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.
2021 winner
The winner of the first Cannes event in two years (following the pandemic-related cancellation of the 2020 festival) was far from the best-reviewed 2021 entry (which, at the close of the festival, was Apichatpong Weerasthakul's Memoria). Still, the sophomore feature from Raw director Julia Ducournau received generally positive reviews from critics at the fest. Described as "extreme cinema" and a "nightmarish yet mischievously comic barrage of sex, violence, lurid lighting and pounding music" by the BBC's Nicholas Barber, the highly stylized Titane is a loosely plotted, highly stylized film that follows a 30-something woman serial killer with a steel plate in her head who poses as a missing teen boy to evade capture. In her first trip to Cannes, Ducournau became only the second female Palme d'Or winner in history, following Jane Campion's groundbreaking victory in 1993.
“With Titane, audiences occasionally just have to give themselves over to the movie’s demented momentum, taking whatever perverse pleasure they can from Ducournau’s willingness to push the boundaries.” —Peter Debruge, Variety
| Stream On |
|
| Stream On |
|
| Stream On |
|
| Stream On |
|