What is the best Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or winning film of all time?

Auteurs and genre-definers, European provocateurs and global breakouts — every film here carries the Palme d'Or. Which deserves the crown of crowns?

1. 1
   Parasite

   Bong Joon-ho's 2019 genre-bending Korean thriller about class inequality, which also became the first non-English film to win Best Picture at the Oscars.
   1000pts
2. 2
   Pulp Fiction

   Quentin Tarantino's 1994 non-linear crime anthology that revolutionized independent cinema and popular storytelling.
   764pts
3. 3
   The White Ribbon

   Michael Haneke's 2009 stark black-and-white mystery set in a German village before World War I, probing the origins of evil.
   745pts
4. 4
   The Eel

   Shōhei Imamura's second Palme d'Or, shared in 1997, follows a paroled wife-killer who opens a barbershop and confides only in his pet eel.
   600pts
5. 5
   The Conversation

   Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 thriller stars Gene Hackman as surveillance expert Harry Caul, who becomes convinced that one of his recordings points to a murder.
   569pts
6. 6
   Rosetta

   The Dardenne brothers' 1999 film follows a teenager living in a trailer park with her alcoholic mother as she fights for any job, and Émilie Dequenne won Best Actress.
   569pts
7. 7
   The Ballad of Narayama

   Shōhei Imamura's 1983 film depicts a remote mountain village where custom demands that elderly people be carried up a mountain at seventy and left to die.
   569pts
8. 8
   Friendly Persuasion

   William Wyler's Civil War drama, the 1957 winner, stars Gary Cooper as the head of a Quaker family in southern Indiana whose pacifism is tested by Confederate raiders.
   535pts
9. 9
   Anatomy of a Fall

   Justine Triet's 2023 gripping French courtroom thriller in which a woman is accused of murdering her husband.
   535pts
10. 10
    Pelle the Conqueror

    Max von Sydow plays an aging Swedish widower who emigrates to Denmark with his young son in Bille August's 1988 film, later an Oscar winner as well.
    535pts
11. 11
    When Father Was Away on Business

    Emir Kusturica's 1985 film sees 1950s Yugoslavia through the eyes of a Sarajevo boy whose father has been sent to a labor camp.
    535pts
12. 12
    Triangle of Sadness

    Ruben Östlund's second winner, from 2022, strands a model couple and super-rich passengers from a luxury cruise on an island where the yacht's toilet manager takes charge.
    535pts
13. 13
    Yol

    Written by Yılmaz Güney from a Turkish prison and directed on his instructions by Şerif Gören, the 1982 co-winner follows five prisoners on a week's home leave.
    535pts
14. 14
    Kagemusha

    Akira Kurosawa's 1980 co-winner follows a petty thief trained to impersonate the dead warlord Takeda Shingen, building to the 1575 Battle of Nagashino.
    535pts
15. 15
    Shoplifters

    Hirokazu Kore-eda's 2018 Japanese drama about a family of petty criminals who adopt a neglected child, tenderly exploring what makes a family.
    497pts
16. 16
    Titane

    Julia Ducournau became the first woman to win outright with this 2021 body horror film about a serial killer who has a titanium plate in her skull.
    496pts
17. 17
    The Cranes Are Flying

    Mikhail Kalatozov's wartime drama follows Tatiana Samoilova as a woman waiting for her fiancé at the front, and it is still the only Soviet winner of the festival's top prize.
    496pts
18. 18
    The Child

    The Dardenne brothers' 2005 Belgian drama about a young man who sells his newborn child and the devastating fallout.
    496pts
19. 19
    4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days

    Cristian Mungiu's 2007 harrowing Romanian drama set during the Ceausescu regime, following two students attempting an illegal abortion.
    496pts
20. 20
    All That Jazz

    Bob Fosse's semi-autobiographical 1980 co-winner stars Roy Scheider as a chain-smoking director juggling a Broadway musical and a film edit while his health collapses.
    454pts
21. 21
    A Man and a Woman

