The 79th Cannes Film Festival came to a close this past weekend with numerous writers putting forth the effort to assess its place in the history of the world’s most important cinematic event. Neon continued their incredible Palme d’Or streak, taking home their seventh in a row for Cristian Mungiu’s “Fjord,” but the conversation seemed to center on Cannes being in a down year, and the hope that it would bounce back in 2027. Considering nearly everyone who attended Sundance and SXSW this year also considered those below average, it leads one to wonder if it’s the broader state of the industry with which we should be concerned than Cannes specifically. This writer saw 40 films and the vast majority of them were worth watching, even if very few of them were legitimately great, maybe even none. “Cannes had a lot of good, very little great” is how I often summarized it to people, and that seems fair.
Having said that, there were some undeniably great performances among the acclaimed films on the Croisette, and we asked our team covering Cannes to highlight a few they loved. No one should consider this list entirely comprehensive. For one, we made sure that each film only had one entry (although played along with the jury and cheated a little for two performances that can’t really be extricated from one another), which means some other turns even in these same films that we love were excluded. (Our writers wanted to write about three separate performances from “Clarissa” alone, for example.) There may not have been many great movies at Canne 2026, but there were great performances everywhere. Here are ten of them. (Well, eleven.) – Brian Tallerico
Hiam Abbass, “Atonement”
Proverbs 25:21-22 states, “If your enemies are hungry, give them bread to eat, and if they are thirsty, give them water to drink, for you will heap coals of fire on their heads.” Indeed, there’s something so disarming about mercy, something so illogical about extending forgiveness, that for many, to receive such atonement can feel as violent as it is liberating. I haven’t seen a better embodiment of those verses than in Hiam Abbass’ performance in “Atonement.” There’s an acting adage that it’s far easier to play anger than it is to play hurt, and her work should be used as a masterclass going forward for performers seeking to play the latter.
Abbass plays Mariam Khachaturian, a woman who sees her husband and sons get gunned down before her eyes by U.S. Marine Lou D’Alessandro (Boyd Holbrook), while in Baghdad. Years later, Lou, seeking forgiveness, expresses a desire to meet with Miriam and her daughter, Nora (Gheed). Through Abbass’ performance, we see how the trauma she’s experienced has burrowed itself under her skin, like shrapnel that won’t leave. From the way she pours tea to the way she simply sits down on her couch, Mariam has been forever rattled by what’s happened. She’s in pain, yes, but she’s also confused, and Abbass captures the oscillation between those poles with such poise: she doesn’t want to torture Lou by not meeting with him, but she wrestles with whether absolving Lou will do a disservice to the memory of her slain family. By staying bitter, does she remain closer to the memory of her family?
The film understands that forgiveness is not about forgetting, and it does not come with the promise of a restored relationship. Such atonement is as much for the victim as it is for the perpetrator, a way for the hurt party to move on with their lives and be free. “We’ve cried out all our tears,” Mariam says; in many ways, the film is a gentle invitation for her to cry once more, to move on in hope that a new beginning is possible, even if such hope is undergirded by doubt. – Zachary Lee
Swann Arlaud, “A Man of His Time”
To call Henri Marre, the vain, pencil-pushing bureaucratic at the heart of Emmanuel Marre’s World War II dramedy, “slippery,” would grant him a level of self-awareness he’s incapable of reaching. Swann Arlaud, most notable for his turn in “Anatomy of a Fall,” plays the failed author turned vile civil servant with a hand in the Holocaust, with the freneticism of a lizard crawling up a tree.
The performance starts with Arlaud’s appearance, which I second-hand heard described by one person as a “silver fox rat boy.” He’s attractive, makes it easy for one to believe that he’d be let in the door for a party full of the hottest intellectuals. But he’s just cagey enough for one to believe that, like in the film, he’d fall flat on his face once inside. As the aloof protagonist, Arlaud never overplays his hand by laying a line too thick or working his face to make the film’s many crash-zoom sight gags land harder. He plays Henri earnestly, a twitchy bundle of nerves happy with the taste of a boot. The fact that he doesn’t play Henri as a cartoonish villain, but as a normal idiot, makes him all the more funny and frightening in a film about how the middle man is as dangerous as the top man. – Robert Daniels
Virginia Efira & Tao Okamoto, “All of a Sudden”
If an entire Cannes jury came to the conclusion that the chemistry between lead actresses Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto was so inextricable from their film’s overall effect that they should be jointly awarded the festival’s best-actress prize, who am I to disagree? More to the point, Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s transcendent “All of a Sudden” furthers the Japanese filmmaker’s signature interest in doubling, mirrors, and coincidence by observing an unexpectedly deep and emotionally significant friendship between two women.
Marie-Lou Fontaine (Virginie Efira) is the director of Garden of Freedom, a nursing home in Paris where she seeks to implement a radically compassionate care technique, known as Humanitude, in spite of resistance from burned-out staff; Mari Morisaki (Tao Okamoto) is an avant-garde theatre director whose latest work, “Up Close, Nobody Is Normal,” concerns society’s need for empathy toward its most vulnerable. Born in Paris, Marie-Lou once studied anthropology in Kyoto before embarking upon her current career path; born in Kyoto, Mari studied philosophy in Paris, which led her toward theatre.
