Stephen David Miller wraps up his coverage of the Cannes Film Festival with reviews of Fjord, The Black Ball, The Beloved, and Orange-Flavoured Wedding, and a recap of the Closing Ceremony

Hello again, Decoding Everything readers! I’m back again with the final installment of my 2026 Cannes Film Festival coverage. In keeping with tradition, I’ll be wrapping up this series with a run-down of the Closing Ceremony and its corresponding awards. 

Despite my abbreviated festival schedule this year, I’m happy to report that I still managed to catch every title awarded by the Jury this year. In fact, there are only three Competition films I missed: A Woman’s Life, The Unknown, and Parallel Tales. In their place, I was able to prioritize a handful of titles from other tracks of the festival, including one favorite that I’ll be reviewing later in this piece.

But now isn’t the time to fixate on metrics. The festival has concluded, and all of those details which, for the week, seemed all-consuming, have faded into a warm, nostalgic blur. So before doing one last dive into the specifics, let’s zoom out and take stock of the experience as a whole.

Working A Muscle

Every year, after the conclusion of the festival, I sit on the flight home licking my wounds and questioning what it is that makes the effort worthwhile. Why dedicate substantial time and resources to flying halfway across the world and riding this anxiety roller coaster year after year? Why endure so much pain to catch a handful of movies, under conditions that are in many ways worse than my local Alamo Drafthouse? And why do I always find it necessary to describe this chaotic process for you alongside the reviews, as if the latter couldn’t exist without the former? 

Today, as I float somewhere between Frankfurt and San Francisco, the word I’m landing on is “tension.” There are multiple competing impulses at play with this festival, a push and pull that ought to detract from the film viewing experience, but somehow only serves to strengthen it. Like working a muscle that might otherwise atrophy.

The first tension has to do with motion. Cannes is a complicated animal: By my count, this year there were over 750 individual screenings my badge gave me the option to attend. Charting a path through that maze requires a great deal of precision, often leaving just enough time to get out of one theater and into the queue for the next. You are always in a hurry, as are thousands of cinephiles alongside you. And yet, the primary mood cultivated at this festival, and the city more broadly, is one of having nowhere else to be. Cashiers pause to make small talk, regardless of the length of the line at their stalls. Narrow sidewalks are filled with groups who fan out and stroll at a leisurely crawl. Even the screenings themselves are guaranteed to fall behind schedule, sometimes due to celebrities taking extra photos on the red carpet, and sometimes due to those famous 10+ minute ovations. The result is a constant tug of war between racing and relaxing: running at full speed only to find yourself walking in a crowd, frantically penciling in a lunch that will take 90 minutes to eat, rushing into a theater to sit and pause for hours at a time. There’s a meditative quality to it, a demand that you temporarily eschew logic and practice stillness. I don’t think it’s an accident that the film which most resonated with me this year, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All Of A Sudden, was about the virtue of slowing down.

The second source of tension involves emotional distance. A major, clout-heavy gathering like Cannes can truly bring out the worst in people, to the degree that I often wonder if some subset of the population is unaware that other human beings exist. Over the past week, I’ve stood behind aspiring influencers having long, impromptu photo shoots on the steps inside the theater, blocking hundreds of us from accessing our seats. I’ve attended world premieres with the cast and crew present, sandwiched between men who are having full-on conversations, or scrolling through TikTok, or snapping photos of the screen with the flash on. Audience members blow their noses and cough to their hearts' content, without even hinting at a precaution that might keep the rest of us from getting sick. Before one recent screening, my neighbor decided to make an Instagram post of herself walking the red carpet, set to “Diamonds” by Rihanna. I know this, because for a full 15 minutes I was subjected to the same tiny snippet of the chorus on repeat, at a volume that I couldn’t believe a phone speaker could produce. The visible agony of everyone within a 20 seat radius of her didn’t seem to make a dent. Days later, I’ve forgotten numerous plot details from that particular screening, but the vocal inflection of "shine bright like a diamond" has dug a permanent groove into my skull.