    Claude Lelouch's 1966 co-winner pairs Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant as a widow and widower who meet at their children's boarding school, set to Francis Lai's famous score.
    454pts
22. 22
    Missing

    Costa-Gavras's 1982 co-winner stars Jack Lemmon as a conservative father searching Chile with his daughter-in-law for his son, who vanished after the 1973 coup.
    454pts
23. 23
    Farewell My Concubine

    Chen Kaige's 1993 co-winner follows two Peking opera stars, played by Leslie Cheung and Zhang Fengyi, across half a century of Chinese upheaval.
    454pts
24. 24
    Eternity and a Day

    Bruno Ganz plays a dying poet who spends his last day helping an Albanian refugee boy in Theo Angelopoulos's 1998 film.
    454pts
25. 25
    Dancer in the Dark

    Lars von Trier's 2000 musical tragedy starring Bjork as a Czech immigrant going blind, whose Bjork-penned score is unforgettable.
    454pts
26. 26
    The Leopard

    Burt Lancaster plays an aging Sicilian prince watching his class fade during Italian unification in Luchino Visconti's lavish 1963 epic, famous for its long closing ballroom sequence.
    454pts
27. 27
    Dheepan

    Jacques Audiard's 2015 drama follows a former Tamil Tiger who reaches France posing as a family man with two strangers, only to face gang violence in a Paris suburb.
    454pts
28. 28
    The Tree of Life

    Terrence Malick's 2011 lyrical meditation on family, memory, and the origins of the universe, starring Brad Pitt and Sean Penn.
    454pts
29. 29
    The Pianist

    Adrien Brody plays Władysław Szpilman, a Polish-Jewish pianist who survives the Warsaw Ghetto and years in hiding, in Roman Polanski's 2002 film.
    454pts
30. 30
    Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

    Apichatpong Weerasethakul's 2010 film follows a dying Thai farmer visited by his wife's ghost and his lost son, who returns as a red-eyed monkey spirit.
    406pts
31. 31
    Scarecrow

    Gene Hackman and Al Pacino play two drifters hitchhiking from California toward Pittsburgh to open a car wash in Jerry Schatzberg's 1973 co-winner.
    406pts
32. 32
    Taxi Driver

    Martin Scorsese's 1976 dark portrait of a New York cabbie's descent into obsession and violence, with a career-defining Robert De Niro performance.
    406pts
33. 33
    The Square

    Ruben Östlund's 2017 art-world satire follows a Stockholm museum curator, played by Claes Bang, and includes a notorious gala scene with a performer acting as an ape.
    406pts
34. 34
    The Tin Drum

    Volker Schlöndorff's 1979 co-winner adapts Günter Grass's novel about Oskar, a Danzig boy who refuses to grow up, and took the foreign-language Academy Award a year later.
    406pts
35. 35
    The Tree of Wooden Clogs

    Ermanno Olmi cast real farmers speaking the Bergamo dialect for this three-hour 1978 portrait of peasant families sharing a Lombard farmhouse in the late 19th century.
    406pts
36. 36
    Padre Padrone

    Made by the Taviani brothers for Italian television, the 1977 winner tells the true story of a Sardinian shepherd boy who escapes his tyrannical father and becomes a linguist.
    352pts
37. 37
    The Wind That Shakes the Barley

    Ken Loach's 2006 drama follows two County Cork brothers who fight together in the Irish War of Independence and then on opposite sides of the Civil War.
    352pts
38. 38
    Chronicle of the Years of Fire

    Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina's 1975 epic traces the roots of the Algerian War of Independence through a peasant's eyes and remains the only African film awarded Cannes' top prize.
    352pts
39. 39
    The Go-Between

    Adapted by Harold Pinter from L. P. Hartley's novel, Joseph Losey's 1971 drama sees a boy carry secret letters between Julie Christie's aristocrat and Alan Bates's tenant farmer.
    352pts
40. 40
    The Long Absence

    Henri Colpi's 1961 co-winner stars Alida Valli as a café owner near Paris who believes an amnesiac tramp is the husband who vanished sixteen years earlier.
    352pts
41. 41
    If....

