The 2026 Cannes Film Festival, it seems, has war on its mind.

An extraordinary number of movies at this year's festival, which concludes on May 23, deal with the experience of life in wartime.

In Lukas Dhont's Belgian World War I drama "Coward," young soldiers in the trenches confront ideas of heroism and masculinity.

"Visitation," the latest film from Volker Schlöndorff ("The Tin Drum"), continues the German director's obsession with the Second World War and its aftermath, tracing the fate of three families living on a lake near Berlin through decades of turbulent history, from the rise of Hitler until the fall of the Berlin Wall.

There are two French films — "Moulin" and "De Gaulle: Tilting Iron" — about French resistance to Nazi occupation, while another movie, "A Man of His Time," takes a rare look at French collaboration during wartime.

These films, like all historical movies, are really about now. The rise of the far right across Europe has spooked European filmmakers and they are looking to the past to find answers, to tell stories about how a nation falls prey to fascism, and how people behave under authoritarian rule: some bravely, heroically, others craven and self-serving.

These films are all concerned with the damage war does to the psyche, with the historic trauma wrought on those who take part in the killing and on those who look away.

An original, modern take on history

Of the wartime movies, "A Man of His Time," from director Emmanuel Marre, is the most original, and the most bracing.

Ostensibly a period piece, the film is shot like a grungy indie flick with 20-somethings in vintage costumes talking and behaving like Gen Zs as they kowtow to Nazi authority as a way to get ahead.

Swann Arlaud, who played Sandra Hüller's lawyer in the Oscar-nominated "Anatomy of a Fall," is an unknown author and shameless social climber determined to make a career in the Nazi bureaucracy. Marre based him on his own great-grandfather, who chose to work for the fascist Vichy regime.

The director's modern take on the historic tale can be jarring — dropping in '80s-era hits like "Life is Life" from Opus or Alphaville's "Sounds like a Melody" over '40s-era images — but his message on the banality, and the maliciousness, of evil could not be more timely.

Thomas and Erika Mann on a post-Holocaust road trip

Pawel Pawlikowski's "Fatherland" is a postwar movie.

The German-language drama from the Polish director of "Ida" and "Cold War" follows Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize-winning German writer, and his daughter, novelist and anti-fascist activist Erika Mann, as they embark on a road trip across divided Germany during the Cold War.

Thomas Mann is eager to secure his literary legacy in "the new Germany" (both East and West), arguing the beauty of German art and literature can survive the horrors of the Holocaust. Erika thinks her father's well-formed sentences are fig leaves covering the ugly reality of a civilization that has turned monstrous.

A thriller portraying corruption in Putin's Russia

"Minotaur," from exiled Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev, is one of the few Cannes films this year to look head-on at a modern-day conflict.

The political thriller ostensibly follows a corrupt businessman who discovers his wife has been unfaithful and tracks down her lover to confront him. (It's a loose adaptation of Claude Chabrol's "The Unfaithful Wife" from 1969.)

But the story plays out against the backdrop of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The businessman is tasked with supplying men from his payroll for military conscription, knowing they will be cannon fodder. He has blood on his hands long before he finds his wife's lover and — in a gruesome but virtuoso cinematic sequence worthy of Hitchcock — murders him.

This being Putin's Russia, a quick word with the mayor and the investigation into the killing is quickly covered up. The executive goes back to his comfortable life, his wife safely trapped — like her fellow Russian citizens, Zvyagintsev seems to be saying — in the embrace of her patriarchal master.

"Minotaur" is Zvyagintsev's first film made outside Russia and his first since recovering from a near-fatal case of Covid-19 that left him stranded in a hospital in Hanover, Germany, with 90% lung damage and unable to move or feel his limbs for months. It is also his most overtly political movie.

Anyone who missed the more subtle takedowns of institutional corruption in the director's last two films — "Leviathan" (2014) and "Loveless" (2017) — will require willful blindness to miss his full-on assault on the Putin regime here, and on the complicity of those inside the country who look the other way while murder is carried out in their name.

It was one of the most powerful and important films at Cannes this year, and is the clear frontrunner for the Palme d'Or.

Edited by: Elizabeth Grenier