Like most major film festivals, Cannes tends to be something of a choose-your-own-adventure affair: Any two people’s perspectives of the fest are likely to vary wildly depending on their professional remit or personal inclination. A critic watching upwards of 40 films over the 12 days is not having the same experience as an executive lining up more meetings than screenings; even for those festivalgoers primarily there for the movies, someone laser-focused on the Competition is on a whole other beat from someone sniffing out discoveries in the sidebars.

This year, however, a common sentiment seemed to unite most of those disparate factions. Ask the standard festival icebreaker — “How’s your Cannes going?” — to any random selection of people at a beach cocktail or in the Debussy queue, and you were likely to hear variations of one word over and over: “Quiet.” 

Whether you were a sales agent eyeing a leisurely buyer’s market or a freelance journalist picking up fewer interview commissions than usual, this felt like a low-key Cannes. Not necessarily a bad one (for this critic, at least, there were more than enough substantial films to make the trip rewarding) but not the buzziest one either. Call it a vibe shift, but compared to last year — whether you got excited by Tom Cruise working his megawatt magic at the “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” premiere or Olivier Laxe’s “Sirāt” giving the Competition a jolt of WTF energy, the way nothing quite did this year — the 2026 festival was altogether calmer, as if the volume and brightness had both been turned that little bit down.

One reason for that, as festival director Thierry Frémaux has been quick to note throughout, was the diminished presence of America in the program. Only two U.S. productions made the Competition lineup, James Gray’s “Paper Tiger” and Ira Sachs’ “The Man I Love” — both were fairly well-received but not ecstatically so, and neither won any awards. It was left to South Korean auteur Na Hong-jin’s exhilarating, extravagantly bonkers monster movie “Hope” to bring the popcorn spirit of Hollywood studio cinema to the Competition, though it’s not, of course, in any way an American production.

America fared better in the Un Certain Regard program. Jane Schoenbrun’s delicious Queer Palm winner “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” opened the section with a bang, handily outstripping the festival’s official opener, “The Electric Kiss,” in the buzz stakes; Jordan Firstman’s crowdpleaser “Club Kid” sparked the most heated bidding war of the festival, eventually won by A24 for a cool $17 million. The film is an outwardly edgy indie with a soft-hearted Hollywood sensibility. Would it have made as much noise in a year with more broadly commercial fare like it? Hard to say.

A handful of other vaguely starry U.S. titles were scattered through the official selection — among them Andy Garcia’s “Diamond,” John Travolta’s “Propeller One-Way Night Coach,” new documentaries by Steven Soderbergh and Ron Howard — but didn’t fire many imaginations. Conspicuously absent, however, was any kind of major blockbuster premiere. Steven Spielberg has previously unveiled summer releases like “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” and “The BFG” on the Croisette, but despite an imminent release date, his upcoming “Disclosure Day” stayed away. In 2018, Disney was happy to take “Solo: A Star Wars Story” to Cannes; “The Mandalorian and Grogu,” not so much.

Is this any great loss? Well, it depends who you ask. Serious cinephiles don’t much care whether or not Cannes hosts the premiere of a film that will shortly be in multiplexes everywhere, but the red-carpet currency of a Cruise-level megastar at the festival is not to be discounted. Like the proverbial rising tide that lifts all boats, the hype attending a burgeoning summer phenomenon directs more crowds and camera lenses to the festival; the smaller films premiering alongside it, meanwhile, benefit from the increased industry and media presence. A few years ago, “Top Gun: Maverick” proved pretty much the platonic ideal of a Cannes blockbuster premiere: The festival got to look sexy and populist by inviting it, while the Cannes imprimatur gave the action sequel a veneer of prestige that carried it all the way to the Oscars.

But not everything can be “Top Gun: Maverick,” of course. The next year, James Mangold’s disappointing “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” premiered at Cannes six weeks before its scheduled release date, and was met with tepid-to-negative reviews, somewhat bursting the film’s bubble; Disney hadn’t counted on over a month of bad buzz before the film even reached paying audiences. The aforementioned “Solo” was similarly burned: If a studio isn’t absolutely confident a film has the goods, there’s far more to be lost than gained by putting in the festival spotlight.

Was that skittishness behind Hollywood’s absence from Cannes this year? Or was it just a matter of bad timing: one of those years when a lot of the right projects weren’t ready at the right time? Possibly a bit of both: Venice, lately the preferred festival for launching studio Oscar hopefuls, could pick up the slack in September. But it could just be that the aspirations of Cannes and those of American prestige cinema aren’t mutually dependent. Frémaux spoke regretfully at Cannes about how Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar champ “One Battle After Another” was planned to premiere at last year’s festival, prior to its release delay. It certainly would have played like gangbusters on the Croisette, but ultimately the film proved it could bypass the festival circuit entirely at no cost to its popularity with critics, audiences or awards voters.

Cannes, meanwhile, didn’t feel artistically diminished for having a reduced U.S. presence this year: European films as strong as Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or winner “Fjord,” Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Grand Prix winner “Minotaur” and Pawel Pawlikowski’s Best Director winner “Fatherland” held up the festival’s reputation just fine without any assistance from across the pond. Indeed, a key story of this year’s Cannes was how it showcased the necessity of global co-production in making major-league art cinema today.

The three films I just mentioned all found their directors working away from home turf, either by practical or narrative necessity, as did other fest favourites like “All of a Sudden,” Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s tale of French-Japanese social fusion, Jury Prize winner “The Dreamed Adventure,” in which German auteur Valeska Grisebach continues her probe into Bulgarian society, or over in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar, Romanian provocateur Radu Jude’s pointed French class satire “Diary of a Chambermaid.” In other words, the idea of world cinema as comprising a map of distinct, singular national cinemas is an altogether dated one; even the Academy has acknowledged as much, by adjusting the submissions rules of its Best International Feature category, and Cannes reflected that truth too.

Still, it was hard not to notice the heavily Eurocentric slant of this year’s lineup, with 17 of the 22 Competition titles (and, as it turned out, all eight Competition prizewinners) either wholly or predominantly European productions. Well, it is a European festival, after all. But with a smaller American contingent making for some extra space in the lineup, Cannes missed an opportunity to get a little more creative and a little more diverse in its programming. 

Where was the African, Latin American or Middle Eastern cinema in Competition? “Clarissa,” Nigerian duo Arie and Chuko Esiri’s inspired Lagos-set reworking of “Mrs. Dalloway” starring a radiant Sophie Okonedo, was as Competition-worthy as anything on distributor Neon’s crowded slate. A few years ago, Cannes took a chance on Senegalese newcomer Ramata-Toulaye Sy by placing her debut “Banel and Adama” in its most prestigious tier; could Rwanda’s Marie Clémentine Dusabejambo, who ultimately took the Camera d’Or for her Un Certain Regard pick “Ben’Imana,” not have been likewise promoted?

It is an irony that the festival’s programming biases were arguably more exposed than they were counteracted by an off-year for American cinema. If it was a quiet Cannes for many of us, it didn’t have to be: Invite the whole world to the party, and things will get a whole lot louder.