Cannes Film Festival 2026: Sheep in The Box, The Beloved, and Paper Tiger

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The Cannes Film Festival competition continued on the Croisette with no fewer than three screenings: Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Sheep in The Box, Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beloved, and James Gray’s Paper Tiger.

The Beloved : On the fourth day of the competition, three highly anticipated films entered the race for the Palme d’Or: Sheep in The Box by Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose feature Monster won the Best Screenplay award at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival; The Beloved by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, the acclaimed Spanish filmmaker behind The Realm (2018), Madre (2019), and The Beasts (As Bestas, 2022); and finally, director, actor, and screenwriter James Gray, who returns to the competition after 2022’s Armageddon Time with the crime thriller Paper Tiger.

Sheep in the Box ©DR

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Sheep in The Box

With Sheep in The Box, Hirokazu Kore-eda delivers arguably his most dazzling film since Shoplifters. The director, a master of intimate family dramas, ventures here into a delicate exploration of emotional science fiction: set in a near-future Japan, a grieving couple adopts a humanoid robot that is a perfect replica of their late child. Yet, in Kore-eda’s hands, technology is never a mere narrative gimmick; it serves as a silent lens exposing grief, denial, and the irrepressible need to keep loving despite absence. The title, inspired by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince (1943), serves as a poetic key: the box may not contain a real sheep, but rather the emotional projections of those who refuse to let go of the departed.

Sheep in the Box ©DR

A Universal Meditation on Humanity

Anchored by a heartbreaking performance from Haruka Ayase as a mother trapped in unappeasable sorrow, and young Rimu Kuwaki in a debut role marked by a disturbingly artificial gentleness, Sheep in The Box impresses with its blend of restraint and philosophical depth. True to his signature style of subtle gestures and subterranean emotions, Hirokazu Kore-eda transforms this futuristic tale into a universal meditation on what defines human nature—be it memory, pain, or simply the capacity to forge connections. In Cannes, this melancholic fable, carrying Ozu-esque undertones, already stands out as one of the most sensitive and unexpected works of the 2026 competition.

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Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beloved (El Ser Querido)

With The Beloved, Rodrigo Sorogoyen delivers what is undoubtedly his most intimate and venomous film to date. The Spanish filmmaker transforms a simple encounter between a father and daughter into a psychological duel of staggering tension. From the opening minutes – captured in a suffocating, long sequence shot – Esteban Martínez, an iconic director returning to shoot in Spain after years abroad, offers his own daughter Emilia the lead role in his new film. After thirteen years apart, a camera becomes their only possible language. Sorogoyen instantly establishes a murky tension blending filial love, manipulation, and a yearning for redemption. Opposite a monumental Javier Bardem, who radiates a coiled, intense brutality, Victoria Luengo brings a nervous fragility that continuously fractures the narrative.

El Ser Querido ©DR

A Film on Power, Memory, and the Ghosts of Cinema

Far from a conventional family melodrama, El Ser Querido also dissects the power dynamics that permeate contemporary cinema. Behind the scenes of a film set where women – the cinematographer, the producer, the actresses – now reject old, authoritarian reflexes, Sorogoyen captures a world in transition. Alternating between a grainy black-and-white aesthetic and raw, almost documentary-like bursts of color, the director of The Beasts (As Bestas) constantly blurs the line between fiction and reality, as if each character were rewriting their own history to survive. His trademark obsession with moral gray areas shines through: Esteban is never fully monstrous, and Emilia is never entirely innocent. This ambiguity lends the film a rare emotional power, heightened by surgically precise dialogue and improvised scenes that seem to lay raw wounds bare. In this dizzying piece on legacy and emotional ruins, Sorogoyen delivers what is likely one of the most unsettling Spanish films seen on the Croisette in years.

Paper Tiger ©DR

James Gray’s Paper Tiger

On the Croisette, some filmmakers arrive preceded by their reputation; others disembark with an entire universe in their luggage. With Paper Tiger, James Gray does both. The New York director’s latest film revisits the obsessions that have defined his cinema since Little Odessa: the family as an intimate battlefield, loyalty as a moral trap, and New York as the stage for a modern tragedy. Set in Queens in 1986, two diametrically opposed brothers attempt to seize a piece of the American Dream through a shady operation linked to the Russian mafia. Yet, in Gray’s filmography, upward mobility always carries the bitter taste of sacrifice. Very quickly, the criminal gears turn into a slow descent into hell, where fear seeps into domestic silences and brotherhood wavers under the weight of betrayal. Enveloped in a twilight atmosphere pierced by grimy neon lights, hoodlums smoky bars, Paper Tiger captures the emotional density of the great 1970s American urban epics, while maintaining the filmmaker’s signature melancholic elegance.

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The Failure of the American Dream

Paper Tiger serves as a powerful reminder of how James Gray remains a singular auteur in the Hollywood landscape: a classical storyteller haunted by the wounds of exile, ancestral legacies, and the failure of the American Dream. Born in Queens and trained at the University of Southern California, the director has long enjoyed a privileged relationship with the Festival, from The Yards and We Own the Night to Two Lovers, his sublime romantic drama starring Joaquin Phoenix. With Paper Tiger, he returns to a rawer, almost visceral style, where every gaze feels burdened by an inescapable past. On the steps of the Palais, the cast’s understated elegance contrasted sharply with the film’s coiled violence, as if Gray wanted to remind us that in New York, behind the façades of success, ghosts are always waiting to resurface. The film stars Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, and Miles Teller.