From Billy Wilder’s “The Lost Weekend” to the Sandra Bullock-starrer “28 Days” and beyond, cinema has a long tradition of substance abuse and recovery stories. There is something inherently cinematic and moving about a struggling person’s by-the-bootstraps journey to healing, with a lifetime’s worth of trials and tribulations. Just two years ago, Nora Fingscheidt’s tough but ultimately restorative “The Outrun” emerged as one of the best in this subgenre, showing both the all-consuming chaos of alcoholism with its unruly structure, and the serenity of the one-day-at-a-time mindset. More tame in its nature but still powerful, writer-director Jeanne Herry’s 2026 Cannes Competition entry “Another Day” is an addiction drama that is honest, patient and deceptively understated when it doesn’t err on the side of didacticism.
That intermittent educational feel (which especially weakens the ending) aside, “Another Day” is full of perceptive and compassionate details about how alcoholism can slowly sink its claws into the vulnerabilities of someone with the false promise of relief from life’s problems. In an authentic and genuinely lived-in performance, a terrific Adèle Exarchopoulos plays Garance, a talented Parisian actress who keeps busy enough in a well-respected and tight-knit theater company while also running from one audition to the next, and doing impressive voice work for extra income. Trying to stay afloat in an expensive city like Paris is tough enough, but piling onto Garance’s gig-economy hurdles is her terminally ill sister, and a romantic life that seems to be going nowhere.