    Malcolm McDowell makes his film debut as Mick Travis, leader of a schoolboy revolt at a boarding school, in Lindsay Anderson's 1969 satire that switches between color and black-and-white.
    352pts
42. 42
    Sex, Lies, and Videotape

    Steven Soderbergh was 26 when his debut about a man who videotapes women talking about sex won in 1989, helping launch the American independent film boom.
    352pts
43. 43
    Viridiana

    Luis Buñuel's 1961 co-winner follows a novice nun whose charity goes badly wrong; Spain banned it and the Vatican denounced its attack on the Church.
    352pts
44. 44
    Blue Is the Warmest Colour

    Abdellatif Kechiche's 2013 romance follows a teenager's love affair with an older art student, and the jury also gave the prize to actresses Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux.
    352pts
45. 45
    It Was Just an Accident

    Shot without permission in Iran, Jafar Panahi's 2025 thriller follows former political prisoners who kidnap a man they believe was their torturer.
    352pts
46. 46
    O Pagador de Promessas

    Anselmo Duarte's 1962 drama follows a farmer who carries a heavy cross to a Salvador church to keep a vow, and it remains the only Brazilian Palme d'Or winner.
    352pts
47. 47
    The Best Intentions

    Ingmar Bergman wrote and Bille August directed this 1992 portrait of the courtship and early marriage of Bergman's own parents, with Pernilla August winning Best Actress.
    352pts
48. 48
    Apocalypse Now

    Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam War epic following a soldier's nightmarish journey upriver to assassinate a rogue colonel.
    352pts
49. 49
    Fjord

    Cristian Mungiu's second Palme d'Or, from 2026, stars Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as a conservative Romanian-Norwegian couple under scrutiny from child-welfare officials in Norway.
    352pts
50. 50
    Marty

    Ernest Borgnine plays a lonely Bronx butcher in Delbert Mann's 1955 drama, the first Palme d'Or winner by that name and an Oscar winner for Best Picture.
    290pts
51. 51
    The Mattei Affair

    Francesco Rosi's 1972 co-winner blends documentary and drama to examine the life and mysterious 1962 plane-crash death of oil executive Enrico Mattei, played by Gian Maria Volonté.
    290pts
52. 52
    Wild at Heart

    Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern play lovers on the run across the American South from her vengeful mother in David Lynch's violent 1990 road movie.
    290pts
53. 53
    Black Orpheus

    Marcel Camus moved the Orpheus myth to a Rio favela during Carnival, and the 1959 winner's bossa nova soundtrack by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Luiz Bonfá became a classic.
    290pts
54. 54
    The Birds, the Bees and the Italians

    Pietro Germi's 1966 co-winner is a three-part satire of adultery and hypocrisy among the respectable citizens of a small town in the Veneto.
    290pts
55. 55
    Fahrenheit 9/11

    Michael Moore's 2004 attack on the Bush administration and the Iraq War was the first documentary to win since The Silent World and became the highest-grossing documentary ever.
    290pts
56. 56
    The Class

    François Bégaudeau plays a version of himself teaching a tough Paris middle-school class in Laurent Cantet's 2008 film, the first French winner in 21 years.
    290pts
57. 57
    The Working Class Goes to Heaven

    Gian Maria Volonté also leads Elio Petri's 1972 co-winner, playing a piecework factory worker whose devotion to productivity collapses after he loses a finger.
    290pts
58. 58
    Underground

    Emir Kusturica's second Palme d'Or, from 1995, is an absurdist epic of Yugoslav history in which a man hides refugees in a cellar for decades, saying the war goes on.
    290pts
59. 59
    Anora

    Sean Baker's 2024 comedy-drama stars Mikey Madison as a Brooklyn stripper who marries a Russian oligarch's son, and it went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture.
    290pts
60. 60
    Taste of Cherry

