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.
1996 winner
Mike Leigh's masterful 1996 dramedy centers on a middle-aged London factory worker (Brenda Blethyn, also the best actress winner at the festival) who is surprised by the arrival of the daughter she gave up for adoption at birth—much like the latter, a middle-class black optometrist played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, is surprised to discover that her birth mother is white. It's one of the very best films of the English director's stellar career and would go on to receive five Oscar nominations including best picture.
Though it would seem that the Francis Ford Coppola-led Cannes jury had an easy choice to make, Secrets was far from the only terrific film at the 1996 festival. Other well-reviewed films screening in competition that year included Fargo, Jacques Audiard's A Self Made Hero, and André Téchiné's Thieves, and Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves.
“The results are wondrous, wrenching and crazily funny to behold.” —David Ansen, Newsweek
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