Cannes Film Fest: Top Winners of Palme d’Or–Ranked

17. Taste of Cherry (1997)

Taste of Cherry, Iran’s premier director Abbas Kiarostami’s Bleak Minimalist film

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.

 

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16. Blue Is 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.

15. 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).

14. 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.

13. 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.

11. 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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10. 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.

8. 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.

7. 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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6. 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.

5. 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.

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.

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.

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.