Cannes Hot List

_{A version of this story first appeared on The Ankler.}

The Cannes Film Festival officially kicks off on Wednesday, with new films from globally known auteurs like Andrea Arnold, Paul Schrader, Jia Zhangke and Yorgos Lanthimos filling the competition slots.

It’s a good reminder that Cannes is much, much more than the red carpet at the Grand Palais, and in a much less glitzy corner of the Croisette you’ll find the bright shining hopes of film festivals yet to come: the Cannes market (the sort of stuff our joint newsletter will dive into).

Sales titles are technically none of my business — we hand statues to the finished product, not the best laid plans of a press release. But some of the projects that hit my inbox inevitably caught my attention and just might be fodder for awards seasons to come. A few favorites:

• Willem Dafoe and Sandra Hüller in Late Fame. A project that very well could have been born at an event during last year’s awards season — Poor Things’ Dafoe and Anatomy of a Fall’s Hüller, joining up with May December writer Samy Burch and producer Christine Vachon. The director is Kent Jones, the former head of the New York Film Festival who’s teamed up with Martin Scorsese for several documentaries and made his narrative debut with 2018’s Diane. If your movie isn’t selling at Cannes, you can tell yourself all the big names were taken up by this one.
  
  
• Ben Stiller and Colin Farrell in Belly of the Beast. All of Us Strangers may have sputtered out at the end of last Oscar season, but director Andrew Haigh remains a major talent, and he’ll further raise his profile with this project, recounting the troubled friendship between Norman Mailer (Stiller) and former convict Jack Henry Abbott (Farrell). Stiller, who has mostly been working on his own projects like Escape at Dannemora and Severance, could be the fascinating wildcard here.
  
  
• Hugh Jackman and Jodie Comer do Robin Hood. Spare me your eyerolls about yet another Robin Hood story — like King Arthur or Harry Potter, you’re simply never going to be rid of him. With direction from Michael Sarnoski, of Pig and the upcoming A Quiet Place: Day One, this might be an imaginative take that actually lives up to the word. Yes, that’s what we thought about Ridley Scott’s 2010 version, but let us dream, okay?
  
  
• Russell Crowe and Rami Malek go to Nuremberg. It’s been 63 years since Judgment at Nuremberg won two Oscars, and Oppenheimer has World War II back on Hollywood’s radar, so why not give it another spin? James Vanderbilt, best known as a writer for Zodiac and recently Scream VI, is writing and directing, and the cast is pretty stacked beyond the two best actor winners at the top: Michael Shannon, John Slattery, Richard E. Grant, Colin Hanks, One Day breakout Leo Woodall and more.

Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgård in leather. No, there’s no set photo, but it seems like a safe assumption based on the description for the “kinky queer romance” Pillion. Skarsgård plays the head of a motorcycle club who takes on Melling’s Colin as his submissive, and takes “all sorts of virginities along the way.” Harry Lighton is behind the camera for the first time, and it doesn’t exactly scream Oscar bait, but I look forward to it being an extremely coveted ticket at Sundance 2026.

Doing the Math on The Bear

Last week FX released a very coy teaser trailer and confirmed a release date for season three of The Bear, which is pretty remarkably sticking to its traditional June release despite last year’s strikes. Last year, season two debuted in the thick of Emmy nomination round voting, a canny move that ensured it was top of mind as the first season was up for its first awards. This year, probably more confident that the nominations are in hand, FX is debuting the show on June 27, four days after nominations round voting closes.

Still, it will ensure that the show is still far fresher in voters’ minds than pretty much anything else — not exactly an edge you need when you’re the odds-on favorite in your category, but hey, it doesn’t hurt.