12. “Coward”
After successful awards and producing controversy at Cannes for “Woman” (2019) and “Shut” (2023), two queer coming-of-age dramas that veer between beautiful sensitivity and near-exploitative cruelty, the Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont returned this yr along with his third and strongest characteristic, set in the course of the First World Battle. Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne shared the jury’s Greatest Actor prize for his or her skillfully harmonized performances as a pair of troopers who take part in a army theatre troupe; as entertainers, they’re not solely granted some respite from the trenches but additionally allowed to push towards the norms of gender expression by way of drag. Dhont expertly handles the strain between the homosocial and the homoerotic, and if his honey-toned visible fashion typically leans towards fussiness, it’s counterbalanced by the brutality of the fight sequences. Mercifully, he avoids his common lurch into tragedy; conflict, he figures rightly, is horrible sufficient.
13. “Hope”
The film that struck its detractors because the competitors’s most incongruous entry was, for the remainder of us, exactly what the race wanted: a jolt of pure, unfiltered blockbuster adrenaline, courtesy of a South Korean horror maestro, Na Hong-jin, whose blood-soaked action-thrillers have accounted for a few of my happiest Cannes reminiscences. “Hope,” a riotous mashup of thrillingly staged and daringly attenuated chase scenes, mordant small-town comedy, and delightfully craptacular C.G.I., isn’t as absolutely realized a nightmare as a few of Na’s earlier triumphs, corresponding to “The Yellow Sea” (2011) and “The Wailing” (2016). Nor am I ready to defend the coda, which makes a bewildering swerve into alien-species lore, all to put the groundwork for a sequel that I doubt the world wants. For now, although, the world does want “Hope.”
14. “One other Day”
I didn’t know beforehand that this modest, successful comedy-drama, written and directed by the French filmmaker Jeanne Herry, was an habit story. What’s refreshing about “One other Day” is that it doesn’t actually appear to realize it, both; it deftly sidesteps a minefield of rehab and relapse clichés, sees its protagonist complete, and doesn’t deal with any considered one of her issues as definitive. Garance (splendidly performed by Adèle Exarchopoulos) is a gifted, struggling actress who, over the course of the film, endures the COVID-19 pandemic, falls in love with one other girl, will get fired from her job, helps her youthful sister by means of a severe sickness, and, alongside the best way, downs sufficient glasses of wine to place her at severe danger of liver failure. “One other Day” ’ s jittery rhythms add which means to its English title: each second is fleeting and, like this film, price savoring for what it’s.
15. “A Lady’s Life”
The 2-time César winner Léa Drucker is overdue for a Greatest Actress win at Cannes; her lead performances in “Final Summer season” (2023) and “Case 137” (2025) have been among the many strongest to grace the competition competitors in recent times. She’s in usually memorable type right here as Gabrielle, a middle-aged maxillofacial surgeon who—like Garance in “One other Day,” the competitors’s different French femme-centric slice of life—exists in a continuous state of upheaval: workers turmoil in an already high-stress job, frustrations along with her husband and stepchildren, and an sudden new love (Mélanie Thierry). The director Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet tries to carry texture and grit to a romantic-dramedy custom recognized for its gloss and sentimentality; the occasional surgical procedure scenes, although unlikely to faze anybody who’s binged “The Pitt,” achieve doing so. I’m much less enamored of the choice to compartmentalize the story right into a sequence of chapters, each with a self-consciously aphoristic title.
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