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Two A-list actors will make their directorial debuts at the fest: Scarlett Johansson’s drama, “Eleanor the Great,” starring 95-year-old June Squibb as a woman starting a new life in New York City, will premiere in the Un Certain Regard sidebar program. So will “Urchin,” from “Babygirl” star Harris Dickinson, soon to play John Lennon in a four-film Beatles biopic series; his drama is about a London street drifter.

Six films by female directors are among the 19 competing for the fest’s top prize, the Palme d’Or; they include 1980s-set AIDS drama “Alpha,” by body horror specialist Julia Ducournau, who won the Palme in 2021 with her erotic automotive nightmare, “Titane.” The other women competing for the Palme this year are Kelly Reichardt, Hafsia Herzi, Carla Simon, Chie Hayakawa and Mascha Schilinski.

This year’s festival is one movie shy of the record set in 2023 when seven female-directed films battled for the Palme. But that number could grow; the competition often has 22 films, and Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux said more will be announced in the days to come.

These could include “Die, My Love” from Scotland’s Lynne Ramsay, a psychological thriller starring Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson and LaKeith Stanfield; and “Couture” by France’s Alice Winocour, a drama of beauty and trauma starring Angelina Jolie, set during Paris Fashion Week.

Festival president Iris Knobloch, joining Frémaux at a Paris press conference Thursday morning, said Cannes is “very attentive” to the desire expressed by many people to increase its female participation. She noted that the Palme jury is led by French actress Juliette Binoche. She follows Greta Gerwig from the 2024 fest, who “passes the torch” from one woman to another as jury president for the first time in 60 years.

Frémaux said his programmers noted the “return of the genre” — films of action, adventure and horror that often play well in multiplexes.

This is reflected in two of the most-anticipated titles premiering at Cannes ’25, one a drama and other a comedy but both described as spy thrillers: the Tom Cruise-led “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” by Christopher McQuarrie, which will screen out of competition; and Wes Anderson’s “The Phoenician Scheme,” a Palme competitor starring Canada’s Michael Cera, Benicio del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson and a host of other stars.

Other Palme contenders with thriller themes include Reichardt’s “The Mastermind,” a Vietnam War-era art heist film starring Josh O’Connor; Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent,” set during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s; and Dominik Moll’s “Dossier 137,” starring Léa Drucker as a French police inspector investigating a crime that gets personal.

Jafar Panahi’s “A Simple Accident,” meanwhile, could almost qualify as a thriller owing to the extreme efforts the Iranian filmmaker had to make to evade authoritarian censors in Iran, his home country.

Playing opposite Paul Mescal, O’Connor also stars in “The History of Sound,” a gay romance and road movie by Oliver Hermanus.

Additional highlights of the Palme contest include the Cannes debut of genre ace Ari Aster (“Hereditary”), whose new drama, “Eddington,” stars Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal as a small-town sheriff and mayor battling each other in Eddington, N.M.

Aster’s competition rivals include two-time Palme winners Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgian brothers who are making their tenth bid for the golden palm with “Young Mothers,” a drama set in a maternity home.

Other returning Palme veterans include Norway’s Joachim Trier, whose new film, “Sentimental Value,” stars Renate Reinsve, who won best actress for Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World” at the 2021 festival.

It’s been nearly two decades since Texas auteur Richard Linklater was last at Cannes, but he aims to impress the locals with his Palme contender, “Nouvelle Vague,” a French-language film starring Zoey Deutch, Aubry Dullin and Guillaume Marbeck about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 New Wave landmark, “Breathless.”

Knobloch described the festival as being in “a dialogue with the world,” a discussion that has expanded in recent years as the French film celebration has started to have greater influence on the eventual nominees and winners at the Academy Awards.

Films premiering at Cannes last year received 31 Oscar nominations and nine wins, led by Sean Baker’s “Anora” with five wins. The Oscar best picture race also had two other Cannes ’24 premieres, “The Substance” and “Emilia Pérez,” while “Flow” won the Oscar for best animated feature.

Spike Lee’s new film “Highest 2 Lowest,” a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s classic 1963 crime drama “High and Low,” was MIA from Thursday’s announcement. But Lee posted on Instagram he’s been invited to screen it out of competition, so it will likely be included in a future announcement.

No Canadian films were announced Thursday for Cannes but that could change when more Official Selection titles are announced in the coming days, along with films in the Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week programs.

Robert De Niro will receive an honorary Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, which runs May 13-24.

Here’s the current list of films in competition for the Palme d’Or:

“Alpha” (Julia Ducournau)

“Dossier 137” (Dominik Moll)

“The Eagles of the Republic” (Tarik Saleh)

“Eddington” (Ari Aster)

“Fuori” (Mario Martone)

“The History of Sound” (Oliver Hermanus)

“A Simple Accident” (Jafar Panahi)

“La Petite Dernière” (Hafsia Herzi)

“The Mastermind” (Kelly Reichardt)

“Nouvelle Vague” (Richard Linklater)

“The Phoenician Scheme” (Wes Anderson)

“Renoir” (Chie Hayakawa)

“Romeria” (Carla Simon)

“The Secret Agent” (Kleber Mendonça Filho)

“Sentimental Value” (Joachim Trier)

“Sirat” (Óliver Laxe)

“Sound of Falling” (Mascha Schilinski)

“Two Prosecutors” (Sergei Loznitsa)

“Young Mothers” (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)