Cannes Film Festival in review

It usually takes a few days before a strong theme emerges from the Cannes Film Festival. But this year the programmers are putting their cards on the table. Pessimistic critics sometimes feel that embarking on a new festival is like being sent down for two weeks in the slammer – and sure enough, this year's selection has started with a crop of films about incarceration.

The opening film, Blindness, didn't go down too well with most critics, but at least it's a more confrontational first-night film than Cannes has offered for some time. Directed by Brazil's Fernando Meirelles (City of Men), it's based on Jose Saramago's novel about an epidemic of blindness breaking out in an unnamed city. A woman mysteriously immune to the condition accompanies her husband when he's interned in a prison-like quarantine camp (Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo). The story follows the breakdown into anarchy and squalor when the newly sightless society loses its bearings.

Watch the Blindness trailer

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The flamboyance of Meirelles's direction sits strangely at odds with the severe subject, and one problem is that Saramago's novel is one of those compelling, near-perfect works that never really needed to be filmed in the first place. Given such a realist treatment, a resonant parable becomes a conventional apocalyptic adventure. But there's much to defend here – above all, Moore's commanding performance, catching a delicate balance between vulnerability and authority. Ultimately this internationally shot, internationally cast drama is another Babel-style drama about the human condition in the global age, but it's immensely watchable. Still, why did the dog have to be so cute?

Little in Cannes is likely to be as provocative as Hunger, the first feature by British artist Steve McQueen, focusing on the last days of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands. McQueen's depiction of the ordeal of Sands and his fellow inmates in the Maze Prison may have the unapologetic overtones of a religious passion, but it's a very scrupulous and detached film, as well as an intensely angry one. Written by McQueen and Enda Walsh, Hunger is long on images, short on words – except for a masterly extended dialogue between Sands and his priest. Directed with unfailing control, Hunger is an artist's film, in the best sense – a sense of intense spareness and resonance. With an intense Michael Fassbender sparing himself no rigours in the lead, Hunger is bound to generate equally intense controversy: it's one of the most uncompromising films to emerge from Britain in some time.

Another behind-bars drama, in the Competition strand is Lion's Den by Argentina's Pablo Trapero. A pregnant student facing a murder charge is sent to a women's prison and gives birth in the wing devoted to mothers and children. Some of the classic tropes of slammer dramas are here – the shower-room brawl, the spell in solitary, the riot. But Trapero's hard-bitten realist approach – he shoots in actual prisons, and casts real-life guards and inmates – gives the film a distinctive steeliness. Expect Martina Gusman to be a leading contender for the Best Actress Oscar.

Further proof that this year's selection is to be taken as seriously as any recent Cannes, comes with Ari Folman's audacious Israeli competition entry Waltz with Bashir. Poised strangely – possibly uniquely – between confessional animation and documentary investigation, the film explores the director's own experience as an Israeli soldier in Lebanon at the time of the Sabra and Chatila massacres. Realising that he can't actually remember what he saw at the camps, Folman investigates his strange amnesia, and finds it also affects his contemporaries too.

Watch the Waltz with Bashir trailer

Delving into his own psyche, and his nation's, Folman delivers a trenchant and unsettling reportage on Israel's complicity in the slaughter of Palestinians by Phalangist militia. That Folman chooses to depict his quest in impressionistic, often dream-like animation initially seems like an outrageous poetic liberty – but it makes his film all the more personal and gives it the urgency of a true cri de coeur.

But for now, my personal favourite in competition – and a definite Palme d'Or contender – is Three Monkeys, by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the Turkish director who made his auteur reputation at Cannes with his features Uzak and Climates. Ceylan vaults into new territory here: Three Monkeys is a noir-flavoured psychological thriller, which starts off close to Georges Simenon, slides more into James M Cain territory, and ends up vaulting into the Dostoyevsky league. A driver is persuaded by his politician boss to take the rap for a hit-and-run accident, in exchange for payment that will ease his family's financial troubles. The driver goes to prison; his son drifts into bad company; his wife gets involved with the politician – and when the driver gets out of jail, things slide toward even darker consequences. It is very much a Ceylan film – there are all the elegant, brooding cityscapes we expect of him – and the elliptical intrigue is typical of his sombre, slow-burning style. But here we find Ceylan having the sort of fun with narrative twists you might expect from the Coen brothers, and the moral resonances leave you feeling you've grappled with not just a teasing enigma but a substantial tragedy too.

Watch the Three Monkeys trailer

Also on show, in the Critics' Week sidebar, is another British discovery, debut film Better Things by Duane Hopkins. A fluid, episodic ensemble piece, it's about a group of young people – and a few old ones – living in the Cotwolds. The drama takes place in the wake of a young woman's heroin overdose, and most of the young characters are past or present users. Austere in the extreme, Better Things is shot in a vein (perhaps "vein" isn't the best word) of poetic realism, Hopkins displaying an intuitive knack for stitching together allusive chains of images. It's certainly fated to be dismissed by some as the latest chapter in the history of British miserabilism, but Hopkins is a director with an introspective subtlety uncommon in UK film-making. Better Things proves the Brits can make Belgian art films as well as anyone – and I hope you realise that's a compliment.

So far, this year's selection has been consistently substantial, but – as you'll have probably noticed – punishingly thin on light relief. No wonder, as I sit down to write this, a few haggard-looking colleagues were eagerly dashing off to watch Kung Fu Panda. I may even join them.