Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” takes the historical epic and turns it into a punk rock contemporary coming-of-age movie.

“Marie Antoinette” generated boos at Cannes reportedly because it threw French history to the wind and seemingly relished in the monarchy’s decadent wealth instead of criticizing it.

I Was There:

Actually, the film only received a small handful of boos, and the media was accused of sensationalizing the reaction.

Though a commercial flop upon release, Marie Antoinette has garnered more critical acclaim over the years.

Richard Kelly’s dystopian comedy “Southland Tales” featured a starry cast: Dwayne Johnson, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Mandy Moore and Justin Timberlake.

But the film’s reception at the festival was more or less a trainwreck. Roger Ebert blasted the film as the biggest Cannes disaster since The Brown Bunny based on the amount of boos and critical pans that erupted after the screening.

The film was self-consciously designed to be a culturally meaningful touchstone, but it was perceived by most as a wannabe visionary epic, an ambitious but finally incomprehensible movie.

Before “The House That Jack Built,” Lars von Trier delivered another Cannes controversy with his horror movie “Antichrist.”

Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg play a couple who descend into madness at a cabin in the woods following the tragic death of their son.

The husband loses his grasp on reality as he’s plagued by sickening visions, while the wife starts to embrace violent and sadomasochistic behavior.

Scenes of castration and bloody masturbation sent Cannes audiences storming out of the theater.

The film’s screening “elicited derisive laughter, gasps of disbelief, a smattering of applause and loud boos.”

Gaspar Noé’s experimental drama “Enter the Void” did not stir up as much controversy at Cannes as “Irréversible,” but it proved polarizing nonetheless.

Some critics (not me) described it as an endurance test. Stirring boos and bravos in Cannes, it ranks up there in terms of ambition and provocation with Lars von Trier’s Antichrist.

Noé presented a nearly three-hour unfinished cut of the movie, told from the perspective of a dead man’s consciousness.

“I thought people would be booing, because people do that to my movies,” Noé said at the Cannes press conference. “I kind of like that, but I didn’t get it this time.

What was it that Douglas Sirk said to Fassbender? To make a good melodrama you need, sperm, blood and tears. All of these are in my film.”

Add Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” to the list of Palme d’Or winners that elicited boos from critics. As Entertainment Weekly reported out of the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, “It’s daunting to describe Terrence Malick’s ‘The Tree of Life,’ but scattered audience members at its first screening in Cannes needed only one syllable: boo. The many supporters of the movie pushed back with counter-applause, but it was a shocking way for the movie to debut.” As one critic in attendance noted: “The booing at the end of today’s ‘Tree of Life’ screening was an ugly, animalistic thing that may explain why Malick doesn’t do press.” The Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain-starring film tells a coming-of-age story in 1950s Texas and juxtaposes the intimate family story with the expansiveness of the cosmos, as Malick famously breaks from the main story to depict the creation of the world.

Lee Daniels’ “The Paperboy” was one of the more ridiculed Palme d’Or contenders at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. The pulpy and dirty Florida crime drama stars Matthew McCounaghey as a reporter investigating a murder involving a death row inmate. Daniels goes full hot-and-sweaty trash with this film, memorably including one scene in which Nicole Kidman simulates peeing on Zac Efron after his character gets stung by a jellyfish. Some critics called “The Paperboy” fearless, while others derided it as campy filth. The film’s sleaziness caught Cannes by surprise, leading audience members to jeer at the film during its premiere screening.

Leos Carax’s “Holy Motors” is often cited by critics as one of the best movies of the 21^st century, but it premiered at Cannes in 2012 to a rollercoaster level of responses. The elusive and enigmatic drama stars Denis Lavant as a man who is seemingly an actor. The man dresses up in different costumes and takes on different skins as he travels throughout London. As The Guardian reported out of Cannes: “Its first screening was greeted by boos drowned out by cheers, by volleys of ecstatic and furious tweets and by one big question: what the hell was it all about?” Variety called the film “certifiably nuts” in its review, adding about the film’s premiere: “Periodically the silence in the theater was broken by laughs and gasps, triggered by an extended glimpse of full-frontal nudity or a sudden burst of frenzied violence, but Cannes audiences are used to those sorts of triggers, often the signature of provocateurs like Lars von Trier and Gaspar Noé.”

