The Director’s Fortnight sidebar of the Cannes Film Festival has become a target of debate in recent years, sometimes viewed as “the films that didn’t get into the main Cannes program.” While it may be true for a few films, there’s a lot of quality in DF, not only exemplified by the excellent clip reel of films that have played in this program over the years but just last year in a diverse slate that included standouts like “Miroirs No. 3,” “Yes,” and “Dangerous Animals.” And this year’s program boasts one of the best films of Cannes 2026, a subtle drama that has already been picked up by Neon. The first few days of 2026 revealed a second standout already; we’ll talk about the third film in this dispatch, widely considered the worst of the fest so far, later.
Let’s start at the top with Arie and Chuko Esiri’s confident “Clarissa,” a film with a tender, sensual visual language that also boasts some heady ideas about the ripple effect of colonialism. Working from the narrative of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the directors of “Eyimofe: This is My Desire” deftly navigate multiple character arcs across two time periods, not only never losing the emotional and intellectual threads of the piece but enhancing them through their craft. They’re also phenomenal directors of performance, guiding an ensemble that will surely be among my favorites of the year. There’s not a false note from a single cast member, from the ones you recognize to the new faces.
Sophie Okonedo (also so great in the upcoming “Mouse”) plays Clarissa, a wealthy women in a conflicted Nigeria, where violence breaks out daily but far away from her palatial Lagos estate. That’s where she plans to host a party, and much of “Clarissa” sees her ordering her staff around to make sure it goes off perfectly. While the party is being prepared, familiar faces spring back into Clarissa’s life, including the deeply melancholic Peter (a heartbreaking David Oyelowo), who has never gotten over the unrequited love he felt for Clarissa decades earlier. Clarissa is married to the stable-but-boring Richard (Jude Akuwudike), and one senses early on that she settled for stability over passion, but it wasn’t really with Peter, but with a girl named Sally (Nikki Amuka-Bird), who also finds her way to the party after dropping her child off for a trip at the nearby airport.
“Clarissa” flashes back to the early days of these upper-class potential lovers, and the Esiris do a better job of casting parallel performers than I’ve seen in years. Forget de-aging; just find a casting director who’s this good. Young Clarissa is played by the captivating India Amarteifio, who a young Sally (Ayo Edebiri) clocks as pretty snobbish from a young age. Clarissa is dating Peter (Toheeb Jimoh, using that Sam charm from “Ted Lasso” effect as an emotional weapon), who wants to be a writer but withers under her criticisms.
Against this backdrop of young intellectuals who would become Nigerian elites that mingle with the leaders of the region at fancy parties, we meet a soldier named Septimus (Fortune Nwafor, a Lagos actor with a bright future who appeared in the Esiri’s last film). Septimus is faced with dwindling supplies and shaky leadership before he’s struck by a traumatic event that shapes his future in a way that the Clarissas of the world don’t have to consider.
From the beginning, Jonathan Bloom’s cinematography is practically another character in this remarkable ensemble. The camera lingers on river water, dewy grass, and blowing sand, transporting us to the region instead of just filming it. He often shoots through panes of glass in Clarissa’s house, giving us the sense of eavesdropping and framing characters like a widescreen image within the image. It’s not a showy visual language, but it’s a poetic one that adds so much veracity to the entire production.
Of course, that wouldn’t work without the grounded, subtle performances. Okonedo conveys only glimmers of regret at a life that could have been or a sadness over the one she chose, and it’s the restraint that makes her work so powerful. It’s an especially strong contrast against the more vibrant work from Amarteifio and Jimoh. Seeing the smile of young Peter and how it will become the shell of a man played by Oyelowo adds such poignance.
So many movies like this would be fractured, but there’s a coherence to “Clarissa” that’s breathtaking, a vision of people at different beaches on the river of life, connected by the flowing water of time.
