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. Made in exile as a Latvia–France–Germany co-production after years in which Zvyagintsev was hospitalised and unable to work, it premiered in the main competition of the 79th Cannes Film Festival in 2026 and 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 meticulously ordered existence begins to fracture under corporate and political pressure. Zvyagintsev films this slow unravelling with the glacial precision and architectural framing that has 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. Continuing the anatomy of family and authority that runs through Leviathan and Loveless, Minotaur confirms Zvyagintsev as one of the essential moral chroniclers of his country, working now from outside its borders.