The 2026 Cannes Film Festival starts Tuesday, May 12th, running through May 24th. The Ebert team returns this year with coverage of all of the major films in review and video form. In this video dispatch, Jason Gorber reflects on his time at the fest, from his first Cannes to some favorites he’s experienced so far this year.
Watch the video and enjoy an edited transcript below.
Jason Gorber:
It’s amazing to be back here at the Cannes Film Festival. The first time I was here was in 1996. So it’s technically been 30 years since my first attendance, and I’ve never been to a weirder-feeling festival. It’s one thing that Hollywood hasn’t really shown up this year, but even the films themselves, some of them have sort of struggled to gain momentum, and I have a feeling that a lot of the films that people are really holding onto tightly aren’t ones that are going to play super well once the festival actually ends.
One of the films is actually quite lovely, but maybe a little bit forgettable, starring Adèle Exarchopoulos. She’s actually a Palme d’Or winner because she and her co-star, Léa Seydoux, won the award for Best Actress for “Blue Is the Warmest Color.” This is another lesbian romance with Adèle Exarchopoulos. She’s done this several times in the past, but this one has a little bit of a twist that she is an alcoholic, and it’s her struggling through her alcoholism as a young girl, coming up, going to parties, doing all the stuff in queer clubs and stuff like that.
As she finds herself and finds her sort of community, but realizes that one way of getting over her anxiety is to actually consume too much alcohol. So it’s a medical drama. It’s a social drama. It’s a relationship drama. It’s very French, and none of it would work at all, except that Adele is so fantastically charismatic on screen, and you really find her own struggles, as well as the warmth of her character, believable. It’s as simple as that. So the documentary-like elements of this film, I think, work. It’s a very, very French film. It’s, in some ways, a very Cannes film, but it might not be a major one. And I think a lot of times people come, especially when they’re looking at competition films for that big, splashy thing that’s going to come out of it.
This is not a film that a lot of people are championing, but I still think it’s actually one of the strongest ones I’ve seen that’s actually playing here, because it allows an actor who has incredible technical skills to provide emotionality in a way that’s rarely seen, especially, on the course that where they’re sometimes much more worried about what the composition looks like, more than they’re worried about how the actual characters are believable and actually are engaging.
Adèle Exarchopoulos:
I wanted to be part of the adventure. I wanted to take on this part. Also, I felt a little scared. Jeanne’s film, well, I was with a friend a week earlier, and I said, I dream about being in a film made by Jeanne Herry, and then I got the phone call a week later. I love the fact that she was exploring something new.
She puts herself in danger. It’s quite rare to be offered a portrait of a woman today. There’s also a fantastic love story in the middle of the film. There’s something in Jeanne’s cinema that deeply moves me. I think she creates great intensity while being gentle.
Jason Gorber:
So it’s been a couple of years since “Flow” completely dominated so much of the conversation here at Cannes.
Making original animated films is one of the core activities in the program this year. The film that is getting a lot of people talking is called “Tangles.” It’s actually one of the few films that has some A-list stars here. You have people like Seth Rogen and Abbi Jacobson, but it’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who, just a couple of weeks ago, was a “Sheep Detective,” who is here in Cannes playing the mom who suffers from Alzheimer’s.
It’s based on a graphic novel, and it tells a really fascinating story of a young girl again struggling with her own sexuality, struggling, finding her community, but then realizing that she has to go back to her sort of small town in Maine and actually take care of her mom, who’s declining mentally. The animation is actually quite stunning. It’s a very specific, sort of hand-drawn look.
The character voices are quite engaging. There’s an emotional too. I think some people will find it a little trite, a little on the nose, especially because of the music selection. But I think there’s an earnestness to this film that will absolutely engage some people completely. I heard a lot of sniffling during my screening.
A lot of people are actually really drawn to its emotionality.
So many people here come to Cannes for the red carpets, the glamour, the exotic costumes as they walk up the red carpet. I come in part for the documentaries. So there have been some amazing documentaries that have played in the past. Some not so good, including this year. But the fact is that nonfiction cinema has found a home at Cannes, particularly in the Classics section.
They make a lot of terrific films about movies. Mark Cousins is here with his ongoing series of chapters on the history of documentaries. Terrific. I saw an excellent David Lean documentary, a much-deserved one, introduced by Cate Blanchett. She does the narration. Sir Kenneth Branagh does the voice of David Lean. It is one of these great films about films that showcases a very complex character, and in so doing, recognizes the humanity behind the lens.
I think it does an extraordinary job of making sure that you can see him for all of his faults. It actually became quite a running joke that the number of women that he was just trading up, or as their ages traded down, the audience, very French, was enjoying that quite a bit. It actually matched very nicely with “Avedon,” Ron Howard’s latest film with the famed photographer Richard Avedon and his journey from, doing fashion photography in the 40s, going to Paris and resuscitating, in part, the glamour of Paris and a bombed out city postwar, all the way through to his more political actions, taking shots of politicians but also going to oil workers, etc.
He had such an incredibly keen eye, and it’s really challenging to make a film about photography that does it justice and actually shows how the sort of immaculate compositions work out. But the way that the filmmakers have actually brought together, I think, it’s incredibly strong. Then, on the other hand, you have stuff like Steven Soderbergh, who absolutely laid an egg with a John Lennon doc, which is one of the most egregious documentaries I’ve seen in many years, made even worse by the fact that it has all this AI nonsense trapped on top of it.
It’s a bad John Lennon documentary, made worse by his use of artificial intelligence. So sometimes you get some glory, sometimes you get some absolute fault. But it wouldn’t be Cannes if we didn’t have the highs and the lows. Sometimes the clouds get a little bit gray, sometimes the sun shines. But it’s incredibly special for me to be here as part of this year’s Cannes and to have my name associated in any way with the Ebert brand, which continues this incredible tradition.
I couldn’t be more and more thrilled to actually be part of it.
Voice over:
On today’s Cannes flashback, we’ll take a look at 2014. When Jason Gorber first arrived in Cannes with a press pass.
Jason Gorber:
This is my first time in Cannes as a member of the press. I was here 18 years ago as a student. I was in Aix-en-Provence just a couple of miles up the road. And I packed my tuxedo, thinking I might make it to the Cannes film festival. I talked my way in, and I had a pass. That’s where I first met Roger Ebert, actually. So I was here, and I promised myself that one day I would come back and work very hard. And here I am, in the press, at the Cannes Film Festival.
Based in Toronto, I’ve been going to TIFF for almost 20 years now.
And so, at TIFF, you have a balance between the public and the industry that sort of works its way out. Here, it’s all industry and all crazy. Between the divides of the red carpet and what tickets you need and the tuxedos and all of that stuff. Just getting your head around all that and the mass of humanity that’s here. It’s unlike any other festival.
Plus, of course, three-quarters of the films are playing to the market, which, as the press, we have no access to. They don’t want us to see these films because they’re not ready for review yet. Sometimes they’re just a poster, some terrible poster of a film that might be sold in some market that maybe we’ll see six years from now that involves the shark fighting a Tyrannosaurus rex.
I mean, this is what Cannes is about. It’s the high and the low. The collision between those with million-dollar cars and those sitting outside at 7:00 in the morning in the hopes of seeing somebody like me walk up the red carpet, and they think, oh, he’s famous. He’s in a tuxedo.
Voice over:
That’s all for now. But keep checking back each day at RogerEbert.com/festivals for more reviews, reports, and reactions.
See you next time.