“Only God Forgives” was supposed to be Nicolas Winding Refn and Ryan Gosling’s celebrated return to Cannes after the breakout success of “Drive,” which won Refn the Cannes best director prize at the 2011 festival. Anyone hoping that Refn and Gosling’s reunion would yield similar results was surely crushed when the ultra-violent “Only God Forgives” crashed and burned at the 2013 festival. Gosling plays an American criminal in Bangkok who is forced to wade through the city’s underworld after his mother tasks him with avenging his brother’s death. Only Kristin Scott Thomas’ performance survived mostly unscathed by the press.

ariety called the film a “vapid, nihilistic exercise in style” and added, “A nasty, hyperviolent thriller set around Bangkok’s seedy brothels and boxing rings, the film was booed at its press screening earlier this morning, countered (as boos often are) by defiant shouts of ‘Bravo!’ and scattered applause, indicating pockets of support.”

“Grace Kelly’s post-Hollywood life may not have been the fairy tale some thought it to be, but you wouldn’t know it from director Olivier Dahan’s cornball melodrama,” Variety wrote in its review of the Nicole Kidman-starring biographical flop. The film opened the 2014 festival and is widely considered one of the weakest starts to Cannes of the 2010s. The film earned terrible reviews across the board, with many shrugging it off as poorly-made Oscar bait. As France24 reported at the time: “The festival took off and quickly came crashing down to earth on Wednesday with ‘Grace of Monaco,’ a dreadful Grace Kelly biopic that earned boos and hisses from a rightfully irritated press at the morning screening… Uninspiring from its first frame to its last, ‘Grace of Monaco’ is a piece of hagiographic fluff that cobbles together tropes from other recent biopics of famous women who just wanted to, you know, live and love without the pressure of public expectation.”

It was back-to-back Cannes misses for Ryan Gosling, who followed up “Only God Forgives” boos in 2013 with even more boos for his 2014 feature directorial debut “Lost River.” As Variety reported: “Ryan Gosling’s gonzo directorial debut ‘Lost River’ provided this year’s Cannes Festival with some of its most memorable WTF moments. In the aftermath of its Tuesday screening, Critics beat a fast path to Twitter to spread vitriol, disbelief and, in a few rare instances, praise for a film that is partially set in an underwater city. It’s a trippy tale that owes debts to David Lynch and Gosling’s ‘Drive’ director Nicolas Winding Refn and premiered to boos and a dollop of applause.” Variety’s review excoriated the film, comparing it to a trainwreck.

Gus Van Sant’s “Sea of Trees” was perhaps the biggest flop of the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. Van Sant is a Palme d’Or winner and had Matthew McConaughey as his lead, following the actor’s Oscar victory for “Dallas Buyers Club.” McConaughey stars as an American man who travels to Aokigahara, aka the “Japanese suicide forest,” to end his life, only to meet a Japanese man (Ken Watanabe) who’s there to do the same thing. Variety reported the film was greeted with a “chorus of boos.” McConaunghey stood up for the film at its Cannes press conference, telling press, “I’m happy to be here. I’m happy to be invited. I’m happy that the film got in. It was a great experience for me. I liked the experience of making it, and I’m glad we got the opportunity to introduce it to the world.”

Nicolas Winding Refn followed one divisive Cannes premiere (“Only God Forgives”) with another thanks to the 2016 debut of “The Neon Demon,” a fashion industry-set psychological horror starring Elle Fanning as a young model thrown into the corrupt underworld of Hollywood beauty. Variety film critic Owen Gleiberman wrote in his review: “Refn has made a baroquely kinky gross-out surrealist horror film set in the L.A. fashion world. It’s not boring, but there’s less to it than meets the eyeball…Beauty mingles with mangled flesh, and each fastidiously slick image seems to have come out of ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’ or ‘The Shining’ or a very sick version of a Calvin Klein commercial. Every scene, every shot, every line of dialogue, every pause is so hypnotically composed, so luxuriously over-deliberate, that the audience can’t help but assume that Refn knows exactly what he’s doing — that he’s setting us up for the kill.” IndieWire reported out of Cannes that reactions to the film ranged from boos to walkouts to audience members literally yelling at the screen in outrage.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” earned strong critical support of the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, but that didn’t stop audience members from booing the disturbing feature. As Variety’s Guy Lodge tweeted at the time, “Predictable booing after ‘Killing of a Sacred Deer’ from critics who somehow resent being challenged or chafed at Cannes. It’s magnificent.” The nightmarish film stars Colin Farrell as a surgeon who befriends a young teenage boy (Barry Keoghan) after killing his mother on the operating table. The boy slowly enacts revenge on the surgeon’s family, the matriarch of which is played by Nicole Kidman. Variety film critic Peter Debruge was a fan, writing that “Farrell and Kidman are astonishingly gifted at playing the subtext of every scene.”