All the Films in Competition at Cannes 2026, Ranked from Best to Worst

12. “Coward”

After winning awards and generating controversy at Cannes for “Girl” (2019) and “Close” (2023), two queer coming-of-age dramas that veer between exquisite sensitivity and near-exploitative cruelty, the Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont returned this year with his third and strongest feature, set during the First World War. Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne shared the jury’s Best Actor prize for their skillfully harmonized performances as a pair of soldiers who participate in a military theatre troupe; as entertainers, they’re not only granted some respite from the trenches but also allowed to push against the norms of gender expression via drag. Dhont expertly handles the tension between the homosocial and the homoerotic, and if his honey-toned visual style sometimes leans toward fussiness, it’s counterbalanced by the brutality of the combat sequences. Mercifully, he avoids his usual lurch into tragedy; war, he figures rightly, is terrible enough.

13. “Hope”

The movie that struck its detractors as the competition’s most incongruous entry was, for the rest of us, precisely what the race needed: a jolt of pure, unfiltered blockbuster adrenaline, courtesy of a South Korean horror maestro, Na Hong-jin, whose blood-soaked action-thrillers have accounted for some of my happiest Cannes memories. “Hope,” a riotous mashup of thrillingly staged and daringly attenuated chase scenes, mordant small-town comedy, and delightfully craptacular C.G.I., isn’t as fully realized a nightmare as some of Na’s earlier triumphs, such as “The Yellow Sea” (2011) and “The Wailing” (2016). Nor am I prepared to defend the coda, which makes a bewildering swerve into alien-species lore, all to lay the groundwork for a sequel that I doubt the world needs. For now, though, the world does need “Hope.”

14. “Another Day”

I didn’t know beforehand that this modest, winning comedy-drama, written and directed by the French filmmaker Jeanne Herry, was an addiction story. What’s refreshing about “Another Day” is that it doesn’t really seem to know it, either; it deftly sidesteps a minefield of rehab and relapse clichés, sees its protagonist whole, and doesn’t treat any one of her problems as definitive. Garance (wonderfully played by Adèle Exarchopoulos) is a talented, struggling actress who, over the course of the movie, endures the COVID-19 pandemic, falls in love with another woman, gets fired from her job, supports her younger sister through a serious illness, and, along the way, downs enough glasses of wine to put her at serious risk of liver failure. “Another Day” ’ s jittery rhythms add meaning to its English title: every moment is fleeting and, like this movie, worth savoring for what it is.

15. “A Woman’s Life”

The two-time César winner Léa Drucker is overdue for a Best Actress win at Cannes; her lead performances in “Last Summer” (2023) and “Case 137” (2025) were among the strongest to grace the festival competition in recent years. She’s in typically memorable form here as Gabrielle, a middle-aged maxillofacial surgeon who—like Garance in “Another Day,” the competition’s other French femme-centric slice of life—exists in a continual state of upheaval: staff turmoil in an already high-stress job, frustrations with her husband and stepchildren, and an unexpected new love (Mélanie Thierry). The director Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet tries to bring texture and grit to a romantic-dramedy tradition known for its gloss and sentimentality; the occasional surgery scenes, though unlikely to faze anyone who’s binged “The Pitt,” succeed in doing so. I’m less enamored of the decision to compartmentalize the story into a series of chapters, each one with a self-consciously aphoristic title.