The 10 Best Cannes Winners From the Last 30 Years, Ranked

Snatching the Palme d’Or off a movie like Zone of Interest usually has a way of turning the critical tide against a film. Still, Justine Triet’s French courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall was simply too entertaining, funny, gripping and brilliantly acted (fans of Sandra Hüller’s performance in Project Hail Mary should seek it out immediately) that everyone basically gave it a pass.

The film stars Hüller as a successful writer who may or may not push her husband out the window of their snowy chateau in the opening scene. Swann Arlaud (who played a sexy lawyer) and Messi (who played a dog) both became memes; Hüller was nominated for an Oscar, and Triet even went and won one. That, my friends, is called impact.

I’m clearly biased, but Ken Loach’s win for The Wind that Shakes the Barley will always be up there with my all-time favourite Palme d’Ors – and not only because it’s the best film ever made on the Irish War of Independence. This was Loach’s 11th time in competition (that number now stands at a record 19), and it elevated his status at the festival in much the same way that The Departed did for Scorsese at the Oscars — shifting him from the status of serial also-ran to amongst the all-time greats. 

The film also reminded people of what Cillian Murphy was capable of during a period in the actor’s career when he was mostly cast as bad guys in solid Hollywood movies (Batman Begins, Red Eye). Is it too much to say that this win partially sowed the seeds of a cultural renaissance in Ireland that has recently produced the likes of Kneecap, CMAT and Fontaines DC? It’s certainly worth considering.

Given the task at hand, it felt only right to limit this list to one film per director. As much as it moved me, Loach’s I, Daniel Blake (a surprise winner in 2016) was never in the running, but Michael Haneke’s back-to-back Palme d’Ors for The White Ribbon and Amour were tough to parse. 

In the end, I’ve gone for the less apocalyptic of the two, even though this tale of death and dementia isn’t exactly sparing in its depictions of grief. It does, however, have a defiant and hard-won sentimentality at its core. Haneke returned to the festival with Happy End in 2017, but the sense of a final artistic statement here is hard to ignore — and with the director now 84 and apparently not in great health, it might very well be just that. 

The Wind that Shakes the Barley might have felt like a career achievement for Loach in 2006, but Abbas Kiarostami’s win for Taste of Cherry in 1997 represented a win for an entire approach to cinema — namely, the Iranian New Wave.

If you’re not familiar with it, this was a generation of filmmakers (led by the likes of Kiarostami, the Makhmalbafs and last year’s Palme winner, Jafar Panahi) who blurred the lines between reality and fiction in their work and approached cinema with a poetic sensibility — often casting people to play themselves to find a deeper truth about events that had already happened. Relatively speaking, Cherry was far from the most adventurous film to emerge from that movement, but Kiarostami’s tale of a man trying to find a place to bury himself is one of the most moving.

Blue is the Warmest Colour was one of the most controversial films to win the Palme in the last 30 years, but the manner in which it transcended those controversies only burnished its legend. This was the decision, by Steven Spielberg and his jury, to award that year’s Palme d’Or between the film’s director, Abdellatif Kechiche, and its two stars — the at that time relatively unknown French actresses, Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux.

The hubbub surrounding the film was mostly to do with the director’s on-set behaviour and his awkward decision to let the sex scenes between his actresses linger. None of that could take away from the overwhelming experience of watching their characters fall in and out of love, though. Oh, to be young and feel such things. 

Had Lars Von Trier not taken it upon himself to sympathise with the Nazis in his press conference for Melancholia in 2011, I would probably be talking about that terrific film on our list and not Dancer in the Dark — but such are the twists and turns of history. 

Not to worry, if you had to choose a Von Trier film to perfectly sum up his taste for button-pushing flourishes and gallows (ahem) humour, you could do far worse than this jagged musical about a factory worker (played, of course, by Björk) who loses her eyesight. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Similar to what occurred with Taste of Cherry, Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days represented a crowning achievement for the Romanian New Wave: a movement of confrontationally realistic cinema that crashed on the festival with The Death of Mr. Lazarescu in 2005 and has more or less held firm ever since — both Mungiu (with Fjord) and Radu Jude (The Diary of a Chambermaid) will be returning to the Croisette this year. 

Like many of the early films in that wave, 4 Months placed the viewer in the belly of the Ceausescu years, providing a razor-sharp and often darkly comic critique of the era (and perhaps our own) that never once felt solemn, even with the film’s impossibly weighty themes. Unlike Cherry, however, it really was that movement’s finest achievement.

I mean, why not? The most adventurous Palme d’Or winner of the last 30 years (maybe ever?) might appear as impenetrable as its title (not to mention its director’s name), but Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives has more colour, sex and special effects in its digestible 114-minute running time than many of the more “accessible” films that the festival has celebrated in that period.

Since transfixing the festival in 2010 with this story of death, ghosts, transhumanism and tropical shapeshifters, Weerasethakul has returned on two occasions (with the similarly dreamlike Cemetery of Splendour in 2015 and his Tilda Swinton-starring Memoria in 2021), but this is destined to be his masterpiece. Give it a try! 

Some loftier critics might baulk at the idea of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite placing high on a list like this, but such is the burden of universal acclaim. We don’t need to tell you all the records that the South Korean director’s kitchen-knife-sharp satire broke on the way to becoming only the second film in history to win both the Palme d’Or in Cannes and Best Picture at the Oscars, so let’s just say there were quite a few.

Even before this movie, Bong’s place as the most significant wide-screen political satirist since Paul Verhoeven looked fairly secure, but Parasite — a class-conscious tale about a family of strivers infiltrating the modernist life of a family of well-to-dos — cemented it, cast it in iron and chiselled it into the rockface. It also, in its small way, kind of changed how people thought about international cinema. In a word, historic. 

Is it too much to say that the 2011 Cannes jury (which was led by Robert Deniro and contained Uma Thurman, Olivier Assayas, Jude Law, Liv Ullman and Johnie To) had the easiest decision to make out of any in the last 30 years? Sure, the 2011 edition was a knock-out, boasting (with apologies to The Artist) movies like Drive, Melancholia, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, and We Need to Talk About Kevin, but after Von Trier’s press conference outburst, it was always going to be Terrence Malick’s year.

The director had returned from his 20-year hiatus with The Thin Red Line in 1998 and followed that up with the mesmerising The New World in 2005. Even so, nobody was quite prepared for the cosmic scope and transcendental intimacy of Tree of Life, a film about a family in 1950s Texas that seemed to contain the secrets of the universe. Not bad for a trip to the movies.