The Cannes-ticipation Index: 10 Movies I Can’t Wait to See This Week
It’s my first time at the world’s most historic film festival. I’m excited, I'm nervous, and I'm not sure what to do with my hands.
Welcome back to Projections, the only serious cinema newsletter on Earth where a grown man will excitedly celebrate a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 4K box set.
Today, I am preparing for my first visit to the Cannes International Film Festival, so I’ll share with you my most anticipated movies, my moviegoing strategy, and where my naivete may lead me in the next two weeks. Plus: Physical Media Corner, a new movie rec, and more.
But before we get into it, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who has jumped on board with this endeavor, especially paid subscribers. I’m going to write a little more frequently during Cannes and will experiment with format, column styles, some historical movie deep dives, and interviews. I’m also working on setting a consistent time for paid subscriber chats every week. Last Friday, we launched the first Physical Media chat so I could see what everyone has been picking up lately. In the aftermath of the High Council meeting, it was nice to see and be seen. Come join us next time. I’ll send an email.
The Cannes-ticipation Index
Before I start rattling off titles, it might be useful to understand the festival landscape in 2026. If you’ve been listening to The Big Picture this decade, you know the outsized importance Cannes now holds in the Oscar race, with the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, signalling the beginning of an 10-month frenzy to anoint Best Picture contenders. It’s all way too early, but also whets our appetite while we’re enduring summer blockbuster doldrums. Last year, two Cannes titles cracked BP—The Secret Agent and Sentimental Value—and four of the five International Feature nominees premiered in competition. But the festival is obviously significantly more than just a bellwether in a horse race.
The fall festivals—Venice, Telluride, Toronto, New York—still occupy a similar role in the season, rolling out hundreds of new movies. But as the Oscars and U.S. movie consumption experiences an increasingly international growth, it’s Cannes that feels like the most vital moment on the calendar right now, with a highly curated competition. That’s one of many reasons I wanted to go this year.
That is in part because of its legacy as the most visible launch pad for international cinema, with winners that include hallowed filmmaker figures like Lean, Welles, Clouzot, Buñuel, Visconti, Fellini, Wenders, Altman, Coppola, Kurosawa, Lynch, Tarantino, Kiarostami, and Campion. A Palme win is a moment of certification in a rare club. Not every victory has aged gracefully but there are far fewer misses on the list than Best Picture at the Academy Awards. And the bleed-through has begun—two of the past seven Palme winners went on to win Best Picture. Cannes titles have appeared in the race in seven of the past eight years.
And this takeover seems to be operating with an inverse proportion to Hollywood’s relationship to the festival—there are zero major U.S. studio titles at Cannes this year. Not even an out-of-competition premiere for a summer blockbuster like Toy Story 5. And none from A24, either. (Perhaps an aftereffect of the unfortunate premiere of Eddington last year. Good reminder not to always trust the early word out of festivals.) It’s a fascinating choice that certainly wounds the U.S. film press’s coverage, but doesn’t mean much for the quality of the films.
The competition at the festival is always one marked by ebbs and flows across the two weeks—every year, you will hear critics grouse about the lineup in the lead-up, during the proceedings, and after its conclusion. But you will also hear impassioned (often retroactive) defenses of the slate. As with anything film culture, it’s a present tense doom in persistent conflict with the nostalgic afterglow. I’m eager to go through the same cycle myself. But from where I sit, this is a damned exciting selection of movies. Let’s talk about ’em.
