PARIS — New movies from Wes Anderson, Ari Aster, and Richard Linklater will compete for the Palme d’Or on the 78th Cannes Movie Competition, organizers introduced Thursday.
Coming off a 2024 version that produced the Academy Award best-picture winner “Anora,” in addition to a lot of Oscar contenders in “Emilia Pérez,” “The Substance” and “The Apprentice,” the French movie pageant responded with a 2025 lineup stuffed with big-name auteurs.
Requested if he was underneath stress after producing so many Oscars contenders final yr, Frémaux stated the pageant organizers really feel like an athlete placing his title again on the road.
“What happened last year was great,” he stated. “And what happened the year before was great. The last seven, eight years, Cannes and the films of Cannes were great.”
Entries embrace Aster’s “Eddington,” a pandemic-set Western starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal and Emma Stone; Anderson’s “The Phoenician Scheme,” starring Benicio Del Toro as a European profiteer and Linklater’s appropriately French-language “Nouvelle Vague,” about Jean-Luc Godard and the French New Wave.
Julia Ducournau, whose “Titane” received the Palme d’Or in 2021, making Ducournau solely the second feminine filmmaker to ever obtain Cannes’ high honor, will return to the pageant with the Eighties New York-set “Alpha,” about an 11-year-old with a mother or father who has AIDS.
A number of high-profile movies that some had hoped would present up in Cannes weren’t introduced Tuesday in Paris, together with Terrence Malick’s long-awaited Jesus drama “The Way of the Wind,” Spike Lee’s Akira Kurosawa remake “Highest 2 Lowest,” and Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another.” New movies by Jim Jarmusch and Kristen Stewart had additionally been anticipated within the Cannes lineup.
Requested about their absence, Fremaux declined to remark, saying he wished to as an alternative concentrate on the photographs which made the lower. He, nonetheless, stated extra movies could possibly be later added to the choice.
An hour after the press convention in Paris, nonetheless, Lee stated on Instagram that “Highest 2 Lowest” is, certainly, going to Cannes, and screening out of competitors. Representatives for the pageant later confirmed that Lee’s publish was correct, noting that the movie wasn’t introduced within the press convention as a result of Cannes was awaiting affirmation that the film’s star, Denzel Washington, can be in attendance. With that confirmed, “Highest 2 Lowest” will premiere on Could 19.
Fremaux altogether introduced 19 movies vying for the Palme d’Or, six of that are directed by ladies.
Two movies starring Josh O’Connor made it into the competitors lineup: Oliver Hermanus’ “The History of Sound,” co-starring Paul Mescal, and Kelly Reichardt’s “The Mastermind,” an artwork heist movie set in the course of the Vietnam Struggle.
Different beforehand Cannes regulars coming again embrace two-time Palme winners Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. The Belgian filmmaking brothers’ newest is titled “Young Mothers.” Joachim Trier, whose “The Worst Person in the World” was a spotlight of the 2021 Cannes, is again in competitors with “Sentimental Value,” which likewise stars Renate Reinsve.
Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who was imprisoned in the course of the launch of his final, secretly made movie, 2022’s “No Bears,” and never launched till he went on a starvation strike, will unveil his newest movie, “It Was Just an Accident.”
Taking part in within the pageant’s Un Sure Regard sidebar is Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, “Eleanor the Great,” starring June Squibb. Harris Dickinson, the “Babygirl” star, may also premiere his directorial debut, “Urchin,” in the identical part.
Bono may also be coming to the Croisette for the premiere of “Bono: Stories of Surrender,” Andrew Dominik’s movie of the singer’s one-man stage present. That can play in Cannes’ particular screening part.
Cannes earlier introduced that “Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning” will launch on the pageant, which three years in the past bestowed an honorary Palme d’Or on Tom Cruise. This yr, Robert De Niro is ready to obtain one in the course of the pageant’s opening ceremony.
The pageant runs Could 13-24. The opening night time movie, taking part in out of competitors, can be “Leave One Day,” the primary film by French director Amélie Bonnin.
