Stay Through the Credits

Eligibility ends May 31st, nominations voting opens June 11th, and the Emmy picture is finally coming into focus. This week's update: "Pluribus" is the drama front-runner nobody saw coming, Rhea Seehorn is long overdue and the predictions agree, and "Beef" is eating the limited series category alive. We run through every category — who's surging, who's fading, and whether Harrison Ford can possibly win this thing again.

Fifty-two films in ten days. We break down everything that mattered at this year's festival, from Cristian Mungiu's devastating Palme d'Or winner Fjord to the quieter miracles nobody saw coming. What Cannes 2026 said about grief, complicity, and the stubborn case for cinema.

Film fifty-two of the festival and Léa Mysius' The Birthday Party is the competition disappointment of the final days. A home invasion thriller with Herzi, Magimel and Bellucci that explains itself into irrelevance. We talk about what the Bellucci subplot promises and doesn't deliver, why Herzi deserved a better film, and what happened to the renegade filmmaker who made The Five Devils.

Film fifty-one of the festival and Grisebach's The Dreamed Adventure returns to the slow Eastern European Western with a woman at its centre and a genuine discovery in Yana Radeva. The first half is atmospheric and alive. The second half doesn't fully deliver on what the first built. We talk about the film's magnificent faces, what Grisebach does uniquely well, and why the ending lands lighter than thirty years of buried history should allow. 

We open day eleven with Maria Martínez Bayona's debut The End of It, in which Rebecca Hall plays a 250-year-old former provocateur who has decided she wants to die, and her death is her final artwork. The high concept is genuinely fascinating, the birthday party sequence is one of the best scenes at the festival, and Hall is extraordinary throughout. We talk about why the film can't quite match her commitment, what the bones room says about immortality and the self, and why this is still worth seeing despite everything it leaves on the table.

Film forty-nine of the festival and Lukas Dhont's Coward is his most mature and most tender film to date. A queer love story at the WWI Belgian front, two young men finding each other in an environment designed to make that impossible, and a first kiss that is among the most purely romantic gestures the movies have produced in years. We talk about what Dhont gets right this time that Girl and Close only reached for, and why Emmanuel Macchia is one of the great debut performances at this Cannes. 

Film forty-eight of the festival and Bertrand Mandico's Roma Elastica is a kaleidoscope of Fellini riffs, carnival grotesques, feminist cannibal peplums, and one extraordinary scene in which Marion Cotillard turns before a mirror and briefly makes everything feel necessary. We talk about what Mandico does that nobody else does, why it works in flashes and exhausts in bulk, and why Cotillard is incapable of giving a bad performance even inside a deliberately incoherent film. 

Film forty-seven of the festival and Marine Atlan's La Gradiva, the Critics' Week winner, is one of the most wholly transporting films we have seen at this Cannes. French teenagers in Naples, a class trip to Pompeii, and a boy named Toni whose entire romantic self is built on a story about his grandparents that turns out to be more complicated than he knew. Colas Quignard is an extraordinary discovery. We talk about the volcano metaphor that earns its weight, the meritocracy debate scene, and the ending that Atlan handles with devastating restraint. 

Film forty-six of the festival and Los Javis' The Black Ball is a monument. Three timelines, Lorca's ghost, a Spanish Civil War love story that is simultaneously the horniest and most heartbreaking thing at this Cannes, Penélope Cruz on a tank, and Glenn Close as an American Lorca scholar. The structural achievement alone is almost impossible to fully describe. We talk about why this is one of the great debuts in recent Spanish cinema and why we sat in the theater after it ended not quite ready to leave.

We open day ten with Zachary Wigon's Victorian Psycho and Maika Monroe's complete and total villain era. A Yorkshire governess with dead eyes, a body count, and a voiceover that exists mostly for her own reassurance. The first two thirds are gleefully, dementedly perfect. The ending needed more nerve. We talk about Monroe, the keyhole cinematography, the baby, and why we want a sequel immediately.