The 20 Best Movies to Win Cannes' Top Prize
Today the Cannes Film Festival begins its 71st year, bringing filmmakers and film lovers from across the globe to one gorgeous seaside town for eleven days of cinematic celebration. But most importantly, 21 films will compete for the film festival’s top prize: the coveted Palme d’Or.
The international prize is perhaps more renown than our country’s Best Picture. For one, the competition is tougher-you have some of the greatest filmmakers from around the world rather than a handful of Americans. (This year, only two films from the States are in competition: Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman and David Robert Mitchell’s Under the Silver Lake.)
More importantly, to win the Palme d’Or places a film in high regard-especially considering the movies that have won in the previous seven decades. Here are 20 of the best films to pick up the top prize at Cannes (which alternated in the past between the current Palme d’Or, the name of the prize since 1975, and the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film).
20. The Square (2017)
Last year’s winner is an oftentimes absurd and unnerving satire about the contemporary art world. The curator at a Stockholm museum must struggle with the dull trappings of his job (administrative duties, interview requests) while his personal life veers out of control as he attempts a vigilante mission to retrieve his stolen wallet. Director Ruben Östlund’s film, which also earned an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, shows how art and performance can push an audience’s boundaries in often unsettling-and unenjoyable-ways.
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19. The Wages of Fear (1953)
Pretty much every thriller owes a debt to Henri Georges Cloutzot’s spellbinding classic. Deep in a South American jungle, four European men take an easy job to transport a truck full of nitroglycerin across the rocky terrain-a journey even the men’s ersatz employers don’t expect them to accomplish. With cargo that could explode at any moment-and emotions that are as equally volatile-The Wages of Fear is a masterclass in suspense and remains one of the most anxiety-inducing films ever made.
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18. Taste of Cherry (1997)
Abbas Kiarostami's minimalist film is a bleak one: It follows a man as he drives around Tehran, searching for someone to bury his body after he commits suicide. The man contemplates his own life in conversations with various people he picks up along the way. The first (and only) Palme d’Or winner directed by an Iranian filmmaker, Taste of Cherry offers a surprising take on humanity from an accomplished director, who manages to insert his own postmodern twist by the film’s end.
17. M*A*S*H (1970)
Long before it was a long-running and beloved sitcom, Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H broke ground as a side-splittingly funny comedy set during the Korean War that skewered the conventional attitudes of the political mainstream during the Vietnam War era. Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould star as the iconic “Hawkeye” Pierce and “Duke” Forrest, two insubordinate army surgeons who cause a lot of grief at a surgical camp in South Korea. M*A*S*H essentially set a standard for the following decade of politically minded films, which often used counter-culture themes to poke fun at the establishment (while, of course, making a lot of money for the establishment).
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16. Dancer in the Dark (2000)
Lars von Trier is known for his discomforting, often brutal films that shed a light on humanity’s worst qualities, and his stories are often told with an incredibly dark sense of humor. It’s no surprise, then, that his attempt at a movie musical wouldn’t look much like Singin’ in the Rain. Björk makes her film debut as a young factory worker who, faced with a degenerative eye disorder, escapes from her hateful reality through fantastical song-and-dance numbers. But like any von Trier film, this one doesn’t end with a gleeful finale.
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15. Wild at Heart (1990)
Fresh off a Best Director nomination for Blue Velvet and the premiere of the game-changing Twin Peaks, David Lynch shocked Cannes audiences with his violent, hyper-sexual, and at times totally bonkers Wild at Heart. Starring Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern as young lovers on the lam, the film was so divisive with Cannes audiences that a circus of boos erupted when then-jury president Bernardo Bertolucci announced it received the Palme d’Or. While it may not be one of his best-known films, Wild at Heart certainly established Lynch as an auteur to whom the world needed to pay attention.
14. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)
The movie musical is a very American genre, one that director Jacques Demy with this tragic romance. Catherine Deneuve and Nico Castelnuovo star as young lovers, Geneviève and Guy, in the titular coastal town. The star-crossed pair are split apart when Guy is drafted into the army, leaving Geneviève pregnant and alone. With the dialogue completely sung through in an operatic way, the musical heightens the emotional romance and reaches a crescendo-accompanied by the famous score composed by Michel Legrand.
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13. Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013)
Based on Julie Maroh’s graphic novel, this coming-of-age drama follows a French teenager who falls for a blue-haired artist. The result is an emotionally charged romance that tracks the young women as they fall in and out of love. The controversial, highly sexual film not only earned the Palme d’Or, but director Abdellatif Kechiche shared the award with its stars, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux.
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12. Black Orpheus (1959)
Marcel Camus brings the music, the colors, and unadulterated life of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro to wondrous life in Black Orpheus. Set in a Rio favela, this modern adaptation of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is gorgeous and romantic, with young lovers Orfeu (Breno Mello, a soccer player Camus scouted on the streets of Rio) and Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn, a Pittsburgh native) crashing together amid the exuberant chaos of Carnival. The film would also win the 1960 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
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11. The Tree of Life (2011)
Terrence Malick’s 2011 film is one of his most divisive; it’s either a glorious reflection on humanity and the unknown nature of our lives on Earth, or an overly experimental tone poem that doesn’t quite come together as a complete narrative. Despite all of its flaws, however, it’s simply stunning and beautiful, a film that shows an auteur investigating the world around him and attempting to assemble his findings. That’s the kind of ambitious (and austere) work that the Palme d’Or perfectly represents.
