There are a million and one different ways to praise a movie.
Attendees of Hollywood premieres and festival screenings will often stand right up in the
theater and cheer as the credits roll.
Here are a few movies that earned themselves a standing ovation when they hit the big screen.
Nearly 30 years ago, Spike Lee took the film world by storm when his uncompromising racial
drama Do the Right Thing made its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.
Since then, the in-your-face director proved himself as one of cinema's most gifted, if
often divisive, filmmakers by releasing a steady stream of artistically ambitious and
politically-themed movies.
In 2018, Lee took Cannes by storm with the timely, racially-charged BlacKkKlansman, the
true story of an African American police officer who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s.
"There's never been a black cop in this city.
We think you might be the man to open things up around here."
Simply put, BlacKkKlansman is a film that refuses to be ignored.
According to Variety, the usually stuffy Cannes crowd seemed more than happy to give the film
its due, awarding it with a six-minute long standing ovation, as well as the festival's
Grand Jury Prize.
The other flick to get the haughty crowd at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival to its feet
was, of all things, a remake of a horror movie.
It helps, of course, that this remake was directed by Luca Guadagnino, the man behind
2017's Oscar-winning heartbreaker Call Me By Your Name.
The stylishly demented and utterly brilliant remake of Suspiria wisely doesn't stray too
far from the original bewitching narrative.
"Higher!
Higher!
Higher!"
But Guadagnino manages to twist the formula in shocking new directions, and he takes his
sweet time in letting this unholy tale unfold.
The result is an epic 150 minutes of pure horror hysterics, and according to Deadline,
it brought the Cannes crowd to their feet for nearly eight full minutes.
There was more than a little reason to worry when Danny McBride and David Gordon Green
set out to "reboot" the Halloween franchise.
As we learned more about their film, particularly that it would ignore all of those ill-fated
sequels and remakes, our fears began to subside.
"Wasn't it her brother who murdered all those babysitters?"
"No, it was not her brother.
That's something that people made up."
But the odds still seemed stacked against the new Halloween living up to the original's
legacy.
Not officially in competition at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival, Halloween
instead had its premiere at a midnight screening, playing to an eager crowd of film critics
and horror enthusiasts.
According to the LA Times, that crowd met the return of the Boogeyman, and a take-no-prisoners
turn from Jamie Lee Curtis, with the expected amount of glee, giving the film a standing
ovation and helping launch it towards a record-breaking box-office run.
While Kristen Stewart became famous with starring roles in big budget fluff like the Twilight
franchise, it's worth nothing that she built her career by starring in indie flicks, and
continues to shine in the indie world.
Personal Shopper, which made its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in early 2016,
is an eerily muted study of loss and grief in the guise of a sexy paranormal thriller.
Though the film's initial festival screening met with a slightly divisive reaction from
critics, the official premiere event was quite a different scene, with Variety reporting
that the audience heaped some serious love on Stewart, in the form of a lengthy standing
ovation.
After scoring back-to-back hits with the formidable one-two punch of Creed and Black Panther,
Ryan Coogler has proven himself a rare director capable of making big-budget films that all
but demand you stand up and cheer.
Neither of those films, however, was his first project to inspire a standing ovation alongside
his go-to actor, Michael B. Jordan.
That honor belongs to 2013's "based-on-true-events" drama Fruitvale Station.
Part slice-of-life drama, and part damning examination of police brutality, Coogler's
sobering film premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, winning the hearts of festival
audiences, and a couple of the festival's top prizes.
Fruitvale Station's undeniable virtues were further praised on the international stage
when it made its way to the Cannes and, according to Color Lines, received a rousing standing
ovation.