Cannes Film Festival's longest standing ovations in history

Yahoo

22-05-2025

If you're ever planning a visit to the Cannes Film Festival, prepare to leave with sore palms. Over the last few decades, Cannes has become famous for lengthy standing ovations. The best films to premiere on the Croisette can have audiences on their feet for well over 15 minutes, which is a frankly absurd use of anybody's time.
This practice has only become more popular in recent years, mostly thanks to breathless reporting in the industry trade press. The phrase "10-minute standing ovation at Cannes" has become even more valuable than a string of five-star reviews when trying to promote a festival favourite on its mainstream cinema run.
As Cannes 2025 gets underway, we've looked back in time — with the aid of a trusty stopwatch — to look at which movies have had festival audiences on their feet for the longest period of time.
Guillermo del Toro's fantastical masterpiece Pan's Labyrinth still stands as the movie with the longest standing ovation in Croisette history. The record has now stood for almost 20 years, recognising the Mexican director's twisted and terrifying journey into the heart of Francoism — which proves to be far more horrifying than any of the mythical beasts visited along the way.
Read more: Tom Cruise receives nearly 8-minute standing ovation at Cannes premiere of final Mission: Impossible film (The Independent, 2 min read)
The movie went on to win three Oscars in the wake of its Cannes premiere, as well as standing as arguably the greatest film made by one of cinema's true modern maestros.
Michael Moore spent most of the early noughties delivering incendiary, political documentaries that broke free of the usual doc crowd to achieve mainstream success. In 2004, he took a big swing at the George W Bush regime with Fahrenheit 9/11 — a searing takedown of the president's policies and the Iraq War.
After achieving a rapturous reception at Cannes, the doc won the festival's most prestigious prize when it was awarded the Palme d'Or. When it landed for ordinary audiences, it became the highest-grossing documentary film of all time — later usurped by Michael Jackson's This Is It.
Matthew McConaughey had a big Cannes in 2012, starring in two movies that received enormous standing ovations — right at the heart of the period of career success known popularly as the "McConaissance". The other one will appear later on this list, but the one with the most excitement behind it was Jeff Nichols' coming-of-age movie Mud.
Read more: Matthew McConaughey grew tired of being 'the rom-com dude' (BANG Showbiz, 2 min read)
For 18 minutes, audiences stood to applaud at the end of the film, in which McConaughey plays a fugitive who befriends a pair of teenagers. The trio then try to evade capture. Ultimately, the buzz catapulted this low-budget drama to a box office return three times its production budget.
Hot off the success of Ryan Gosling thriller Drive, director Nicolas Winding Refn delivered a pair of very divisive movies. The first was Only God Forgives — another collaboration with Gosling — and the second was The Neon Demon, in which Elle Fanning played an aspiring model who discovers real darkness at the heart of the fashion industry.
Read more: Elle Fanning's contacts 'burned into her eye' during The Neon Demon shoot (Cover Media, 1 min read)
When the movie came out on general release, the reviews were split squarely down the middle and the box office was very disappointing. However, at Cannes, Refn's vision earned 17 minutes of continuous applause from the assembled crowd.
For a very long time, the record for Cannes' longest ever standing ovation was held by Sergio Leone's gargantuan crime epic Once Upon a Time in America. As with so many of the films on this list, Leone's movie proved to be controversial when it emerged into the wider world — particularly because of sexual violence that some critics and audiences believed to be gratuitous.
The film follows best friends played by Robert De Niro and James Woods as they rise through the world of organised crime in New York City. Nowadays, it regularly appears on lists of the best gangster movies ever made.
The second part of Matthew McConaughey's incredibly busy Cannes docket was the 2012 movie The Paperboy, directed by Lee Daniels. It quickly became notorious, largely for a scene in which Nicole Kidman urinates on Zac Efron's character after he is stung by jellyfish. In Cannes, though, any controversy was dwarfed by an enormous standing ovation.
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There has to be an asterisk next to this ovation, though. Robbie Collin of the Daily Telegraph explained that he was at the screening and referred to the ovation as "a cacophonous quarter-hour of jeering, squawking and mooing". So not quite an unqualified success, it's fair to say.
The Dardennes are long-time stalwarts of the Cannes Film Festival, winning the Palme d'Or twice. They got the ovation to match their festival fame in 2014 with Two Days, One Night. Marion Cotillard would go on to earn an Oscar nomination for her performance as a factory worker who has to convince her colleagues to vote to forego a cash bonus so that she can keep her job.
It was Cotillard who found herself at the centre of the lavish praise for the film, which still stands as one of the actor's best pieces of work.
Capernaum is a fascinating film, using extended flashbacks to tell the story of a 12-year-old boy incarcerated for a violent crime who seeks to sue his parents for giving birth to him. It's a bleak tale led by a tremendous performance from its non-professional lead actor Zain Al Rafeea and it certainly made an impact at Cannes, where the audience rose to its feet for 15 minutes of applause.
The film won the Jury Prize at Cannes and then went on to do very well at the box office, still standing as the highest-grossing Arabic movie of all time. It's a tough watch, but one that's worth your time.
Alice Rohrwacher makes strange, magical movies. She might never have made one as unusual and beguiling as Happy As Lazzaro, which subtly pulls the audience around in time and tone through the genius of Adriano Tardiolo's quiet, sensitive performance in the title role.
Read more: 'La Chimera' Filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher Named 2025 Cannes Camera d'Or Jury President (IndieWire, 2 min read)
This is the sort of film that will often thrive in a festival environment, and so it proved at Cannes with a 15-minute ovation. Rohrwacher's relationship with Cannes has since continued with the premiere of her next film La Chimera, and she is serving as the president of the jury for the Caméra d'Or prize for the festival's best first feature.
Belle is a strange and over-stuffed movie that is carrying rather too much plot for its own good, but that didn't stop Cannes audiences from falling head over heels in love with it. The film reimagines the story of Beauty and the Beast — it really is a tale as old as time — in a virtual world, where the titular youngster becomes a successful singer within an online landscape.
However, there's an undeniable, crowd-pleasing joy to the film that no doubt got the Cannes audience to leap to its feet.
At Cannes in 2024, the big winner in terms of audience reaction was not Kevin Costner's epic western movie Horizon — though that did manage around 12 minutes of applause. The most remarkable ovation went to Iranian thriller The Seed of the Sacred Fig, in which a judge becomes increasingly paranoid about his own family when his secret gun goes missing against the backdrop of anti-regime protests.
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Seed of the Sacred Fig is a strange and unconventional film that is as remarkable for its behind-the-scenes story as the one in front of the camera. Director Mohammad Rasoulof has repeatedly violated Iran's censorship laws to tell his stories, while his actors were unable to leave Iran to come to the Cannes premiere. The footage, shot in secret, had to be smuggled out of Iran. That's an achievement worthy of any standing ovation.