Top films at Cannes 2026

The top three films at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, according to press ratings, are The Corset, Minotaur, and The Day of His Return. These films received the highest scores from critics, with The Corset leading the list with a press rating of 4.3/5.

Critics praise The Corset

Critics praised The Corset for its emotional depth and artistic quality. Adam Sanchez of GQ called it "a film of incredible generosity and beauty," while Laurent Cambon of aVoir-aLire.com described it as "a small pearl of the 2026 Cannes selection" that offers "touching and sensitive perspectives on the peasant condition of the 1980s."

Audience ratings reflect similar favor

Audience ratings also placed The Corset at the top with a 4.3/5 score. Viewers praised it as "a magnificent animated film that deserves all its awards" and "a beautiful story that speaks to children as well as adults."

Second place goes to Minotaur

Minotaur came in second with a press score of 4.2/5. Olivier Bombarda of Bande à part noted that it "never separates the intimate from the political, the domestic crime from the national disaster," while Stéphane Dreyfus of La Croix described it as "a powerful marital drama in wartime Russia."

Audience ratings differ slightly

The audience ranked Minotaur third with a 3.9/5 score. Viewers called it "a film as cruel and beautiful" and noted its "political cinema in very high form," where "family intimacy becomes a mirror / echo chamber of a state of the world."

Third place film highlights moral themes

The Day of His Return received a press score of 3.8/5. Mathilde Grasset of Cahiers du Cinéma highlighted its "solid moral ambition," and Diogo Serafim of Critikat.com noted its message that "life always exceeds what the image can capture, even if it is cinema that allows us, with each new repetition, to better discern what really matters."

Audience ratings highlight another film

Audience ratings placed Les Misérables second with a 4/5 score. Viewers appreciated its "touching" and "current" themes, as well as its "excellent" storytelling. The ratings are based on the AlloCiné barometer as of Friday, October 16, 2026, for films released in theaters on October 14 with at least 10 reviews for the press top and 50 for the audience top.