Falling palm trees and a faltering Palme d’Or director: how Cannes 2025 went – and who will win

Cannes this year had a lot to live up to after last year’s award-winners, headline-grabbers and social media meltdowners Anora, The Substance and Emilia Pérez. It makes reading the signs now that bit more difficult: the bizarre event on the Croisette boulevard this year was a palm tree falling over. If it happened in a film, the metaphor would be unbearable.

Whether 2025’s Cannes movies are going to spark a new burst of overwhelming excitement remains to be seen, though this year’s vintage feels good – often excellent, although even the biggest names can get it wrong: former Palme d’Or winner Julia Ducournau presented an incoherent drama called Alpha.

This was a Cannes competition whose great movies were about political cruelty and tyranny. Jafar Panahi’s A Simple Accident was about a fortuitous event that unearthed horrifying memories in Iran. Kleber Mendonça Filho’s glorious, sprawling, Elmore Leonard-esque film from Brazil, The Secret Agent was about the 1970s dictatorship – interestingly, both films showed petty officials taking bribes. Filho’s wretched cops are bought off with some cigarettes – Panahi’s crooked security guards carry a debit card reader so they can take contactless payments. But for sheer existential grandeur of evil nothing could touch Sergei Loznitsa’s Two Prosecutors – about the Stalin 30s, with its Dostoyevskian and Kafkaesque moments of despair.

And to go with these views of the patriarchy, there were daddy issues. Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value showed Stellan Skarsgård being insufferable with his daughters – the preening Egyptian movie star played by Fares Fares in Eagles of the Republic infuriates his son, and Josh O’Connor’s hapless art thief in Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind is a very neglectful dad. And in the Dardenne brothers’ compassionate and poignant movie Jeunes Mères, about a care facility for teenage mothers, the fathers were conspicuous by their absence.