In the end, this year only two American films, James Gray’s Paper Tiger (starring Adam Driver, Miles Teller, and Scarlett Johansson) and Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love (with Rami Malek and Rebecca Hall) earned slots in the official Cannes competition. Apparently, the festival’s selection committee didn’t see many American films it deemed worthy. Maybe the potentially great films of 2026 just weren’t ready in time—or maybe they’re not being made at all.
The focus these days is, after all, on streaming. The upcoming season of The White Lotus is being filmed in Cannes, with the festival as its backdrop, though you wouldn’t have seen its stars—among them Laura Dern and French actor Vincent Cassel—just walking around the Croisette. (Dern did walk the red carpet with her father, Bruce Dern, the subject of a documentary that played in the festival.) Yet their invisible presence was a reminder that Hollywood still craves, and needs, Cannes glamour, and vice-versa. The Cannes Film Festival is many sometimes conflicting things at once: a symbol of glamour, a showcase for that nebulous thing we call quality, and, most important of all, a place where the movies refuse to be shrunk down to fit our increasingly compartmentalized lives. And as for stars: If Cannes can’t get them the old-fashioned way, by bringing them over from Hollywood—well, it will just make some new ones, on its own terms. The French and American film industries have always been symbiotic, if also a little antagonistic. And so, even if Hollywood as we knew it is dead, it’s not over. Cannes is on standby with the electrodes, ready to jolt the corpse back to life, even if we’ve neglected it ourselves.
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