Cannes: the highlights and lowlights

There's still nothing in the film festival calendar like it: that unmatchable sense of anticipation as critics from around the globe pile into the vast velvety darkness of Cannes' 2,600-seat Lumière theatre for the world premiere of a new movie. Afterwards, in heated argument, its fate is decided and reputations made, cemented or shattered. And the verdicts can be merciless.

The lone first feature in competition was particularly vulnerable to scorn, but Andrea Arnold's Red Road held its own against the old hands and was, moreover, viewed by many as one of the festival's revelations. Making her own persuasive feature debut, Kate Dickie plays a solitary CCTV operator who spends her days and nights in front of a vast bank of monitors trained on some of Glasgow's meanest cityscapes; part voyeur, part guardian angel, she radiates the mysterious aura of a tragic past.

One day, she spots a man she recognises and begins to stalk him, first on the monitors, then on the streets and eventually to the grim high-rise block of flats - called Red Road - where he lives. Carefully building up to the revelation of the painful event that binds them, this spare, tense film marginally overplays its climax but still shows a new director well in command of her craft.

Nothing could be in starker contrast to Sofia Coppola's fabulously frothy third feature, Marie-Antoinette, the shocking pink posters for which have been plastered all along the Croisette. Kirsten Dunst plays the doomed French queen whose life is surveyed, not in a dutiful blow-by-blow narrative, but in a series of impressionistic setpieces scored to rock music (The Cure, New Order and others) that capture the dreamy decadence at the Court of Versailles. It's pure eye candy, a dazzling mood piece with little historical analysis, and drew boos and cheers in almost equal measure. I loved it.

Nanni Moretti's The Caiman is three movies in one: part zany comedy about the follies of the Italian film world, part touching portrait of a man still in love with and fighting to keep his estranged wife, part satirical broadside against Berlusconi. Crackling with ideas, it's full of brusque changes of tone, yet it is robust enough to intrigue even after its ostensible target has been zapped at the Italian elections.

Other world-class directors fared less well. The second British competition entry, Ken Loach's handsome-looking The Wind That Shakes the Barley, about the Irish guerillas battling the British in the 1920s, commands respect rather than enthusiasm, though Cillian Murphy has a stellar presence as the watchful, idealist doctor involved in the struggle.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, the director of Amores Perros and 21 Grams, has always been intrigued by the power of malign accident over human destiny, and so there was a poetic justice in the fact that the reels were scrambled at Babel's first screening. It took us all a moment to realise, given his stories' intricate, overlapping time-lines; as with the director's other films, Babel is another multi-stranded yarn, in which an impulsive rifle shot in the Moroccan desert detonates a chain of catastrophic events from Mexico to Tokyo. Inarritu essays big, self-important themes about cultural difference and miscommunication but, for all its doomy overtones, it's a contrived, unconvincing work.

Aki Kaurismaki's Lights In the Dusk forms a loose trilogy with Drifting Clouds and The Man Without a Past and has the same spirit, only less so. A lonely security guard is suckered into becoming the accomplice in a jewellery robbery in a gloomy minimalist melodrama with too-brief flashes of Kaurismaki's signature black humour.

Climates, from Turkey's Niri Bilge Ceylan, the director of Distant, has the cool temperature of a 1960s art film - Antonioni, perhaps. It's a minutely observed study of a crumbling marriage over three seasons with a taciturn, stonily remote protagonist.

Summer Palace arrives with the recommendation of a ban by the Chinese censors - unsurprisingly, since its terrific first hour chronicles the arrival of provincial girl Yu Hong at Beijing University and the heady thrill of political activism and sexual experiment in the build up to the the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. Thereafter, though, it runs out of steam as the characters go their separate ways and become mired in self-pity.

With The Da Vinci Code a distant memory, the American presence has been low on glitzy Hollywood crowd-pullers and long on edgy indie fare, with mixed results. Richard Kelly's sprawlingly incoherent apocalyptic epic Southland Tales has been the festival's chief casualty and few expect it to achieve the cult success of Kelly's first film, Donnie Darko.

An Inconvenient Truth is a workmanlike record of the politician Al Gore's lecture show about global warming, which commands attention less for its filmic qualities than for the charisma and conviction of Gore, who introduces himself as the man who used to be the next President of the United States.

A less persuasive campaigning piece was Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation, a drama based on the bestselling exposé by Eric Schlosser. It presents a collection of people involved at different levels with the junk food industry in a dead-end town in Colorado, from ranchers and executives to the college kids who work at a local burger joint and the illegal Mexican immigrants at the bottom of the food chain who suffer wretched conditions at the meat processing plant. The whole feels a little like an especially proselytising John Sayles movie, where declamatory speeches and sketchy characters replace real red dramatic meat to chew on.

Men: would you like to learn how to perform auto-fellatio? Shortbus will show you the way (tip: yoga proficiency is essential). This playful, out-of-competition comedy about oddball New Yorkers in search of love, happiness and the perfect orgasm boasts yards of explicit, unsimulated and very much non-missionary sex - not, as it happens, a quality in short supply in this year's films - but the end result is affectionate and generous rather than shocking. For anyone deterred by the high-camp posturing of John Cameron Mitchell's previous film, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, it will come as a most enjoyable surprise.

The festival's sidebar sections can be full of arcane and indigestible stodge, but this year has yielded a number of captivating discoveries that should pop up at art houses over the coming year. Paris Je t'Aime is a compendium film that constantly threatens to drown in the irreducible naffness of its central theme - love in the City of Lights - but has stand-out segments from Walter Salles, Gena Rowlands and Alexander Payne.

Watch out, too, for Ten Canoes, a droll shaggy-dog story inspired by the Australian aboriginal Dreamtime; for Luxury Car, an exquisitely poignant family drama set in urban China; The Court, an African film about global politics that has been one of the festival's hottest tickets; monsters in South Korea in The Host; and much more. Despite critics' ritual complaints, it has been a pretty good year for world cinema.

BEST IN SHOW?

It's always a big mistake to second-guess the jury's thinking. Wong Kar-Wai is this year's president but won't necessarily champion a film that resembles his own. It might be a sign, though, that a number of jury members, including Samuel L Jackson and Helena Bonham Carter, were spotted at the exclusive after-screening party for Volver.

Pedro Almodovar has definitely been the one to watch at Cannes this year. In his new film, the man from La Mancha returns to his birthplace, a curious rural Spain where women wear black and observe all the old customs but smoke pot and even grow their own. Equipped with an unsuspected acreage of cleavage and (reportedly) a prosthetic posterior, Penelope Cruz (right) plays one of those voluptuous Mediterranean earth mothers in the tradition of Anna Magnani, holding together her family in the teeth of disaster; around her, a galaxy of women teeter on the verge of a nervous breakdown but bear up magnificently.

The complex story, which even the director admits to having trouble summarising, involves child abuse, murder, cancer, mother-daughter relations and a possible ghost. And, by the way, it's a comedy: colourful, exuberant and uplifting. It's that near-unique phenomenon, in fact: a totally idiosyncratic auteur film that critics revere and audiences adore. SJ