Cannes Film Festival 2025: Where Tom Cruise and Charlie Chaplin Collide

Greetings from the Cannes Film Festival. The most glamorous film event in the world is all about cinematic juxtaposition. Within a 48-hour time span, the 78th edition of the festival offered up a hodgepodge of cinematic experiences big and small: There was a lovely restoration of Charlie Chaplin’s silent comedy epic The Gold Rush, Tom Cruise on the red carpet for the world premiere of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, a fiery speech from honoree Robert De Niro, and promising young filmmaking efforts from the likes of Germany and Israel. The main jury for the Competition, which includes Halle Berry and Jeremy Strong, settled in for a busy screening schedule that has another week to go, and many unpredictable variables ahead.

Cannes thrives under these circumstances and, as a result, provides a valuable reminder that movies remain a vital and resilient art form. I’ve attended the festival almost every year since 2007, and each time out, I emerge dazed, awestruck, and overwhelmed with a fresh perspective on the state of international cinema.

Founded in 1939 as an alternative to the Mussolini-controlled Venice Film Festival, Cannes has clung to its stature as the most prominent festival in the world in part because it attracts such a dense global community. Anyone on the planet who works in movies has Cannes on the radar.

The action never stops. There’s a lively marketplace in the bowels of the Palais des Festival, just a few hundred feet away from the Lumiere Theatre, which seats some 2,300 guests, and that’s just one of a few dozen screening rooms packed with offerings from early in the morning until late at night. Thousands of journalists crank out copy to establish the reputation for movies large and small, while the timeline gradually builds anticipation for the finale. That’s when the jury, this year headed by French actress Juliette Binoche, dispenses awards that can set expectations for the year ahead.

The coveted Palme d’Or award has been handed over to an array of major filmmakers such as Orson Welles, Robert Altman, and Jane Campion. In more recent years, it has been an early indicator of awards season buzz as well. It was here five years ago that Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite became the first Korean Palme winner before building steam for its historic Best Picture Oscar win; last year, the Palme d’Or winner was Sean Baker’s Anora, which swept the Oscars in a similarly groundbreaking fashion.

At the time of this writing, it’s hard to say which direction this year’s competition will go. Palme d’Or predictions are not an exact science. One year launched the arthouse sensation of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life and in a later edition, it went to the slow-burn three-and-a-half hour Turkish procedural Winter Sleep. Each juror gets one vote and new competition entries arrive each day.

This year, there are several new works from major directors for the jury to consider, including Lynne Ramsay’s dark romance Die My Love (starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson), Richard Linklater’s black-and-white French New Wave homage Nouvelle Vague, and oppressed Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi’s enigmatic It Was Just an Accident (Panahi was recently imprisoned by Iran for resisting censorship, but has continued to make movies after his release).

There are newcomers in the mix, too: One early critical favorite has been Sound of Falling, the sophomore feature from Mascha Schilinski, which follows a group of women across three generations through largely wordless, cryptic proceedings. (It has shades of The Virgin Suicides in its poetic evocation of alienated women who find comfort in community.) Another filmmaker who has been gaining traction in the U.S. in recent years, horror director Ari Aster (Hereditary), makes his Cannes premiere in a few days with the Joaquin Phoenix pandemic comedy Eddington, where expectations run high. Out of competition selections include Spike Lee and Denzel Washington re-teaming for Highest 2 Lowest and Ethan Coen’s stylish crime comedy Honey Don’t, which stars Margaret Qualley.

That busy schedule means that there will be much to process about this year’s festival, not only in terms of individual movies but how they speak to one another. Seeing the new Mission Impossible a day after the 4K restoration of The Gold Rush bore some unique insights.

Bear with me here: Cruise’s action antics in these movies are wild feats of physical endurance that come mighty close to slapstick comedy, and in the new one, the best sequences take place with virtually no dialogue at all. Cruise’s Ethan Hunt floats through a buried submarine while racing to maintain his oxygen levels as the whole vessel slowly rolls down an undersea hill; later, he clings to the wing of an airplane speeding high above the hills. These ludicrous daredevil stunts (coming to the Playhouse on Memorial Day weekend!) are especially jarring to watch on an IMAX screen, as they emphasize the sheer scale of the actor’s ambition.

Chaplin took his own kind of risks. When The Gold Rush was made in Hollywood 100 years ago, there were no stunt doubles. When the Tramp comes across a cabin in snowy Alaska that gradually rolls off a cliff during a fistfight within, he’s flopping around in real time. Chaplin used his body, like Cruise still does to this day, as an extended punchline. These unexpected parallels between the past and present point to the sheer delight of the festival experience.

Cannes also embodies the need for collective big-screen encounters to expose new generations to the power of the movies. At the screening of The Gold Rush, the festival director Thierry Fremaux asked the audience at the Salle Debussy how many people were watching the film for the first time. Dozens of hands shot up. If the ensuing laughter was any indication once the lights went down, they won’t forget the experience anytime soon.

During the festival’s opening night ceremony, De Niro received his honorary Palme d’Or and Quentin Tarantino made official remarks to open the festival before literally dropping the mic. Then Cannes screened a scene from Palme d’Or winner Wild at Heart as a brief homage to David Lynch, who died earlier this year. It was a welcome reminder that while nobody lives forever, the magic of the movies is immortal.