After a chance encounter, Marie-Lou attends Mari’s play and is moved, even more so after she learns Mari is battling cancer; that night, as they discuss their respective paths and the interlinked perspectives these have instilled in them around such weighty subjects as late-stage capitalism and physical deterioration, a profound friendship takes root. Through its gentle, generous three-hour runtime, as “All of Sudden” explores the true extent of their connection, Efira and Okamoto each deliver master-classes in emotional sensitivity.
Meeting one another’s eyes with rapt curiosity as they converse fluidly back and forth across French and Japanese, growing intellectually intimate as insights spill forth, the two actresses never strike a false note, instead complementing and complicating their two characters through the quietly transformative act of taking time with each other. Rarely in modern cinema have such simple manifestations of humanity as looking and listening been made to feel so existentially enlightening. – Isaac Feldberg
Hannah Einbinder, “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma”
The first breakout title at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, by almost unanimous opinion, was Jane Schoenbrun’s “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” an intellectually rigorous and magnificently horny vivisection of the psychosexual impulses that fuel “problematic” horror movies and that smart seductively inside our relationships to such tantalizing, forbidden-fruit cinema. As Kris, the young queer filmmaker hired to direct a reboot of a long-dormant slasher franchise, Hannah Einbinder does more than hold her own against a sultry Gillian Anderson, as the “Camp Miasma” franchise’s purringly vampish final-girl-turned-grande-dame; the “Hacks” actress matches Anderson’s freak while gradually shedding layers of emotional and academic fixation to emerge as the film’s jittery, breathy, insatiably titillated heart.
Delivering every line of dialogue as if on the edge of orgasm, savoring fried chicken and gummy candy with the same finger-licking relish, moving beyond shame to awaken the sweet and sanguinary nature of her own desire through an emotionally complex and progressively blood-drenched détente with her ultra-canny leading lady, Kris is an inspired creation. Einbinder invests her with a shivering combination of terror and lust, even as the actress enables us to simultaneously witness Kris achieving a kind of intellectual freedom through erogenous overdrive. A standout scene in which a video-conference pitch meeting goes off the rails, leaving Kris flushed with arousal and her producers baffled, is only one showcase for the chaotically erotic energy Einbinder can harness even when alone in a snowy car park. And when she comes together with Anderson for giddily gore-splattered, libido-liberating scenes that blur the boundaries between reality and fantasy, the actress commits with stupendous and surprisingly tender abandon to a climax so powerfully cathartic it sends shockwaves through the screen. – Isaac Feldberg
Hoyeon, “Hope”
There was only one entrance at this year’s Cannes Film Festival in screenings I attended that produced actual applause. For almost an hour, we’ve been watching the great Hwang Jung-min race through devastation to track the monster that’s destroying the small village in which he’s a cop in Na Hong-jin’s divisive “Hope”. He’s perfect at capturing a sort of panicked desperation, the kind of character who doesn’t really want to catch what he’s chasing because then it might kill him. And then Hoyeon’s Sung Ae comes speeding in driving a cop car like she’s Sarah f-ing Connor and the tone shifts. Is she more heroic or just more reckless? Is there much of a difference?
So much of what’s been written about (and will be written about) “Hope” will focus on the men (and the creatures), but the film doesn’t work without Hoyeon’s deceptively great work to balance the macho chaos. It also helps a great deal that the “Squid Game” star seems to quite literally just be having a blast, as if she can’t believe this shit either. Even when she’s screaming her way through the insane places this movie goes, there’s almost a smile on her face, and that energy can be contagious. She’s the part of this movie that subconsciously encourages us to just sit back and enjoy the ride. And you very likely will. – Brian Tallerico
Victoria Luengo, “The Beloved”
The first scene of Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s “The Beloved” is arguably the best of the year, a tone-setting showcase for Javier Bardem and Victoria Luengo that hums with equal amounts of hope and resentment, emotions that can co-exist in children that have felt let down by their parents. That’s how Luengo’s Emilia Martinez approaches this restaurant sit-down with her estranged father Esteban Martinez, played with icy precision by Bardem. In this sort of “Unsentimental Value,” Esteban is there to offer his struggling actress a job on his new project, “Desierto,” and the two performers imbue the scene with so much back story that we instantly believe everything that the script needs us to over the next twenty minutes. Rarely has a foundation been laid more confidently as we witness Esteban’s controlling nature just through tone and Emilia’s refusal to let him rewrite history. It’s a perfect prologue in that it plays like an overture, defining the themes the orchestra will play in the drama to follow.
