If you have been following the coverage of the New York Times on the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, you are led to believe that because Tom Cruise isn’t walking the Croisette or that Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day didn’t open the festival, it was a lackluster year. “This year’s festival was comparatively muted, particularly in light of last year’s strong lineup,” writes Times film critic Manohla Dargis. “The absence of the major American studios was a contributing factor, as was the lack of globally recognizable stars on the red carpet.”

Her colleague Kyle Buchanan agrees. “As this year’s Cannes Film Festival comes to a close, many have called it an underwhelming edition. Whether it was the lack of A-list stars or the divisive slate of competition films, there wasn’t much to get pulses racing, and even some of the most acclaimed auteurs turned in work that felt a little too familiar.”

But were they both too deep in the trenches to see the big story of Cannes this year — or rather, the big queer elephant in the room?

Other media outlets saw the trend. “Hollywood Ghosts the Croisette, Queer Cinema Owns It,” headlined The Hollywood Reporter, which noted that while “on the surface a more subdued edition,” queer cinema was emphatically “where the vitality was.” And The Wrap noted the historical moment with this headline: “Queerest Cannes Ever: La Bola Negra, Coward and Club Kid Mark a Pivotal Moment for Movies.”

It must be so when an acting/directing couple, best-known to Americans as judges on Drag Race España, win the Best Director award for an epic film that many say is likely a Best Picture nominee at next year’s Oscars. Or when a social media influencer who appeared a few years ago playing himself having X-rated sex on a public Mexican beach in a little-seen (but quite wonderful) indie film receives $17 million from A24 for his first feature. Queer films are niche no more.

The Spanish duo are Los Javis, Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, award-winning filmmakers who have brought queer stories to Spanish television in a big way. Now they are taking on film with The Black Ball, a 155-minute queer historical epic that received the longest standing ovation — 20 minutes — of any film at the festival.

The social media influencer is actor/writer/director Jordan Firstman, who grew a massive Instagram audience in 2020 and has since acted in such series as Search Party, The Other Two, FX’s The English Teacher, and HBO’s I Love LA, where he plays Charlie Cohen. (The meta-indie thriller was Rotting in the Sun.) He wrote, starred in, and directed Club Kid, a dramedy about a washed-up NYC club promoter who learns he has a 10-year-old son. After a rapturous screening in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section, the film initiated a bidding war with A24 taking it for $17 million, with plans for a major awards push.

And they are just two titles among many. Seven of the 22 films in the official competition featured LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or perspectives — a remarkable proportion for a lineup that has historically been dominated by the straight anxieties of European auteurs and their American wannabes. The Queer Palm, the independently sponsored prize for LGBTQ+-relevant films that has run alongside the festival since 2010, announced a record-breaking 21 feature film nominees for its 16th edition. When the prize launched, only five or six films qualified for consideration. Now, as its founder Franck Finance-Madureira observed this year, 21 features are competing.

“The films we’ve seen this year — more and more, the fact that the characters are queer is not the crux of the story,” the Queer Palm founder told The Wrap. “The film doesn’t build its plot around that. In a way, characters no longer need to justify their queerness — it’s treated as something revealed incidentally.” He called this edition “a pivotal moment” for LGBTQ+ cinema. Finance-Madureira was also explicit about the political dimension: “We need this now more than ever. And Americans are very aware of it, given what they’re living through under Trump. They know it falls to us to build the bulwark — to mobilize so these projects come to fruition, even if they grow less and less aligned with the spirit of the times.”

Nor is this trend a diversity initiative; rather, it is proof that queer cinema is no longer on the margins. Queer filmmakers are making some of the most relevant, ambitious, and deeply emotional work in cinema today. Queer stories are no longer just for queers — they have universal appeal. And the festival, whatever its conservative nature, could not ignore the caliber and the variety of these films.

Seven Films to Look Out For

The Black Ball (La Bola Negra)

Directed by Javier Ambrossi & Javier Calvo (Los Javis) • Spain/France • Competition

After its tumultuous premiere, it was widely thought Los Javis’s sprawling historical epic would win the Palme d’Or. It did not, but that the pair took home Best Director — which they shared with Polish filmmaker Paweł Pawlikowski for Fatherland — confirmed the jury’s high regard. The narrative weaves three stories across three time periods spanning nearly a century, linked by the influential presence of the poet Federico García Lorca. The ambitious concept comes from a four-page manuscript for a proposed novel that Lorca wrote shortly before his murder. Called The Black Ball, it concerns a man denied entry into an exclusive club because of his homosexuality. Los Javis took this fragment as the basis for one story, and its discovery for a another. Between them is an original story about two soldiers from opposing sides having a relationship at the height of the Spanish Civil War.