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10. The Conversation (1974)
Frances Ford Coppola premiered two films at the Cannes Film Festival in 1974. One would go on to win that year’s Palme d’Or, while the other-The Godfather Part II-would win the Oscar for Best Picture and be considered one of the greatest films ever made. While The Conversation has been overshadowed by the mafia epic, this moody thriller (which shares a few plot sensibilities with the 1967 Palm d’Or winner, Blow-Up) features Gene Hackman in one of his greatest performances, playing a surveillance expert who becomes increasingly paranoid when he believes he has captured a murder on tape.
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9. Paris, Texas (1984)
Here you have an incomparable team putting together a cinematic masterwork: stunning direction from Wim Wenders, a quietly emotional script by Kit Carson and Sam Shepard, heartbreaking performances from Harry Dean Stanton and Natassja Kinski, and an iconic score by Ry Cooder. Set in the American southwest, Paris, Texas tells a distinctly contemporary American tale of isolation, reunion, and redemption.
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8. Blow-Up (1967)
Michelangelo Antonioni skewered the carefree, hedonist swinging ’60s with this stylish and cerebral thriller. David Hemmings stars as a fashion photographer who breezes around London, often bored and barely interested in finding any meaning in his work. All of that changes when he convinces himself that he catches a murder on film and confronts a mysterious woman (Vanessa Redgrave) about what he witnessed. Sexually provocative for its time, the film now stands as a mod classic that introduced not only liberal attitudes toward sex, drugs, and rock and roll to a mainstream audience, but also pushed the boundaries of “mature” content on film.
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7. Secrets & Lies (1996)
Mike Leigh’s drama tackles the complexities of race in class in contemporary Britain. Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Hortense, a middle-class black woman in London who searches for her birth mother. She discovers Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn), the working-class white woman who gave her up for adoption years ago-and whose family is not prepared for Hortense’s sudden appearance in their lives. The film’s effective story is told primarily through improvisation, with Leigh’s actors delivering their own lines (and thus their own emotional responses) to one another.
6. All That Jazz (1990)
Bob Fosse’s most beloved film may be Cabaret, but his autobiographical All That Jazz is perhaps the better anti-musical: a completely original and unexpected look at an artist as he questions his life, work, and relationships. Roy Scheider stars as Fosse avatar Joe Gideon as he works on what could be his very last Broadway production. Despite his failing health and his failing relationship (both caused by his own bad behavior), he attempts to cement his legacy as a theater titan while faced with the ultimate deadline.
5. Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989)
Steven Soderbergh’s directorial debut not only established himself as one of our great contemporary directors, but it also kickstarted the independent film movement of the early ‘90s and established Miramax Films as a cinematic powerhouse. But beyond its legacy, the film itself examined sexuality and relationships in a frank and edgy way, with James Spader (who won Best Actor at that year’s Cannes) playing a drifter who causes a rift between an emotionally fragile married couple.
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4. The Piano (1993)
Holly Hunter stars as Ada, a mute who travels from Scotland to New Zealand with her young daughter (Anna Paquin) after being sold by her father into marriage. When her suitor discards her piano-the one possession Ada truly loves-the coupling is immediately cooled. The marriage sees further complications when Ada begins an affair with another frontiersman, Baines (Harvey Keitel). Jane Campion’s erotic drama is perhaps infamous for being the single Palme d’Or winner to have been directed by a woman.
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3. Apocalypse Now (1979)
Francis Ford Coppola had a winning streak in the ’70s, which saw him direct some of the finest films in the American canon. That string of hits culminated with his epic Apocalypse Now, a loose adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness set during the Vietnam War. Martin Sheen stars as Captain Benjamin Willard, who receives orders to terminate Colonel Kurz (Marlon Brando), who has gone insane and is leading a band of vigilantes in Cambodia. Coppola’s war is hell (both on screen and, infamously, off), and its extreme view of mankind remains one of the most striking and disturbing films ever made.
2. Pulp Fiction (1994)
Though it was his sophomore effort, Quentin Tarantino became Quentin Tarantino with his bold, brash, unconventional, and highly influential Pulp Fiction. Full of postmodern quirks, self-referential moments, and elevated dialogue, Pulp Fiction completely changed the way we watch-and make-movies. Following three interconnected plot lines told from various points of view and seemingly random order, the film inspired countless imitators in the years after its release. No one could have predicted that when it premiered at Cannes, however, but the film did cause an international sensation as audiences knew immediately that what they saw had never been done before.
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1. Taxi Driver (1976)
Martin Scorsese’s fifth film nearly eclipsed his good early efforts, and you can understand why. With a career-making performance from Robert De Niro (fresh off his first Oscar win for The Godfather Part II) and an incredible script from Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver remains in a league of its own, a violent and disturbing picture that tracks a man’s descent into madness as he loses control of the despicable and destructive world around him. Travis Bickle is hardly a product of his own time; we see remnants of him in our current era, proving Schrader and Scorsese’s view of toxic masculinity was eerily prescient. With a supporting cast made of Harvey Keitel, Jodie Foster, Cybil Shepherd, and Albert Brooks, Taxi Driver shows how man can corrupt and be corrupted at the same time-and how loneliness and isolation are two of the most harmful byproducts of our contemporary society.
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