Either Bardem or Luengo could have made this feature but it’s the latter who feels more like a revelation, even if the Oscar winner hasn’t been this good in years. Also appearing at Cannes in Pedro Almodovar’s “Bitter Christmas,” Luengo feels this year like she’s reached a new level in terms of character work and subtlety, never leaning into the potential heartbreak of her arc in “The Beloved,” but letting us see her emotional journey unfold on her face. When Esteban eventually gets around to his toxic ways on the set of “Desierto,” Luengo maintains the restraint of a child who has seen this behavior from their parent before, a portrayal of a pain that comes from knowing you’ve been let down yet again. – Brian Tallerico
Masahiro Motoki, “The Samurai and the Prisoner”
You might think a guy cast in a samurai film would have to brush up on his swordplay skills. But as Murashige Araki, a 16th-century Japanese warlord, the actor Masahiro Motoki has to master verbal jousting: The heart of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “The Samurai and the Prisoner” lies in the conversations between Motoki’s character, who is engaged in a struggle against another warlord, and Kanbei Kuroda (Masaki Suda), a cunning prisoner from whom he seeks advice on strategy and murder mysteries.
Kanbei’s brilliance is beyond doubt, but he may not have Murashige’s interests at heart. He repeatedly suggests that Murashige has violated the samurai code by showing too much mercy. If you can imagine the dynamic between Clarice and Hannibal reconstituted for a bone-dry, stately samurai epic, you might not be too far off, although Kanbei evokes far more sympathy than Hannibal does. Still, the trickiest task might go to Motoki, who has to play Lord Murashige as a curious mix of ruthlessness and generosity, of knowledge and ignorance. He addresses Kanbei with respect even while holding him captive. It’s the larger of the two main roles, and Motoki gives it an understated unpredictability. – Ben Kenigsberg
Sophie Okonedo, “Clarissa”
Cutting a figure that’s as arrestingly elegant as it is unexpectedly mournful, Sophie Okonedo’s performance as the titular Clarissa in the Esiri brothers’ adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway finds its shattering power in restraint. That’s not to say that it’s a quiet performance; when we meet Clarissa from the start, she’s in the throes of organizing a party, and her words can be as gentle and cutting as the Lagos wind as she scolds her children and staff alike. It would have been easy to write off Clarissa as being curmudgeonly or bitter, a woman whose youthful ideals have been sanded down by the realities of growing up, but it’s the way Okonedo laces tenderness and regret that makes her performance so noteworthy.
This is also a performance that wouldn’t work without India Amarteifio playing a younger Clarissa, both of them acting from a strong sense of identity, even if the older Clarissa is more easily defined by calcified heartache. Breaking through Clarissa’s steely exterior, whether it’s through the way she might hug an old friend or gaze off into the distance, we see flashes of her longing, of a woman who still dreams even if the logistics of life have kept her from ever fully exploring them. We see Clarissa come to life as more guests arrive at her party, the tension behind her eyes slowly slackening. What we see before us is a woman coming alive again, who allows herself the grace to remember fondly and to hope unabated. It’s all thanks to Okonedo’s full-bodied commitment to embracing all of Clarissa’s multitudes. – Zachary Lee
Sebastian Stan, “Fjord”
I’m more skeptical of Cristian Mungiu’s expertly directed “Fjord,” this year’s Palme d’Or winner, than many others. The story—in which a family from Romania with strict religious and socially conservative views is targeted on a dubious pretext by child services in Norway—struck me as jerry-rigged to promote the caricature that Big Government persecutes free-thinking individuals. One test of this is that the film removes any possibility that the targets don’t grasp the machinations against them: The parents, Mihai (Sebastian Stan), an I.T. expert, and Lisbet (Renate Reinsve), a nurse originally from Norway herself, are educated, know three languages, and recognize that they are being railroaded by powerful bureaucrats who regard them as insufficiently progressive.
Even so, I can’t find fault with the almost unrecognizable Stan’s performance as the patriarch, who decides that adhering to the legal counsel he and Lisbet are given is a losing strategy. While I knew in advance that the Romanian-born Stan was in the film, at some point during the festival frenzy I’d put that information out of my mind. So—much as Roger once found with Charlize Theron in “Monster”—I spent all of “Fjord” wondering who that charismatic actor was and what I’d seen him in before, which is one definition of a performer vanishing into his role. – Ben Kenigsberg
Tom Sturridge, “The Man I Love”
Every time the camera turns to Tom Sturridge, the light around him seems to bend differently. In Ira Sachs’ quietly affecting study of a character and an era, Sturridge is Dennis, the dedicated partner to actor Jimmy George (Rami Malek). Throughout “The Man I Love,” George persistently cheats on Dennis. Yet, Dennis, determined and intense, remains by George, who’s battling AIDS through a blend of showmanship and song.
Sturridge, as his character entails, is a supporting player here. But every time he appears, he grounds a film filled with bright musical performances and actorly jokes. He reminded me of Sterling Hayden, the granite-face leading man whose ruggedness could belie the genuine pathos he brought to films. Sturridge walks through this film with a similar nimbleness. At first, through his frozen visage, he appears unapproachable. But as the film advances, his exterior melts, revealing a deeply sensitive man whose love isn’t delivered through physical or emotional affection but through the repetitive, yet necessary tasks he performs with notable familiarity, to keep his partner alive. This is a rich turn, by a seasoned actor, who knows exactly who this character is down to his core. The result is the best performance of Sturridge’s career. – Robert Daniels
