The 2026 Cannes film festival comes to an end with an uneasy consensus that this has very much not been a vintage year. It’s a Cannes ordinaire. There has even been some dark muttering from older veterans about comparing 2026 to the dreaded 2003 Cannes, the year of Vincent Gallo’s epically embarrassing erotic road movie The Brown Bunny. Was the Cannes cocktail missing one vital ingredient … the sparkle of Hollywood?

Well, the glitzy Hollywood films of previous years, like Mission: Impossible or Elvis, all tended to be out of competition. Their presence or absence wouldn’t make any difference to the glittering prizes at the end. But there’s no doubt about it. A really big A-lister studio picture wouldn’t have come amiss in the official selection somewhere. Are the studios really so scared of snarky Cannes reviews spoiling their big movies’ PR gameplan? Are they really petrified of Rotten Tomatoes and its fatuous and meaningless percentage score? Maybe.

In any case, the Tinseltown no-show wasn’t the trouble with Cannes in 2026. The real problem was with the big auteurs: those protected silverback gorillas of world cinema who can be relied upon to show up on the Croisette with a very good and perhaps great film. Not this year. László Nemes, Pedro Almodóvar, Asghar Farhadi, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Cristian Mungiu and Ira Sachs all gave us films which were, in my view, frankly pretty average. Although Mungiu’s Fjord about an abusive patriarch was liked by many, and there was a fair bit of saucer-eyed praise for Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden, his contrived and entirely preposterous tale of a friendship between an actor and a care home director.

I, on the other hand, rather enjoyed the unhurried – and underrated – eccentric comedy in Farhadi’s minor film Parallel Tales, featuring a ripe face-off between Catherine Deneuve and Isabelle Huppert, a film denounced by some as awful. But I’m sorry to say that there was wide agreement about the sentimental sci-fi fantasy Sheep in the Box, from that otherwise formidable Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda. It landed in Cannes with a deafening splat – a colossal clunker best forgotten about.

For me, the problem is often the Europudding mix of coproduction, which I suspect is the result of celebrated film-makers spending so much of their time on the international film festival circuit and having conversations with prestigious admirers from all over the world who want to work with them. Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden and Mingiu’s Fjord mashed up two settings and two national identities – France and Japan in Hamaguchi, Romania and Norway in Mungiu – and succeeded in telling us little of value about either.

The French films were (as so often) very variable, and oddly we had two films about the Nazi occupation of France during the second world war, the better of the two being Emmanuel Marre’s Notre Salut, a rather fascinating study of the Vichy France bureaucracy.

But there were some superb films. The now exiled Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev gave us a triumph with Minotaur, about Russia’s collective trauma and denial about their leader’s terrible mistake in Ukraine. And the Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski returned to Cannes with Fatherland, a brilliant historical vignette about Thomas Mann coming to Germany after the second world war with his daughter Erika: a film dense with regret, with tension and with the burden of history – great performances from Hanns Zischler and Sandra Hüller. Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beloved was a grippingly horrible, unsentimental picture about emotional abuse in the movie business, and Marie Kreutzer’s Gentle Monster was a brutal study of a married man’s terrible secret.

So here are my predictions for Cannes 2026, followed by my imaginary Cannes Braddies, my awards for those categories which should exist but don’t.

Palme d’Or Minotaur (dir. Andrey Zvyagintsev)

Grand Prix Fatherland (dir. Paweł Pawlikowski)

Jury prize The Black Ball (dirs. Javier Calvo, Javier Ambrossi)

Best director Marie Kreutzer for Gentle Monster

Best screenplay Emmanuel Marre for Notre Salut

Best actor Javier Bardem for The Beloved

Best actress Léa Seydoux for Gentle Monster and The Unknown

Best supporting actress Lola Dueñas for The Black Ball

Best cinematography Mikhail Krichman for Minotaur

Best production design Antxón Gómez for Bitter Christmas