Cannes 2026’s – At Cannes 2026, “Club Kid” and “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Mishima” set a shimmering standard for personal reckoning—while “Parallel Tales,” “Hope,” and other Competition entries left some viewers wondering what the festival was even for. Through the lineup
For the ninth year in a row. Cannes has been part of David Ehrlich’s pilgrimage—and this time he still remembers the moment that knocked the wind out of the ritual. At the beachfront soirée for Jordan Firstman’s “Club Kid. ” several different people asked him. with warm hope in their eyes. if he had any cocaine.
He says he’d never been asked that before in all his years coming to Cannes in 2026—also the first time he says he “desperately wished” he did. The details land for a reason: the premiere of “Club Kid” itself. he reports. brought people to happy tears as it pushed its lead toward sobriety and a reckoning with reality.
Then the night spilled out onto the Croisette. where the festival’s contradictions kept moving—just with a different kind of intensity. Ehrlich describes everyone going across the Croisette to a private beach in the south of France and inhaling enough blow to stay awake through Asghar Farhadi’s “Parallel Tales.”.
In the middle of it, he draws a line between the performance and the promise. “Club Kid” is. in his telling. funny and sweet: a major festival breakout about a gay Manhattan scenester who finally decides to grow up and stop taking endless party drugs after he learns he has a 10-year-old British son who loves the Cocteau Twins and Elliott Smith. The film’s stakes also trace back to the one time Firstman’s character got so high on GHB that he wound up having sex with a woman.
But Ehrlich can’t ignore what Cannes feels like when its own energy collides with the gravity directors claim they’re chasing. He writes that Cannes often seems like the last place on Earth where anyone should take movies seriously—and the last place on Earth where anyone does. This year, the friction was sharper. He frames it as a byproduct of a festival where the worst films felt like they had little bearing on reality. while the best ones commented on it from a critical distance.
Jane Schoenbrun’s “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Mishima” opened the Un Certain Regard sidebar with a “fingerbang” and—at least in Ehrlich’s view—immediately set the tone for what the lineup could do when it turned the screen inward. He describes it as a self-reflexive but unambiguously sincere meditation on the relationship between shame. violence. and sexual identity as Schoenbrun collapses the history of slasher movies.
If “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Mishima” was the spark. “Camp Miasma. ” Schoenbrun’s next step. was the signal flare. Ehrlich says it further dimensionalizes their “gift” for transforming screens into mirrors. He also calls its popcorn spectacle impossibly high for the summer movie season to come. even while insisting it’s more inspired by “Kwaidan” than “Spider-Man.”.
On the other side of the emotional equation sat Farhadi’s “Parallel Tales.” Ehrlich says it soured Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “A Short Film About Love” into what he experienced as a long film about nothing: a story of a voyeuristic novelist so devoid of purpose that it made fiction itself feel like “a frivolous waste of time.” He adds that the movie’s low point even made Pedro Almodóvar’s “Bitter Christmas” seem like a vital masterwork by comparison.
That praise comes with its own bite. Ehrlich says he thoroughly enjoyed “Bitter Christmas” as a vivid and self-excoricating piece of autofiction. but he argues it’s ultimately “about nothing so much as Almodóvar himself”—to the point where its punchline depends on familiarity with his previous work. He also writes that by the end of the fest. he realized “Bitter Christmas” was one of the more amusing things he saw.
Even with that split—joyful premieres and messy nights—Ehrlich says he’d argue that a bad Cannes is still better than just about anything else in the world. He adds a sharper counterpoint: the festival’s heightened mania and manufactured importance has a singular way of exposing the weaknesses of the films that play there. standing ovations be damned.
He doesn’t mince words about the Competition lineup. He calls it the weakest lineup he’s had the privilege of experiencing first-hand so far as the Competition is concerned. In his account. Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Minotaur” is the only film that left him feeling like he had lightning in his veins when it was over—the only film that gave him the same “I can run through a brick wall high” feeling he chases across the Croisette every year.
He ties his reception to the day’s shockwaves too. He writes that seeing “Parasite” and “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” on the same day is the kind of experience that can do irreparable damage to your brain—an offhand admission that still helps explain why “Minotaur” landed so hard.
Still. he also says morale stayed low only until the minute he left—and that he came to appreciate how the rest of the lineup worked in residual context with Schoenbrun’s film. At the most basic level. he describes “Camp Miasma” as about reconciling mind and body. inside and outside. fantasy and reality. And he says the festival became unusually preoccupied with mapping the space between opposite dimensions.
