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When the competition program for the 78th Cannes Film Festival was unveiled a few weeks ago, I was not the only one who predicted that Iranian director Jafar Panahi would win the Palme d’Or, the festival’s highest award, for his new film, It Was Just an Accident. After seeing the film in Cannes last week, I was more certain than ever. Over the past twenty years, Panahi, like many of his compatriots and fellow artists, has been subjected to constant harassment by the Iranian government: detained, imprisoned, placed under house arrest, banned from leaving the country, and banned from making films. He has circumvented this last restriction many times, with extraordinary courage and ingenuity. Today, living in Tehran, he is a free man, an independent artist, and, yes, a Palme d’Or winner; He was in Cannes to receive his prize on Saturday night at one of the most exciting and moving closing ceremonies I have ever seen.
Panahi’s well-deserved triumph capped one of the festival’s strongest editions in years. You may have noticed the diversity of the selection, reflected in the wide range of awards handed out by the competition jury, chaired by actress Juliette Binoche. Ranking all the films in the competition from best to worst has become something of a tradition in recent years, and I’ve never had as much difficulty with the task as I do now. Establishing an order of preference imposes a useful discipline, as it encourages immediate response; at the same time, it can feel both arbitrary and temporary. I look forward to seeing many of these films again if and when they play at other festivals and/or in U.S. theaters in the coming months, and to learning about them that I may have missed the first time around.
Below are the twenty-two films in competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, ranked from greatest to most disappointing:
1. “Sirat”
The film opens with a crowd walking through the Moroccan desert – a rave at the end of the earth, but also, as rumors of a deadly global conflict reach us, perhaps at the end of the world as we know it. This pre-apocalyptic desert odyssey – the work of French-Spanish director Oliver Laschet, who won the third-place jury prize at the festival – has produced the competition’s most sustained, enveloping contact thrill. It yanks you out of your seat with a powerful sound sequence, then quickly snaps you back to the quaking tragedy itself. The title, in Muslim eschatology, refers to the narrow bridge between Heaven and Hell, which is appropriate, as Laschet’s film is as much a nightmarish experience as it is a thrilling one – a relentless ordeal that is nonetheless underpinned by extraordinary love and tenderness. Laschet’s astonishingly physical direction has already drawn comparisons to The Wages of Fear and Sorcerer; Whether or not the film compares to them, I was completely and utterly bewitched.
2. “It was just an accident.”
Panahi’s Palme d’Or winner’s plot – a group of people packed into a rickety van, arguing over where to go and what to do – might seem at first glance like a comedy about a dysfunctional family. But while it’s full of farcical elements and contains a caustic vein of social criticism, the deftly tonal film soon reveals itself as a powerful moral thriller about the uncertainty of truth, the abuses of the Iranian regime, the effects of physical and psychological torture, and the choice between revenge and mercy. It builds to a startlingly cathartic sequence, unleashing fury and horror in a single take that leaves you genuinely shaken – and thinking of Panahi himself, the great dissident director who once again (or, I hope, not for the last time) turned a life’s struggle into galvanizing art.
3. “Resurrection”
Thirty-five-year-old Chinese director Bi Gan is one of cinema’s most extraordinary magicians. In his first two features, Kaili Blues (2016) and Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2019), he delivered dazzling feats of craftsmanship behind the camera, with languidly enveloping, meticulously staged tracking shots that felt like magic tricks you could live in. Another of those one-off marvels came in Bi’s transcendent third feature, Resurrection, but overall the film—which won Binoche’s Special Jury Prize—is an entirely strange, more fluid marvel than its predecessors. Starring a playfully shifting Jackson Yee and a sublime Shu Qi, it takes us on a multipart odyssey through a century of cinema history. Along the way, it echoes Blade Runner and Holy Motors; pays tribute to the Lumiere brothers, F.V.
Sourse: newyorker.com
