Perhaps the most prestigious film festival on the planet has a not so secret reputation for rowdy audience behavior. If the crowd doesn’t like a film at the Cannes Film Festival, get ready for a chorus of boos—or at least that was the case for most of the festival’s storied history. Dozens of films have been heckled, walked out of, or even protested, but this trend seems to have cooled off in recent years in favor of coverage for the length of standing ovations. In this series presented and programmed by FilmScene and the Bijou Film Board, we take a look back at the films that audiences and critics wrongfully raked over the coals, reevaluating misunderstood masterpieces and cult classics. So take a second (or first) look with the power of hindsight and decide for yourself if you’ll jeer or cheer.

Technology and sexuality meet in a head-on collision in director David Cronenberg’s (Videodrome) controversial adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s hugely transgressive 1973 novel. James Ballard (James Spader) is a film producer whose deviant sexual desires are awakened by a near fatal automobile accident with Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter). Soon the pair, alongside Ballard’s wife Catherine, are drawn into an underground world of car-crash fetishism presided over by renegade scientist Vaughan. Danger, sex and death become entwined as eroticism and technology join together in a disturbing, deadly union. Prompting boos and walkouts at its premiere at Cannes, the film nevertheless took home a Special Jury Prize for originality, daring and audacity and would go on to have campaigns to ban it in countries around the world.