I Saw 24 Movies at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. These Five Were the Best

Reported by Vogue.

Cannes 2026 was, by most accounts, a quieter year on the Croisette — fewer Hollywood tentpoles, some disappointing work from reliable names, and a handful of films that left critics genuinely puzzled. But according to Vogue, across 24 screenings (15 of them Palme d'Or contenders), five films cut through the noise hard enough to be genuinely unmissable. Here's what to put on your radar before these hit theaters.

The most quietly devastating of the lot is Fjord, Palme d'Or winner Cristian Mungiu's slow-burn thriller starring a fully transformed Sebastian Stan and the always-compelling Renate Reinsve as a Romanian-Norwegian couple who relocate to the fjords with their five children — only to have them stripped away by Norway's strict child protection services after suspicions arise. Mungiu refuses easy villains: the disciplinarian father is genuinely troubling, the state bureaucrats are just doing their jobs, and the whole film becomes a forensic meditation on immigration, parenting, and cultural collision. Minotaur, Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev's first film in nearly a decade, operates at a similar register of controlled dread. Set in 2022, it follows a morally bankrupt provincial CEO — manipulating both his unfaithful wife and his most vulnerable employees — whose hypocrisy is finally laid bare in a chilling finale that implicates an entire class of oligarchs who've outsourced their suffering to others.

The Ones That Will Actually Make You Feel Something

Club Kid is the festival surprise nobody expected: Jordan Firstman — known from I Love LA and Rotting in the Sun — writes, directs, and stars as a dissolute New York club promoter whose fog of drugs and late nights is punctured by the arrival of Arlo, the 10-year-old British son he never knew existed. What follows is raucous, occasionally clichéd, and completely irresistible — a genuine crowd-pleaser that sparked a bidding war and landed at A24, which feels exactly right. Then there's Full Phil, Quentin Dupieux's gleefully unhinged hour-and-18-minute fever dream: Kristen Stewart eating everything in sight in Paris while Woody Harrelson's stomach literally expands in response, riots erupt outside, and a hotel employee (Charlotte Le Bon) may or may not be in love with her. It's absurdist and occasionally padded, but when a film commits this hard to chaos, resistance is futile.

The most joyful film of the bunch — possibly of the year — is Congo Boy. Director Rafiki Fariala, just 28 and making his fiction debut, follows a teenage Congolese refugee in civil war-torn Bangui who spends his days fighting to free his imprisoned parents and his nights chasing a dream of musical stardom. Lead Bradley Fiomona, discovered through street casting, is magnetic. The film doesn't always resist the urge to over-explain, but its emotional range — terror to euphoria, gunfire to dancefloor — is extraordinary.

Five films, zero filler: your Cannes watchlist is officially sorted.

Read the original at Vogue.