Yet just as I feel as far as possible from other people, something will happen that makes me reconnect. There’s an intimacy to a Cannes screening that you simply don’t get at a theater back at home, however nicer the screen or more comfortable the commute. It's the act of sharing art in the presence of the people who created it, and with enthusiasts from around the world who love it just as much as you. Having a fraction of the audience roar with laughter at a joke that didn’t really translate in English, and letting their energy compel me to laugh in kind. The way we clap and shout when the credits come up, as a direct communication to the cast and crew. Even the aforementioned clout-chasing behavior, the performative desire to be seen attending by folks who clearly don’t care about the movie, has the effect of elevating the art. For two and a half hours, that screening of a naturalistic drama about Eastern European immigrants feels like the most exclusive club in town.

Ultimately, for as much as I care about the quality of the movies, it’s the full-body context that I’m here for. The other night, I caught a new Samurai flick by Kiyoshi Kurosawa in a side track of the festival. I had to run to get there on time, after a mob of tourists who were photographing the red carpet had blocked my usual route, and a celebrity motorcade had blocked my fallback. But I made it all the same, and because I was so late, I was escorted to one of the few remaining vacant seats. It was a far better spot than what my ticket would have gotten me. Immediately, the head of the festival Thierry Frémaux took the stage, and all my cortisol dissolved into excitement. When Kurosawa entered the theater, the cheers were nearly deafening. Among those wildly applauding a few rows ahead of me was Hirokazu Koreeda, a director whose own film in Competition had just been panned. In that moment, it didn’t matter how Sheep In The Box had been received, nor did it particularly matter if the new Kurosawa would be a hit. Whether we were all gearing up for a Michelin-starred dinner or just a solid, home-cooked meal, what was important was that we were gathered around the table. That’s what I’ll remember.

Festival Round-Up: Four Favorites

In the spirit of celebration, with this final installment I’d like to dispense with negativity and focus on the good. I’ll start with a deep dive into the film that took home the top prize this year, then finish up with more bite-sized reviews of three of my most pleasant surprises of the fest.

Fjord (Cristian Mungiu)

The family unit is meant to stay intact. It’s an almost universally accepted truth, as tautological as religion. But families, like societies, need something to bind them together. They can be held with brute force by a totalitarian ego, though as Minotaur explored, that’s a fragile truce. The more stable option is to cultivate a shared context: principles, traditions, specific experiences, unique ways of seeing and talking about the world. Spend time with a tight-knit pair of siblings or a particularly long-lived friend group, and you’re likely to catch snippets of a secret language—a dialect of inside jokes and cultural touchstones only those within the circle understand. None of this is a bad thing; it can be comforting and wholesome! But if we aren’t careful, those forces that bind us together can easily become reasons to distance ourselves from others. We create factions, bubbles that are impenetrable from the outside.

The Gheorghiu family have recently emigrated from Romania to a quiet seaport on the west coast of Norway. Everything is evidently idyllic. The fictional setting of Fjord, filmed in and around Ålesund, is gorgeously serene. The townspeople are cheery and inclusive, paragons of Scandinavian values. And the Gheorghius themselves are, by most any metric, a model family. Lisbet (Renate Reinsve) is an empathetic soul who cares for elderly patients at a nursing facility. She was born in this town, and she's excited to plant roots here again. Her husband Mihai (Sebastian Stan) is a fastidious, polite software engineer who volunteers at the church and has already made great strides in learning Norwegian. Even their five children seem kindhearted and impeccably well-behaved, particularly their eldest Elia (Vanessa Ceban). Pay a visit to the devout Christian family’s home, and you’ll likely be made to endure a warm plate of food, an impromptu worship singalong, and a prayer for good health on your way out the door. Corny, perhaps, but ultimately well-intentioned.

