The war is back in the present tense. Or rather, it’s back in fashion—both in reality and on screen. It has been years since Cannes, with its competition, parallel sections, and Marché, felt like such a precise barometer of where world cinema is heading: populated by war films, para-war films, and narratives threaded with soldiers, battles, occupations, trenches, resistance movements, collaborationist regimes, and tanks.
In the main competition alone, there are at least six titles directly or indirectly tied to a war imaginary: Minotaur by Andreï Zviaguintsev, Coward by Lukas Dhont, La Bola Negra by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, Moulin by László Nemes, Notre Salut by Emmanuel Marre, and Fatherland by Paweł Pawlikowski. Outside the competition, there is also the large-scale historical epic La Bataille de Gaulle: L’Âge de fer by Antonin Baudry.
What makes this even more striking is the absence this year of the major American studios, historically among the key producers of war cinema. Hollywood spent decades constructing its relationship with war through a shifting mix of propaganda, moral reckoning, and national guilt: from the Second World War as a foundational myth of American exceptionalism, to the “dirty” or lost wars—from Vietnam to Iraq—that became fertile ground for filmmakers critical of Washington’s interventionism.
This year, the Americans are largely missing. And yet war films are everywhere, with a clear European dominance.
The question then becomes: which wars are being told?
One might assume that, with so many active conflicts in the present, cinema would turn primarily to contemporary war. The war in Ukraine, after all, has been present on screen since its earliest tremors in 2014, both through Ukrainian filmmakers and Russian directors—often exiled—openly opposed to Putin’s interventionism.
Within this lineage sits Minotaur by Andreï Zviaguintsev, set in Russia in 2022 and centred on Gleb, a businessman consumed by jealousy over his wife Galina’s affair. A contemporary Russian reworking of Stéphane, a Faithless Wife, Minotaur keeps the war in the background while making it structurally decisive. The protagonist’s marital crisis gradually collides with Russia’s war effort: his company is drawn into supplying equipment, manpower, logistics, and financial support. Zviaguintsev constructs a subtle but unambiguous war discourse in which the conflict becomes yet another terrain of corruption, pressure, and structural inequality in Putin’s Russia. Those with money, connections, and power remain at the edges of war; everyone else is absorbed by it.
The remaining titles instead turn to the past, and in particular to Europe’s two major twentieth-century traumas.
Coward by Lukas Dhont returns to the trenches of the First World War, while Moulin by László Nemes and Notre Salut by Emmanuel Marre move through occupied and collaborationist Vichy France. Fatherland by Paweł Pawlikowski becomes a road movie through post-1949 Germany, already divided between the victorious powers, following Thomas and Erika Mann as they return to a country morally and materially shattered. Meanwhile La Bola Negra weaves contemporary Spain with two moments of Franco’s dictatorship in the 1930s.
It is above all French—or France-adjacent—cinema that seems newly obsessed with its own history of occupation, resistance, and collaboration.
The extra-cinematic context makes this even more legible: Cannes 2026 is also marked by controversy surrounding Canal+ and Vincent Bolloré. A letter signed by hundreds of film professionals against the growing influence of the conservative billionaire over France’s audiovisual industry has reverberated across the Croisette, where signatories have appeared on red carpets and in press rooms. Canal+ has threatened to cut ties with some of them, turning the festival into a site of political tension.
In this atmosphere, Vichy becomes a symbolic space in which French cinema can examine collaboration and institutional cowardice, as well as a certain idea of patriotism.
Notre Salut, for instance, is set in September 1940, as the Vichy regime consolidates itself. Henri Marre arrives in Vichy convinced he can find in the new administration the recognition he has long been denied—a man defined, in essence, by a lack of qualities. Played by Swann Arlaud, he is ambiguous, mediocre, and driven by an abstract, bureaucratic idea of national greatness that ultimately reveals its moral viscosity. Collaboration here is not presented as sudden monstrosity, but as adaptation, ambition, and opportunism. The way institutions capitulate, leaving the burden of justice to individuals, speaks clearly to a present in which complicity often takes the form of comfortable inertia.
The opposite approach is taken by Moulin by László Nemes, dedicated to Jean Moulin, leader of the French Resistance arrested in June 1943 while attempting to unify the forces of the Armée secrète. Interrogated for weeks by Klaus Barbie, head of the Gestapo in Lyon, Moulin becomes the site of an intense moral and physical confrontation on which the fate of Free France depends.
