CANNES 2025: STIFF COMPETITION

The 78th Cannes Film Festival (May 13-24, 2025) will see Tom Cruise light up the screen one last time in the guise of Impossible Missions Force agent Ethan Hunt.

- Saibal Chatterjee

An Out of Competition screening of Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning on the second day of the festival will be preceded hours earlier by a Rendezvous with the film's co-writer and director Christopher McQuarrie.

But there will be life — in fact, plenty of it - beyond the red-carpet excitement around the potential blockbuster that is scheduled for release in the United States on May 23. Three other American actors — Scarlett Johansson, Kristen Stewart and Eva Victor — and English actor Harris Dickinson will be in Cannes with their directorial debuts.

Johansson's Eleanor the Great, starring 95-year-old June Squibb as a nonagenarian Floridian woman who develops an unlikely bond with a 19-year-old student in New York: Stewart's The Chronology of Water, an adaptation of American writer and editor Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir starring Imogen Poots; and Dickinson's Urchin, about a drifter struggling to integrate into society, are among the 19 films that constitute the festival's Un certain regard section.

Editor-turned-actress Eva Victor's Sorry, Baby, which premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, will play as part of the parallel Quinzaine des Cineastes (Directors' Fortnight).

The film, produced by Barry Jenkins, has the director herself in the lead role as a college professor confronting the aftermath of an unsettling incident.