2025 Cannes Film Festival Reviews: ‘Eleanor the Great,’ ‘Miroirs No. 3,’ ‘A Pale View of Hills,’ ‘The Richest Woman in the World,’ and ‘Vie Privée’
In my final set of reviews from the 78th Cannes Film Festival, we’re taking a look at five films from three of the Festival’s sidebar sections. First, we dive into Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, Eleanor the Great. This film, starring June Squibb as the titular Eleanor, premiered in the Un Certain Regard section, alongside a plethora of films from actors-turned-directors (Urchin, The Chronology of Water). Next, we head to the Directors’ Fortnight section to uncover the mysteries of Christian Petzold’s latest film, Miroirs No. 3, featuring an incredible performance from longtime collaborator Paula Beer. Then, we head back to the Un Certain Regard section with Kei Ishikawa’s delicate adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel in A Pale View of Hills. Finally, we spend time with two of our greatest actresses in a pair of French-language films that played Out of Competition: Isabelle Huppert in Thierry Klifa’s The Richest Woman in the World and Jodie Foster in Rebecca Zlotowski’s Vie Privée. Interestingly, each of these five films features a woman struggling to come to terms with the truth, a theme found in several films across the festival.
Eleanor the Great (Dir. Scarlett Johansson, Un Certain Regard)
94-year-old Eleanor Morgenstein (June Squibb) has settled into a rhythm, but when her best friend of seventy years and her late-in-life roommate Bessie (Rita Zohar) passes away, she has to leave Florida to move back to New York with her daughter Lisa (Jessica Hecht) and grandson Max (Will Price). Lisa wants Eleanor to find activities to get her out of the apartment, so she signs her up for a Broadway singing class at the Jewish Community Center. When she arrives, though, she accidentally stumbles into a support group for Holocaust survivors, and soon enough, Eleanor is sharing Bessie’s stories of survival with the group as if they were her own. Eleanor’s little white lies are complicated when Nina (a delightful Erin Kellyman), a journalism student at NYU, approaches her after shadowing the support group for her research project. She was so moved by Eleanor’s story that she wants to profile her for her assignment. Both women are lonely in New York, and the two strike up an unlikely friendship built on their shared grief (Nina has just lost her mother) and Eleanor’s spiraling lies.
On the surface, Eleanor the Great is a predictable story with few narrative surprises, but it soon becomes a much trickier balancing act. Tory Kamen’s script pivots from Squibb’s usual brassy comedy to a deeply sad rumination on how people behave when they lose the people who matter most. In her directorial debut, Johansson takes subtle risks in her storytelling, too, oscillating between light comedy and highly emotional melodrama. These gambles don’t always pay off, as the final product feels a bit treacly and unable to pull off the film’s bizarre tonal shifts. The film’s central question lies in whether or not it was okay for Eleanor to share her friend’s experiences as her own. Was she outright wrong to lie about something so serious, inadvertently manipulating the emotions of others? Or did she bring her friend’s experiences to light, giving her a voice and a platform to share what she went through during the darkest period of her life? Eleanor the Great suggests “Yes, and” to be the answer to both questions, and while the film doesn’t seem quite so sure of itself, Johansson’s debut is a promising look into the types of stories she plans to grapple with as a filmmaker.
Grade: C+
Eleanor the Great will be released theatrically in the U.S. by Sony Pictures Classics.
Miroirs No. 3 (Dir. Christian Petzold, Directors’ Fortnight)
German master Christian Petzold’s beguiling and brilliant new film, Miroirs No. 3, begins with music student Laura (Paula Beer) standing alone at the bank of the river. She sees someone paddling by, their features completely obscured, clad in all black–the mood conjuring up our character’s version of the River Styx. This shadow person feels like a bad omen for Laura, who shortly after, finds herself in a gnarly car accident that leaves her boyfriend dead. Petzold doesn’t show the car accident; instead, we hear the sounds of the wreckage while the camera focuses on the worried face of Betty (Barbara Auer), a woman on the porch of a nearby farmhouse. Laura seems desperate to leave her life in Berlin behind, and soon enough, Betty is taking care of her and nursing her back to health. Interestingly, the accident leaves her completely unscathed, without a scratch. As Laura settles into a new, refreshing life in the country, Betty seems to have brightened up too, and she invites her somewhat estranged husband (Matthias Brandt) and son (Enno Trebs) back to the house to meet her. After the loss of their daughter Yelena to suicide, the two men are worried that Betty has stopped taking her pills and that Laura is just a figment of her imagination to help her cope in the wake of her grief. Imagine their surprise, then, when they arrive at the house for dinner, and the woman that Betty has been describing is actually there.
Like Petzold’s prior films (Phoenix, Afire), information is revealed slowly and deliberately, creating a world drenched in ambiguity. Seeing the film’s events unfold feels akin to watching an old fairy tale through an enigmatic cinematic language, like Hitchcock getting his hands on the works of Hans Christian Andersen. While the film’s conclusion and dramatic twists feel somewhat inevitable, Petzold’s sophisticated storytelling and pitch-perfect collaboration with Paula Beer deepen what first appears to be a simple story. Throughout the film, Ravel’s piece “Miroirs No. 3” plays diegetically on the car radio and again later as Laura prepares for an upcoming concert. It’s a mysterious little detail, and, like the piece of music, the film is immaculately constructed and a little peculiar. Miroirs No. 3 is one of the year’s best films and a tale that will linger long after the credits roll.
