This was our fifth year at the most influential and prestigious film festival in the world. We provided our avid readers with in-depth coverage of the two main competitive strands (the Official Competition and Un Certain Regard), as well as some insight into the remaining sections (Directors’ Fortnight, Critics’ Week, Special Screenings, etc). In total, we published a whopping 51 reviews during the course of two weeks. This is thanks to the hard work of our editor Victor Fraga and one of our oldest and most prolific writers Eoghan Lyng, both at the coalface. We also had two pairs of remote helping hands from Joshua Polanski and John McDonald, who picked up a piece each.

Below are some of their thoughts on the winners, our dirty favourites, and a few misfires. You can see the full coverage in our review archive, or by clicking here.

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Victor Fraga’s verdict

My dirty favourite is Mohammad Rasoulof’s anti-fascist thriller The Seed of the Sacred Fig (pictured at the top of this article), a movie that deserved to win the Palme d’Or for its adrenaline-inducing realism and audacity, and which also earned its director an eight-year jail sentence in his native Iran. Instead the event’s top prize went to Sean Baker’s funny and moving drama Anora, about a hooker-multimillionaire whirlwind marriage. Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light received the Grand Prix (one of the only two films that I missed, and was instead picked by Josh; he described it as a filthy genius drama that “bludgeons the beauty standards of both Bollywood and Hollywood”). The The Jury Prize went to a Mexican trans-gangster melodrama with French DNA, Jacques Audiard’s heart-stopping Emilia Perez (which also snatched a joint Best Actresses prize, for the four leading women). Best Director went to Miguel Gomes of Grand Tour, a beautiful but soporific travelogue of Asia under colonial rule. Best Actor went to chameleonic American Jesse Plemons, in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness (silly-eerie fun a la David Lynch and Peter Greenaway). Best Screenplay went to Coralie Fargeat’s hilarious body horror The Substance, featuring a very fast-ageing Demi Moore.

Outside the Official Competition, praise goes to Raoul Peck’s Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, a sombre documentary about the titular “recorder of the Apartheid”. My personal Wooden Palme Ex-Aequo prizes goes to Paolo Sorrentino’s pompous, verbose and superficial comment on “beauty” Parthenope and Paul Schrader’s boring and pointless fragmented memory drama Oh Canada.

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Eoghan Lyng’s verdict

It was my first year at Cannes, and I was tasked with covering the Un Certain Regard section. The winner, Guan Hu’s Black Dog (pictured above), was an inspired choice because it combined inventive camera-work with intuitive storytelling: brilliantly packaged. I was also deeply moved by the central performance in Boris Lojkine’s The Story of Souleymane, which won Best Actor, although I was surprised Charlotte Le Bon didn’t win Best Actress for the equally impassioned Niki (Celine Sallette). Only one out of the 18 features could be described as animation (Gints Zilbalodis’s Flow). Most of the films pushed the boundaries of narrative, which wasn’t the case for The Kingdom (Julien Colonna); a throve of mafia clichés. Element Pictures had two features: one was excellent (Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl), the other was anything but (Ariane Labed’s September Says).

Outside of this arena, I watched a dissertation on mental illness (Sophie Fillieres’s This Life of Mine), an Australian-American sci-fi Western (George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga), a restoration of a Scottish feature (Andrea Arnold’s Red Road), Francis Ford Coppola’s ambitious but meandering novel (Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, which showed in the Official Competition) and a story about tennis was largely about other balls (Tudor Giurgiu, Cristian Pascariu and Tudor D. Popescu’s Nasty: More Than Just Tennis). The most astonishing out of all the projects was the re-structure of Abel Gance’s Napoléon, which might be the truest adaptation of the 1927 print audiences will ever get to see. Concentrating four hours of cinema, the work celebrated the Frenchman’s crusades in a series of faders, cut-outs and silhouettes. Cinema was great in the 1920s, and continues to flourish in the 2020s.