“Is this the most political Cannes festival since 1968?” asked a headline in a Hollywood Reporter article, shortly before the 2025 film fest’s halfway mark.
Nothing of that magnitude happened at this year’s Cannes, which concluded yesterday — though there was a five-hour blackout right before the closing ceremony that, it was suggested by local media, might not have been accidental per se.
And while the baker’s dozen of movies that we’d argue were the best that this Cannes had to offer weren’t all explicitly political, they all served to underline that fact that the movies continue to be both an urgent reflection and a necessary refraction of the world around us.
Here are our picks for the highlights of this year’s festival.
(And some quick shout-outs to: The Chronology of Water, Heads or Tails, The Mastermind, The Plague, The Sound of Falling, Two Prosecutors, and Urchin.)
Shortly before the halfway point of the 2025 film festival, a headline in the Hollywood Reporter questioned, “Is this the most political Cannes festival since 1968?”. It’s a valid question. Historians might recall that in 1968, the Croisette was rocked by protests, the Palais was taken over by filmmakers, four jurors resigned, and organizers finally closed the competition. While there was a five-hour blackout just prior to the closing ceremony, which local media suggested might not have been an accident per se, nothing of that size occurred at this year’s Cannes, which ended yesterday.
However, there was a general sense of instability and unease, which was heightened by the threat of “100-percent tariffs” on foreign-produced films by a certain authoritarian president. S. When you add in Robert De Niro’s name-calling of the President of the United States during his honorary Palme d’Or speech during the opening night’s ceremonies, as well as nearly a dozen films that focused on current and former fascist regimes, political unrest, and the general sense of IRL doomscrolling that permeates our current collective reality, it was difficult to avoid wondering if the answer to that question was, to use the title of one of the more inflammatory films in the 2025 edition, “YES!”.
Cinema still serves as a passport, a tool for empathy, a means of overcoming cultural and geographic barriers, and a means of putting you in other people’s shoes countless times. We who were confined to Cannes’ cinematic bubble could easily see that, especially since it was not completely sealed off from the events taking place in the rest of the world. Even though the dozen films that we would consider to be the best this Cannes had to offer weren’t all overtly political, they all emphasized how important and necessary the films are as a reflection of the world we live in. These are our selections for this year’s festival’s highlights.
The Chronology of Water, Heads or Tails, The Mastermind, The Plague, The Sound of Falling, Two Prosecutors, and Urchin deserve special mentions. ).
