Minotaur

Andrey Zvyagintsev's Minotaur is the Russian director's first feature since Loveless (2017), which won the Jury Prize at Cannes and an Oscar nomination for Best International Feature. It was made in exile as a co-production between Latvia, France and Germany, after years in which Zvyagintsev was hospitalised and unable to work, and it premiered in the main competition of the 79th Cannes Film Festival in 2026, where it won the Grand Prix, the festival's second prize.

Loosely reworking Claude Chabrol's La Femme infidèle (1969), the film follows Gleb, a prosperous company director whose carefully ordered existence begins to fracture under corporate and political pressure. Zvyagintsev films the slow unravelling with the glacial precision and architectural framing that have defined his work since The Return: long, cold compositions in which money, status and power curdle into something rotten. Dmitriy Mazurov anchors the film as a man watching his own life slip beyond his control.

Critics greeted it as a return to form, and it holds a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes; reviewers read it as a scalpel taken to the moral life of contemporary Russian elites. It carries on the anatomy of family and authority that runs through Leviathan and Loveless, and Minotaur shows Zvyagintsev, now working from outside his country's borders, still among its sharpest moral chroniclers.