Rolling Stone has named 22 of the most anticipated movies headed to Cannes 2026, and one of the films drawing attention is Kiro, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s French-language debut, All of a Sudden. The 79th annual Cannes Film Festival begins on May 12.
All of a Sudden is a drama about the growing bond between a nursing-home director and a playwright dying of cancer, with Virginie Efira in the first role and Tao Okamoto as the second. Hamaguchi has described it as “the film where I’ve been cruelest with myself,” and the nearly three-and-a-half-hour feature is based loosely on You and I — The Illness Suddenly Got Worse, a book made from correspondence between a philosopher and a medical anthropologist.
The film arrives in a Cannes lineup that also includes Pedro Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas, Nicolas Winding-Refn’s Her Private Hell, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Sheep in a Box, Asghar Farhadi’s Parallel Tales and James Gray’s Paper Tiger. That puts Hamaguchi’s project among a crowded field of established auteurs and high-profile premieres, which is part of why the attention around Kiro has grown before the festival has even opened.
What makes All of a Sudden more complicated is that it is already dividing opinion in Spain, where the movie has opened. That reaction gives Cannes something more volatile than a standard prestige launch: a long, intimate drama with serious pedigree, but one that is arriving with debate already attached.
For Cannes, that is exactly the kind of title that can dominate conversation once the festival starts. For Hamaguchi, it is a test of whether a French-language debut built from grief, correspondence and a running time of nearly three and a half hours can land with the same force it has been promised.
