Best Movies of 2025 Cannes Film Festival: Variety Critics’ Choices

Fatih Akin’s poetic and elegantly spare World War II drama asks us to take interest in a 12-year-old member of the Hitler youth, and maybe even to sympathize with him. What makes “Amrum” soul-stirring is the early realization that had the boy been brought up under different circumstances, he would have been an ordinary child, doing good instead of brewing in hateful thoughts. And that’s the kind of thing that only a certain kind of observant art could make one consider: There is a human at the root of any evil and the only way to disable it is knowing that origin. (Read the full review by Tomris Laffly.)

In the handsomely shot film that Andrew Dominik has made of the U2 frontman’s 2022 solo stage show, we watch as Bono tells the story of his life, taking us inside his ambition, his passion, his celebrity, his charity, his hypocrisy, and his demons (he’s got one of those fathers you wrestle with for your entire life). Bono is every inch a poetic showman, and he infuses the saga of U2, and their rise in the world, with an electricity that’s cathartic. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)

Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut is based on the memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch, who told of how she grew up in a sexually abusive household, and how she squirmed away from the legacy of it — through competitive swimming, through sex and drugs and other escape hatches, and ultimately through becoming a writer. Stewart presents the story as a pinpoint series of impressionistic moments that sear themselves into you. And Imogen Poots’ stunning performance captures Lidia’s hunger, and also the shattered space inside her. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)

Ari Aster’s audacious sociological Western thriller tosses liberal art-house orthodoxy to the winds. It’s set in the desert city of Eddington, New Mexico, during the COVID summer of 2020, and the first sign that it will tweak conventional wisdom is that Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), the city sheriff, refuses to wear a mask. But COVID is just the trigger. Eddington presents the big picture of an angry, conspiracy-addicted, maybe crazy new America going through the looking glass, a kind of Great Crack-Up that the film views with a poker-faced trepidatious glee. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)

Spike Lee has taken Akira Kurosawa’s “High and Low” to new highs, delivering a soul-searching genre movie that entertains while sounding the alarm about where the culture could be headed. After a kidnapping forces hip-hop mogul David King (Denzel Washington) to put his priorities into perspective, he throws down in the remake’s all-new climax. As David reclaims what he loves, we can hear Lee’s own passions: as a teacher of film, a speaker of truths and an elder statesman to the community. (Read the full review by Peter Debruge.)

The first time in ages that a mainstream Hindi-language production has felt vital, Neeraj Ghaywan’s tale of impoverished young men trying to escape their circumstances proves to be both a moving character piece, as well as a searing indictment of modern India. “Homebound” is built in the vein of a traditional Bollywood social drama, which is to say it contains broad political statements delivered practically down the lens, but its leads inject this otherwise obvious cinematic form with moving, naturalistic nuance. (Read the full review by Siddhant Adlakha.)

Like Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, the five lead characters in the dissident director’s Palme d’Or-winning film served time in prison, emerging fired up and ready to fight back. Each of these survivors swears he’d recognize the self-righteous one-legged prosecutor who tortured them, even though none of them saw the man with his own eyes. When he limps into the auto garage where Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) works, however, it sets into motion a kind of reckoning: Vahid kidnaps the man, then rounds up other survivors to confirm his identity and dispense justice. Strange as it may sound for a slow-burn scripted drama with endless driving scenes, their mordantly funny task crosses the absurdism of Samuel Beckett with one of Tarantino’s more furious revenge pictures. The characters’ backstories were directly inspired by things Panahi heard while incarcerated, suggesting that he couldn’t have written this movie without meeting like-minded people in prison. (Read the full review by Peter Debruge.)

Spiraling into surrealism as ordered lives and minds unravel, Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason’s “The Love That Remains” is an album of achingly felt, morbidly funny and increasingly haywire scenes from a marriage. While artist Anna (Saga Gardarsdottir) is ready to be separate rather than separated from her seafaring husband Magnus (Sverrir Gudnason), he doggedly maintains a presence in the house she shares with their three children, and occasionally her bed too — clinging to a semblance of domestic stability that she finds ever less stabilizing. (Review to come from Guy Lodge.)