Reed van Dyk’s “Atonement” couldn’t be more different in terms of storytelling but shares a similar sense of truth-seeking that elevates it from a standard PTSD drama. Genuinely harrowing before becoming deeply moving, Van Dyk’s debut looks at an act of extreme violence from three perspectives: the perpetrator, the survivor, and the witness. It has a few beats in the center that feel like they could have used a bit more restraint, but it recovers nicely, and stays anchored to truth through a trio of excellent performances from people who clearly took this project very seriously, refusing to simplify or exploit this true story into melodrama.
“Atonement” opens in Baghdad in 2003, introducing us the Khachaturian family, led by Mariam (Hiam Abbass). As the city erupts in violence, the Khachaturians survive a bombing near the relative’s home at which they’re staying, choosing to try to leave that part of the region to go back to their family house. The commute leads them into the heart of a firefight between U.S. Marines and Iraqi insurgents. Soldiers on a roof in the city center have been told to shoot on any car that attempts to pass due to how many have been used as weapons against American soldiers. With her sons and even a baby grandchild in the car, Mariam enters a nightmare of gunfire, and not everyone survives.
In these early, terrifying scenes that have a tactile realism that recalls “The Hurt Locker,” we also meet one of the soldiers on the roof shooting at the Khachaturians, Lou D’Allesandro (Boyd Holbrook). When a reporter from The New York Times named Michael Reid (Kenneth Branagh) comes to the area shortly after the tragedy, Lou confronts him with bravado. After all, why did they drive toward the shooting? What did they think was going to happen?
A decade later, Lou is deep in the grip of PTSD. He takes drugs to manage and shakes when he thinks about Baghdad. To achieve some sort of healing, he contacts Reid in the hope that he can coordinate a meeting with Mariam and her family so they can talk about that day.
Even in the heat of war, what is a soldier who takes an innocent life owed? What is a mother who had to grieve an impossible amount that day expected to give? And what roles do journalists play in connecting the two? There’s a line in a PTSD meeting about how a gun fires both ways, impacting the person it hits and the one who pulls the trigger.
Van Dyk is delicate, mostly avoiding melodrama except for a few missteps, trying to ask these questions through nuanced character work, especially from Holbrook and Abbass. The former is always good, and one hopes this is the part that finally breaks him, while the latter is incapable of a bad performance. Their scenes together have an immediate emotional power, both of them unsure of what to demand and what to give.
The final scene of “Atonement” is a beauty, an unexpected group of people working together to find that which has been lost.
Finally, there’s the opening night film of Director’s Fortnight: the atrocious “Butterfly Jam” from “Beanpole” director Kantemir Balagov. Talented people are sucked into the vortex of this brutal drama that purports to be about toxic masculinity but has absolutely nothing to say about its hot topic. Worst of all, so little of it feels truthful that its extreme violence become little more than button-pushing, an exercise in audience torture.
The best way to read “Butterfly Jam” is that it was actually written by its 16-year-old protagonist Temir (Talka Akdogan) because this is a script that sees the world through the eyes of a confused teenager. Temir is a successful wrestler at his school in Newark, and he clearly adores his father Azik (Barry Keoghan), who makes the best delens in town at the family’s Circassian diner, where they also work with Azik’s sister Zalya (Riley Keough). A troublemaking Johnny Boy character enters these mean streets in the form of Marat (Harry Melling), one of those guys who you know is going to do something wrong or horrible or both to initiate the final act of the film. And I haven’t even mentioned the giant bird or the Chekhov’s Cotton Candy Machine.
Balagov’s characters don’t have the depth for this to work as a study—a fellow wrestler of Temir’s named Alika (Jaaliyah Richards) is offensively underwritten to an almost comical degree in that we know two things about her by movie’s end: she wrestles and she has acne.
Keoghan, Keough, and Melling can be such complex performers, but you can see them wrestling (sorry) with this script in every scene to the degree that they often feel like they’re in different movies. Keough especially seems eager to rise above the nonsense around her, and not just in character.
