Cannes 2025: Movie Scorecard

(Photo by Memento Distribution. IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT.)

Check out every movie that got enough reviews for a Tomatometer at the 2025 Cannes film fest, including Palme d’Or winner It Was Just An Accident, from director Jafar Panahi.

And for more, see our guide to the 10 most-hyped movies playing (including Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water, Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, Ari Aster’s Eddington, Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love, Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, Ethan Coen’s Honey Don’t!), along with our daily recap Ketchup.

“If you’re down for a trip, Sirat is The Wages of Fear meets The Vanishing on shrooms; startlingly original, jarringly hilarious and deeply disturbing.”
– John Bleasdale, Time Out 

“A layered masterpiece that The Worst Person in the World director Joachim Trier has been working toward for his entire career.”
— David Ehrlich, IndieWire 

“As for Harris Dickinson, it’s only mildly galling to see how bloody good he is at everything he turns his mind to… yet deftly refuting any vanity project allegations by virtue of creating a phenomenally impressive debut feature.”
– Hannah Strong, Little White Lies

“Lighton has made a truly provocative anti-romance that’s funny, honest, strangely touching. It’s an exceptional balance act that makes Pillion the unlikeliest crowd-pleaser.”
– Zhuo-Ning Su, The Film Stage

“Through this moral exercise, Panahi lays bare a cynical cycle of violence that continues to consume Iran and its people while also giving himself the outlet to express his rage and fury in ways he cannot outside the cinematic art form.”
– Matt Neglia, Next Best Picture

“The Davies brothers have crafted a father of mythic proportions… Dìrísù, in a revelatory performance that should put him at the top of casting lists, grounds that fantasy with a realistically intense but quiet performance.”
– Murtada Elfadl, Variety 


“A sweat-saturated riot of a movie: a dual-timeline thriller powered by the kind of anarchic, erratic energy that you would expect to find at the end of a two day bender.“
–Wendy Ide, Screen International

“This is a film that will travel widely — not just because of the Baker stamp of approval. There’s engagement in its energy, its sense of humour, its simmering feminist anger and the standout performances of three fine leads.”
–Lee Marshall, Screen International

“So much of what A Useful Ghost is doing feels like it shouldn’t work, but that only makes it all the more exciting to see how it does.”
– Chase Hutchinson, The Wrap

“Like reading a slim paperback classic by Camus or Kafka or Orwell, where the pages are spotted with age, but the insights remain painfully, vividly fresh.”
– Jessica Kiang, Variety

“Cinema is too small a word for what this sprawling yet intimate epic achieves in its ethereal, unnerving brilliance; forget Cannes, forget the Competition, forget the whole year, even — Sound of Falling is an all-timer.”
– Damon Wise, Deadline Hollywood Daily 

“It’s a minor work for the director and its emotional heft feels softer than usual, but even his lesser films can be compelling, and Beer is never less than transfixing.”
– David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

“Reichardt has made a genre picture that peels away all the usual tropes to focus on character, on human failings and on the reality that even someone from a comfortable middle-class background can be worn down by struggle and reach for unwise solutions.”
— David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter 

“Unabashedly epic, fearlessly funny, and proudly Black, Highest 2 Lowest might derive from a Japanese filmmaker. But its soul clearly resides in Lee.”
– Robert Daniels, RogerEbert.com

“The Chronology of Water isn’t some  pretty good, prosaic, actor-directs-actors-how-to-read-the-script thing. It’s far more artful and captivating than that. .”
– Owen Gleiberman, Variety

“The great Léa Drucker is — this year — proving that she can play restrained and responsible adults… As Stéphanie, she convinces as a focused and intelligent professional with an easy charm that papers over the script’s disinterest in her inner life.”
– Sophie Monks Kaufman, indieWire (edited) 

“A beautiful, tender, and heartaching coming-of-age story, and a fitting tribute to Cantet… featuring a stunning breakout performance from Eloy Pohu.”
– Dallas King, Flick Feast 

“Jai Courtney is a rip-roaring force of nature in Dangerous Animals.”
– Kristy Puchko, Mashable

“Ramsay’s jumble of pictures and sound is bound together by Lawrence’s confident, fearless gravity. It’s quite something to behold: a comedic performance that manages convincing notes of devastation, or a dramatic turn that is also screamingly funny.”
– Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair 

“With wide eyes and trembling chin, Izadyar vibrates with emotion, leaning into the character’s rock-bottom despair with a ferocious intensity that never tilts so far into melodrama that it becomes too much.”
-Dan Bayer, Next Best Picture

“It’s a good natured, intelligent effort for which Godard himself, were he still alive, would undoubtedly have ripped Linklater a new one.”
– Peter Bradshaw, Guardian

“Using a bold animated style, the film depicts the complex nature of activism: its contradictions, its goodness, the desperate need to embrace it, and the importance of understanding its limits.” [Full Review in Spanish]
– Ricardo Gallegos, La Estatuilla

“While this picture lacks the guileless immediacy of the child’s-eye view of her first two films, Romeria demonstrates once again that Simon has a rare gift for capturing the unpredictable, mercurial beast that is the family.”
– Wendy Ide, Screen International

“None of this would work at all if it weren’t pinned to the unselfconscious gaze of Fuki (delightful newcomer Yui Suzuki), 11 years old and already an original.”
– Jessica Kiang, Variety 

“There’s a deliciously overripe, almost campy quality to much of “Private Life” that’s expertly balanced by the intense focus of Foster’s performance.”
-Peter Debruge, Variety

“The film dazzles with its trompe-l’oeil-like worldbuilding, which inhabits the fairy tale reality of Anderson’s mind without ever giving over to the wayward indulgence of dream logic.”
– David Jenkins, Little White Lies 

“Vibrantly felt yet impressively controlled — and blessed with a stone-cold stunner of a central performance — The Little Sister is indeed an instant classic of the genre, as moving in its humanism as it is sexy.”
– Joe Frosch, The Hollywood Reporter 


“It’s bombastic, extravagant and melodramatic at times – but I don’t use those words as pejoratives, because in the hands of Bono and Dominik, it’s also pretty glorious…”
Steve Pond, TheWrap 

“The History of Sound is as plaintive and lilting as a piano note in minor key, never wallowing in its own misery but still keen to explore the psychic sensations, afterglow, and wreckage of a meaningful connection.”
– Ryan Lattanzio, IndieWire

“This film, which contrasts dark experiences in prison with bright summer adventures, seeks – and only sometimes succeeds – to sustain a permanent energy.” [Full review in Spanish]
– Diego Batlle, Ostrocines.com

“Without ceremony or mercy, Eddington rips the Band-Aid off, and not everyone is going to want to look at, or think about, what’s there underneath it.”
– Damon Wise, Deadline Hollywood Daily 

“At a time when movies seem divided between commercial fare and works made strictly for the arthouse, Saleh occupies an intriguing middle ground here, directing a crime story that keeps us engaged while saying plenty about the world we live in.”
– Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter 

“Anyone with even a passing knowledge of Orwell may not be surprised by the conclusions Peck draws in “Orwell: 2+2=5,” but he uses Big Brother’s methods against him, painting his message in big letters for all to see.”
— Philip Bagnall, Next Best Picture

“It’s a trifle, and not even fully successful on its own small-bauble terms. But oh, is it ever meant to bathe you in a warm retro glow.”
– Owen Gleiberman, Variety 


“It’s a little predictable, a little bizarre, a little funny, and very sad, but it’s also an ambitious swing at what movies can still be, a message and an idea that we expect will lead both the director and writer into quite fruitful new chapters.”
– Kate Erbland, indieWire