Tom Quinn and Neon have accomplished something that even Miramax couldn’t in its prime of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, when they were snapping up Palme d’Or winners like “Pelle the Conqueror,” “Farewell My Concubine,” and “Pulp Fiction.” The company will have produced and/or distributed six Palme d’Or winners in a row, starting with 2019’s “Parasite” and continued this year with their purchase of Jafar Panahi’s “It Was Just an Accident.” We thought we’d use this impressive streak to reminisce on our coverage of all six films, from their initial coverage at Cannes through their review on theatrical release, and sometimes even into year-end and interview coverage. Can they make it seven in 2026?

2019: “Parasite”

In May 2019, Barbara Scharres was the first to cover “Parasite” for this site, writing “Bit by bit, Bong succeeds in turning the tables on this plot with a conspicuous sense of righteousness, to reveal his whole crew of merry grifters as little people fighting over crumbs.” It was the first of many pieces about the film, followed closely by a news item about its Palme win, and, eventually, a 4-star review from Brian Tallerico, and inclusion on our Best of 2019 and Best of the 2000s lists. Read them all below:

Parasite movie review

Bong Joon-ho on the Themes and Crafts of His Must-See Film, Parasite

The Ten Best Films of 2019

The Best Films of the 2010s

Chaz Ebert’s Top 10 Films (And Then Some) of 2019

2021: “Titane”

Ben Kenigsberg launched our coverage of Julia Ducournau’s “Titane,” saying, “A kind of neo-giallo, “Titane” is a movie of bold colors and slick, metallic noises.” His mixed review was countered by a rave on October of that year when the film was released in theaters, and Sheila O’Malley wrote, “The deeper thematic revelations may come too late in the game for those either turned off or turned on by the frenzied pitilessness of the first half, but Ducournau, inventive, bold, fearless in her approach and sensibility, doesn’t lose her nerve. Neither does “Titane.””

2022: “Triangle of Sadness”

Ruben Östlund won his second Palme for Neon’s three-peat (after 2017’s “The Square”) and Ben Kenigsberg led the coverage out of Cannes: “Throughout Östlund’s dissertation, the shifting value of various currencies—money, food, sex—continually recasts the boundaries of acceptable behavior.” Jason Gorber also wrote about the film from Cannes, and featured in a Chaz Ebert video that same year.

The film was covered several times that year, including out of KVIFF by Robert Daniels and NYFF by Godfrey Cheshire. Finally, Brian Tallerico reviewed the film on its theatrical release in October, writing: “There are undeniably sharp dialogue exchanges and entertaining storytelling twists in Östlund’s takedown of the shallow elite, and yet some of it, especially in the final act, all starts to feel redundant, and maybe even as superficial as the uber-wealthy that the film seeks to tear down. Still, if “Triangle of Sadness” falls short of greatness, it lives comfortably on the tier of goodness, even as it unpacks such bad, bad behavior.”

2023: “Anatomy of a Fall”

Our Cannes expert Ben Kenigsberg hit Justine Triet’s eventual Palme winner first on May 21^st, 2023, writing: “The key to the film is that it is not, in fact, an anatomy of a murder. It’s an anatomy of a marriage, or specifically how a marriage has fallen apart.” There wasn’t much other coverage outside of Brian Tallerico’s 3.5-star review, and the film did place in the runner-ups for the site’s best of 2023 on its way to a Best Picture nomination.

