Film Critic Harlan Jacobson Takes a Pre-Peek at the 78th Int’l Festival du Film

The official 78th Cannes Film Festival poster is actually two: Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant from both sides now of the final, elegant shot in Claude Lelouch’s 1966 now classic A Man And A Woman / Un homme et une femme

By Harlan Jacobson – May 9, 2025

Broadcast on WBGO, May 10, 2025

WBGO: If the 77th Cannes Film Festival accomplished nothing else, it let Hollywood know it has the power to be a kingmaker at the Oscars. The lineup on the Riviera last May went all the way to the Oscars this March with 31 Oscar nominations and 9 wins, including Sean Baker’s Anora which won Best Picture, Director, Actress, Original Screenplay and Editing.
The 78th Cannes Film Festival opens next Tuesday night, the 13th, through Saturday the 24th and the awarding of the Palmes D’Or. Our film critic Harlan Jacobson will be reporting in. What are you looking forward to this year, Harlan?

HJ: Hope springs eternal, my friend, as the Cannes lineup this year is loaded with all sorts of goodies I’m excited to see. And one or two where I’m dreading the slog.

First, from the Cotton Candy Dept at Cannes:

• Tom Cruise long ago transferred out of the Serious Actor Wannabe Dept to Beloved Stunt Man who can get through his lines okay. He’s back as Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible-The Final Reckoning in a showdown between Athleticism and Artificial Intelligence. I’m not sure which side I’m going to take. When he was here in 2022 with Top Gun 2, the French Navy flew jets overhead, he received a special Golden Palme, they set off fireworks. And then he came back the next year with the Mission Impossible The One Before This One, The Final Reckoning—Ha! I’ll believe that when I don’t see the next one back here in two years. Paramount jumps this installment from Cannes into a theatre near you, wherever you are, May 23.

I’m hot to see the Special Screenings of

• A Magnificent Life, about one of my favorite storytellers, Marcel Pagnol, of 20th Century Marseille, by The Triplets of Belleville director, Sylvain Chomet.
• The late addition of Six Billion Dollar Man, Eugene Jarecki’s doc about Julian Assange, was all set for Sundance but called back at the last minute into edit after Assange broke out.
• Maybe also Highest 2 Lowest, for the reteaming of Denzel Washington with Spike Lee, in a New York City thriller about a record producer in a jam, based off the 1963 Akira Kurosawa film, High and Low. Plus, it’s got Jeffrey Wright and a guy named Ice Spice.

Jennifer Lawrence  – Die My Love

The Competition – 22 films – lines up with:

• Eddington, with Sheriff Joaquin Phoenix and small-town New Mexico Mayor Pedro Pascal squaring off against each other in the Covid era.
• The Young Mother’s Home, by the Belgian Dardennes brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, who’ve won Cannes twice with their cutting-edge social dramas, this one following five mothers in a shelter.
• Jennifer Lawrence plays a mom in rural France in a post-partum tailspin-cum-thriller in Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love, co-starring with-it-guys Robert Pattinson and Lakeith Stanfield.
• That Worst Person in the World woman, Renate Reinsve, who won best actress in Cannes for that film in the Covid festival of July ‘21, and was nominated for an Oscar, returns to work with Norwegian Director Joachim Trier in Sentimental Value, a story about three adult children convening after their father has died. By the way you can see her in the film Armand, courtesy of Music Box Films out of Chicago, when it opens in a theater near you this month.
• The History of Sound. South African director Oliver Hermanus (Living) pairs Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor in the story of two young guys recording the words of American soldiers from the trenches of WWI. Then they fall – in inconvenient love.
• Nouvelle vague, or New Wave, by Austin-based Richard Linklater, (of Before Midnight, Sunset and Sunrise fame) conjures when Jean-Luc Godard made the leap from film critic to director of the film firmament-shaking A bout de souffle, Breathless, in 1960. Filming in Paris, in French, and Black and White, Linklater is taking a big risk in front of the Cannes guardians of cinema – assembled from the four corners of the earth — and whom you refer to indelicately as film nerds. Can’t wait.

Nouvelle Vague – Directed by Richard Linklater

Not looking forward, I must confess, to:

• The Phoenician Scheme by Cannes favorite Wes Anderson, who sent me into insulin shock with Asteroid City here in 2023, and before that The French Dispatch in’21.
  clip: WATCH VIDEO (from 1:19 – 1: 47).
  This one, written with Roman Coppola, has Benicio del Toro, Tom Hanks, Michael Cera, Bryan Cranston, a lot of people I love including Scarlett Johansson. I’ll see here, and maybe you there when Focus releases it in a couple weeks Stateside.
• Plus 15 more trying for the Palme D’Or

There are First Films by American actresses I am looking forward to: The Chronology of Water, a 5-year passion project by Kristen Stewart, and Eleanor the Great by Scarlett Johansson.
And films by directors I’ve loved like Orwell by doc maker Raoul Peck, The Disappearance of Josef Mengele by Kirill Serebrennikov, It Was Just An Accident by Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who’s spent years under house arrest there, and Honey Don’t by Ethan Coen, with Margaret Qualley as a lady investigator named Honey O’Donahue somewhere out in Podunk.

The beauty of going to Cannes –where I’ve spent about a year and a half of my life — is what will shake out that I never saw coming.

And I’m HJ pas sur la plage / not on the beach for WBGO in Cannes
WBGO: Check back with more from Harlan in Cannes 2025 right here on WBGO, at wbgo.org and at talkcinema.com