The awards from the 2025 Cannes Film Festival have now been presented. Every year, the prestigious French film festival honors new movies with a variety of awards celebrating the best director, actor, actress, and screenplay, in addition to the Jury Prize, the Grand Prize, and the coveted Palme d’Or. Recent Palme d’Or winners include Sean Baker’s Anora, which went on to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards, Bong Joon Ho’s fellow Best Picture winner Parasite, and the Oscar-nominated European films Triangle of Sadness and Anatomy of a Fall.
ScreenRant was in attendance at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, which ran from May 13 through May 24 and featured screenings of a number of films that were in competition for the biggest awards, including Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, Ari Aster’s Eddington, Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love, and Julia Ducournau’s Alpha. The awards have now been presented at the closing ceremony. The prizes were determined by the year’s jury, which includes chair Juliette Binoche alongside Hong Sang-soo, Halle Berry, Payal Kapadia, Jeremy Strong, and more. Check out the winners below:
Best Actor: Wagner Moura (The Secret Agent)
Check out our review for The Secret Agent
Best Actress: Nadia Melliti (The Little Sister)
Best Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho (The Secret Agent)
Best Screenplay: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Young Mothers)
Jury Prize: Sound of Falling (Mascha Schilinski) and Sirat (Oliver Laxe)
Check out our review for Sound of Falling
Check out our review for Sirat
Grand Prize: Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)
Check out our review for Sentimental Value
Palme d’Or: It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi)
Check out our review for It Was Just an Accident
What This Means For Cannes 2025
France Is The Most Represented Country
The movies that won awards at Cannes in 2025 are a truly international slate. After the United States scored three wins with Anora and the co-productions Kinds of Kindness and The Substance in 2024, the country has been completely shut out despite having notable titles in competition such as the new Ari Aster movie. This year, the most represented country is France, which co-produced every award winner except Sound of Falling, which is a fully German production.
In 2024, Jesse Plemons won Best Actor for Kinds of Kindness and Coralie Fargeat won Best Screenplay for The Substance.
This makes sense, given the fact that the Best Picture-winning Sean Baker movie won the Palme d’Or last year, and before that an American film had not taken the big prize since 2011, when Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life was the victor. Generally, Cannes represents the interests of the European arthouse, anointing movies that represent a variety of nations and storytelling traditions. This allows it to be a tastemaker in that sphere, especially when it comes to what movies might have global crossover appeal.
Our Take On The Cannes Award Winners
The Secret Agent Is A Standout
Although it did not win any of the three biggest prizes, the fact that The Secret Agent was the only film to win two awards at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival makes it stand out among the crowd. The co-production between Brazil, France, Germany, and the Netherlands stars Wagner Moura (Civil War, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish) as a teacher who is caught in a sticky situation during the tail end of Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1977, and the fact that it was able to win both acting awards could make it a shoo-in during the 2025-2026 awards season.