List: Top Ten Palme d'Or Winners

The Cannes Film Festival is always an exciting time for seeing what's on the world cinema docket for the coming year. This year's festival is a few weeks away and the lineup is set. In addition to new films from Cannes regulars Mike Leigh (Palme d'Or 1996 for Secrets and Lies; Best Director 1993 for Naked), Abbas Kiarostami (Palme d'Or 1997 for Taste of Cherry) and Alejandro González Iñárritu (Best Director 2006 for Babel) there is a sequel to Nikita Mikhalkov's Burnt by the Sun (1994 Grand Prix winner), a new film from Doug Liman based on the memoir of Valerie Plame.

Burnt by the Sun 2 picks up the story of Col. Kotov several years after his execution (he was never executed on screen, but a post-script revealed he'd been shot) as a soldier in Stalin's army fighting back the Nazis in WWII.

Liman's Fair Game stars Naomi Watts as Plame, the former CIA operative, whose identity was revealed by Washington Post reporter Robert Novak, and Sean Penn as her husband Joseph Wilson who claims the Bush administration leaked her identity in order to discredit him after he criticized the Iraq invasion. Liman had a promising start to his career with his hilarious debut Swingers followed up by the Pulp Fiction-for-kids Go and then the first in the Bourne trilogy. After that he started a two-film downward spiral that culminated in the horrifically received (16% on the Tomato Meter) Jumper. I don't imagine his new film will be much more than standard Hollywood boilerplate conspiracy theory. And that Liman has established himself as a premiere action director, I would expect this new film to have several unnecessary action sequences thrown in for good measure. Don't look for any awards to be handed to this film.

As for the rest of the line up, I have no idea. It's virtually impossible to make any kind of prediction about the festival until it kicks off and we hear what critics, producers, executives and attendees are saying.

So with that in mind, I decided to throw together a list. I promised lists at the beginning and I haven't delivered any yet. Well I looked over the list of Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or winners and selected what I think are the 10 best, listed below alphabetically. In so doing I discovered how deficient my knowledge of foreign films is. I've really only seen about half the big winners of the last 60 years. Hopefully I will correct that one day and revise this list to reflect it.

4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days (2007) dir. Cristian Mungiu - The herald of a New Romanian Cinema. This is a harrowing story of a young woman who enlists the help of a close friend to obtain an illegal abortion during Ceausescu's reign.
Barton Fink (1991) dir. Joel and Ethan Coen - Possibly the Coens' best film. It's certainly the darkest. About a New York playwright who tries his hand at Hollywood screenwriting on the eve of WWII.
Blow-Up (1967) dir. Michelangelo Antonioni - A brilliant comment on the truth and nature of photography, especially as it is delivered in the medium of motion pictures. A photographer thinks he's photographed a murder, but the blown up photo isn't clear enough to reveal truth while his own investigation fails to turn up evidence outside his own observation.
The Conversation (1974) dir. Francis Ford Coppola - Brilliant filmmaking in this exploration of paranoia in a post-Watergate America.
MASH (1970) dir. Robert Altman - Hilarious anti-war satire set during the Korean War but ostensibly a commentary on Vietnam.
The Mission (1986) dir. Roland Joffe - A Spanish slave trader in colonial South America does penance and slowly converts to the Jesuit order to help bring Christianity to the native people. This is one of the best films you've probably never seen.
Paris, Texas (1984) dir. Wim Wenders - A man is found wandering in the desert and brought to his brother. He can't make peace with himself until he finds his ex-wife and asks her forgiveness for his past treatment of her.
Pulp Fiction (1994) dir. Quentin Tarantino - Surely you know this one.
Taxi Driver (1976) dir. Martin Scorsese - Vietnam veteran Travis Bickle goes a little funny in the head trying to clean up the streets of New York.
The Third Man (1949) dir. Carol Reed - In a divided post-WWII Vienna, Harry Lime has been killed just before his close friend arrives from America. It turns out Harry has been involved in a black market trade of penicillin that has left many children horribly disfigured. One of the best of the original films noirs.