The latest edition of the Cannes Film Festival was a return to basics in ways both intentional and forced. One of the strongest films in any section was an old B Western called Red Canyon, a 1949 action film directed by George Sherman and presented by Quentin Tarantino in the Cannes Classics strand. The old-fashioned genre of the Western was key for a few new films in competition, including Ari Aster’s New Mexico–set film Eddington, about life in May 2020, and Oliver Laxe’s Sirât. In the plot’s central search for a missing daughter, the Laxe film was a bass-booming rave version of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), transposed to a dance subculture of European travelers in the Moroccan desert instead of the Comanche tribe in Monument Valley.
On the last day of the festival, hours before Laxe’s film won the Prix du Jury, the power went out during a repeat screening of Sirât. The entire city of Cannes and neighboring areas were without electricity for over five hours. Shops were closed, market stalls and restaurants were accepting cash only, and people ate oysters on beds of melting ice or ordered half-liquid gelato. There was a confused and isolated feeling in the city, running to vaguely apocalyptic on the periphery, depending on what nihilistic films you had watched. The winds were still, so there were rumors that the power outage was deliberate. (This was proved correct when an anarchist group took credit for the act in protest of “a world that will not stop bombing, extracting, hoarding, ravaging” and committing other egregious acts.) In contrast, the power disruption affected the screening of Sirât and other films for less than thirty minutes: organizers immediately turned on high-powered emergency generators and the show went on. Movies and espresso machines churned inside the Palais des Festivals while surrounding life was in temporary chaos. That was a similar feeling in some of the best films of the festival. These singular artistic visions had equally strong political messages pushing in at the edges of the frame: Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, Harris Dickinson’s Urchin, and Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind.
In press notes for her new film, Reichardt described the current political reality as a major inspiration for her Vietnam War–era story of a fictional former art student’s museum heist in 1970 Massachusetts. “Horrors peek into your world, but then you go on with your day. It’s hanging over all of our heads. There’s a collective sorrow we’re all living with,” she stated. The film’s lead character, D. B. Mooney (Josh O’Connor), ignores war protesters and dodges draft-dodgers while concentrating on his simple yet flawed plan to steal a few paintings by Arthur Dove. He then endangers friends and family, including his young sons and wife (Alana Haim), when he goes on the lam. This mediocre man who feels entitled to success seems as motivated by using theft as a shortcut to notoriety as by hocking art for cash. With influencers crowding the Cannes red carpet in 2025 in place of the protesters who disrupted the festival in 1968, the themes of Reichardt’s masterpiece about a self-deluded flop felt all too relevant.
Another film about the lure of putting on blinders in order to pursue everyday life was Panahi’s Palme d’Or–winning It Was Just an Accident. The accident in question happens in Iran, where a family car containing a young girl, her father (Ebrahim Azizi), and her very pregnant mother run over a dog while taking a rare road trip. When they pull into a garage for emergency repairs to the car, the sound of the father’s walk—he has an artificial leg—arouses painful memories of political imprisonment in one of the garage workers, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), who is convinced that his customer was a notorious torturer nicknamed “Eghbal.” Learning where Eghbal lives, Vahid impulsively kidnaps him yet shies away from killing him, even though he feels retribution would be fair, when the father denies being Eghbal. Uncertain, Vahid asks several other former political prisoners to confirm his identification. As a photographer, a bride, and a loose cannon join this shaggy crew of mostly good people who cannot resist getting revenge, a question emerges of the nature of justice. Should they or would they become as bad as their torturer? Should they blow up their current lives while righting the wrongs of the man who destroyed their earlier lives? Would violence lead to more violence, or would taking the high road let bad people continue to do harm? The film addresses these themes with formal rigor. Sound, framing (often within a vehicle), structure, and character are all streamlined, differentiating It Was Just an Accident from fascinating but looser competitors.
The film feels personal, since Panahi himself endured years of imprisonment, travel bans, and being forced to film in secret after having been found guilty of “propaganda against the system” for participating in protests and making films critical of the Iranian government. While several of his films have screened in Cannes over the last two decades, this year was the first time he was able to attend the festival in person since 2003. When the president of the Cannes jury, Juliette Binoche, announced that Panahi had won the top prize, the Palme d’Or, he took a minute to take it in before going onstage to accept.
A first-time filmmaker at Cannes but not a first-time attendee, Dickinson screened his directorial debut, Urchin, in the festival’s Un Certain Regard section. Dickinson had previously been at the festival for acting in Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or–winning film Triangle of Sadness in 2022. Festival director Thierry Frémaux asked Dickinson about that film when the two were introducing Urchin from the stage of the Théâtre Claude Debussy. This seemed to confuse Dickinson, who was clearly there as a director. If the film is any indication, he may consider himself a director first.
Dickinson appears in a supporting role but doesn’t star. Instead, Frank Dillane plays Mike, a man who has spent years sleeping rough on East London streets. After emerging from jail newly clean of drugs, Mike tries to maintain a job and a bed with the support of social services, not an easy task for someone with no real family or savings and little community. In one of cinema’s most accurate depictions of laboring in dead-end jobs, Frank and his coworkers fill the boredom and emptiness of hospitality or sanitation work by gabbing endlessly about sex, politics, and the meaning of life. They seem to try to escape drudgery mainly through conversation, though occasionally also through alcohol, drugs, or karaoke. Mike is usually gentle and searching. His internal life is not immediately accessible to the audience, but is shown at a polite distance through gorgeous abstract scenes and the audio of his self-help books. He only really becomes distraught, in a high-strung and heartbreaking way, when a stranger callously tosses liquid in a trash bin that Mike will have to clean up.
A stereotype about actors-turned-directors is that they excel at working with actors, and the performances are strong here (especially those by Dickinson as Mike’s frenemy and Shonagh Marie as one of Mike’s coworkers). Yet the strengths of Dickinson’s debut are the writing and the visual imagination. His influences are obvious, from Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993) to Josh and Benny Safdie’s Uncut Gems (2019). But when the film is not emulating the styles of others, Dickinson’s own style emerges as genuinely warm, witty, weird, and class-conscious in a particular and accurate way that few British films currently attain.
In all three of these Cannes highlights, the basic elements of a film’s sound and image are honed to create a very specific world, more dreamy than realistic yet with more to say about life and politics than many films with styles that could be described as realist. The production design, natural-light cinematography, and ’70s-style brown palette of The Mastermind create a world recalling 1970s American classics such as Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces (1970), with Jack Nicholson. That era was defined by charismatic antiheroes, though, and these films are about charming buffoons. Their lead characters are people who mean well but can’t get it right—can’t quite connect with the world around them.
