13 discoveries from Cannes 2025

Laura Wandel, Belgium/France

Just as Laura Wandel’s debut feature Playground (2021) was anchored to the viewpoint of a young schoolchild, her second feature Adam’s Sake relentlessly tracks the frantic work life of an ever-present paediatric nurse, Lucy (an excellent Léa Drucker), whose day is thrown into chaos when a parent refuses to leave a child’s side overnight. Wandel’s tightly focused film is a gripping watch, but what makes it linger in the mind is its nuanced portrayal of a bureaucratic childcare system and the ethics of bending the rules.

– Thomas Flew

Lucio Castro, US/Argentina

The gem in this year’s ACID sidebar is a beautifully woven queer tale of yearning by Argentinian filmmaker Lucio Castro. It starts with art student Adnan (Laith Khalifeh) meeting the delivery guy at the door on his first night of flat-sitting in New York – a good example of how a film can take a chance encounter and shroud it in erotic mystery even before any words are exchanged. Sex in the park, followed by noodles on a park bench in the middle of the night, is just one of Adnan’s meaningful, yet fleeting rendezvous. Drunken Noodles threads its storytelling through past and present, instead of simply unfolding it. Like the homoerotic and very explicit embroidery pieces (inspired by the American artist Sal Salandra and his ‘thread paintings’) that are on show at the gallery where Adnan interns, the film itself brings together the strings of desire over the course of two summers, mirroring and enriching each other.

– Savina Petkova

Kawamura Genki, Japan

An entertaining conceptual mindfuck from Kawamura Genki, a bestseller author (If Cats Disappeared from the World) turned director. Based on an influential video game, it’s about a man attempting to exit a seemingly endless subway tunnel by spotting anomalies – but does that include such mysterious figures as the white-shirted ‘Walking Man’ caught in an infinite loop, or are they lost souls like our hero? Like a minimalist variant on mindbenders like Cube (1997) or Primer (2004), but with unexpected variations very inventively programmed in.

– Jonathan Romney

Akinola Davies Jr, UK/Nigeria

A mesmerising Sopé Dìrísù carries hidden worlds in Akinola Davies Jr’s layered, atmospheric and emotional feature debut. In 1993, a dad takes his boys on a day out in Lagos, where the deftly sketched backdrop – all city hustle and political machinations – never overpowers the intimate relationship drama. Real brothers Godwin and Chibuike Marvellous Egbo offer cheeky charm galore and Davies balances their youthful excitement with a mounting sense of significance that subtly builds to a crescendo of feeling.

– Sophie Monks Kaufman

Diego Céspedes, Chile/France/Belgium/Spain/Germany

Setting his tale in the early 80s, when rumours about the cause of Aids abounded, Diego Céspedes conjures a strikingly alternative universe: a fairytale brothel-cabaret in the middle of the Chilean desert where trans women service copper miners with sex and stage shows. There, young Lidia (Tamara Cortés) is being raised by her ‘mother’, Flamingo (Matías Catalán), and the formidable head of the house, Mama Boa (Paula Dinamarca). The clan of prostitutes – all named for animals – mobilises in times of danger or celebration. Though a mysterious disease is transforming their bodies and lives, Aids may be not the only threat. When Flamingo’s old flame beguiles, danger returns. For Lidia, this is a life worth fighting for – and she proves herself, with her trusty sidekick, to be a worthy avenger for this special universe she cherishes. Céspedes deserves to be hailed as a remarkable conjurer who has managed to resurrect the full glory of the New Queer Cinema.

– B. Ruby Rich

Harry Lighton, UK

For traffic warden Colin (Harry Melling), love comes in the superhuman form of Alexander Skarsgård as Ray, a biker who takes Colin on an erotic ride of submission and domination. Harry Lighton’s film – adapted from Adam Mars-Jones’ 2020 novel Box Hill – exists within the recognisable tradition of the feel-good English comedy. Think Richard Curtis but with butt plugs. Ray is a little like Julia Roberts in Notting Hill (1999), swooping into a boring British life – Colin lives in Bromley – and transforming it with transatlantic glamour.

