Stand and deliver - Shawn's Sense with Shawn Loughlin

If you’re like no one, you’re busy plotting out your strategy for the busy film season ahead. Whether it’s summer blockbusters or film festival darlings, there is going to be a lot to see this year and surely you want to be on top of it if you want to keep pace with all of the others (nobody) who plan out such things.

 

We are smack-dab in the middle of France’s Cannes Film Festival (at least I was as I wrote this), marking the unofficial start of standing ovation season. And, at the time of writing this, Furiosa was making standing ovation waves.

 

The Anya Taylor-Joy vehicle that serves as a sort of prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road had patrons on their feet for six minutes, according to Variety, while The Hollywood Reporter’s watches stopped at seven minutes and Deadline clocked the ovation as being “nearly eight” minutes. Controversy! Tighten it up!

 

So far this sounds like the longest standing ovation of the film festival season, which means that we should all be pre-booking our Furiosa tickets for when it hits regular-people movie theatres not just screenings for film critics, insiders and fancy French people.

 

Although, maybe it’s a bit too early to be putting all of our movie ticket eggs in one basket. The festival is just getting going, after all, and we could easily see an even longer standing ovation come out of Cannes, which of course would mean that movie’s much better.

 

So, now, we wait. But, seeing as how we’re all waiting here together, unsure of which movies to see based on how long people stand up and clap once they’re done, we have some time to look back at some of the other times that people stood for a long time after a movie.

 

Last year, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon enticed - nay, demanded - that people stand up and clap for nine minutes after its credits rolled. One writer pointed out that this enthusiastic response was made even more impressive by the fact that the movie itself neared the four-hour mark, so to have that kind of energy left means... well, surely something.

 

The previous year, Elvis engaged audiences for 12 minutes. That’s the same amount of time (minus some seconds on either side, I’m sure) that people stood in Cannes for The Artist. That’s the black-and-white silent movie that would go on to win the Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Director Academy Awards in 2012 - wins that I think represented the height of the rift between award-winning movies and movies that people actually watch and enjoy.

 

However, as we know, awards mean nothing and standing ovations mean everything, so The Artist is a triumph and if you don’t think so, you’re clearly exposing yourself as someone who has never elicited applause or standing.

 

The story then lists several other films I’ve neither seen nor heard of that brought about 13-, 15-, 17- and 18-minute standing ovations, but, as you probably already know, these are all JV entries. Let’s get to the heavy hitters.

 

Documentarian Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 roused a 20-minute standing ovation in 2004. (This is not Moore’s only appearance on this list, as Bowling for Columbine had people on their feet for 13 minutes back in 2003.)

 

But the granddaddy of them all is Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, which, in 2006, did it, setting the record for the longest-ever standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival at 22 minutes. That’s the length of a sitcom episode without the commercials. 
And there you have it, Pan’s Labyrinth, the best movie ever made by the totally legit and not insane at all metric of standing ovations. At least until some theatre full of maniacs stands for like, an hour, later this festival season.