Cannes at Home: A Polarizing Pandemonium

by Cláudio Alves

Adèle Exarchopoulos won a César for Jeanne Herry's ALL YOUR FACES. Will her new collaboration with the director, presently at Cannes, produce similar results?

The 2026 Cannes Film Festival is drawing to a close, so I should probably hurry up with this corresponding Cannes at Home program. In the past few days, a number of titles have come and gone on the Croisette, most of them eliciting wildly divisive reactions. Nobody seems to agree on the merits of Na Hong-jin’s Hope, and Arthur Harari’s The Unknown has proven similarly polarizing. While some bet on Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord for the Palme, others are decrying it as a minor work, if not an outright failure. Elisa is a fan, for instance, but TFE’s old friend Nick Davis is a naysayer. In the middle of all this, László Némes’ historical Moulin and Jeanne Herry’s Garance have mostly slipped by under the radar, drawing little attention while also sparing themselves the lacerating putdowns their bolder, more ambitious competition has inspired in film critics and audiences alike.

For this lightning round of Cannes at Home, let’s run this gamut of filmmakers in capsule form. Their films are Nemes’ handsome Sunset, Herry’s actorly All Your Faces, Na’s go-for-broke bonkers The Wailing, Harari’s portrait of Onoda, and Mungiu’s first foray into the intolerance that can emerge in European communities beset by the arrival of outsiders, R.M.N...

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Six More Foreign Film Oscar Contenders

by Nathaniel R

We're now up to 36 entries for Best Foreign Language Film, so  over one-third of the way to the full list. Of the six latest announcements The Heiresses has had the arguably highest profile at festivals but the Russian entry is the most "typically Oscar-like" in subject matter, though that thankfully matters less than it once did, even in the foreign category. 

• The Great Mystical Circus Brazil
  A century in the life of a family of circus owners. This is the 7th time Brazil has submitted a film by Carlos Diegues. He's their most frequently submitted director but none of his submitted films have been nominated. 
• Graves Without a Name Cambodia
  Rithy Panh created Cambodia's only Oscar nominee (the brilliant documentary The Missing Picture). This is another doc on the same topic: the Kmer Rouge and genocide
• Polyxeni Greece 
  The plot sounds intriguing. A young Greek orphan with a lust for life, is adopted and raised by a wealthy Greek-Turkish couple, unaware that people are plotting and after her large inheritance. Greece used to automatically submit the winner of the Thessaloniki Film Festival but those awards have since been abolished. The new big prizes for Greek films are the Hellenic Film Awards (often referred to as "the Iris" like we call the Academy Awards "Oscar"). They began in 2010 with Dogtooth as their first winner but winning the Iris (which Polyxeni did) doesn't automatically get you the Oscar submission since the submission is now decided by a committee. 
• Sunset Hungary
  It's László Nemes' follow up to his Oscar winning debut Son of Saul. He's gone further back in time from World War II in the previous picture to just before World War I for this story of a young woman who wants to be a milliner in a hat shop previously owned by her parents.
• The Heiresses Paraguay 
  Lesbian drama about a formerly wealthy woman restarting her life after her longtime partner is imprisoned. Among its several festival prizes is the promising Best Actress win at Berlinale.
• Sobibor  - Russia 
  A true story of a prisoner uprising at an extermination camp in Russia during World War II.

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