The Best Movies We Saw

Key Points:

• Cristian Mungiu’s “Fjord” won the Palme d’Or at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, exploring themes of religious fundamentalism and cultural clashes in Norway, and was among IndieWire’s highlighted films.
• IndieWire’s list also features standout films beyond the main competition, including Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “All of a Sudden,” a female-driven drama set in Paris about care and capitalism, and “The Black Ball,” a complex Spanish film by Los Javis intertwining multiple timelines around queer narratives.
• Other notable films include “Clarissa,” a Nigerian adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs Dalloway,” “Club Kid,” a comedic and heartfelt story about unexpected fatherhood, and “Fatherland,” a black-and-white post-WWII road trip drama by Pawel Pawlikowski.
• The festival also showcased diverse works such as Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Minotaur,” a Russian thriller set in a corrupt society, and “I’ll Be Gone in June,” a semi-autobiographical film reflecting on teenage solitude during the post-9/11 era in America.
• Several films with unique narratives and styles received praise, including James Gray’s “Paper Tiger,” a Jewish-American family tragedy; Jane Schoenbrun’s “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” a sapphic exploration of sexual identity; and Rakan Mayasi’s “Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep,” a poetic drama about tribal honor and conflict in Lebanon.