It is a literal story of resistance: a former prefect enduring extreme torture without revealing collaborators or Allied plans. What makes the film notable is also Nemes’s position as an outsider—an Hungarian director, launched at Cannes with Son of Saul, now entrusted with one of the foundational myths of French resistance. The result is formally controlled, almost reassuringly classical cinema: Barbie becomes an absolute embodiment of evil, while Moulin is shaped as a paternal, stabilising figure, with hints of queerness folded into a largely conventional heroic monument.
Nemes has never made a film this restrained, and at times almost rhetorical. After Son of Saul, which radically interrogated survival within a system of extermination, Moulin opts for a clearer, more legible moral trajectory.
Perhaps this, too, says something about the present: in a moment when antisemitism is again visible and Europe looks at war as a real possibility, even the most unsettling cinema seems drawn toward more stable, readable figures.
Even more explicitly patriotic is La Bataille de Gaulle: L’Âge de fer, the first part of a diptych on Charles de Gaulle. The film reconstructs France’s collapse and the 1940 armistice with Nazi Germany. Forced into exile in London, the then little-known general fights to convince the world that Paris can be retaken. The grandiose title matches an equally monumental ambition: an international cast and large-scale production design supporting a vision of historical cinema suspended between heroism and entertainment. Director Antonin Baudry, after Wolf’s Call, once again centres military imagination, this time placing De Gaulle as an isolated hero forced to invent Free France from nothing.
If Nemes depicts occupied France, Pawlikowski turns to the ashes of post-Nazi Germany in Fatherland. The film follows Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika as the writer returns to Germany in 1949 to receive the Goethe Prize. The country they encounter is already fractured by Cold War logic, still processing the trauma of Nazism.
As in Pawlikowski’s previous work—from Ida to Cold War—history moves through bodies, families, love stories, and ideological affiliations. Here, the tragedy is also that of Stalinist communism beginning to build itself on the ruins of another dictatorship. The passage through Buchenwald—transformed from Nazi concentration camp into Soviet detention site for dissidents—is especially striking. War, once again, is experienced most acutely by those at the margins, while the intelligentsia drifts through private dramas, only intermittently connected to the world.
A question remains: have the Second World War, occupied France, Vichy, and the Resistance become the ideological terrain on which French cinema is attempting to rebuild a patriotic self-image?
The temptation to think so is strong. But it is also true that, in a decade in which cinema often struggles to articulate the present, the world wars offer a familiar narrative frame—shared, legible, and in a sense timeless. A space in which political, emotional, and identity-driven stories can unfold without directly confronting the instability of now.
Two of the most interesting films, in this sense, intertwine war and queerness.
Coward by Lukas Dhont is less interested in the trenches as a site of combat than in their emotional and performative backstage. The film follows Pierre, a young soldier newly arrived at the front, and Francis, who stages theatrical performances to raise troop morale. War becomes a paradoxical laboratory of masculinity: an almost entirely male world in which the absence of women produces surrogates, disguises, roles, and new forms of desire and care.
Inspired in part by historical photographs of soldiers performing in drag for their units, Coward explores the domestic life behind the front line and the discovery of queerness as both a public and clandestine experience.
La Bola Negra by Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo works instead on inheritance. Set across three moments in Spanish history—1932, 1937, and 2017—the film follows real and fictional characters navigating their homosexuality within a repressive society in which deviation from rigid gender categories can mean exclusion, violence, or death.
If Federico García Lorca’s lost novel protagonist is denied entry to a local social club due to rumours about his sexuality, a woman in the village of one of the soldier protagonists is killed with a guitar string for appearing too free, too inclined toward pleasure.
In La Bola Negra, the Spanish Civil War does not generate this violence; it simply renders it more visible, more legitimate, and harder to ignore. The Spain depicted by the Javis is a society obsessed with homogeneity and control, unable to accommodate anything that exceeds the categories imposed by religion, family, and power.
And yet the film remains oriented toward the present: those silenced identities resurface a century later in a country that has begun to confront its own historical memory, while still remaining vulnerable to the same mechanisms of exclusion and repression.