Everything changes when a school gym teacher notices bruises on Elia’s body. At once, the Norwegian Child Welfare Service leaps into action, sending all five children into the foster system while an investigation is performed. It begins with a simple factual question: Do Mihai and Lisbet hit their children? But it doesn’t take long for the situation to spiral, with the very question casting aspersions on their character. Once positive attributes, like the children’s pitch-perfect behavior, now start to look like evidence of emotional abuse. By the time a hearing can formally convene, the case has ballooned into a lightning rod of public opinion about the place of religious and conservative values in Norwegian society. All of this leads to a lengthy series of philosophical debates, recalling the riveting courtroom scenes from Anatomy of a Fall.

I loved this sharp, incisive movie. As a former evangelical turned bleeding-heart, progressive heathen, I was impressed with Fjord’s balanced framing, tipping our sympathies towards the Gheorghius just enough to make us root for reunification while also constantly wondering if that instinct is correct. Secular entertainment often depicts religious fundamentalists in cartoonish strokes—either the knowing grifter or the terminally brainwashed naïf. But Mungiu’s screenplay, paired with Reinsve and Stan’s incredibly layered, multilingual performances, resists easy stereotypes at every turn. Lisbet and Mihai are neither punchlines nor martyrs. Instead, they are painted as loving parents with genuine beliefs, some elements of which are edifying and others harmful and regressive. It’s a contradiction familiar to most anyone who grew up in the church, but it’s one I’ve rarely seen accurately portrayed on film. At the same time, we’re also led to question those “accepting” liberal neighbors and the smiling institutions that represent them. In their earnest quest to create a healthy, pluralistic society, haven't they just codified yet another brand of xenophobia—a social code written in a language of shifting norms, with little grace for those who weren’t already fluent? 

If that sounds like it’s veering into a be-tolerant-of-my-intolerance, anti-cancel-culture screed, fret not. Fjord is far too thoughtful and restrained to fall into that trap. Rather than preach, it aims to provoke thought, highlighting real incongruities and asking the audience to unpack them. I'm still wrestling with it days after my screening. When it hits theaters in the States for its inevitable awards season run, I highly recommend you take the plunge.

The Beloved (Rodrigo Sorogoyen)

A world-renowned director meets his estranged daughter at a local dining establishment. After a bit of awkward chit-chat, he cuts to the chase. He's seen her in various projects—mostly garbage, he (too readily) concedes—but he can tell that given the right material, she would shine. Does she want to star in his next film? It piques her interest, but soon an argument ensues, leaving him frozen while she storms out of the room.

If you’ve seen Sentimental Value, that description might give you déjà vu. But it’s a new year, and that means there’s a new movie about moviemaking and dysfunctional families in town. The above scene opens Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beloved, and though it begins in familiar territory, it diverges almost at once. Esteban Martínez (Javier Bardem) is a legendary filmmaker with an equally legendary temper and more than a few skeletons in his closet. His daughter Emilia (Victoria Luengo) hasn’t heard from him in decades, but despite the clear relational scars from that (and their aforementioned argument) she accepts the part without hesitation. And so, we join them on a multi-week film shoot in the Canary Islands, as they make a period piece set in 1930s Western Sahara. Though they do their best to keep things strictly professional and focus on the work, their personal history inevitably bubbles to the surface. Who are they to each other now?

This is an artful, sophisticated character study, and it won me over completely. Bardem brings a captivating mixture of volatility and softness to the role; we feel how badly he wants to reconnect with Emilia, and also understand the many good reasons she ought to resist the attempt. Luengo is equally compelling, playing Emilia less as a wounded inner-child, and more as a reasonably well-adjusted adult who sees a chance at getting clarity but hasn’t yet decided how much of her self is worth the risk. Their conversations flow with a natural, lived-in authenticity, but the best parts of the movie are when they’re silent—watching each other, studying the path not taken from a distance. It’s beautiful stuff, with a raw emotional core and a handful of formal grace notes that further help to make it sing. Although The Beloved isn’t my single favorite film in competition, it’s the one that most surprised me. I went in knowing nothing and left in awe.

