For those of you who haven’t been following along with A.V. Club film editor A.A. Dowd’s dispatches from Cannes this year—which, lucky you, because you’ve got a whole trove of fascinating new films, and also one dire, four-hour twerkfest, to dig through—few movies caught his attention more firmly than Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite. Following in the footsteps of Bong’s earlier class warfare parable Snowpiercer, the film ditches endless winters and unstoppable trains in favor of a more ground-level story about two families—one rich, one poor—steadily encroaching on each other. It’s now also an official Cannes Film Festival Palme D’Or winner, with Variety reporting that the South Korean satire has just taken home the festival’s top prize.
In addition to Bong’s first big Cannes win—he was previously in competition with the Netflix-tainted Okja in 2017—the festival jury handed its Grand Prix second-prize to Mati Diop’s Atlantics, a tale of star-crossed lovers and migrant immigration. The Jury Prize, meanwhile—typically seen as an unofficial third place trophy—ended up going down as a tie, with Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Bacurau sharing the honor.
Over in the acting awards, Antonio Banderas scored a win for embodying a thinly veiled version of his old friend and frequent director Pedro Almodóvar, in the latter’s Pain And Glory. Meanwhile, Emily Beecham won for the “crucial, very carefully modulated dread and uncertainty” she brought to the low-key sci-fi horror film Little Joe. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne shared the director award for their story of a 13-year-old boy radicalized into religious violence, Young Ahmed, while Portrait Of A Lady On Fire—our personal pick for a worthy Palme D’Or recipient—garnered a screenplay award for Céline Sciamma.
That’s it for the major prizes (although Elia Suleiman did pull down a Special Mention award for his first film in years, It Must Be Heaven.) Notable non-inclusions on the list of winners include Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse—which ran as part of the separate Director’s Fortnight section—and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood, probably the most high-profile film playing in competition at this year’s fest. (But at least it did win the coveted Palm Dog award, handed out for the best pooch to appear on-screen at the festival every year.)