There is something quietly subversive about sitting in a cinema on the Côte d'Azur in late September, when the last of the summer crowd has thinned and the light over the bay turns the colour of old parchment, and watching a film set inside a snowbound Benedictine abbey in fourteenth-century northern Italy. The contrast is part of the pleasure. Cannes, a city that has built its identity around the moving image, understands that certain films do not age — they deepen.
On Thursday 24 September 2026 at 19h30, Cinéma Olympia on the rue de la Pompe presents a screening of Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Name of the Rose in its original version with subtitles, as part of the Play It Again! festival — a programme dedicated to bringing canonical films back to the theatrical context for which they were made. Admission is 7 € (or 6,50 € on a cinéphile tariff). The running time is 2 hours and 12 minutes.
A Film Three Years in the Making
Released in 1986 and adapted from Umberto Eco's labyrinthine novel, the film was, by any measure, an ambitious undertaking: three years of preparation, a production budget of nineteen million dollars, and a cast anchored by Sean Connery as the Franciscan friar William of Baskerville and a young Christian Slater as his novice Adso. The story unfolds in 1327, when the two arrive at a Benedictine monastery to attend a theological disputation, only to find themselves drawn into an investigation into the disappearance — and death — of monks, against a backdrop of Inquisition, doctrinal crisis, and a library that guards its contents with lethal resolve.
Annaud, who had already demonstrated his patience for historical reconstruction with Quest for Fire (1981), approached the material with the same rigour. The result is a film that belongs simultaneously to several genres — thriller, adventure, period drama — without being reducible to any of them. The monastery's scriptorium, its labyrinthine stacks, the fog-shrouded courtyard: the production design functions almost as a character in its own right.
'A film that asks its audience to slow down and look closely — at architecture, at text, at the face of a man choosing between faith and reason.'
Why a Festival Screening Changes Everything
Play It Again! is not a retrospective in the archival sense. Its premise is simpler and more direct: some films reveal themselves more fully on a large screen, in the dark, with an audience. The Name of the Rose is a case in point. The sound design — the creak of stone passages, the murmur of liturgical chant, the crackle of fire — was engineered for a theatre, and the film's deliberate pacing, which might read as slow on a laptop, becomes something closer to meditative when projected properly.
Cinéma Olympia, located at 5 rue de la Pompe in central Cannes, is one of those mid-sized urban cinemas that the French have a particular talent for preserving: not a multiplex, not a museum piece, but a working neighbourhood screen with genuine character. In a city whose relationship with cinema is constitutional — the Palais des Festivals sits barely a kilometre away — it carries a certain weight to watch a film here that was itself, in its time, a major international production.
For visitors spending a few days on the Riviera in late September, when hotel rates have eased and the coastal roads are navigable again, an evening of this kind has a particular logic. Dinner in the old quarter, a short walk to the rue de la Pompe, and then two hours and twelve minutes in the company of Connery at the height of his authority, a story that moves between faith and doubt, and a mystery that the film, wisely, does not entirely resolve.
The screening is in the original language — English, with French subtitles — which means that Connery's cadences, Slater's uncertain youth, and the film's careful layering of Latin, Italian, and ecclesiastical argument all arrive as Annaud intended them. Some films lose a register in dubbing. This one would lose its spine.