He points to “Club Kid” as one example. He pairs it with Pawel Pawlikowski’s anemic “Fatherland” as another. He adds that even Marie Kreutzer’s largely dismissed “Gentle Monster” fits the bill. “Gentle Monster” stars Léa Seydoux as a woman who struggles to accept that her husband might be a pedophile.
Then come the Competition films that don’t settle into the same groove. Arthur Harari’s hyper-polarizing “The Unknown. ” Ehrlich writes. was either the most vile or beguiling film at Cannes depending on who you asked. Cristian Mungiu’s “Fjord. ” he says. is more limited in scope than his previous work. with its thorniness softened by a specificity of its attacks on Nordic progressivism; he still credits its spiraling moral drama with offering an unresolvable consideration of how dangerous it can be when who people are is allowed to take precedence over what they actually do.
Ehrlich places “Fjord” alongside James Gray’s masterful “Paper Tiger. ” a period crime thriller where a Queens family is undone by a man’s abject failure of self-definition. He also links it to Emmanuel Marre’s clear-eyed but stultifying “A Man of His Time. ” in which a “snakey opportunist” played by Swann Arlaud surrenders any claim to his own moral code in a bid to survive Vichy France.
Those films. along with Jeanne Herry’s rambling “Another Day. ” Hirokazu Koreeda’s “Sheep in the Box” (he calls it heartbreaking for all the wrong reasons). and Koji Fukada’s lovely “Nagi Notes. ” in his account drilled into what it feels like to live apart from the world around us—even if many of them were content to illustrate the feeling by virtue of their own irrelevance.
Lukas Dhont’s “Coward” is listed as another film he saw, without further unpacking in this excerpt.
Among the more expansive offerings. Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “All of a Sudden” is described as a talky but sprawling eldercare drama so concerned with the dynamic between the personal and the collective that Ehrlich says a good chunk of its 196-minute running time becomes a kind of Ted Talk on macro-divisiveness of capitalism. He even notes the white board used for illustrative purposes. In the film’s argument. he says. the only hope for survival is to gradually chip away at defining stratifications of modern society—present and future. patient and provider. performer and audience.
Ehrlich wasn’t quite as bowled over as most other critics. He says Hamaguchi’s intellectual and emotional interests remained frustratingly separate for him. Even so. he calls it easy to appreciate why a film making such a forceful case for personal agency seemed to tower over much of the Competition. calling it an “invaluable corrective” to a festival where so many movies seemed resigned to a world they’d lost confidence in their ability to shape or at least shake up.
That’s where his disappointment hits again with Na Hong-jin’s “Hope.” He describes the film as determined to elevate blockbuster filmmaking to new heights before abruptly pivoting into what he calls an endless piece of drivel. His blunt objection is cinematic: he says nothing that ends with someone turning to camera and setting up a sequel—the familiar “the battle is over. but the real war has just begun” routine—deserves to be included in the film world’s most prestigious competition.
And he adds that the argument feels even less palatable because of the Competition’s internal contrast. He frames it as a question of seriousness, pointing back to the festival’s contradictions from earlier in his account.
In his view. the Competition’s only true masterpiece was as Cannes as it gets: “Minotaur.” He describes it as an ultra-austere work of auteur cinema where every shot is freighted with geopolitical importance. He says the film transposes the familiar story of Claude Chabrol’s “The Unfaithful Wife” onto the widescale amorality of modern Russia.
In “Minotaur. ” he writes. a medium-rich business owner juggles a marital crisis with the stress of the war in Ukraine. all from a clinical remove. Ehrlich lays out the protagonist’s competing pressures: his wife is having sex with a hot young photographer. At the same time, he has to select 14 employees to be sentenced to death via involuntary enlistment. Ehrlich stresses these aren’t co-equal problems. but he says they become increasingly braided together over the course of Zvyagintsev’s film. until generational catastrophe becomes the solution to the protagonist’s domestic crisis.
He points to the film’s final shot as “unspeakably haunting,” calling it a typifying image of Cannes 2026 to a tee. He also describes the movie’s free-floating detachment from reality as doubling as a revelatory expression of the festival’s and audience’s relationship to reality itself.
For readers who want to follow the same thread beyond the noise. Ehrlich closes with a subscription pitch for “In Review by David Ehrlich. ” a biweekly newsletter where he rounds up the site’s latest reviews and muses about current events in the movie world. He says subscribers can receive it every other Friday. and that it includes the best new reviews and streaming picks along with exclusive musings—available to subscribers only.
Cannes 2026 Club Kid Jordan Firstman Camp Miasma Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Mishima Asghar Farhadi Parallel Tales Andrey Zvyagintsev Minotaur Pedro Almodóvar Bitter Christmas Ryusuke Hamaguchi All of a Sudden Na Hong-jin Hope