Orange-Flavoured Wedding (Christophe Honoré)

Continuing the theme of dysfunctional families, I want to use this platform to shout out Orange-Flavoured Wedding. Christophe Honoré’s semi-autobiographical family drama screened outside of competition in the Cannes Premieres track, which might explain the scarcity of buzz surrounding it. But having seen and enjoyed the director’s previous work (starting with a screening of Sorry Angel on my very first visit to Cannes), I knew I wanted to prioritize catching this premiere, even if it threw my schedule deeper into chaos. I’m glad I did, because it wound up being one of my favorites of the fest.

The film takes place over a single day in 1978, where the Puig family is celebrating the marriage of their youngest brother Jacques (Paul Kircher). Jacques has six siblings, many of whom have spouses and children in turn, and so the gathering—like the cast list, a who’s-who of recognizable French actors which would take a full paragraph to list—is jam-packed nearly to the point of toppling over. It’s a rowdy, alcohol-fueled affair. Though the Puig children's estranged, abusive father isn’t invited to the wedding, his presence looms large over the festivities: in the psychic damage they are still working through, in their fervent desire not to be anything like him, and in the cycle of violence that continues despite their best efforts. What follows can best be described as a combination of Rachel Getting Married and the “Fishes” episode of The Bear. Alternatingly tender and chaotic; a Polaroid snapshot of a family trying to set aside their flaws and have a nice time together, abysmally failing, but finding something lovely and enduring in the wreckage. With a few stunning asides, Honoré makes it clear that we are watching a memory reconstructed from some distance. But even if that framing device weren’t told to us directly, the tone alone would have confirmed it: mournful, nostalgic, already halfway out the door. I can’t say I fully kept up with the sprawling family tree or the personal dramas of each character within it, but I’m also firmly convinced I wasn’t meant to. It’s the feeling that lingers, and it's one I found intensely cathartic.

The Black Ball (Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi)

There’s one more film I want to highlight before pivoting to the awards. Continuing what appears to be a theme this year, it’s another overstuffed, multigenerational saga that’s better expressed by way of feeling rather than literal plot. It’s the ingenious, dazzling, absurdly ambitious new film by “Los Javis”, Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi.

The Black Ball premiered at the tail end of the festival, and I was starting to seriously feel the pain. For as much as I try to go into every screening with a positive attitude, the truth is, I was exhausted and dreading its well-above-2-hour runtime. As the film opened, bouncing between seemingly disconnected timelines and offering little by way of context, I felt myself fading. I braced myself for a lengthy struggle to stay awake. But it turns out, it had me in the palm of its hand: lulled at first, levitating by the end. 

There are three threads at play here. The first takes place in Grenada in 1932, where a young man (Milo Quifes) is attempting to gain membership to a Casino club. The second follows a young soldier (Álvaro Lafuente Calvo) in 1939, who joins the Francoist Nationalist Army only to forge a friendship with a POW under his watch (Miguel Bernardeau). The third follows Alberto (Carlos González), a graduate student in modern day Madrid who is doing research on queer themes in early century Spanish art. Eventually, the three will converge—and with them, the work of playwright Federico García Lorca, multiple elaborate song-and-dance numbers, and some half dozen different filmmaking styles.

With so many moving parts, this could have easily been a disaster, yet it succeeds on virtually every level. I can best describe it as a tower. Calvo and Ambrossi are patiently teaching you how to watch their movie, one scene at a time. You climb it with them, rung by rung, having no clue where you're headed, until eventually you look down in astonishment at how far you've come. Once you reach that spinning sensation of vertigo, they make it dance, unleashing a flood of emotion alongside a rousing message about queer art and inheritance. It's astonishing. If I’m wearing my critic hat, I’ll concede that the journey could have been a little tighter: There are a few too many ideas here, and they weigh down the climb a bit. But the construction is so impressive, and the altitude high it conjures is so pure, I hardly care to dwell on the mechanics. This is an overwhelming, passionate work, and an incredible calling card for whatever the filmmakers do next.

