With the 2025 Cannes Film Festival kicking off on Tuesday, one key question is what movies not to miss on the Croisette.

From competition veterans like the Dardenne brothers, Kelly Reichardt and Joachim Trier to newly promoted auteurs like Ari Aster, Oliver Hermanus, Carla Simón and Oliver Laxe, THR’s chief film critic rounds up 10 essential premieres

Die, My Love

Lynne Ramsey first turned heads in Cannes with her stunning 1999 feature debut Ratcatcher, about a 12-year-old boy growing up in poverty in the Glasgow housing projects. The Scottish director returned to the Croisette three years later with Morvern Callar, graduating to the official competition with We Need to Talk About Kevin in 2011 and You Were Never Really Here in 2017. Admirers have had a long wait for Ramsey’s fifth feature, a thriller with a vein of comedy she describes as “dark and fucked-up,” starring Jennifer Lawrence as a new mother walloped by postpartum depression, deteriorating mental health and a crumbling marriage. Robert Pattinson co-stars, with LaKeith Stanfield, Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte in supporting roles.

Eddington

After forging a reputation as a maestro of insta-cult horror with Hereditary and Midsommar, then taking a swerve into gonzo tragicomedy with Beau is Afraid, Ari Aster lands his first Cannes competition spot with this contemporary Western. Joaquin Phoenix stars as a small-town New Mexico sheriff opposite Pedro Pascal as the local mayor. Their standoff ignites a divisive uproar among the residents, with tensions heightened by social media, if the film’s trailer is anything to go by. The promising cast also includes Luke Grimes, Clifton Collins Jr., Emma Stone and Austin Butler.

The History of Sound

South African director Oliver Hermanus has been on a roll in recent years, with 2019’s powerful drama of racism and homophobia, Moffie, about a young gay conscript in the Apartheid-era military; and 2022’s Living, a delicate Anglicized adaptation of the Akira Kurosawa classic, Ikiru, with Bill Nighy as a London bureaucrat navigating his remaining time after a terminal cancer diagnosis. His new film, adapted from Ben Shattuck’s luminous short story, stars Josh O’Connor and Paul Mescal as lovers who travel together in the summer of 1919, walking hundreds of miles to record the ballads and folk songs of rural New Englanders.

The Mastermind

After premiering Showing Up in the 2022 Cannes competition, Kelly Reichardt returns with a drama that takes her away from her frequent setting in the Pacific Northwest to Massachusetts circa 1970. Unfolding against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the rise of the Women’s Liberation movement, the film stars Josh O’Connor, playing an unemployed carpenter who orchestrates a daring art heist in broad daylight, his life unraveling when things go haywire. The ensemble also includes Alana Haim, John Magaro, Gaby Hoffman and Hope Davis.

Romería

Following her lovely 2017 feature debut, Summer 1993, Carla Simón won the 2022 Berlin Golden Bear for Alcarràs, a deeply personal portrait, cast with nonprofessional actors, of a family of peach farmers about to lose the orchard that has sustained them for generations. The Catalan director’s family history is again at the heart of her latest work, about a young woman who travels to Galicia to meet her paternal grandparents, uncles and aunts for the first time. Both her parents died of AIDS when she was a child. The lingering shame around her father’s drug addiction makes her relatives reluctant to revisit his loss, but she finds her own way of reckoning with the painful past.

The Secret Agent

Returning to Portuguese-language cinema for the first time in several years, Wagner Moura stars in this historical political thriller from Brazil’s Kleber Mendonça Filho, who won the 2019 Jury Prize in Cannes with the wildly imaginative anti-colonialist Western, Bacurau (co-directed with Juliano Dornelles). Like 2023’s haunting documentary memoir, Pictures of Ghosts, the new film is set in the director’s hometown, Recife, this time during the final years of the country’s military dictatorship. It centers on a schoolteacher with a mysterious past in search of a peaceful refuge.

Sentimental Value

The concluding part of Joachim Trier’s Oslo trilogy, The Worst Person in the World, was a highlight of the 2021 Cannes competition, landing Renate Reinsve the best actress prize and putting her on the international map. It also went on to score two Oscar nominations. Working with his longtime writing partner Eskil Vogt, the director again casts Reinsve, this time as an acclaimed stage actress in an intimate portrait of a Norwegian family and the house in which they have lived for generations, reflecting on memory and the reconciliatory power of art. Stellan Skarsgard and Elle Fanning also star.

Sirat

All three of Oliver Laxe’s previous features have premiered at Cannes and sent him home with a prize. Especially after his hypnotic slow-burn drama about rural life at risk of extinction in the Galician mountains, Fire Will Come, which won the 2019 Un Certain Regard Jury Prize, it was only a matter of time before the French-born Spanish director got an upgrade from the sidebars to the main competition. The always excellent Sergi López plays a father in search of his lost daughter, who travels with his son to a rave in the mountains of southern Morocco where she vanished, and where they will be forced to confront their own limits.

Urchin

Cannes this year is crawling with actors making feature directing debuts, including Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water, with Imogen Poots as a woman seeking to find her voice and channel her trauma into art; and Scarlett Johansson’s Eleanor the Great, starring June Squibb as a nonagenarian who uproots from Florida to New York City and strikes up a friendship with a 19-year-old student. The one that most intrigues me — and has generated strong early word of mouth — is Harris Dickinson’s raw portrait of an unhoused London man, played by Frank Dillane, attempting to break his relentless cycle of self-destruction and turn his life around.

The Young Mothers Home

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are Cannes royalty, having won the Palme d’Or in 1999 for Rosetta, and again in 2005 for L’Enfant. One could argue that, with their signature naturalism, leftist leanings and blue-collar milieux, you know what you’re going to get from the Belgian brothers, like their British counterpart Ken Loach. But their unsentimental social realist dramas seldom fail to pierce the heart, which promises to be the case with this latest, about five women from troubled backgrounds, living in a shelter while struggling to build a better life for themselves and their children.