Cannes 'Jury of One' and Predictions

by Elisa Giudici

LA BOLA NEGRA

There’s a strange atmosphere lingering over Cannes this year: not scandal, not outrage, not even division exactly. More like collective hesitation. A sense that everyone liked several films, respected many more, but truly loved very few. The consensus around the Croisette is unusually blunt: Competition was quite weak, only occasionally excellent, and rarely exhilarating. In a year where Hollywood increasingly seems willing to bypass festivals altogether for its prestige launches (Sinners, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another all cultivated awards ambitions without Cannes or Venice), the festival perhaps needed a genuine cinematic event more than usual. Instead, 2026 mostly offered strong craftsmanship without many discoveries. The real surprises often came outside Competition.

That doesn’t mean the lineup failed. The major auteurs mostly delivered exactly what one expects from them: polished, controlled, intelligent work. Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, Pawel Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur are all films of remarkable rigor and seriousness...

None quite detonated the festival, but all three feel substantial in a Competition where many films struggled to escape the gravitational pull of metaphor and historical allegory.

What distinguished All of a Sudden and Minotaur, in particular, was their willingness to engage with the present directly rather than filtering contemporary anxieties through nostalgia or inherited trauma. In a Competition crowded with ghosts of wars, dictatorships, and collapsing empires, they felt unusually immediate.

French cinema, meanwhile, had an unexpectedly weak year. There’s admiration for Notre Salut and Moulin, both films haunted by Vichy-era complicity and the contemporary resurgence of far-right politics, but neither emerged as a genuine Palme contender. Still, Swann Arlaud’s quietly devastating work in Notre Salut increasingly feels like the kind of performance juries rally behind late in the festival when in need for a nod for the hosting country. For much of the week Javier Bardem looked poised to take Actor for El Ser Querido, but momentum around Arlaud has become impossible to ignore.

The American presence was limited but generally well received. Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love and James Gray’s Paper Tigerplayed as sturdy, classical works from filmmakers uninterested in reinvention. Neither inspired feverish reactions, but both reminded audiences how satisfying mature filmmaking can still be.

If Cannes 2026 had a defining thematic current, though, it was unquestionably queer cinema, especially films exploring masculinity through historical settings. The festival’s two most discussed titles, Lukas Dhont’s Coward and Los Javis’ La Bola Negra, both use wartime Europe to interrogate performance, desire, repression, and the construction of male identity.

Of the two, La Bola Negra remains the presumed Palme frontrunner. Pedro Almodóvar’s producing credit, enormous critical enthusiasm, and the film’s sheer emotional and symbolic ambition make it the obvious “big statement” choice. But it’s also visibly overextended: a film constantly expanding beyond its own control, unable to entirely contain its themes, imagery, or emotional crescendos. Coward, by contrast, is almost severe in its precision. It may ultimately be the most formally accomplished Competition title by a younger filmmaker: elegant, restrained, emotionally exacting. Which is precisely why it risks becoming one of those Cannes films rewarded everywhere except with the Palme itself.

Personally, I’d love to see the Directing prize go instead to Hope. The film has obvious flaws and moments where its ambitions overwhelm its execution, but the sheer confidence and inventiveness of the direction deserves recognition. Still, early whispers around the Croisette suggest neither the filmmaker nor cast have returned to Cannes for the closing stretch: often not a great sign when prize logistics quietly begin taking shape behind the scenes.

The strongest discoveries arguably emerged outside Competition. Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma won both Un Certain Regard and the Queer Palm, though many critics continued championing Everytime as the festival’s true revelation. Germany also had an excellent year overall, boosted further by Yana Radaeva’s extraordinary turn in The Dreamed Adventures, which increasingly feels like the Actress performance to beat.

Though even there, competition remains fierce. Léa Seydoux’s work in L’Inconnue earned passionate support throughout the second half of the festival, while Adèle Exarchopoulos in Garance delivered the kind of emotionally naked performance Cannes juries historically adore.

Outside Competition, queer cinema remained one of the festival’s liveliest spaces. Club Kid balanced gay club culture irreverence with unexpectedly moving family melodrama, while the animated Jim Queen transformed Parisian queer nightlife into something halfway between South Park and Rick & Morty. And then there was Gradiva, a delicate French coming-of-age story set during a school trip through southern Italy, which increasingly feels destined for the Camera d’Or.

So where does all this leave the Palme race?

At this point, La Bola Negra still feels like the default prediction, the film many expect to win even among people unsure whether it should. But the more one talks to critics and industry people around Cannes, the more Fatherland and Minotaur begin to sound like serious alternatives: less ecstatic choices perhaps, but more controlled, complete, and jury-friendly works.

My current predictions:

Palme d’Or: Fatherland or Minotaur

Grand Prix: La Bola Negra

Jury Prize: All of a Sudden

Best Director: Lukas Dhont, Coward

Best Screenplay: Cristian Mungiu, Fjord

Best Actor: Swann Arlaud, Notre Salut

Best Actress: Yana Radaeva, The Dreamed Adventures

But this remains one of those unusually open Cannes competitions where almost everyone seems uncertain. And sometimes that’s exactly when juries become the most unpredictable.