Have Film Festivals Reached Peak Standing Ovation?

The practice of clapping to signal approval goes back at least as far as Roman times, if not earlier. But at some point, we decided we needed another, better way to say “Yes, that was good”—a kind of clapping-plus, for when simply slapping our palms together didn’t meet the occasion. And so we came up with the standing ovation: clapping, plus standing. It’s a serious accolade, reserved by audiences for the most excellent of performances.

Or, it was reserved, anyway. At film festivals—particularly Cannes, but also Venice, which is underway at the moment—audiences really, really love standing ovations. Maybe it’s because film-fest audiences tend to be full of wellness-obsessed Hollywood types who are anxious about the adverse health effects of sitting down for too long. Another (more serious) theory is that standing ovations were once a polite tradition but gained unstoppable momentum the minute film trade publications started measuring and reporting on their length as an indicator of a film’s overall reception. Either way, the habit has been firmly established, and films routinely get standing ovations that stretch for minute after minute after minute. An ovation that lasts only five minutes—which is, to be clear, a long time for people to clap for something!—is increasingly seen as a bad sign.

Pedro Almodovar’s new film The Room Next Door, the Spanish legend’s first in English, got an 18-minute standing ovation on Tuesday. It’s the longest in the Venice Film Festival’s history. (It also happens to be the same length as “Empire of the Clouds”, the longest song in Iron Maiden’s very large discography, for those into operatic prog metal.) But it’s not quite the longest in the history of film festivals overall. Here are some of the most extensive ovations at Venice and Cannes (mostly Cannes); how all that clapping translated (or didn’t) to commercial and critical success; and some friendly suggestions for what else ecstatic audience members could have been doing instead of wearing out their wrists.

Note: standing ovations generally generate a small spread of recorded times, as different publications have different criteria for when they start and end. But if you’re really exercised by us short-changing a film by a minute or two, it’s probably worth getting a life.

13 minutes

Bowling for Columbine (Cannes, 2002); Mommy (Cannes, 2024); The Banshees of Inisherin (Venice, 2022); The Brutalist (Venice, 2024)

It might be an unlucky number for some, but many films that have received 13-minute film-fest ovations have gone on to great things; a Best Documentary Feature Oscar for Michael Moore’s Bowling and a nice pile of Golden Globes and BAFTAs for Banshees. It bodes well for Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, a three-and-a-half-hour epic starring Adrien Brody as a Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor. Clapping for 13 minutes is a bit uncomfortable, but more comfortable than swallowing a sword, which Irishman Murray Molloy did for a record 13 minutes and 12 seconds in 2020.

14 minutes

Belle (Cannes, 2021); The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Cannes, 2024); Motel Destino (Cannes, 2024); Blonde (Venice, 2022)