Cannes 2026 Opens With Sheepish Glamour and a Surprise Masterpiece

“I’m not a Palme d’Or guy,” said a tuxedoed Peter Jackson on the opening night of the 79^th Cannes Film Festival. “I don’t really make Palme d’Or films.” His frank admission acknowledged the odd curiosity of him receiving an honorary version of the otherwise competitive top award at Cannes — which has never programmed any of the native New Zealander’s movies over his four-decade career (although his virtuosic schlock debut Bad Taste did make a splashy impression in 1987 at the festival’s pay-to-play parallel market).

Adding to the strange celebration was a mustachioed Elijah Wood — who Jackson playfully ribbed, claiming that the boyish actor had struggled for years to grow one — and a female duet who come onstage to sing their cover version of “Get Back,” in homage to Jackson’s multipart restoration and expansion of Michael Lindsay-Hoggs’ Beatles film which sidestepped movie theaters and streamed exclusively on Disney+.

Why Jackson? Why now? This year, Cannes is having its most celeb-bereft installment in recent memory, due to a lineup of auteur-driven films with very few international stars or high-wattage name directors. Contemporary masters like Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Ira Sachs, Cristian Mungiu, Hirokazu Kore-Eda, Paweł Pawlikowski, and Asghar Farhadi might get cinephiles’ blood racing, but they sure don’t make for splashy headlines.

Hollywood is mostly absent this year, although Cannes is doing its best to prop up the glitz with sweaty-palmed special screenings of questionable quality. Take John Travolta’s appearance to present his directing debut Propeller One-Way Night Coach, a barely-hour-long trifle that premieres on Apple TV in two weeks; and a 25^th anniversary midnight screening of The Fast and the Furious, so Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez can walk the red carpet.

“Electric” is not the most apt word to describe the festival so far, despite its best efforts to convince people otherwise by opening with Pierre Salvadori’s film The Electric Kiss. Too bad the French film, a harmless period romance about a carnival-attraction gamine who offers high-voltages smooches to a paying public and gets hired to give an uninspired painter a jolt of inspiration, isn’t as shocking as its convoluted premise might suggest.

Doing its best to juice Cannes with some human chum was Jane Schoenbrun’s Un Certain Regard opener Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, the non-binary auteur’s genre-tweaking, gender-bending meta-movie riff on the storied-hoary Friday the 13^th franchise. Hannah Einbinder stars as Kris, a young Sundance-darling queer director hired to reboot the legendary ’80s slasher series Camp Miasma and its Jason-esque killer antagonist Little Death, which finally ran out of steam years ago after fourteen installments.

Her ambition is to subvert the films’ infamously chauvinist and transphobic politics while “rethinking cultural depictions of monstrosities” by enlisting the elusive Billy Preston (Gillian Anderson), final-girl teen star of the 1980 original that launched the series. But Billy, now a Norma-Desmond-inspired recluse, has no patience for how Kris intellectualizes Camp Miasma. “It was about two simple things: flesh and fluids,” she drawls in her best southern gothic accent, hinting at a sapphic seduction that will inevitably lead to the duo consummating urges that are inexorably intertwined with the sex-as-death mantra that made Camp Miasma such a pop-culture phenomenon.

What follows is a tender mess of a movie, too self-aware, self-effacing and self-serious to shape its borderline pretentious jumble of ideas into a cogent, compelling story. There’s not enough depth and resonance in its characters or their actions to make any lasting statement about how mainstream representations of sexual desire affect, define, and sometimes warp their viewers’ world. Schoenbrun’s take is to create an artifice so unmoored from reality that it functions less as poetic metaphor and more as a hermetic safe space.

But Cannes is showing more significant signs of life as the official selection of competition films starts to unspool. Pawlikowski’s austerely potent Fatherland had its premiere only two days after Cannes opened, yet is already far and away the one to beat for the Palme d’Or. The period film, set in 1949 amid the early machinations of the Cold War, follows expat and Nobel Prize winning author Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) as he travels with his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller) from West Germany to East Germany collecting dueling Goethe prizes in Frankfurt (where Goethe was born) and Weimar (where he lived).

Both political powers — capitalists and communists — want to claim both Goethe and Mann for their own. But the German-born Mann, now an American citizen on his first visit to his homeland since emigrating in 1933, sees an opportunity to give speeches on love and freedom, how language and literature have no national boundaries, the nobility of Goethe’s ideas, and the necessity of facing your friends as well as your enemies. A family tragedy casts a pall on their tour, which adds an even more human dimension to the sociopolitical tragedy and postwar ruins that surround them on their journey.

Fatherland has a slim 82-minute running time, but its compressed world contains a multitude of ideas and emotions, a heady blend of the personal and the political with regrets that loom over the characters and just enough glimmers of cathartic hope by the end to reaffirm the impact that a single life can have on a world that’s been so utterly decimated. If this superb entry is any indication, this edition of Cannes might yet light up the Croisette.