The first section, “The Birth of Desire,” takes place in 1932 Madrid, a time of relative freedom and openness for queer culture. But not for Carlos, who seeks entry into one of the city’s most exclusive clubs and is rejected because he is queer.  The second, “The Civil War and Flight,” is set in 1937 at the height of the Spanish Civil War.Two soldiers from opposing sides bond over the death of Lorca by the Fascists the year before and began an affair with emotionally devastating results. The third section, “The Inheritance,” lands in 2017 Madrid — a Spain of legal same-sex marriage and hard-won rights — where a young historian discovers a Lorca manuscript amongst the papers of his grandfather, a staunch Fascist. The discovery liberates him from his family’s deep-rooted homophobia as he learns that his queer freedom came from the ongoing struggle dating back nearly a century. Lorca makes a brief appearance in this section, saying. “This land has too many love stories buried in its fields.”

In many ways, in its scope and literary aspirations, the film is a corollary to Matthew Lopez’s equally ambitious play The Inheritance. (The Black Ball even shares that name as the title of its final section.) Lopez used British author E.M. Forster as his source, paraphrasing the plot of Howards End to tell a story of how queer men lived through the AIDS epidemic in the 1990s. Through its cross-generational narrative, it also comments on how the struggles of the previous generation have brought new freedoms to today’s younger queers.

The film’s three leads are Guitarricadelafuente, the Spanish singer; Carlos González; and Milo Quifes. Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close appear in pivotal supporting roles. 

The reception at Cannes was unlike anything most critics had seen. The 20-minute standing ovation drew comparisons to the legendary receptions given to All About My Mother and Parasite. Ambrossi and Calvo spoke afterwards about the film’s driving question: “As part of the LGBTQIA+ community, do we honour like we should the people who were murdered, who endured repression, who fought for our rights? Would they look at us and be proud?” That question, and the aching beauty with which they pursue its answer across 155 minutes, is why The Black Ball is the revelation of Cannes 2026.

Distribution: Netflix acquired worldwide rights following a bidding war. No release date confirmed.

Club Kid

Directed by Jordan Firstman • USA • Un Certain Regard

Jordan Firstman has a big personality, which has made him ideal for the roles he has played on such series as FX’s The English Teacher and HBO’s I Love LA. The Instagram-born writer, actor, and provocateur who turned viral videos into a genuine acting career makes his feature directorial debut with something shrewdly personal: a film that deliberately cannibalizes his own reputation as a gay scene fixture and asks what happens when the party is finally, genuinely over.

Firstman plays Peter, a drug-fueled downtown New York party promoter coasting through his thirties on cocaine and clubbing when a one-night stand from a decade earlier produces a surprising consequence: a 10-year-old son (played by newcomer Reggie Absolom) who suddenly needs a father. The film has been compared to a queer-NYC-club-culture take on Kramer vs. Kramer — a comparison that isn’t entirely inaccurate — and to “an Adam Sandler movie with drugs and dolls.” Both descriptions are flattering in their own way. Cara Delevingne and Diego Calva co-star, with Kirby Howell-Baptiste and Colleen Camp in supporting roles. The film was shot in 35mm by Emmy-winning cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra.

The Hollywood Reporter’s review noted that Club Kid “will strike a chord with any retired party animal who, as David Bowie once put it, suddenly realizes they don’t want to go out anymore — they just want to stay home and get things done.” What lifts it above the familiar man-child-grows-up template is Firstman’s willingness to implicate himself, to play into every garish reputation he’s earned and then puncture it from within. It is the funniest queer film at Cannes, and possibly the most honest.

Distribution: A24 acquired worldwide rights for $17 million following a Cannes bidding war. Being positioned for a major awards campaign.

Coward

Directed by Lukas Dhont • Belgium/France/Netherlands • Competition • Best Actor (shared)

Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont’s third feature confirms him as one of the most important queer voices in world cinema. After Girl and Close — both of which premiered at Cannes to enormous critical response — he has made his most formally restrained and emotionally devastating work to date. Set in 1916 at the Belgian front during the First World War, Coward follows Pierre (Emmanuel Macchia), a young soldier who meets the flamboyant, life-affirming Francis (Valentin Campagne) in the trenches. To push back against the horror around them, the two men organize a theatrical revue for their comrades. In doing so, and over the terrible weeks of waiting for what may come, they fall in love.