And The Winner Is…

Every year, the festival concludes with its official Closing Ceremony. The event is reminiscent of the Academy Awards back in the States, with a stacked red carpet (even by Cannes standards), a live telecast, a dedicated emcee, and a roster of celebrity presenters. It’s a sparkling spectacle, and consistently one of the more difficult tickets to get your hands on. Last year, I failed and needed to watch on a screen from the overflow theater next door. The year prior, I nabbed one begging on the street mere moments before the show began. This time around, though, the online ticketing gods had smiled upon me, granting me an invitation days ahead of schedule. So on late Saturday afternoon, I donned my tux and took my first and only leisurely stroll of the week, ambling my way to the Grand Théâtre Lumière to take one final trip up the red carpet steps.

There is a strict “no photography” rule on the Cannes red carpet during black tie premieres, and security guards are famously vigilant in their enforcement. This is doubly true at the Closing Ceremony, given the stakes of the event. For a hypothetical example of what that vigilance might look like, see the guy in the video still below who is staring daggers directly into my covertly-placed camera, moments before berating me in French.

Since I’ve covered the Closing Ceremony previously on this site, I’ll be brief in describing the logistics. For each award, the host introduces a surprise celebrity presenter. The presenter then walks onto the stage, delivers a preamble about the award they are presenting, before throwing to a specific member of the Jury. That Jury member then stands and announces the winner, who is then ushered onto the stage to give a speech. 

This year’s event was hosted by French actress Eye Haïdara, who delivered a spirited monologue about the importance of the festival before introducing the two side prizes that are awarded by special juries. First, filmmaker Carla Simón, gave the prize for Best Short Film to Federico Luis’s For The Opponents. Then actress Monia Chokri announced the winner of the Camera d’Or, which recognizes the best first feature film by a director, chosen across all festival tracks. This year, that went to Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo’s Ben’Imana, a film about a Rwandan genocide survivor which screened in the Un Certain Regard slate. I unfortunately hadn't been able to catch either film. But judging by the audience reaction, they seem to have been beloved, and Dusabejambo's speech was particularly affecting.

Haïdara then invited the Official Competition Jury to the stage. This year, Park Chan-Wook presided over the committee, comprised of Demi Moore, Diego Céspedes, Chloé Zhao, Isaach De Bankolé, Ruth Negga, Paul Laverty, Laura Wandel, and Stellan Skarsgård. Here they are, seated in risers to the right of the stage.

After an interminable detour wherein Isabelle Huppert gave an Honorary Palme d’Or (Lifetime Achievement Award) to a pre-recorded video of Barbra Streisand, we were off to the races!

• Best Performance By An Actor was presented by Geena Davis, who eagle-eyed readers may have noticed is a part of the poster for this edition of the festival. After an introduction about Thelma & Louise and the rising tide of feminism which gives both male and female actors a broader emotional palette to work with, she threw to the Jury. Stellan Skarsgård and Isaach de Bankolé announced the winners to be Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne, stars of the queer, French WWI romance Coward. This was the first of many awards that I didn’t have anywhere on my Bingo card. But I liked Coward quite a bit, and particularly appreciated the work of the two leads—one of whom, Macchia, had never acted in a film before! It was heartwarming to see just how thrilled they were to be there.
• Best Screenplay was presented by Lebanese director Nadine Labaki, who gave the first of many speeches about the difficulty of celebrating film in our current geopolitical moment. Paul Laverty then announced the winner as Emmanuel Marre for A Man Of His Time, a slow-burning historical procedural about a man (Marre’s real great-grandfather) who climbs the ranks of the collaborationist Vichy government during WWII. I thought the star, Swann Arlaud, had a chance of getting an actor nod, but I wouldn’t have predicted this would win screenplay. For my money, this banality-of-evil story was fairly laborious, and “subtle” to the point of feeling lifeless. Though of course, my lack of historical context likely factors into that assessment.
• Best Actress was presented by actor Pierfrancesco Favino. Chloé Zhao announced yet another joint award, this time for the two leads of All Of A Sudden, Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto. This was my single favorite film in competition, and the one I assumed would be a lock for the Palme d’Or. Efira and Okamoto collectively carried nearly every frame, so I was delighted to see them get their flowers. Sadly, this was the only recognition All Of A Sudden would be receiving at the event. Efira and Okamoto made the most of it, effusively praising Ryusuke Hamaguchi from the stage.

