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.
2018 winner
The fifth film to play in competition at Cannes for Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda was his first to collect the Palme d'Or (and the fifth Japanese film to do so). A moving, deeply human drama about a group of unrelated, impoverished people in Tokyo who live together as a de facto family and use shoplifting as a means of survival, Shoplifters was the best-reviewed film at Cannes in 2018 (indeed, only two films in all of 2018 scored higher), and it was later nominated for a foreign-language Oscar.
“A tender ensemble piece whose skillful performances dovetail into a perfectly symphonic whole, Shoplifters is a work of such emotional delicacy and formal modesty that you're barely prepared when the full force of what it's doing suddenly knocks you sideways.” —Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times
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