The film is something of a first: a queer WWI narrative, a trope long ignored by filmmakers despite the documented reality of same-sex love in the trenches. Dhont and co-writer Angelo Tijssens developed the screenplay over three years, drawing on diaries, letters, and historical accounts to build a portrait of desire under conditions designed to obliterate it. Macchia and Campagne — both relative newcomers — were jointly awarded Best Actor by jury president Park Chan-wook, and their stunned response at the ceremony was itself a kind of performance: two young men who had not expected to be standing there, learning in public that they had.

Deadline caught the consensus opinion, praising Dhont’s eye for “what makes us who we are” and describing the film as “a war film in name only, more a celebration of a human need to sing, to dance — even in the most unimaginably horrific of circumstances.” The film also won the Prix du Cinéma Positif. It is, alongside The Black Ball, the film most likely to be standing at next year’s Oscars.

Distribution: MUBI (Belgium/Netherlands: Lumière; France: Diaphana Distribution). US and international distribution under negotiation.

The Man I Love

Directed by Ira Sachs • USA/France • Competition

For two decades Ira Sachs has been in the forefront of queer cinema in the United States. From the harrowing Keep the Lights On (2012) to the socially relevant Love Is Strange (2014) and the magically sweet Little Men (2016), Sachs looks at diverse queer narratives with cool precision and insight. With The Man I Love, he has made his most ambitious film: a musical fantasy set in late 1980s New York about Jimmy George (Rami Malek), a gay actor facing a life-threatening illness who takes on what may be his final major role. Tom Sturridge, Luther Ford, Rebecca Hall, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach co-star in what is, emphatically, the only American film in the competition.

Malek arrives here carrying specific cultural weight. He won an Oscar playing Freddie Mercury — another gay icon felled by AIDS in the same era this film inhabits — and Sachs appears to be asking audiences to bring that knowledge, and that grief, to their experience of Jimmy George. The film is also a genuine musical, with original numbers woven into a narrative that blurs the line between performance and reality, between the role an actor plays and the life he’s actually living. For an AIDS-era film to arrive as a musical fantasy in 2026 is a choice that reads as both formally surprising and historically resonant: the era’s defining tension between beauty and devastation embedded in the genre itself.

The film received a ten-minute standing ovation at its premiere and immediately generated awards conversation for Malek. That it left the festival without a prize surprised many observers — though in a competition as strong as this one, going home empty-handed from Cannes is not the same thing as being overlooked. The Man I Love is a film that will find its audience. It may simply need a room that isn’t competing with The Black Ball for the air.

Distribution: No US distributor confirmed at time of writing. International rights under negotiation. Expect a fall acquisition announcement.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

Directed by Jane Schoenbrun • USA • Un Certain Regard (Opening Film) • Queer Palm Winner

“A new kind of horror remake,” reads the trailer to Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Jane Schoenbrun’s revelatory horror film that quickly became the talk of Cannes after its premiere. Its premise has Hannah Einbinder as a queer filmmaker making the latest sequel in the Camp Miasma series, a 1980s slasher franchise set at a sleepaway camp. “I don’t want to make a sequel of a sequel of a sequel,” she says, and sets out to meet the mysterious female star from the series first film, played by Gillian Anderson, who refused to star in any of the sequels. Anderson has received high praise for her grand diva performance that some have compared to what it would be like if Dolly Parton played Norma Desmond; but Schoenbrun’s film is more than a star-turn. With striking confidence they have made a deeply personal film of their acceptance of their trans body told in a highly enjoyable send-up of a horror franchise film. Variety concluded that Schoenbrun had succeeded at their stated aim — beating Hollywood at its own game by smuggling an entire queer and trans worldview into the packaging of a movie about a franchise slasher reboot.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma examines the lineage of trans villains that have codified (in Schoenbrun’s words) “an idea of transness as monstrous.” But with their film, Schoenbrun, who recently transitioned, says they hopes to honor and critique this lineage, and in doing so show that trans lives are not monstrous. As Ryan McQuade writes in Awards Watch, “Schoenbrun takes us down their most personal film to date, another bold trans allegory that makes for the perfect companion piece to I Saw the TV Glow, in which they examine of not being able to break through their wall (or TV screen) to become the person they’ve always meant to be, and elevating it with this bold third film that graduates those themes and says loudly, there is nothing to fear or hide, that it’s time to take back control of the narrative, and let it be known that transness isn’t monstrous, but rather it contains as much beauty, urges, wants, needs as the lives of cis gendered individuals.” The film has 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Distribution: MUBI. US theatrical: August 7, 2026 (11 markets). UK/Ireland: August 21, 2026.

