Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | May 18, 2026
The 2026 Cannes Film Festival is underway. This year, with director Park Chan-work heading the jury, a slew of beloved filmmakers are competing for the Palme d'Or, including Pedro Almodovar, James Gray, Asghar Farhadi, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi. Only two American directors are in the main line-up and neither are particularly Hollywood, so it seems likely that things will remain stridently indie this year. And with the arrival of Cannes comes yet another season of the film world's most baffling and tedious details: standing ovation length discourse.
Cannes is notorious for a standing ovation. Almost every film gets one. It's only polite to give the talent their time in the spotlight before the critics go hog-wild. They also love a bit of booing and some dramatic walkouts, but you have to either really suck or be so wildly divisive that half your audience will still want to worship the ground you walk on. Remember, Roger Ebert booed David Lynch at Cannes! But it's all about the standing ovations, which means some beleaguered journalist in the screening has to sit there with a stopwatch or play the game of guesstimation from the moment the end credits roll. Anything lower than five minutes is an EMBARRASSMENT! They might as well have thrown rotten tomatoes at you!
This year, the first half of the festival hasn't been loaded with big long ovations. The longest Cannes ovation on record is 22 minutes for Pan's Labyrinth. 22 minutes! Guillermo del Toro could have watched an episode of The Simpsons in that time! We should also note that the length of the ovation is not in direct correlation with the film's quality. The Paperboy, the Lee Daniels Southern gothic drama where Nicole Kidman pees on Zac Efron's leg, had a 15 minute ovation then received terrible reviews. In-the-room hype at a film festival is a very real thing.
So, who's being applauded until the talent feels awkward and tries to leave at this year's Cannes?
Parallel Tales, the new drama from Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, starring Catherine Deneuve and Isabelle Huppert, received a seven-minute ovation. The reviews, however, were pretty paltry, with many feeling this was his worst movie and a poor imitation of the movie it's loosely remaking, A Short Film About Love.
James Gray's Paper Tiger, starring Adam Driver and Miles Teller, also got seven minutes, although some reported it was closer to ten. The timing at these things is always wobbly. Gray is one of those American directors far more beloved in France than his home turf, but this one also did very well with US critics. Star Scarlett Johansson was not there and Gray tried to Facetime her for the ovation but she didn't pick up.
Javier Bardem's getting some career-best reviews for The Beloved: Another seven-minute ovation. That seems to be a nice sweet spot: not overlong but not so rushed that it seems rude.
Outside of the Palme competitors, one of the most enthusiastically received films was Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, starring Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder. They got nine minutes. Take THAT, main competition!
This is such a nutty tradition for Cannes, right? And it's even nuttier that people stand there and count the seconds. It makes for an easy headline and great hype, which is why I think so many obsess over them. Who doesn't want to go on a chat show and hear the crowd clap even more when you tell them that your movie got a seven-minute ovation? Do you know how hard it is to get a crowd of people that large to do anything for that length of time? Plus people like to be part of something. Speaking as someone who has seen a world premiere or two at a film festival, you get a real high from it, and it's easy to get caught up in the emotion, especially if famous people are in the vicinity. Maybe not "21 minutes of standing" easy but you get my point.
But the longest standing ovation at a film festival didn't happen at Cannes. It was in Venice last year, when The Voice of Hind Rajab, a drama about the murder of a Palestinian child by the IDF, received 24 minutes of uninterrupted applause. That'll be hard to beat.
