The Cannes Film Festival has never just been about the best films coming up for release in the next year or so. As well as finding the next arthouse hit and perhaps the odd future blockbuster, the glitziest party on the film industry calendar loves a talking point: Cannes comes to life when people argue about or just universally condemn a hot new picture, even more so than when a masterpiece makes its debut. Here’s our guide to the ten films that have generated the most heat, plus where you can stream them.
Taxi Driver
It’s established as a classic now and was generally well regarded on its release, but Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver was not without its strong detractors when it landed at Cannes in 1976. The jury president for that year, Tennessee Williams (yes, the legendary A Streetcar Named Desire playwright), criticised films in the programme for “tak[ing] a voluptuous pleasure in lingering on terrible cruelties”, and Taxi Driver’s violent conclusion was met with boos at the premiere. Scorsese was supposedly so spooked by the outrage that he left Cannes early, but he needn’t have worried too much: Taxi Driver won the Palme d’Or and became more highly acclaimed the more people around the world saw it.
The Brown Bunny
Vincent Gallo was an arthouse darling following his 1998 debut The Brown Bunny, when it debuted at Cannes in 2003. Rumours swirled around the movie before the festival, focusing on an unsimulated sex scene between Gallo and Chloe Sevigny, but when the screening took place, critics were angry simply because they thought the film was appallingly bad, calling it a pointless, directionless vanity project. In the ensuing row, Gallo showed how maturely he was taking the criticism by saying he hoped highly respected American reviewer Roger Ebert would get colon cancer.
Crash
The modern era of controversial Cannes movies began in earnest in 1996, when director David Cronenberg brought his extremely transgressive dramatisation of the JG Ballard novel Crash to the festival. The film is about a subculture of people who visit the scenes of serious car crashes because they are sexually aroused by the carnage, a premise that caused boos and jeers at screenings and a somewhat murky kerfuffle involving the Cannes jury. Cronenberg later claimed that the jury president for that year, Francis Ford Coppola, was instrumental in it not winning the Palme d’Or, which was given instead to Secrets & Lies. But someone liked it: Crash won a “special jury prize”, which has not been awarded to any film at the festival since.
Triangle of Sadness
In 2023, Swedish director Ruben Östlund promised that his next movie, The Entertainment System Is Down, would “create the biggest walkout in the history of the Cannes Film Festival”. It hasn’t done that yet, because it’s 2025 and Ostlund is still making it, but he has experienced the unique thrill of prompting a famous Cannes walkout. The Square had in 2017, but the scene in Triangle where a gang of bloated socialites are spectacularly seasick on a cruise ship caused a similar reaction in the auditorium. When the film was over it received a standing ovation… from the people who had made it to the end.
Titane
French director Julia Ducournau specialises in gruesome body horror, which is bound to get juices flowing in the sultry south of . Having warmed up with allegorical cannibal-fetish shocker Raw at the 2016 festival, Ducournau really divided Cannes audiences five years later with Titane, a film about a woman with a metal plate in her head who has sex with cars. Some audience fainted and several walked out before the fifteen-minute mark, but this did not stop Titane taking the Palme d’Or, the festival’s biggest prize. Ducournau is back in Cannes this year with her latest provocation, Alpha.
Irreversible
Argentine director Gaspar Noe has been a controversy addict ever since his super-disturbing debut Seul Contre Tous, which opens with real footage of a horse being slaughtered in an abattoir and gets worse from there. That film didn’t cause much of a stir at Cannes in 1998, but this very much wasn’t the case in 2002 with Noe’s follow-up, Irreversible. An almost unwatchable tale about a horrifying rape and the violent revenge that follows, the film caused so many fainting and vomiting fits in the Cannes audience that not only were the emergency services called, but they gave the movie a bad review: a fire department spokesman described Irreversible as “unbearable” when speaking to local reporters.
Do the Right Thing
Many of the films on this list did actually win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, which meant the controversy that had greeted their initial screening at the festival subsided somewhat. But in 1989, the row that erupted around Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing was precisely about it not winning the top prize. Instead the Palme d’Or went to sex, lies, and videotape, which doesn’t feel too controversial now, since both films are well regarded in retrospect. But at the time, critics promised never to return to the festival in protest at the injustice, and Lee himself threatened to attack jury president Wim Wenders with a baseball bat. Lee has since expressed his regret at the remark, but the Do the Right Thing hubbub has been the context for Lee’s return to Cannes this year with Highest 2 Lowest.
Marie Antoinette
There have been fewer Cannes premieres anticipated with warmer optimism than Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. It reunited the director with star Kirsten Dunst, who had memorably played the lead in Coppola’s first film The Virgin Suicides. And it was about French history! But there were boos at the Cannes screening, from viewers who interpreted the movie as celebrating the lavish lifestyle of the infamous Queen. This was 2006, however, by which time the concept of the poorly received Cannes film had become a major source of press hype: any negative reaction was pounced on, and in this case just a few disgruntled punters became a story. It is still, however, the most notable aspect of the film’s otherwise unremarkable appearance at the festival.
Carol
If you’ve ever seen an A-list actress walk barefoot up the Cannes red carpet and wondered why - Julia Roberts and Kristen Stewart are among the stars who have made the gesture - it all stems back to the 2015 Cannes premiere of Carol, an otherwise uncontroversial dramatisation of the Patricia Highsmith book by director Todd Haynes. A group of female festival-goers reported being barred from the screening for not wearing high heels, this being a result of the vaguely expressed but strictly enforced requirement for red-carpet attendees to be smartly dressed, shoes included. The festival’s director denied that heels were a must, but by then the damage was done, although Carol’s PR campaign had received an unexpected lift.
La Dolce Vita
All the above films are arguably trailing in the wake of La Dolce Vita, which sashayed into Cannes in 1960 having already cheesed off the Vatican. The Catholic Church scorned Federico Fellini’s vision of a decaying Rome driven by hedonism and cheap celebrity, missing its satirical lament and simply finding it disgusting instead; Italy’s right-wing religious press was outraged by the opening shot of a statue of Jesus being carried over Rome by a helicopter. The sizzling hype could have gone either way in Cannes but, like so many films on this list, ultimately La Dolce Vita got the reward its stellar film-making deserved, and it went home with the Palme d’Or.
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