All of a Sudden, the Glories of Cannes Are Upon Us
Key takeaways
- Lee Chang-dong’s magnificently unsettling psychological chiller, “Burning,” failed to ignite the excitement of the 2018 jury.
- Del Toro’s film, the last one to début in the 2006 competition, was the first one unveiled at this year’s festival, in a lustrous new 4K restoration.
- A twentieth-anniversary revival of “Pan’s Labyrinth” felt pointed in another respect, too: as a measure of the gap between what Cannes used to be and what, for some disappointed observers, it now is.
Paper Tiger, 2026.Photograph courtesy Cannes Film Festival Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story Attend the Cannes Film Festival long enough, and you will grow wearily accustomed to the reality that some of the best films to première there are routinely overlooked for prizes. Lee Chang-dong’s magnificently unsettling psychological chiller, “Burning,” failed to ignite the excitement of the 2018 jury. The tragicomic glories of Maren Ade’s “Toni Erdmann,” from 2016, were just as inexplicably unrewarded. Jurors shut out David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence,” in 2005; Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “Flowers of Shanghai,” in 1998; Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Three Colors: Red,” in 1994; Martin Scorsese’s “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” in 1975; and—the tradition goes way back—Vittorio De Sica’s “Umberto D.,” in 1952. At the 2006 festival, the first edition of Cannes I ever attended, Guillermo del Toro’s magnificent “Pan’s Labyrinth” drew rapturous acclaim but left the competition empty-handed.
Del Toro’s film, the last one to début in the 2006 competition, was the first one unveiled at this year’s festival, in a lustrous new 4K restoration. The movie, set in Spain in 1944, is both an intoxicating work of fantasy and a grim parable of political rebellion, and its insights into the cruelties and vulnerabilities of fascist power remain undimmed. Introducing the film, del Toro noted, “We are unfortunately in times that make this movie more pertinent than ever, because they tell us . . . it’s useless to resist, that art can be done with a fucking app.” After the screening, he yelled, “Fuck A.I.!” into a raucously adoring crowd. (The festival, for its part, doesn’t entirely echo del Toro’s sentiment. One of this year’s selections is Steven Soderbergh’s documentary “John Lennon: The Last Interview,” which uses Meta’s A.I. tools to illustrate some of Lennon’s and Yoko Ono’s words—“a practical example,” per a Meta press release, “of how AI can support a director’s creative process.”)
A twentieth-anniversary revival of “Pan’s Labyrinth” felt pointed in another respect, too: as a measure of the gap between what Cannes used to be and what, for some disappointed observers, it now is. Hollywood was a dominant presence at the 2006 festival, with prestige titles like “Babel” and “Marie Antoinette” contending for the Palme d’Or, and movies like “The Da Vinci Code” and “X-Men: The Last Stand” representing the studios outside of the competition. Notably absent from this year’s offerings are summer entertainments on that scale; there’s no “Top Gun: Maverick” or “Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning,” to name two recent blockbusters that held their world-première screenings at Cannes. For industry analysts, the lack of such Hollywood-event movies is the latest evidence of a film business in precipitous decline. Amid a catastrophic wave of downsizings and restructurings, plus the impending sale of Warner Bros. Discovery to Paramount Skydance, fewer and fewer studios, it seems, can afford the glitzy launchpad of a Cannes opening. Bringing stars and their retinues to the French Riviera is expensive enough, but a disastrous festival reception can further dent a film’s long-term fortunes, as Disney discovered, in 2023, with the ill-fated launch of “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.”