Falling palm trees and a faltering Palme d'Or director: how Cannes 2025 went – and who will win
Whether 2025's Cannes movies are going to spark a new burst of overwhelming excitement remains to be seen, though this year's vintage feels good – often excellent, although even the biggest names can get it wrong: former Palme d'Or winner Julia Ducournau presented an incoherent drama called Alpha.
This was a Cannes competition whose great movies were about political cruelty and tyranny. Jafar Panahi's A Simple Accident was about a fortuitous event that unearthed horrifying memories in Iran. Kleber Mendonça Filho's glorious, sprawling, Elmore Leonard-esque film from Brazil, The Secret Agent was about the 1970s dictatorship – interestingly, both films showed petty officials taking bribes. Filho's wretched cops are bought off with some cigarettes – Panahi's crooked security guards carry a debit card reader so they can take contactless payments. But for sheer existential grandeur of evil nothing could touch Sergei Loznitsa's Two Prosecutors – about the Stalin 30s, with its Dostoyevskian and Kafkaesque moments of despair.
And to go with these views of the patriarchy, there were daddy issues. Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value showed Stellan Skarsgård being insufferable with his daughters – the preening Egyptian movie star played by Fares Fares in Eagles of the Republic infuriates his son, and Josh O'Connor's hapless art thief in Kelly Reichardt's The Mastermind is a very neglectful dad. And in the Dardenne brothers' compassionate and poignant movie Jeunes Mères, about a care facility for teenage mothers, the fathers were conspicuous by their absence.
So here are my prize predictions, followed by my extra Cannes Braddies, my personal awards in other sections which should exist, but don't.Palme d'Or The Secret Agent (dir Kleber Mendonça Filho)Grand Prix Two Prosecutors (dir Sergei Loznitsa)Jury prize A Simple Accident (dir Jafar Panahi)Best director Carla Simón for RomeríaBest screenplay Mascha Schilinski for Sound of FallingBest actor Josh O'Connor for The MastermindBest actress Yui Suzuki for Renoir (dir Chie Hayakawa)Braddies for prize categories that don't exist but shouldBest supporting actor Stellan Skarsgård in Sentimental Value (dir Joachim Trier)Best supporting actress Tânia Maria for The Secret Agent (dir Kleber Mendonça Filho)Cinematography David Chambille for Nouvelle Vague (dir Richard Linklater)Production design Roger Rosenberg for Eagles of the Republic (dir Tarik Saleh)
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'We have been eating it the same way always – there was never any variation.' For her new French-Scandinavian restaurant Hildur, in Brooklyn, Kihlstrom decided to reinvent the classic dessert. Together with Simon Richtman, a chef who once worked for the Swedish consulate in New York, she developed a single-serving pink version of the cake, with queen's jam – a mixture of blueberries and raspberries – instead of the raspberry jam, and a lighter diplomat cream in place of the traditional pastry cream filling. At her restaurant, 'It's on every table,' Kihlstrom said. 'It's funny how it's just become this phenomenon.' Nearby in Brooklyn, the owners of BonBon, the TikTok-famous Swedish 'candy salad' shop, have now opened Ferrane, a Swedish bakery which offers their own twist on princess cake. Their cocktail-glass mini cakes were inspired by the Swedish restaurant Sturehof, which now serves a tiny princess cake in a rounded coupe glass, Kihlstrom said. 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Slices of the cake are so popular that they sell out almost every night: 'People will email in advance and ask us to hold slices for their dinner,' she said. A Bon Appetit video of Ziskin making her 'homage' to the Swedish national cake went viral last fall, garnering more than 1m views and sparking heated pushback in the comments over the use of mascarpone, the correct shade of green for the marzipan – and the missing marzipan rose. (Ziskin garnishes logs of her cake, which sell for $85 each, with real flowers.) 'Why do Americans have to ruin everything,' one TikTok commenter asked. 'If you're doing something, do it properly.' Then, in April, British baker Nicola Lamb published a 'simplified' princess cake recipe in the New York Times – one made upside down in a bowl, to help with the difficulty of creating the dome shape. The Food Network's Molly Yeh produced an even-easier square pan version. By early May, the food site Eater had declared: 'The Princess Cake Gets Its Princess Moment.' For longtime American fans of princess cake, this fanfare of discovery has been a little befuddling. MacKenzie Chung Fegan, the food critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, credited the 'great mainstreaming of princess cake' to New Yorkers belatedly encountering a dessert that was already popular elsewhere. 'I lived in New York, a city of 8 million people and nearly as many bakeries, for 20 years and never spotted a princess cake in the wild,' she wrote. Growing up in California's Bay Area, by contrast, princess cake had been a familiar treat available at many local European bakeries. Ikea, the Swedish home furnishings superstore, has long offered its own princess cake, the 'KAFFEREP Cream Cake,' in its frozen food aisle, and has also sold the cake in Ikea restaurants in the US since 2019. The Ikea cake comes in a tiny, single-size version, with pink marzipan instead of green, and has some very enthusiastic American fans on Reddit. Ziskin, the Los Angeles pastry chef, said she grew up eating supermarket princess cake from the Viktor Benes bakery at Gelson's, a southern California grocery. 'I've literally had princess cake for my birthday since I was five years old,' Ziskin said. 'It was always part of my life.' For some Americans, the sheer femininity of princess cake can cause some anxiety. 'People come in and say, 'I'd really like to give this cake to my husband, but is there a way to make it more masculine?' said Basegio, the owner of the Fillmore Bakery in San Francisco. 'They'll ask us to take the rose off the top, so it's just green... We've been asked to make it blue, which we don't do. It's just cake.' These concerns are 'frequent' and they always come from women buying the cake for men, Basegio said, even though, 'men, specifically, would be the demographic that love princess cake cake most'. One of Basegio's ex-boyfriends once made her a shirt that read, 'Real men eat princess cake,' illustrated with a tattooed arm holding up the cake. While princess cake might seem like a recipe that would be popular with trad wife influencers, that does not appear to be the case. I asked Ziskin about this. While not wanting to sound 'snooty', Ziskin said, she thought it might be a skills issue. 'It's a difficult thing to make well and present well, without your marzipan cracking,' Ziskin said. 'It's kind of more in the world of professional baking … there's something that's a little inaccessible about it.' If you make a mistake while frosting a cake with buttercream, 'you can wipe it and do it again,' Ziskin said. 'You can't take back the final placement of the marzipan.' There are online debates over where to find the best princess cake in the United States. Quarter Sheets is among the contenders: Ziskin said that Lost Larson in Chicago, Sant Ambroeus in New York, and Copenhagen Pastry in Los Angeles are also frequently mentioned. As princess cake grows in popularity, Ziskin said, she's excited to see people continue to experiment with the flavors of the traditional cake. And, she added, 'I'm interested to see how certain countries react to that.'