Bitter Christmas (Amarga Navidad)

Directed by Pedro Almodóvar • Spain • Competition • Queer Palm Nominated

When you think of the godfather of queer cinema, one name comes to mind: Pedro Almodóvar. His entire career, from Law of Desire to All About My Mother to Pain and Glory, is what queer cinema is all about — the high style, the vivid color palette, the often transgressive subjects, the use of melodrama, the ironic sensibility. He calls Bitter Christmas, which played in competition, “his cruelest film yet.” It has two narratives, one set in 2004 and one in the present. The earlier follows a commercial film director (Bárbara Lennie) who, mourning the death of her mother, escapes to Lanzarote with a friend, where she begins a relationship with a fireman who also works as a stripper. This narrative is revealed in the contemporary story as a screenplay being written by Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), a celebrated older auteur struggling with a creative block. Raúl acts as an alter-ego for Almodóvar, using his own life, his boyfriend (Santi, played by Quim Gutiérrez), and his assistant (Mónica, played by Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) for inspiration, raising ethical questions about violating privacy for art. Some found the film’s meta structure — a filmmaker making a film about a filmmaker — mere navel-gazing. But even Almodóvar at his most self-involved is still Almodóvar. And to have a new Almodóvar film in competition the same year as The Black Ball, Coward, and The Man I Love only points to his importance in the creation of a genre that is finally coming into its own.

Distribution: No US distribution confirmed. Spanish theatrical release expected fall 2026.

Flesh and Fuel (Du Fioul dans les artères)

Directed by Pierre Le Gall • France • Special Screening • Queer Palm Revelation Prize

Two queer trucker movies in one year? Earlier this year, David Pablos’ powerful Mexican thriller On the Road premiered at the Venice Film Festival and walked away with the Orizzonti prize. According to The Hollywood Reporter, it was “violent, stylized and sexually explicit,” but managed to spin “a surprisingly moving love story out of plenty of bullets and bodily fluids, leaving the viewer shaken by the time the gas finally ran out.”

While On the Road didn’t turn up at Cannes, Flesh and Fuel did. Shown out of competition, Pierre Le Gall’s trucker romance won the Queer Palm’s newly inaugurated Revelation Prize. Far less bleak than On the Road, it plays like its tender, hopeful Gallic cousin. It follows dedicated lorry driver Étienne (Alexis Manenti), who keeps his romantic life confined to clandestine encounters in parking lots until he meets and falls instantly for Bartosz (Julian Swiezewski), a Polish trucker he encounters on a cross-European route. Their connection inspires Étienne to consider exchanging his isolated, secret existence for something more.

The Queer Palm jury described the film in terms that cut to its essential quality: “this is a premiere film that undeniably extends the list of great love films.” Its trucker-romance premise has a kind of timeless queer cinema appeal — the erotic pull of the transient, the longing of men who live in motion — but Le Gall grounds it in the specific material realities of working-class European life: the schedules and the cold and the borders, in a way that gives the love story weight.

Distribution: The Jokers Films (France). International rights under negotiation.

The Wrap

What does this cultural trend mean? Did queer films merely fill the void left vacant by the absence of Hollywood product? And why didn’t Hollywood come in the first place?

There are numerous reasons. First, the cost. Studios spend millions promoting films shown at Cannes and are cutting back on spending this year. It would have cost even more given that the Euro is outpacing the dollar significantly. Nor are Cannes screenings even necessary for awards success, as last year’s most acclaimed films, One Battle After Another and Sinners, showed. And then there are the notoriously surly French critics who can sabotage a screening by booing a film, which immediately goes viral and does immeasurable harm to a film’s prospects. Some also now feel that Cannes occurs too early in the year to have much impact on the Hollywood awards cycle.

Cannes Festival director Thierry Frémaux offered a more reasonable assessment, saying that the quiet American presence was the long-term hangover from the Hollywood SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes. Production delays meant highly anticipated tentpoles from directors like Steven Spielberg (Disclosure Day) and Christopher Nolan (The Odyssey) simply weren’t finished in time.

But how about giving the last word to queer director Jane Schoenbrun, who is no fan of the studios having dealt with them over the past few years: “Hollywood can feel like a mafia… Your movie is not commercial because they think it’s not commercial… We’re in such a bled-dry moment. You can really feel it with the s**t that’s coming out.”