Grade: A-
A Pale View of Hills (Dir. Kei Ishikawa, Un Certain Regard)
When Kazuo Ishiguro introduced Kei Ishikawa’s adaptation of his novel, A Pale View of Hills, at the film’s premiere, he made a cheeky comment to the audience. Ishiguro has had quite a few of his celebrated novels developed into films (The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go), but he doesn’t consider his writing to be quite as strong in “A Pale View of Hills,” stating, “there is a history of bad books making wonderful films and this is one of them.” Ishikawa’s adaptation is indeed a beautiful one, especially as it vividly explores Japanese identity across generations. The film begins in 1952 in Nagasaki with an anachronistic needle drop (New Order’s “Ceremony”) before flashing forward to 1982 in England. Niki (Camilla Aiko) has returned home to help her mother prepare to sell their family’s home, but she also has another reason for stopping by. She’s conducting research on life in Nagasaki after the war, and she’s eager to hear about her mother’s experience, seemingly for the very first time.
Similarly to two festival award winners, Sound of Falling and Sentimental Value, A Pale View of Hills explores the unseen things that can be passed down from women of different generations. For Niki’s mother, Etsuko (Yō Yoshida in 1982/Suzu Hirose in 1952), it’s difficult for her to articulate just how different her life was at that time, but she begins to tells Niki a story about a young woman, Sachiko (Fumi Nikaido), and her daughter who lived nearby. As Niki begins to learn more about her mother’s experiences living in Nagasaki, she also remembers her sister Keiko, who died by suicide a few years ago, her bedroom still untouched. As the similarities between mother and daughter emerge, so too do the experiences of Etsuko and Sachiko. And as their stories begin to converge in Nagasaki, the film tries to evoke the look and emotion of melodramas from Douglas Sirk and Todd Haynes, without quite reaching similar heights. While it doesn’t quite stick the landing in its dramatic reveal, A Pale View of Hills is a delicate exploration of the lives of Japanese women throughout history.
Grade: B-
The Richest Woman in the World (Dir. Thierry Klifa, Out of Competition)
Marianne Farrère (Isabelle Huppert) awakens one morning to find the police raiding her beautiful home, instantly calling to prestige dramas with a bit of flair, like Succession and Billions. Based loosely on the life of L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, The Richest Woman in the World jumps back in time to find billionaire Marianne meeting the unsuccessful photographer, Pierre-Alain (Laurent Lafitte), a man who is over-the-top and absolutely detestable to everyone around him (except for her). She’s bored and needs a distraction from her lifeless marriage, seeming eager to bestow her garish lifestyle on anyone who’d like to join in. Pierre-Alain is more than willing, and soon enough, she’s funding all of his failed endeavors and inviting him to accompany her everywhere, much to the chagrin of her daughter Frédérique (Marina Foïs, with a truly tragic wig). Frédérique has had a bit of a strained relationship with her parents since she married her Jewish husband, and Pierre-Alain’s omnipresence certainly isn’t helping.
Huppert is predictably fabulous as Marianne, an icy French iteration of Miranda Priestly, if Miranda were less protective over her career and assets. With her dramatic line deliveries, pursed lips, and perfectly tailored ensembles, it’s easy to get sucked right into Huppert’s creation of Marianne’s world. It’s frustrating, then, that the film’s script doesn’t spend any time developing her character, opting instead to focus on the convoluted family relationship plot–a subplot revealing Marianne’s deceased father’s Nazi tendencies is particularly mishandled. It also stretches on to repeat the same tired beats with Pierre-Alain, one of the most irritating characters in recent memory. After two hours, one question remained: how could a movie where Isabelle Huppert gets her hands on poppers at the club be so dull? Unfortunately, The Richest Woman in the World isn’t interested in the woman, only her wallet and the people who take from it.
Grade: D
Vie Privée (Dir. Rebecca Zlotowski, Out of Competition)
Early in Rebecca Zlotowski’s crime-thriller comedy Vie Privée, psychiatrist Dr. Lillian Steiner (Jodie Foster) has a dream about Paula (Virginie Efira), a patient that she’s been trying to get in touch with. Lillian has been seeing Paula for nine years, so naturally, she’s a bit worried for her after she’s missed their last three sessions. Eventually, Lillian learns that Paula has died by suicide and is completely rattled; as far as she knew from their sessions, there were no signs that Paula had suicidal ideations. Lillian isn’t convinced that Paula’s death was a suicide, so she decides to go back through the tapes from their recorded sessions to try to discover what went wrong. When the puzzle pieces still aren’t fitting together, she decides to take the investigation into her own hands, alongside her ex-husband, Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil).
It’s always thrilling to see Foster at the center of an investigation (Silence of the Lambs, True Detective: Night Country), but it’s refreshing to see her flex her comedic chops and have so much fun with a project. In her first French language film in twenty years, Foster excels as Lillian, bringing to life an expat who is confident enough to hold her own as an American in Paris, yet just as easily able to be slightly unsure of herself. As an aside, her character’s English-language expletives when something doesn’t go her way are a complete delight. While a design of Zlotowski and Anne Berest’s script, it’s a shame that Foster and Efira don’t get to spend more time together onscreen. Efira delivered one of the best performances of the year in Zlotowski’s emotionally rich drama, Other People’s Children, but in Vie Privée, her role is effectively a mysterious, French Hitchcock blonde who exists in the past, before the events of the film unfold. Despite the lack of shared screen time, though, Foster proves that she is one of her generation’s most surprising actresses. In many ways, Vie Privée feels like the type of independent venture that Foster would’ve been interested in in her early career: a well-made, delightful film with a nostalgic feel.
Grade: B-
Vie Privée will be released theatrically in the U.S. by Sony Pictures Classics.
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