This year Tom Cruise will not be taking to the skies over Cannes Film Festival. There’ll be no octogenarian men cracking their whips as hapless Nazis fall about the place screeching. But look beyond the headlines on a dismaying lack of the old Hollywood razzle-dazzle on this year’s Croisette, and you’ll find an embarrassment of riches.

Slimming down the ridiculously stacked rollcall for Cannes’ 2026 edition to a bitesized list is a thankless task, so we’ll take just a second here to acknowledge the omission of new work from Cristian Mungiu (Fjord), Pedro Almodóvar (Bitter Christmas), Asghar Farhadi (Parallel Tales) and Ira Sachs (The Man I Love – a musical, no less!) before cracking on with the job, shall we? Park Chan-wook heads up the main competition jury this year; with the No Other Choice auteur in charge you would think fortune will favour the bold for anyone dreaming of laying their paws on the Palme D’Or.

Coward (Lukas Dhont)

Thirty-four-year-old Dhont is already on a roll at Cannes, with his first two features to date, Girl and Close, taking home the Camera D’Or and Grand Prix respectively. Coward puts the Belgian director in contention for the biggest prize of them all, the Palme D’Or, and is described as a period drama about two men who stage a theatrical revue while fighting in the trenches of World War I. With talk of military drafts and national service now making headlines in Europe and abroad, it should make for a timely return from Dhont, working once again with regular screenwriter Angelo Tijssens and cinematographer Frank van de Eeden.

Fatherland (Paweł Pawlikowski)

Pawlikowski cut his teeth as a filmmaker in the UK but really hit his stride with the Polish-language Ida (2013) and Cold War (2018), which distilled whole swathes of European history into beautifully austere, psychologically rich character studies. Since then it’s all gone a bit quiet, a planned desert-island drama starring Joaquin Phoenix scuppered by the Sag-Aftra strikes just as filming was due to begin, so excitement is understandably high for Fatherland, starring Sandra Hüller as Erika Mann, who takes a trip through the newly divided Germany with her dad, the author Thomas Mann, as the dust still settles on the Second World War.

Gentle Monster (Marie Kreutzer)

Marie Kreutzer made her bow at Cannes in 2022 with the waspishly funny Corsage, only to find her film mired in scandal when one of its stars, Florian Teichmeister, was convicted for possession of child pornography the following year. The case led to new legislation being passed by the Austrian government and clearly left its mark on Kreutzer, who reportedly channelled the episode into the writing of her new film, Gentle Monster, about two women (Léa Seydoux and Jella Haase) who discover dark truths about the men in their lives.

Hope (Na Hong-jin)

Genre cinema only rarely gets its flowers in the main competition at Cannes, though the likes of Julia Ducournau (Titane) and Coralie Fargeat (The Substance) have been doing their best to change all that in recent years. Following in their footsteps is Na Hong-jin, whose last film, The Wailing, was a work of rug-pulling horror genius to rank with the best of Bong Joon Ho’s work. Squid Game star Jung Ho-yeon leads a Korean cast of principals (with support from Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander and Taylor Russell) in the story of a terrifying series of events that transpire in a village on the edge of Korea’s heavily fortified Demilitarised Zone.

Butterfly Jam (Kantemir Balagov)

Russian director Balogov left an indelible impression with Beanpole, a bleak but transfixing second film about lives upended in the aftermath of World War II. Relocating to the US with his home country’s invasion of Ukraine, his new film tells the story of a Russian migrant in New Jersey trying to be a wrestler while working in his father’s Circassian restaurant, and boasts a terrific cast including Barry Keoghan Riley Keough, Harry Melling and Monica Bellucci.

Her Private Hell (Nicolas Winding Refn)

Refn is a polarising presence but a first new film in ten years from the Danish director (Drive, The Neon Demon) brings much-needed glam to the Croisette in a year that’s unusually light on Hollywood spectacle. With an easy-on-the-eye cast including Sophie Thatcher, Charles Melton, Havana Rose Liu and Diego Calva, the film concerns “a strange mist [that] engulfs a futuristic metropolis and unleashes an elusive deadly presence” – expect the customary lashings of style and ultraviolence from this one.

Club Kid (Jordan Firstman)

Firstman’s had a weird CV to date – he was a writer on Alia Shawkat’s millennial conspiracy comedy Search Party, a star of Sebastian Silva’s wild X-rated comedy Rotting in the Sun, and an ensemble cast member in Rachel Sennott’s I Love LA from last year. Now he’s back with a first feature about a washed-up party promoter forced to take care of the son he never had, screening as part of the festival’s experimental Un Certain Regard strand. Diego Calva and Cara Delevingne are among the cast.

Sheep in the Box (Hirozaku Kore-eda)

Kore-eda won the Palme D’Or in 2018 for Shoplifters; here he reteams with his star from Our Little Sister, Haruka Ayase, on the story of a couple who welcome a humanoid infant into their home following the death of their child. It’s a setup with strong echoes of Kazuho Ishiguro’s novel, Klara in the Sun, now being made into a movie by Taika Waititi, so here’s hoping for a novel slant on the premise, which brings a leading light of humanist cinema squarely into the realms of the post-human.

Clarissa (Arie and Chuko Esiri) 

Virginia Woolf’s classic novel Mrs Dalloway gets a modern reimagining with Clarissa, an ambitious-sounding first feature from brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri. Moving the action to present-day Lagos, the film stars Sophie Okonedo as our upper-class protagonist, recalling episodes from her life while preparing for a party. Bridgerton’s India Amarteifio plays the young Clarissa, while Ayo Edebiri – still crying out for a role to sink her teeth into after her sterling work on The Bear – plays the closeted love interest.

All of a Sudden (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)

Making the jump to foreign-language films can be a risky endeavour for even the most established auteurs, so let’s hope Ryusuke Hamaguchi can continue his golden run with All of a Sudden, a drama about a nursing home director (Virginie Efra) who befriends a terminally ill playwright (Mari Morisaki). Loosely based on the real-life correspondence between late Japanese philosopher Makiko Miyano and anthropologist Maho Isono, the film was reportedly shot in pockets of Paris only rarely glimpsed on screen and clocks in at a reported three-and-a-quarter hours – not even close to a record for Hamaguchi, in case you were wondering.