The Cannes Film Festival: A Hotbed of Bold Films, Beautiful People, and Ugly Rumors

For the last 79 years, around this time, a super-glamorous, warm-weather film festival at Cannes happens. For 12 days, a nice, balmy, champagne-fizz city glistens with beautiful beaches, rich dudes, foxy ladies, and dozens of huge movie banners hanging from hotel balconies.All socially aspiring types want to attend the Cote d’Azur cinematic festival because it’s the most flash-bulbed, red-carpeted event of the year, replete with wide-vista views of the sparkling, light blue Mediterranean and expensive yachts and three-masted schooners anchored in the bay. Cannes smells great too — a briny aroma evoking water, palm trees, seafood, scooter exhaust, and asphalt. I love the cry of hovering seagulls in the early hours of the morning, long after the packed cafes, restaurants, and gelato shops have shut. Oh, lest we forget, the Cannes Film Festival has always tended to show standout, Grade A films. Nearly a fortnight in Cannes can set devotional movie hounds thousands of euros, although enterprising journalists have been known to scrape by on expenditures of less than $5,000, plane fare included.Cannes remains a big deal eight decades after its inception because festival award winners can still be big Oscar influencers come the end of the year — “Anora,” 2025’s Palme d’Or winner, won last year’s Best Picture Oscar. “Parasite,” the 2019 Palme d’Or winner, took the top Oscar as well. “No Country for Old Men,” which premiered at Cannes in 2007, went on to win the Best Picture Oscar.The Festival des Palais in preparation for the Cannes Film Festival in 2003. Frank Micelotta/Getty Images When “Pulp Fiction” and “Apocalypse Now” premiered at Cannes in 1994 and 1979, respectively, it was hugely influential. Not to mention those 1955 “To Catch a Thief” memories of a tanned Cary Grant wading ashore in red-plaid bathing trunks in front of the Carlton hotel with the beach-attired Grace Kelly applying suntan oil while gazing in Grant’s direction.The knock against the 79th Cannes Film Festival, which is currently ongoing, is that there are too few American-produced films. The high-octane titles this year — Cristian Mungiu’s “Fjord,” Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Minotaur, ”Lukas Dhont’s “Coward,” Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Fatherland,” Pedro Almodovar’s “Bitter Christmas” — are all European product. John Travolta and Barbra Streisand will be making appearances, but 2026 will be light on major U.S. celebrities.Cate Blanchett attends the Cannes Film Festival. Matthias Nareyek/Getty ImagesI’ve been attending Cannes Film Festival for 26 straight years as an online film columnist, although my first Cannes experience happened in 1992 when I was working for Entertainment Weekly. The hot new films that year were “Reservoir Dogs,” “The Player,” “Howard’s End,” and “Basic Instinct,” and I schmoozed with the cool directors including Quentin Tarantino, Spike Lee, Paul Verhoeven, and Robert Altman. I brought a tuxedo that year that I rented in West Hollywood for black tie parties and stayed in a small room in the Moliere Hotel — only $100 per night — and regularly frequented Le Petit Carlton, a great bar and late-night street party.The premiere of ‘Basic Instinct’ at the Cannes Film Festival in 1992. Wikimedia CommonsImmediately I was intoxicated by the bolt and the buzz from hastily-consumed cappuccinos; a woman’s cultured voice informing filmgoers inside the Grand Lumiere cinema, “Ladies and gentlemen, the screening is about to begin;” the roar and hum of the storied Croisette.In 1992, my mission for Entertainment Weekly was to get quotes about the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles that just had concluded, the faint aroma of burnt wood and melted rubber still in the air as I boarded my Cannes-bound jet. Mr. Verhoeven gave me a snappy quote. When I asked Altman, he said, “This subject is too important to be discussed in the pages of Entertainment Weekly.” When I quizzed Mickey Rourke, he said that “the blood of Los Angeles falls upon those who instigated this revolt, the malicious prophets of black cinema.” Subsequently I spoke with Spike Lee at a party who ripped into Mr. Rourke big time for his comments. Entertainment Weekly was happy with that.But Cannes is not, as a rule, a casual, easy access environment like the Telluride Film Festival. It’s almost completely paparazzi-driven, and all the noteworthy celebrity quotes are shared during press conferences.But a few choice moments linger in the mind. During a Cannes party in 2008 for “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” I congratulated Shia LaBeouf, who, having been involved in a few alcohol-related episodes, had become involved with Alcoholics Anonymous, I had recently read, and joined the program. “The program?” Shia replied. “Not me…I’m just livin’ my life.”Barry Pepper and January Jones at the Cannes Film Festival press event for ‘The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.’ Jeffrey WellsIn 2005 I attended a press event at a handsome hillside mansion for “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada,” a pretty good film which Tommy Lee Jones directed and starred in. Mr. Jones was asked about the US distribution prospects for his picture, a modern-day tale set in western Texas and Mexico. He replied, “The wheels of commerce are turning as we speak.”At the event, a fellow journalist said I should have snapped a picture of January Jones, later Betty Draper from “Mad Men,” when she was eating a banana at our press table. He then proceeded to share an unsubstantiated and insubstantial rumor concerning Ms. Jones’s erotic activities. During a conversation with Mr. Jones, this same journalist then got into a fierce argument with a critic at the Washington Post, prompting Mr. Jones to referee the dispute, exclaiming, “Boys? Boys?”Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise at the Cannes Film Festival premiere of ‘Far and Away’ in 1992. Wikimedia CommonsAt the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, a press conference for Lars Von Trier’s film “The Idiots” occurred at the celebrated Hotel du Cap. At one point Mr. Von Trier passed along an anecdote about the filming of “Eyes Wide Shut” which was then shooting in London; a bizarre tale about why Harvey Keitel, who had been originally cast as Sydney Pollack’s character Bill Harford, had left the film. Before passing along the oddball story, which allegedly involved an accident, which he called an “honest misfire” between Mr. Keitel and his co-star Nicole Kidman, Mr Von Trier instructed the assembled journalists to switch off their audio recorders. Coincidentally, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman had attended my very first Cannes Film Festival to promote “Far and Away,” but I’d seen Ron Howard‘s period film in Los Angeles previously, and that was enough. Mr. Von Trier was later responsible for one of my favorite Cannes cinematic moments in 2000 when his film “Dancing in the Dark” premiered. When Bjork’s overture began playing at the beginning of the film, the music and the moment signalled something exceptional was about to happen. I later saw “Dancer” a few times in America, but the overture was either ignored or the effect wasn’t the same. Then there was the time in 2005 German film director Wim Wenders premiered his western “Don’t Come Knocking.” It was not on a par with his previous masterpieces “The American Friend” and “Wings of Desire.” At a press luncheon for the film I asked Mr. Wenders to respond to a comment in a review of his new film written by New York Times’ critic Manohla Dargis who had declared, “This deeply sincere film takes place in an American West that bears little relation to the real world…like other artists and intellectuals from abroad, Mr. Wenders seems to have fallen for an America that mostly exists on Hollywood backlots and in rock’n’roll lyrics.” Mr. Wenders responded, “I have travelled around this country and gotten to know it better than any other film critic I’ve ever met. I don’t think [Dargis] has ever been to Butte, Montana.”Cannes hasn’t changed all that much over the decades — the same expectant vibes when it begins and the same feeling of downshifting during the final two or three days; I have never attended the end-of-festival awards ceremony. But at least, unlike the Sundance Film Festival, Cannes has never gone “woke.” Cannes was, and is, a safe space, for cinema. Recently it’s been more supportive of female filmmakers, but who hasn’t been?Robert Reford at the ‘All is Lost’ Cannes Film Festival party in 2013. Jeffrey WellsA typical day involves at least three screenings but it’s considered a tiny bit wimpy not to see four, and it takes a soldier of fortune to see five. You have to write about everything as you go along. That meant in 2013 leaving a post-premiere yacht party for the Robert Redford-starring film “All is Lost” early because I needed to be up at 6.30 AM the next morning to see Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska.”Frankly the Venice Film Festival, which I also cover, has more award-season winning films and feels more spiritual than Cannes. But the Cannes Film Festival possesses a certain pride. As Mick Jagger could have sung in the Rolling Stones’ song “Shattered,” “To attend the Cannes Film Festival, you must be tough, tough, tough, tough, tough, tough, tufffff.”

The Cannes Film Festival: A Hotbed of Bold Films, Beautiful People, and Ugly Rumors

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