Bringing offbeat wit and bluesy wisdom to what might be described as an anti-heist movie, Kelly Reichardt delivers a canny rejoinder to the glamorous high drama of the traditional robbery-gone-wrong plot, in which an extraordinary act gradually comes undone when exposed to nothing more malign than the everyday forces of ordinary life, and the fatal flaws of an ordinary man. The quietly fantastic film is hardly moralistic, but it is a gentle, cautionary hand-on-the-arm for those who feel so entitled: The world doesn’t owe you anything, so steal from it and it will steal from you. (Read the full review by Jessica Kiang.)

“My Father’s Shadow” pulls off a miraculous, double-edged feat with a rather simple structure. The film, written by brothers Akinola and Wale Davies and directed by the former, spans one day in the life of two young boys traveling with their father from a small village in rural Nigeria to the bustling capital city Lagos. However, as the audience is taken in by this intimate and well-observed drama, the rug gets pulled from beneath them by revealing the violence and strife that was simmering underneath. It’s a trick so devastating that it completely upends the movie, elevating it into a deeply humanist narrative. (Read the full review by Murtada Elfadl.)

In Richard Linklater’s ingenious and enchanting docudrama about the making of “Breathless,” it’s as if Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck), in the sunglasses he never takes off, had sprung to life before us in a nearly magical way. And that uncanny quality extends to the whole movie, which plunks us down in Paris in 1959, in many of the same streets and cafés and hotel rooms where “Breathless “was shot. Godard has decided that he’s basically going to make up his movie as he goes along. And this is elating to experience because of what’s holding it all together — that Godard is out to capture the lightning of reality in a bottle, revolutionizing what cinema can be. It’s a savory pleasure to be able to step into this time machine, watching Linklater mirror the formal incandescence of “Breathless” in the spontaneous bravura with which he re-creates it. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)

Seven years after “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” Bi Gan returns to Cannes with a marvelously maximalist movie of opulent ambition that is actually five or six movies, each at once playful and peculiar and part of an overarchingly melancholy elegy for the dream of 20th-century cinema. With all its extraordinarily intricate ambition, “Resurrection” will undoubtedly challenge viewers who have been trained to expect simpler structures. But for those who miss the way the movies used to act on us, it is a dazzlingly cineliterate lesson in the lost art of letting go. (Read the full review by Jessica Kiang.)

Carnaval provides a convenient cover story for nearly 100 deaths and disappearances in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s robust sense-memory immersion into the sights, sounds and suffocating climate the Brazilian director associates with 1977 Recife. It was a period of great “mischief,” although that’s too light a word to describe the everyday corruption that permeates practically every aspect of this meaty 160-minute period piece. Mendonça remembers it well, demonstrating how even the worst of times can inspire a perverse sort of nostalgia. (Read the full review of Peter Debruge.)

While not as stylistically radical as “The Worst Person in the World,” Trier’s layered family drama shares its ability to find fresh angles on sentiments you’d think that cinema would have exhausted by now. It also shares the great Renate Reinsve, unpredictable as an actor reluctant to make a film with her estranged father (Stellan Skarsgård). Gustav wrote the lead role with Nora in mind, and we sense that accepting could save their relationship, if not both of their lives. (Read the full review by Peter Debruge.)

We are all merely the playthings of a callous God. For the characters on Oliver Laxe’s extraordinarily strange and nerve-wracking journey from the middle of nowhere to the back end of beyond, that God is the unseen force that gradually thins their number, saps their spirits and forces them to consider the idea of life after hope. For the viewer, it might very well be Laxe himself, as he pummels us in ways we can’t predict, and have done little to deserve. (Read the full review by Jessica Kiang.)

Intricately braiding the lives of four generations of girls, living (if they’re not dying) through different eras on the same forbidding farmstead in northern Germany, Mascha Schilinski has constructed a haunted-house story of unique and devastating proportions. Formally rigorous but not austere, the novelistic film comprises four narrative strands, each already rife with its own enigmas, ambiguities and floating shifts in perspective; woven together in largely impressionistic order, they begin to reflect and resemble each other in complex, telling ways. (Read the full review by Guy Lodge.)

Harris Dickinson’s actorly preference for unusual independent and art-house assignments shows through in his directorial debut, a jagged, perceptive slice of life from London’s grimier sidewalks, addressing a nationwide homelessness crisis with unassuming care and candor. Centered on a single young man (Frank Dillane) ricocheting between prison, hostels and the streets, the film makes no claims to represent an entire disenfranchised demographic, but there’s resonant human texture and political feeling in its close-up individual portrait. (Read the full review by Guy Lodge.)