Recently, though, that’s changed, in large part thanks to an unexpected (and unprecedented) streak: The last five Palme d’Or winners, including this year’s, have all been distributed by Neon in the U.S. In fact, Neon picked them up before their Cannes victory, sensing their commercial potential along with their creative achievement. Alongside A24 and MUBI, the New York-based company is one of the hippest arthouse studios around: When Neon puts out a film, it’s basically a stamp of approval that you ought to check it out. Not every one of their Palme d’Or films has gone on to be a massive hit, but having five straight wins is, nonetheless, incredibly impressive.
In honor of victory No. 5—Sean Baker’s “Anora” won this past weekend—I decided to rank all five of their Palme wins. To be clear, all of these are good movies worth seeking out, but I was curious where “Anora” stacked up alongside three Best Picture nominees (including one Best Picture win) and one of the freakiest French exports of recent years. Remember: Cannes didn’t have a 2020 edition because of COVID-19, so this list encompasses 2019 to the present.
5. “Titane” (2021)
Body-horror was big at this year’s Cannes thanks to “The Substance,” writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s nervy satire of Hollywood superficiality. That movie’s go-for-broke weirdness called to mind another French filmmaker whose sophomore effort similarly rocked the festival, writer-director Julia Ducournau’s “Titane,” which told the story of Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), a troubled young serial killer who goes into hiding, disguising herself as a boy who went missing a decade ago. The boy’s father (Vincent Lindon) is grateful to reunite with him, leading to a twisted tale of masculinity and kinky vehicular occurrences. Ducournau’s follow-up to her unsettling cannibal horror film “Raw” is a bigger swing and not always successful. Still, its audacious strangeness won over the Cannes jury led by Spike Lee—and gave Lindon one of his finest roles as a grieving, aging father who thinks he’s finally gotten his son back. Clearly, Neon wants to stay in the Ducournau business: The company will be teaming up again with the writer-director for her next feature, a “genre-defying” project called “Alpha.”
4. “Anora” (2024)
In 2017, Sean Baker launched “The Florida Project” in Directors’ Fortnight. Four years later, he was in the Cannes Official Competition for “Red Rocket.” This year, he returned to the Competition with a film whose plot was under wraps until right before the festival. “Anora” is hardly the first time he’s chronicled the lives of sex workers—don’t forget “Starlet” and “Tangerine”—but it might be his most compassionate and layered examination, starring Mikey Madison as the title character, an exotic dancer who thinks she’s hit the jackpot once she seduces and marries a rich Russian (Mark Eydelshteyn). What follows is a screwball adventure in which anything that can go wrong does. But Baker never loses sight of Anora’s precarious financial situation—and, by extension, how she represents the struggles of all society’s have-nots. (The film’s crowd-pleasing fun eventually gives way to a crushing ending that leaves you replaying everything you’ve seen in a completely different light.) When Baker won the Palme d’Or, he dedicated the victory to sex workers past and present—and his next film will be about that same topic.