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.

One of the the most uncompromising and controversial films of the 90s, Todd Solondz’s portrait of damaged souls reaching out for connection reveals the existential void underneath middle-class suburbia. Darkly hilarious and endlessly disturbing, the film follows loosely connected New Jerseyans—deviants, depressives, and misfits, among them a frustrated phone-sex pest, an all-American dad concealing his pedophilic urges, and a lonely woman with a grisly secret, all of whom want just one thing: to be loved.The film unnerves precisely because it dares to see the humanity in those most often denied it.