The Square

Ruben Östlund's The Square won the Palme d'Or at the 70th Cannes Film Festival in May 2017, Östlund's first major Cannes prize after the breakthrough of Force Majeure three years earlier in Un Certain Regard. The film also earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film at the 90th ceremony in 2018 and won the European Film Award for Best Film. Östlund would return to Cannes five years later and win a second Palme for Triangle of Sadness (2022), making him one of only nine directors in the festival's history to win the prize twice.

The cast pairs the Danish actor Claes Bang in the lead role (his first major international feature performance, leading directly to his subsequent casting as Dracula in the BBC's 2020 adaptation) with Elisabeth Moss (in her first significant European art-house role between her seasons of The Handmaid's Tale) and Dominic West. The Christian Marclay-style chimpanzee-mimic performance art sequence with Terry Notary became one of the most-discussed individual sequences of any film of 2017.

The film is set largely at the X-Royal Museum, a fictional Stockholm contemporary-art institution loosely modelled on the Moderna Museet and the Magasin III; production designer Josefin Åsberg constructed the sets to evoke the visual register of the Swedish institutional contemporary-art tradition. Cinematography is by Fredrik Wenzel, Östlund's regular collaborator since the early 2000s. The film is widely cited in academic literature on the cultural critique of the contemporary-art museum complex.