• Gael García Bernal presented the Jury Prize, which is essentially the Bronze Medal of the competition. He immediately apologized for needing to present in Spanish: “My French is terrible, although admittedly it is not as terrible as the current geopolitical situation!” Ruth Negga announced the winner to be Valeska Grisebach’s The Dreamed Adventure. Yet again, this was nowhere in my prediction bracket. Although I’d heard murmurs of diehard fans for the slice-of-life portrait of a Bulgarian border town, I was not one of them: At 167 minutes, I found it to be overlong and difficult to engage with. Clearly I need to give it another go after more than 4 hours of sleep. 
• Best Director was presented by Cannes stalwart Xavier Dolan, who gave an even more strongly-worded speech about the current state of the world, quoting Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish to thunderous applause. Laura Wandel and Diego Céspedes then announced the third shared award of the evening, giving the prize to Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi for The Black Ball, and to Paweł Pawlikowski for Fatherland. Calvo and Ambrossi would have been my personal picks for Director. In my mind, a messy but towering work is exactly what this award was designed to recognize, as I'd hoped for Resurrection last year. At the same time, I was an even bigger fan of Fatherland, and think Pawlikowski is arguably the single most deserving candidate in this year's slate. Absent further recognition for Fatherland, a Director prize was the bare minimum. All in all, two strong selections by the Jury.

• Zoe Saldaña came to the stage to present the Grand Prix, or Silver Medal of the fest. She teed up Demi Moore, who announced Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur as the winner. I was blown away by Minotaur, and also had it slotted as my personal Grand Prix pick. Zvyagintsev gave a poignant speech, featuring an impassioned plea for Putin to put an end to the war in Ukraine. “Millions of people around the world dream that this butchery will stop, and the only person who can put an end to this madness is the President of the Russian Federation."
• Finally, it was time for the top prize of the evening: the Palme d’Or, presented by Tilda Swinton. I don’t know if the presenters’ speeches are written with foreknowledge of the winners, but Swinton’s felt particularly prescient. In it, she referenced the need for films that unite us “in a world that has grown more violent and more authoritarian, where people see difference as a threat.” Park Chan-Wook further reiterated the message, saying that they were delighted to give the Palme to a film which advocates for understanding, bridging divides across language and culture: Cristian Mungiu's Fjord. As I detailed in today’s review, I was enthralled by Fjord, and likely would have found a way to get both it and Fatherland on my personal podium. But it’s a somewhat muted, challenging film, and I assumed my passion for it was personal and specific. All of which is to say, I was extremely surprised to see it take home the top prize; happy for Mungiu, but disappointed that All Of A Sudden, which I felt tackled the same themes in a more transcendent way, didn’t take home the gold. Still, it was great to see Mungiu take to the stage for his second Palme d’Or, with Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan celebrating beside him.

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And that's a wrap! In the end, as with every year, the feeling I’m left with is gratitude. Thankful for the opportunity to get a front-row seat to this art form that means so much to me, and thankful to have a chance to share a glimpse of it with you all. Even as my plane enters its descent, exhaustion settles in, and plot details begin to fade, I’m warmed by the afterglow of memory. It’s beautiful, like diamonds in the sky. Shine bright like a diamond. Shine bright like a diamond. Shine bright like a diamond. Shine bright like a di—

Stephen David Miller is a film enthusiast and cohost of The Spoiler Warning Podcast, who writes on Letterboxd and his personal blog.