All of a Sudden
Japan’s Ryusuke Hamaguchi dazzled Cannes in 2021 with his symphonic meditation on grief, regret and human connection, Drive My Car, which went on to receive four Oscar nominations, winning for best international film. His French-language debut casts Virginie Efira as the director of a nursing home in the Paris suburbs, who adopts the compassion-based “Humanitude” treatment method with her patients despite discord among her team. Her life changes when she meets a terminally ill Japanese playwright played by Tao Okamoto. The two women develop a spiritual bond as they fight together to overcome systemic constraints and transform the care facility into a symbol of resistance.

Coward
After kickstarting his career with Girl and Close, two intimate contemporary queer stories that both took home awards from Cannes, Lukas Dhont tackles his first period drama and his most ambitious project to date. Described by the Belgian director as “a film about love and death, creation and destruction,” it’s set on the frontlines of World War I. A newly arrived soldier eager to prove his valor meets a comrade who decides to lift the company’s spirits by putting on a theatrical show behind the trenches. In an atmosphere of violence and brutality, the two men find ways to escape, even if only momentarily. Newcomers Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne head the cast.

Fatherland
In what is becoming a major year for Sandra Hüller — a blockbuster hit with Project Hail Mary; a Berlin best actress win for her gender-switch role in Rose; Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Tom Cruise-led Digger coming in the fall — the brilliant German actress joins Hanns Zischler and August Diehl in Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski’s continuing exploration of post-WWII Europe. Following Ida and Cold War, and again shot in richly textured black and white, the new drama accompanies Thomas Mann and his daughter on a road trip across a Germany in ruins, marking the Nobel Prize-winning author’s first time back in the Fatherland since fleeing to safety in the U.S. during the war. 

Fjord
One of the major figures to come out of the Romanian New Wave of the mid-2000s, Christian Mungiu won the Palme d’Or in 2007 for his breathless abortion drama, 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days. His new film promises to be another provocative piece of social realism in the director’s customarily rigorous style. Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve play a Romanian-Norwegian couple who relocate with their kids to the mother’s birthplace in remote Norway. They form close friendships with a neighboring family but face severe scrutiny and legal entanglement when suspicions of child abuse arise. Mungiu reportedly drew inspiration from real-life stories relating to Norway’s controversial child protection system and its family investigations.

Hope
Ten years after launching his cult horror hit The Wailing in Cannes, Na Hong-jin returns with this large-scale science fiction thriller, reportedly the most expensive Korean film ever made. It’s set in the remote village of Hope Harbor, near the Demilitarized Zone, where alarmed locals alert the outpost police chief to sightings of a tiger on the outskirts of town. As the village erupts into full-scale panic, the emergency evolves into a darker mystery, forcing the cop to confront a seemingly impossible reality. Alongside the Korean principals, Taylor Russell, Cameron Britton, Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender also appear.

Paper Tiger
It’s a sore point among many admirers of James Gray’s work that despite five previous competition entries, the writer-director has never won a major award in Cannes. Perhaps his sixth contender will change that. Miles Teller, Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver star in the gritty 1980s-set drama about two brothers chasing the American Dream, who find their mutual loyalties tested as they navigate a dangerous world of corruption and violence, leading to the terrorization of their family by the Russian mob. While not strictly a sequel, the film is a continuation of sorts to Gray’s last competition entry, the maddeningly under-appreciated 2022 drama Armageddon Time.

Parallel Tales
Two-time Oscar-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi assembles a deluxe cast for his second French-language film (following 2013’s The Past), including Isabelle Huppert, Virginie Efira, Vincent Cassel, Pierre Niney, Adam Bessa and Catherine Deneuve. Loosely based on the sixth chapter of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog series, which was extended to feature length as A Short Film About Love, the film is set in Paris and follows a novelist seeking inspiration for her new book. She begins spying on her neighbors across the street, which has enexpected consequences when fiction draws from real life but also starts to influence reality. 

Sheep in the Box
A Palme d’Or winner in 2018 for Shoplifters, Hirokazu Kore-eda returns to the competition with an idiosyncratic take on the relationship between humanity and AI in this sci-fi-adjacent drama. The Japanese auteur reflects on parenthood and childhood, loss and grief, the meaning of life and death through the story of a couple mourning the loss of their son when a mysterious package arrives, inviting them to participate in a new program designed to resurrect deceased loved ones as robotic clones. While the wife embraces their animatronic offspring, her husband keeps a wary distance, unconvinced that the android has any connection to their boy. 

The Unknown
Arthur Harari shared an original screenplay Oscar in 2024 with director and co-writer Justine Triet for Anatomy of a Fall. His new film casts Niels Schneider as a man nearing 40, who keeps his life and his pursuits as a photographer to himself. When he’s reluctantly dragged by friends to a wild party, he is unable to take his eyes off a woman in the crowd, eventually following her. A few hours later, he wakes up in the body of the unknown woman. That role is played by the busy Léa Seydoux, who also stars in Marie Kreutzer’s competition entry, Gentle Monster.