Every Cannes Palme d'Or Winner Since 1990, Ranked
Updated May 27, 2023 with the 2023 Palme d'Or winner, Anatomy of a Fall.
A best picture Oscar may be film's peak honor, but a Cannes Palme d'Or win isn't far behind. Though it didn't adopt its current name (which translates to "Golden Palm" in English) on a permanent basis until 1975, the top award at the globe's most prestigious film festival has been handed out in nearly every year since 1946, with occasional interruptions (most recently in 2020, when the festival was canceled during the COVID pandemic).
Is the latest Palme d'Or winner a favorite with critics as well? Not every Palme d'Or recipient is, as Cannes juries (typically composed of actors and directors, and different every year) don't always have the same tastes as reviewers. In the gallery on this page, we rank all of the Cannes winners since 1990. They are arranged from worst to best by Metascore, which reflects the consensus of professional critics for each film.
1993 co-winner (tied with The Piano)
The first split result at Cannes in over a decade (ties are infrequent in recent years, though they were once more common) resulted in two worthy films taking home a Palme d'Or trophy. One of those, Farewell My Concubine, was China's (and Hong Kong's) first and only Cannes winner. The adaptation of Lilian Lee's novel from director Chen Kaige centers on a pair of opera actors and lifelong friends played Leslie Cheung and Zhang Fengyi (Gong Li also stars as the latter's wife), set against six decades of a changing China both before and after the Cultural Revolution. Concubine received a pair of Oscar nominations and is widely regarded as one of the best Chinese-language films of the 20th century, though it didn't score quite as highly with critics as its English-language Cannes co-winner.
“No film can ever hope to convey the complex mosaic of cultural upheaval caused by everything that happened between 1924 and 1977, but Farewell My Concubine does an excellent job presenting samples of the flavor while telling a story that is both epic and intimate.” —James Berardinelli, Reelviews
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