New films from Wes Anderson, Ari Aster, and Richard Linklater will compete for the Palme d’Or at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, organisers announced Thursday. Coming off a 2024 edition that produced the Academy Award best-picture winner Anora, as well as a number of Oscar contenders in Emilia Pérez, The Substance and The Apprentice, the French film festival responded with a 2025 lineup bursting with big-name auteurs.
Thierry Frémaux, Cannes’ artistic director, announced the selections in a news conference in Paris with festival president Iris Knobloch. Entries include Aster’s Eddington, a pandemic-set Western starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal and Emma Stone; Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, starring Benicio Del Toro as a European profiteer; and Linklater’s appropriately French-language Nouvelle Vague, about Jean-Luc Godard and the French New Wave. Julia Ducournau, whose Titane won the Palme d’Or in 2021, making Ducournau only the second female filmmaker to ever receive Cannes’ top honour, will return to the festival with the 1980s New York-set Alpha, about an 11-year-old with a parent who has AIDS.
Other previous Cannes regulars coming back include two-time Palme winners Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. The Belgian filmmaking brothers’ latest is titled Young Mothers. Joachim Trier, whose The Worst Person in the World” was a highlight of the 2021 Cannes, is back in competition with Sentimental Value, which likewise stars Renate Reinsve. Playing outside of competition is Scarlett Johansson’s Eleanor the Great — the actor’s directorial debut. Among the films some had hoped might show up in Cannes but that weren’t announced were Terrence Malick’s long-awaited Jesus drama The Way of the Wind and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. Cannes earlier announced that Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning will launch at the festival, which three years ago bestowed an honorary Palme d’Or on Tom Cruise.
This year, Robert De Niro is set to receive an honorary Palme d’Or during the festival’s opening ceremony. Following in the footsteps of Greta Gerwig, Juliette Binoche will head the jury that decides this year’s Palme d’Or. Knobloch said it’s the first time in 60 years that two women succeed each other in this role. The festival runs May 13-24.