The most shocking disappointment was the great Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi made this film called "Parallel Tales." It's a French film. You know, it stars Isabelle Huppert and Virginie Efira, who is in another film here, Vincent Cassel. And it just felt like this kind of silly, soapy movie about these two apartments across the street from each other in Paris, coming from this filmmaker who has made, I think, some of the great films of this millennium, these, like, incredibly delicately made, incisive, domestic dramas. To watch him make this movie that I found really silly was just pretty crushing.
Chan-Wook took it as a chance to remind everyone that while he's won the Grand Prix, Best Director, and the Jury Prize, he's never won a Palme d'Or. "I didn't want to give the Palme d'Or to any of the films because it's an award that I've never gotten," he said, before leaving everyone with one final joke. "But I had no other choice."
“My decisions aren't based on how many minutes my character will be on screen; it's about being part of something, wanting to be part of something that matters to you,” the Oscar-winning Spanish actor said. “Films can't change the world, but in some cases they can help make things better,” she added, especially for young people. “What you experience can sometimes have a greater impact when you're sitting in a cinema for two and a half hours ... than anything you might study over three years at school.”
The 2026 Cannes Film Festival starts Tuesday, May 12th, running through May 24th. The Ebert team returns this year with coverage of all of the major films in review and video form. In this video dispatch, Scott Dummler interviews correspondent Marya E. Gates about her three favorite films from the festival, and we get a Cannes flashback to 2019, when Chaz encountered a street magician on the festival grounds.
We were accompanied by Vietnamese American filmmaker Nguyen, whose film How to Ride a Bike follows a Vietnamese dad who never learned to ride a bike but, after a failed attempt to teach his son to do so, begins learning in secret, and Amer, the Palestinian American comedian, writer, and director behind on Netflix, whose new project Return to Sender follows a Palestinian stand-up and refugee who experiences progressively senseless immigration restrictions while on a global tour.
Miles Teller earned rave reviews out of the gate for his debut performance in "Rabbit Hole," when he was signed swiftly by CAA, followed by "Whiplash" and "The Spectacular Now." He has worked steadily ever since, with everything from auteur fare like "Whiplash" and studio franchises such as "Divergent" and "The Fantastic Four" to his name. Holding his own opposite Tom Cruise in the blockbuster "Top Gun: Maverick" pushed him into the limelight, but he was still playing Rooster, the son of radar intercept officer Nick "Goose" Bradshaw (Anthony Edwards).
However, what surprised me the most were two questions that kept resurfacing in conversations: "Is Cannes the same as it's been?" and "Are you going to Cannes Lions?" At first I thought these were variations on classic Cannes small talk ("How long are you here?"), but finally realized that they were different expressions of the same idea. One question is about decline and the other is about emergence, but both are really asking the same thing: Where is the center of gravity in storytelling moving?
There's no script. There's no filters. Just queer news, quick and dirty. This week, Graham Gremore, Cameron Scheetz, Henry Giardina, and John Halbach dive into the generational drama rocking the community after an elder lesbian says a younger gay man disrespected her at a Pride planning meeting.
However, that one stalled out, not because of the whole high-end call girl thing, but because by 2022, Millennium Films' Jeffrey Greenstein said "that project was always trying to find a way to justify why we'd have a woman team."
His films have been hailed as damning allegories of the Russian population's apathy in the face of state oppression. Yet when director Andrey Zvyagintsev learned of his country's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he too was paralysed, and literally so. A severe infection with Covid-19 had left the film-maker stranded at a clinic in Hanover, Germany, struggling to breathe with 90% lung damage and unable to move or feel his limbs for several months.
