men, were killed by the rival Hutus. In Ben’Imana, filmmaker Marie Clémentine Dusabejambo reaches out to the survivors of the genocide, calling them to forgive those who caused the violence and killings, so people can live the rest of the lives.

Nearly a decade after the genocide, the country is coping with trials of justice and reconciliation, when Dusabejambo’s protagonist Vénéranda (Clémentine U Nyirinkindi) is called to testify against her neighbour.

But Vénéranda’s approach is to maintain a dialogue with the perpetuators of the crimes. She believes hate has to end, although there are roots of hatred evolving within her own family.

Ben’Imana is a beautifully made, powerful thought-provoking film. It was no surprise that the film won two awards: The Camera d’Or given to a first-time filmmaker (Mira Nair won that award for Salaam Bombay! in 1988) and the FIPRESCI Prize handed out by the international group of critics for the Un Certain Regard section.

5. Coward (Belgium/France/Netherlands)

In 2022, filmgoers at Cannes were blown away by Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont’s Close, a heartbreaking film about the deep friendship between two 13-year-old boys. The film won the Grand Prix award.

Four years later, Dhont is back with another story of male bonding and love.

In Coward, Dhont’s protagonists Pierre (Emmanuel Macchia) and Francis (Valentin Campagne) are young Belgian soldiers during World War I. In the midst of the violence around them, they participate in a play being put up for their colleagues.

In the course of the rehearsals, the two men are romantically drawn to each. Unlike Close, where the teenagers were unclear about the meaning of their love, Coward‘s men are certain about their love and sexual attraction.

First-time actors Macchia and Campagne pour their heart and soul into their performances.

On the closing night, many people were surprised when the main jury headed by Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook handed out the Best Actor award to Macchia and Campagne. They definitely deserved it.

4. Minotaur (France/Latvia)

Morality and ethics, coupled with the rot in Russian society, are often the main themes of Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev’s films. His characters sometimes face serious lapse in judgement, leading to difficult consequences.

But all seems to smooth out — even in one of him most tragic films, Loveless (2017), which won the Cannes Jury Prize. His new film Minotaur — the director working after months of a severe medical emergency caused by Covid — is a remake of French filmmaker Claude Chabrol’s thriller An Unfaithful Wife (1969).

Chabrol’s film was already remade into Unfaithful by Adrian Lyne (2002). In Minotaur, winner of this year’s Grand Prix prize, a Russian businessman suspects that his wife is cheating on him and he decides to take matters into his own hands.

His mind is already cluttered by a professional crisis and the decision he takes can have severe consequences.

The genius of a writer and filmmaker like Zvyagintsev lies in his skill to pull his protagonist out of an ugly mess. But people’s lives will never be the same after this, and Zvyagintsev’s characters will live with dark clouds over their heads for the rest of their lives.

3. Fjord (Romania/Norway)

Cristian Mungiu’s celebrated films have ethical complexities at their heart, and he makes powerful films that often leave us reassessing our own values.

His strongest film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007), a devastating film about a young woman who gets an illegal abortion, won him the Palme d’Or.

Nineteen years later, Mungiu won another Palme d’Or for Fjord that questions parenting, clashing conservative values against a seemingly liberal society.

In Fjord (the narrative somewhat resembles the tear-jerker Bollywood film Mrs Chatterjee vs Norway), a Romanian-Norwegian couple’s children are taken away from them when authorities seem to believe the parents have mistreated their kids. The couple is played by Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve.

In the world Mungiu creates, there are no villains. Eventually, our basic assumptions are challenged as we realise that the parents and the authorities all work in the interest of the children.

2. La Bola Negra (Spain)

La Bola Negra had a late premiere and changed the minds of many critics, who had written off this year’s Cannes film festival. Co-Directors Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo have made a sweeping saga, spanning three time periods in Spain’s history — 1932, 1937 and 2017 — with different gay men whose struggles are interconnected through circumstances.

The key to the narrative is an unfinished play by Federico Garcia Lorca, the gay Spanish playwright and poet, who was killed at the young age of 38 for his left-wing views and his homosexuality.

La Bola Negra is a grand, ambitious, tragic and equally delightful film and features two surprise guest performances by Penelope Cruz and Glenn Close.

For their sprit, energy and taking on a challenging film like La Bola Negra, Ambrossi and Calvo jointly won the Best Director award. They shared it with a third filmmaker from another film.

1. Fatherland (Poland/Germany)

Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowsky’s Fatherland is a brilliant black and white narrative about the German Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann’s visit to his homeland, divided during the height of the Cold War.

Pawlikowsky was the third best director award winner for his exceptional handling of a complex subject of a nation divided by two contentious ideologies. The year is 1949 and Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (an excellent Sandra Hüller) leave their exiled home in California on invitation from the two Germanies where the author is supposed to accept awards in the honour of the late German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

The father and daughter first start with Frankfurt, devasted by the war and then cross into Soviet controlled East Germany.

Meanwhile, they are also suddenly struck by a personal tragedy.

While Mann is acknowledged as the son of the land by the two Germanies, the author himself is torn about by the idea of home and where he belongs. Fatherland is a fine film, and the best I saw at Cannes.

Photographs curated by Satish Bodas/Rediff