– John Bleasdale

Charlie Polinger, Romania/US

The charge of this psychological teen drama lies in its shapeshifting between horror and realism. Does the awkward outcast tormented by a group of boys at a water polo summer camp really have a contagious skin disease or is it a ruse to make him a pariah? The hermetic theatre of adolescent cruelty and the vicious stranglehold of conformity imposed by teenage conformity that first-time director Charlie Polinger sketches may be familiar, but this is a well-crafted fable with impressive performances and eerie cinematography.

– Isabel Stevens

Simón Mesa Soto, Colombia/Germany/Sweden

Colombian director Simón Mesa Soto’s rambunctiously funny second feature couldn’t be further from romanticised images of poets with its portrait of the frustrated and frustrating Oscar Restrepo. Greeting stunted middle age from his room in his mother’s flat, he published a prize-winning collection decades ago but now barely squeaks into a job teaching at high school (with the help of a flask). As Oscar, Ubeimar Rios is a force of nature, a Socratic mien crammed under glasses with a serious expression that could just as easily burst into tears or radiate with delight. Soto shifts into another phase with class tensions when a student, Yurlady (Rebeca Andrade), clinches Oscar’s exacting vision for poetry with her precocious talent and becomes a chaste obsession, though he is quickly caught in the machinations of the wonderfully awful and cynical types who run the local poetry scene. No matter where Oscar is headed, A Poet shows Soto blazing ahead.

– Nicolas Rapold

Hasan Hadi, Iraq/US/Qatar

A little girl embarks on a stressful quest for ingredients across 1990s Baghdad after she’s tasked with baking a cake for Saddam Hussein’s state-enforced birthday celebrations. This crowd-pleasing, Camera d’Or-winning debut from Hasan Hadi is careful not to over-egg its political realism. The film plays like a bittersweet childhood fable, enriched by Tudor Vladimir Panduru’s serene cinematography of Iraq’s marshlands. Baneen Ahmad Nayyef gives a knowing, intelligent performance as Lamia, and she has a great comedy co-star in her charismatic pet cockerel, Hindi.

– Katie McCabe

Sven Bresser, Netherlands/Belgium

An elderly reed-cutter happens upon the body of a murdered teen girl on the land he’s working, triggering an obsessive quest for justice unanswered by the authorities. A Critics’ Week highlight, Dutch writer-director Sven Bresser’s stern, wind-rustled debut is hardly novel in its excavation of human evil amid rural serenity. But the crime story here feels like a sidebar to a wider, more searching study of loneliness: the devil is in its frank, stoically heartbreaking details of widowed domestic routine, weary grandparenting and late-life sexuality.

– Guy Lodge

Michael Angelo Covino, US

American indie renaissance man Michael Angelo Covino follows up The Climb (2019) with another riotous relationship comedy he directs, writes, produces and stars in. This time, a bumbling man played by Covino’s regular collaborator, co-writer and co-producer Kyle Marvin is dumped and then has sex with his best friend’s wife (Dakota Johnson) after they tell him they’re in an open relationship. Farcical, crude and truthful, Splitsville is an early contender for funniest film of the year and also contains a hysterical, unforgettable fight scene.

– Lou Thomas

Harris Dickinson, UK

Harris Dickinson proves himself a director of promise with this focused and thought-provoking tale of homelessness in London. The writing of protagonist Mike (Frank Dillane) avoids many of the usual clichés – no sob story to explain his circumstances, no heart of gold to elicit audience sympathy – making this a relatively fresh take on a familiar theme. Most exciting are dream-like – or nightmare-like – moments representing Mike’s time in prison and on drugs, which show a finely tuned creative vision.

– Thomas Flew

Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, Thailand/France/Singapore/Germany

A broken vacuum cleaner and the arrival of a sexy repairman trigger the events of Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s A Useful Ghost, a bewitching dark comedy from Thailand which premiered in Critics’ Week and took home the Grand Prix, the section’s top prize. In a series of elegantly arranged static compositions, and with a droll sense of humour that brings to mind Aki Kaurismäki, the film unfolds a fantastically off-kilter world in which humans live casually among ghosts that habitually take the form of household appliances. The ‘useful ghost’ of the title is a friendly vacuum – the deceased wife (Davika Hoorne) of the son of an exploitative factory owner who seems less disturbed by the fact that her son is having sex with a machine than the fact that he’s still in love with a working-class woman. A tragic love story that blooms into an indictment of unethical labour practices, A Useful Ghost achieves a rare feat among festival titles: surprising you at every turn.

– Beatrice Loayza