This year's Cannes Film Festival finishes today – and from the hundreds of titles that premiered, here are the ones which are going to be big talking points all through 2025.

With the combined star power of Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson and the arthouse credentials of acclaimed Scottish film-maker Lynne Ramsay (Morvern Callar, We Need to Talk about Kevin), Die, My Love was one of the most eagerly anticipated titles going into Cannes, where it sold to Mubi for $24m (£17.8m). Adapted from a 2017 novel by Ariana Harwicz, it sees Lawrence and Pattinson play a loved-up couple whose relationship unravels after a move to the countryside and the birth of their baby, and centres on the psychotic breakdown of Lawrence's character. At a festival event, Ramsay criticised journalists' read of the film as purely about postpartum psychosis, however, saying it was instead "about a relationship breaking down, it's about love breaking down, and sex breaking down after having a baby. And it's also about a creative block". Critics praised the cast in particular, which includes Sissy Spacek, LaKeith Stanfield and Nick Nolte – but the film belongs to Lawrence's raw, sensual-but-humorous performance. "What Lawrence does in Die, My Love is so delicately textured, even within its bold expressiveness, and its fiery anger, that it leaves you scrambling for adjectives," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Time, while the BBC's Nicholas Barber calls her "better than ever". (RL)

Even by Cannes' standards, Sound of Falling is an extraordinarily ambitious, richly textured and beautiful work of art. Mascha Schilinski's second feature film is all set in and around the same farmhouse in Germany, but it slips between four different time periods. We see the same characters as young children and as old people; we hear the traumas that echo through the generations. It can be challenging to figure out how everyone is connected to everyone else, and in some ways Sound of Falling is more reminiscent of a novel than a typical film. But Schilinski conjures up haunting, immersive effects that are only possible on the big screen. "Cinema is too small a word for what this sprawling yet intimate epic achieves in its ethereal, unnerving brilliance," said Damon Wise in Deadline. Forget Cannes, forget the Competition, forget the whole year, even – Sound of Falling is an all-timer." (NB)

Arguably, no film had a more striking premise this year than this British feature playing in the Un Certain Regard sidebar: a gay BDSM romance, featuring Hollywood star Alexander Skarsgård as Ray, a "dom", leather-clad biker living in the London suburbs who finds a "sub" in the form of adorkable car park inspector Colin, played by Harry Potter star Harry Melling. But the film itself was no mere provocation, instead providing a sharply observed and creditably knotty inquiry into such a relationship. Initially, as the inexperienced, nerdy Colin is thrust into a whole new world of sexual transgression, the film seems to occupy classic Brit-com territory in its quirky, farcical tone, despite the boundary-pushing subject matter. But it also darkens as it goes on, leaving the audience to reflect on whether such degrading role-play is plain emotional abuse; events reach a climax with an electric, excruciating lunch scene, in which Colin's mother (a brilliant Lesley Sharp) confronts Ray about his treatment of her son. Some reviewers such as David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter found it "unexpectedly sweet" though for me, it was far more troubling than that – a sign, perhaps, of the kind of divided opinions that it may inspire when it is unleashed on the general public. (HM)

A wild and chaotic comedy thriller from Ari Aster, the director of Hereditary and Midsommar, Eddington stars Joaquin Phoenix as a bungling small-town sheriff who imagines himself to be the straight-talking hero of his story, but might just be its devious and detestable villain. The setting is New Mexico in 2020. Aster pokes despairing fun at the ways Americans reacted to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the other events that defined that strange year, making this one of the only major US films to grapple with so many divisive contemporary political issues. Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone and Austin Butler co-star in what

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