2024: “Anora”

Sean Baker’s film was arguably the most essential of last year from its Palme win through to the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director. It started again with Ben Kenigsberg, writing before it took home the Palme: “Baker now has a way of working with locations and actors that seems entirely his own (look out for other past collaborators, like Brittney Rodriguez from “Red Rocket”). His films are also effortlessly political, touching on issues of immigration, discrimination, economics, and city living in ways that feel entirely organic to the comedy.” The coverage from there was as extensive as any 2024 film. Read them all below, including our writing on the film as one of the best of the year:

Anora movie review

Less Sex Scenes, More Sex Shots: Sean Baker and Mikey Madison on “Anora”

The Great Performances of 2024, Part One

The Best Films of 2024

Anora’s Real-Life Fairytale: Five-Oscar Victory for Indie Film

2025: “It Was Just an Accident”

Which brings us to the latest Palme d’Or winner that will be released by Neon, likely later this year. There will be much more to come, but, for now, our coverage begins and ends with this review by Brian Tallerico, in which he writes, “Panahi again refuses to work in a dramatic register that provides simple answers to complex moral questions. He is a deliberate, refined filmmaker, but his films also hum with the emotional strength of personal demons.”

Jafar Panahi’s “It Was Just an Accident,” a Death and the Maiden–like drama about a group of Iranians confronting a man whom they suspect was their torturer in prison, won the Palme d’Or on Saturday night at the 78th Cannes Film Festival.

The film marked a triumphant return to Cannes for the Iranian director, who had found ways to show work at the festival in recent years—“This Is Not a Film” in 2011 was said to have been smuggled to France on a thumb drive—but had not been able to attend until this year due to a travel ban from Iranian authorities. When “It Was Just an Accident” had its premiere on Tuesday, his arrival received a standing ovation in the Lumière theater. When the Palme was announced in the same theater on Saturday, Panahi, sporting sunglasses and looking overjoyed, lifted his hands in the air and sat back in his seat for a moment before taking the stage.

At a press conference that followed the awards ceremony, the jury president, Juliette Binoche, discussed the ways that political and artistic impulses combine in Panahi’s film. “The film springs from a feeling of resistance, survival, which is absolutely necessary today,” she said in French. “So we felt it was important to give this film the paramount award. Fifteen years ago, Jafar Panahi was in prison.”

She suggested that part of the movie’s power derived from that aspect of Panahi’s experience. “We’re in a world ruled by revenge, violence, cruelty,” she said. This film, she said, came from someone who had been imprisoned and had then chosen to make a work that raises the possibility of rising above revenge.

Binoche’s fellow juror Jeremy Strong emphasized that awarding “It Was Just an Accident” was not simply a “gesture,” the word used by the moderator, Didier Allouch. “It’s important to say, for us, we wanted to recognize films we felt were transcendent intrinsically as pieces of work,” Strong said.

The second-place Grand Prix went to Joachim Trier for “Sentimental Value,” centered on the complicated relationship between an actress and her famous filmmaker father. It reunited Trier with Renate Reinsve, the star of his “The Worst Person in the World” (2021). “We live in a time of tremendous excess and saturation of images,” Trier said when accepting the award. “Moving images are being thrown at us all the time.” He said he wanted to pay homage to the Cannes Film Festival for being a place where the “image that we take time to look at, the image where we can identify with each other in contemplation and empathy” could be shown.

The best-director prize went to Brazil’s Kleber Mendonça Filho for “The Secret Agent,” and there was a brief delay before he appeared on the stage. “I was having Champagne,” he explained. He had just been up there to accept the best-actor prize for his lead, Wagner Moura.

Nadia Melliti won best actress for her performance in Hafsia Herzi’s “The Little Sister,” in which she plays a young woman who works to reconcile her identity as a devout Muslim with the discovery that she is gay.

The Dardenne brothers, who have won the Palme d’Or twice and also taken home just about every other prize that Cannes has to offer, won their second screenplay prize (after one for “Lorna’s Silence” in 2008) for “Young Mothers,” a tender portrait of teenage mothers working through tough choices.

The jury prize—third place, in a way, but also an award often given to boundary-pushing films—was split between two of the competition’s most experimental titles, Mascha Schilinski’s “Sound of Falling” and Oliver Laxe’s “Sirât.”

And the jury invented one more prize—a “special award”—for yet another singular work, Bi Gan’s late-premiering “Resurrection.” “It was like an unidentified flying object, an amazing invention, which is the stuff of directors’ dreams,” Binoche said of the film. “It was so different.”