The 7 movies at Cannes Film Festival 2025 I’m most excited for
The festival is especially stacked with starry names and buzzy films this year.
The 2025 Cannes Film Festival officially opens on Tuesday, and this year’s edition promises to be as bold and star-studded as ever – and I cannot wait.
From Tom Cruise debuting Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning on the Croisette to returns for the likes of filmmakers Wes Anderson, Spike Lee and horror auteur Julia Ducournau – and a first-time appearance for Ari Aster – there’s lots of buzzy titles to watch.
We’re talking Highest 2 Lowest, Eddington, Die, My Love and The Phoenician Scheme, as well as three major Hollywood actors making their directorial debuts with Scarlett Johansson’s Eleanor the Great, Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water and Harris Dickinson’s Urchin.
Other stars opening movies include Pedro Pascal and Emma Stone, Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Lawrence and Josh O’Connor and Paul Mescal – as well as A$AP Rocky.
Cannes has also never seemed so well positioned in terms of being an awards season tastemaker – last year, it was Cannes where Sean Baker opted to roll out eventual best picture winner Anora and Demi Moore launched an incredible comeback via Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance.
I already know there won’t be enough time to see everything I want to, but, after much agonising, here are the seven films I’m most excited for at Cannes 2025.
Eddington Director Ari Aster is making his Cannes debut with the intriguing Eddington, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal (pictured) (Picture: A24 via AP)Directed by Ari Aster, the filmmaker behind Midsommar and Hereditary, Eddington boasts a starry cast featuring Pascal, Joaquin Phoenix, Stone and Austin Butler.
Billed as a contemporary Western, this was almost Aster’s debut feature, but he came back to it later and updated it, setting it in May 2020 at the height of the Covid pandemic.
The story concerns Phoenix’s sheriff, who faces off against Pascal’s mayor running for re-election and apparently ‘sparks a powder keg, as neighbour is pitted against neighbour’ in their New Mexico town.
Another A24 film for Aster – now seen as a hallmark for quality movie-making – the trailer has given very little away with its tease of news snippets on social media offering mere glimpses at its characters. As with some of the best experiences at Cannes, that means I’m going in with very little prior knowledge.
I truly don’t know what a Western about Covid will be like, but I’m intrigued to find out!
The Phoenician Scheme