    Abbas Kiarostami's minimalist 1997 co-winner follows a man driving the hills around Tehran in search of someone willing to bury him after he takes his own life.
    219pts
61. 61
    Elephant

    Inspired by Columbine, Gus Van Sant's 2003 film follows students through an ordinary school day that ends in a shooting, and he also took Best Director.
    219pts
62. 62
    The Hireling

    Robert Shaw plays a chauffeur who falls for the grieving aristocrat he drives, played by Sarah Miles, in Alan Bridges's 1973 co-winner based on L. P. Hartley's novel.
    219pts
63. 63
    Man of Iron

    Andrzej Wajda shot this 1981 sequel to Man of Marble amid the Gdańsk shipyard strikes, and Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa appears in it as himself.
    219pts
64. 64
    The Son's Room

    Nanni Moretti directs and stars as a psychoanalyst in Ancona whose family comes apart after their teenage son dies in a diving accident in this 2001 drama.
    219pts
65. 65
    The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

    Every line of dialogue is sung in Jacques Demy's 1964 musical, in which Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo play young lovers in Cherbourg separated by the Algerian War.
    219pts
66. 66
    The Mission

    Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons play Jesuits defending a Guaraní mission in 18th-century South America in Roland Joffé's 1986 film, scored by Ennio Morricone.
    219pts
67. 67
    M*A*S*H

    Robert Altman's 1970 black comedy follows irreverent surgeons at a Korean War field hospital, starring Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould, and later inspired the long-running TV series.
    219pts
68. 68
    Barton Fink

    Written during a bout of writer's block, the Coens' 1991 film stars John Turturro as a New York playwright stuck in a Hollywood hotel, and it swept three Cannes prizes.
    219pts
69. 69
    Paris, Texas

    Harry Dean Stanton wanders out of the desert after four years missing in Wim Wenders's 1984 road movie, written by Sam Shepard and scored with Ry Cooder's slide guitar.
    219pts
70. 70
    La Dolce Vita

    Federico Fellini's 1960 winner follows Marcello Mastroianni's tabloid journalist through seven days and nights of Roman high life, including Anita Ekberg's midnight wade in the Trevi Fountain.
    135pts
71. 71
    Under the Sun of Satan

    Maurice Pialat's 1987 adaptation of Georges Bernanos stars Gérard Depardieu as a tormented country priest, and Pialat answered the boos at the ceremony with a raised fist.
    135pts
72. 72
    The Knack ...and How to Get It

    Richard Lester's 1965 Swinging London comedy follows a shy teacher who tries to learn seduction from his womanizing lodger, with Rita Tushingham as the girl caught between them.
    135pts
73. 73
    The Piano

    Jane Campion's 1993 drama about a mute Scottish woman and her piano in colonial New Zealand made her the first female director to take the top prize.
    135pts
74. 74
    I, Daniel Blake

    Ken Loach's second winner, from 2016, follows a Newcastle carpenter recovering from a heart attack who is trapped in Britain's welfare bureaucracy.
    135pts
75. 75
    Winter Sleep

    Nuri Bilge Ceylan's three-hour 2014 drama, loosely drawn from Chekhov, follows a retired actor who runs a hotel in snowy Cappadocia.
    135pts
76. 76
    The Silent World

    Jacques Cousteau and a young Louis Malle shot this 1956 documentary aboard the Calypso, among the first films to show the ocean depths in color; it also won an Oscar.
    135pts
77. 77
    Secrets & Lies

    Mike Leigh's 1996 drama follows a Black optometrist who traces her birth mother, a white factory worker played by Brenda Blethyn, who also won Best Actress.
    135pts
78. 78
    Blow-Up

    Michelangelo Antonioni's first English-language film, the 1967 winner, follows a Swinging London fashion photographer, played by David Hemmings, who may have captured a murder on film.
    0pts
79. 79
    Amour

    Michael Haneke's second Palme d'Or, from 2012, stars Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva as retired music teachers facing her decline after a stroke.
    0pts

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