And yet it remains the ultimate film festival, the place where the world’s greatest directors come to pit themselves against their peers. Godard, Scorsese, Kiarostami, even Nicole Kidman – Cannes matters to everyone who cares about cinema. It’s what the Oscars wish they were. So The Context is here along with all the rest – and here’s the best of the new films this year.

MOULIN ROUGE: Opening the festival, Baz Luhrmann’s post-modern musical has split the critics. You’ll either love or hate its OTT, magpie celebration of kitsch pop culture moments (much of the dialogue is directly lifted from Elton John/Madonna songs), harnessed to hyper-active visuals, kinetic editing and 1-D acting. Ewan McGregor plays a penniless writer in Paris, 1900; Nicole Kidman is the courtesan he falls for and fights to win against all obstacles. The story doesn’t go much further than that, and it often teeters on the knife-edge of absurdity, but more often than not, Luhrmann’s sheer nerve pulls it off. Moulin Rouge is a sparkly rave, a funfair ride through 20th Century bohemia; it’s cinema over-stimulated by E-numbers, a vintage song & dance extravaganza re-tooled for the attention-deficit generation.

DISTANCE: Kore-Eda Hirokazu made Afterlife, one of the finest films of the 1990s, so much was expected of his latest. On a single viewing, you’d have to say that Distance is no Afterlife, but remains a strong film in its own right. It’s about the relatives of an apocalyptic religious cult which tried to poison Japan’s water supply, killing 100 people including themselves (shades of the Tokyo subway Sarin attack). There are definite longeurs - lengthy scenes where nothing happens at all - but also moments of powerful human drama, culminating in a haunting last half hour that re-casts everything you’ve seen before.

KANDAHAR: Mohsen Makhmalbaf is a master of Iranian and world cinema. Of late, he’s been helping members of his family make films (including his daughter Samira, whose Blackboards won the Jury Grand Prize here last year), but Kandahar marks his return. It follows a woman’s perilous journey through Afghanistan to find her sister. It’s full of his trademark bizarre imagery: a pair of prosthetic legs, floating down from the sky on a parachute; a turquoise ring glinting on a skeleton; a vibrantly coloured wedding procession making its way through the barren desert. But the stunning visuals are in the service of a passionate plea for the plight of Afghan women, imprisoned behind their veils, eking out a precarious existence in a land where even toy dolls conceal deadly land mines. A definite contender for the Palme D’Or.

APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX: Francis Ford Coppola’s new cut adds almost an hour to his already sprawling 1979 classic; he claims this is the definitive version. But in a triumph of awkward Cannes programming, it screened at the same time as Kiarostami’s latest (see below), demanding an impossible choice. I went for the film which I hadn’t already seen two and a half hours of, so all I can report is that colleagues thought it long, but strangely more focused and intense than the original. Wow.

ABC AFRICA: Abbas Kiarostami’s documentary on Ugandan orphans is a small-scale gem. Avoiding manipulative ploys for sympathy, it simply and effectively documents the situation of almost two million children who have lost parents to war and AIDS. Despite the subject matter, it’s full of humour and spontaneity - and even shooting with a single digital video camera, Kiarostami can't help but make memorable images. True, there’s none of the self-reflexive brilliance of his Iranian films here - apart from a stunning scene where we’re plunged, with him, into utter darkness for an unbearably long few minutes, finally broken by a storm – but his recent concern with matters of life and death is much in evidence.

TEARS OF THE BLACK TIGER: This extraordinary, invigourating, frequently hilarious Thai movie is to the Western what Moulin Rouge is to the musical: a reinvention, and then some. Black Tiger is so retro, it’s past post-modern. Touted as an homage to 1960s Thai cinema, it seems to these eyes a feverish fusion of old classics like Gone With The Wind and Johnny Guitar with ultra-violent Asian action cinema, from Bruce Lee to John Woo. It glows in lurid pinks and greens, with sets so super-stylised they’re almost expressionist. But it goes beyond its cheeky film jokes to tell a simple, timeless story, surprisingly straight. It’s about a rich girl and poor boy whose love is constantly thwarted. He grows up to be a feared bandit; when she thinks he’s forgotten her, she gets engaged to a police captain. It can only end one way – but it’s quite a thrill watching it get there.

STORYTELLING: Todd Solondz has always liked to suck on a few taboos, and Storytelling drips with them, from sex with cerebral palsy sufferers to the Columbine massacre. But along with the comedy of alienation he mastered in Happiness, there’s a new layer here, a thoughtful wrestle with storytelling itself and what it means. It’s split into two segments, ‘Fiction’ and ‘Non-Fiction’. Many of the characters (a creative writing class in the first part; a documentary-maker and the dysfunctional family he films in the second) find themselves confronted with just the criticisms and dilemmas faced by Solondz and others who mine this seam of raw human drama. Thoughtful as well as provocative, but still funny as hell, it's helped by strong performances (John Goodman and Paul Giamatti especially) as well as music (Belle And Sebastian)... And you’ve got to love any film that crucifies American Beauty.

THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE: Some critics dismiss the Coen brothers’ latest as all style and no substance, technically virtuosic but emotionally empty. But then, they've been getting the Coens wrong since Blood Simple, somehow missing the love, lust, hate and hurt that drive their plots. Yes, The Man Who Wasn’t There has a cool, distant surface; it’s shot like a textbook 1940s film noir, furnished with their usual allusions and references. At its centre is the most deliberately under-stated performance since Montgomery Clift: Billy Bob Thornton, playing a cuckolded husband whose scheme to get a little revenge on wife Frances McDormand and her lover James Gandolfini goes horribly wrong. His laconic voiceover gives little away explicitly - but simmering just below its surface is a seething mess of anger and regret, ultimately transformed into a remarkably moving sense of acceptance. How anyone could miss this is entirely beyond me.

LA PIANISTE: Michael Haneke is up to his funny games again in this tale of a Viennese piano teacher (Isabelle Huppert), whose frosty exterior conceals an unfulfilled sado-masochistic sexuality. By day, she berates her students in prim cardigans; by night, she slashes her vagina with razor blades, sniffs semen-soaked tissues in porno theatres, urinates in voyeuristic ecstasy at drive-in cinemas, etc. Benoît Magimel plays the dashing young man who falls in love with her, gets revolted when he learns her true desires, and then beats the living daylights out of her. What we’re supposed to learn or gain from all this is unclear. It’s certainly intense; Haneke’s control of all the elements of cinema is ever more complete, and he denies us the questionable pleasures of conventional romance just as Funny Games denied us those of violence. But after the subtlety and humanity of Code Unknown, La Pianiste feels disappointingly calculated and immature.

ELOGE DE L’AMOUR: The new film from Jean-Luc Godard, like almost all his others, requires more than one viewing. This is not ideal for the hothouse atmosphere of the Croisette, where attention spans are among the world’s lowest, so it’s had some damning reviews. Ignore them. If you’re only ready to accept that a film, like a piece of music, need not be instantly comprehensible and consumable, and are willing to trust what Godard gives you, Eloge De L’Amour offers an intensely affecting experience. Its themes: the ebbing away of history, memory, civilisation; the Americanisation not only of the world but of imagination itself. Its structure: the first half in elegant black and white, recalling Godard’s 1960s classics like Vivre Sa Vie; the second half in flaming hyper-colour, a testament to his video experiments of the past 20 years. The whole is held together by a profoundly elegiac tone, clearly reflecting Godard’s own sense of impending mortality. Give this man the Palme D’Or, right now.

MULHOLLAND DRIVE: Only David Lynch (and perhaps not even he) can say what this film is about. It’s a story that folds back in on itself, like Lost Highway; it’s populated by weird doubles who swap names and personalities. And then there’s that monster with the shiny blue box... After the simplicity of The Straight Story, this is Lynch in full-on weird mode: baffling, compelling and occasionally utterly terrifying.

VA SAVOIR: Who would have guessed that Jacques Rivette would make a feelgood comedy? Or that it’d be such fun? Va Savoir is like an 18th Century farce, revolving around three couples in present-day Paris. As the characters circle and manoeuvre around each other, old loves and new passions are kindled; infidelities contemplated and loyalties tested. With every shuffle of the deck, dialogues become triangles, squares, hexagons – Rivette puts the characters through every combination in search of happiness. It’s not ground-breaking cinema – fans of Celine And Julie Go Boating will be disappointed – but it’s light and elegant, a refreshingly adult piece of film-making.

MILLENNIUM MAMBO: Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s latest is set in a clubby, druggy milieu, all ultraviolet light and dark techno beats. It looks and sounds amazing – probably the best realized vision of that setting yet put on celluloid – but like many of Hou’s films, it’s hard to care about the characters or story. A hostess bar girl is caught between a psychotically jealous DJ boyfriend and a nice older man who actually seems to care about her. Which would you choose? It’s hardly compelling as drama, but the aesthetics are exquisite.

THE SON’S ROOM: Italy’s Nanni Moretti is best known for his quirky comedies, but this is a serious, grown-up film about death and loss. In a terrific performance, Moretti himself plays a psychoanalyst whose comfortable, well-adjusted family life is shattered by the death of his son in a random accident. Simply shot and very naturally acted, it’s not particularly eye-catching as cinema, but extremely effective as drama.

ATANARJUAT, THE FAST RUNNER: The first film ever made in the Inuit language, Atanarjuat is authentically mythic storytelling on an epic scale. It’s based on a 4,000 year-old Inuit legend of a community divided by an evil shaman. Two brothers – Amaqjuaq the Strong One and Atanarjuat the Fast Runner – emerge to challenge the unbalanced order. Amaqjuaq is killed in his sleep; Atanarjuat escapes, fleeing naked across the polar ice, and plans his revenge. As befits a story of this sweep, the characters are towering archetypes – but they’re also very human, people who piss and belch, and bleed when speared. First-time director Zacharias Kunuk fills the screen with stunning images, glowing in the ice and bathed in pink-blue northern light. The discovery of the festival, Atanarjuat is what going to the cinema is all about.

FINAL ROUND-UP: OK, so I was wrong about the glamour of Cannes. In the last fortnight, I've stood within ten feet of Jean-Luc Godard, on my feet and applauding with everyone else in the room; I've sat next to Agnes Varda in a restaurant, and observed her slipping napkins into her shoes; I've seen Wong Kar-Wai take off the dark glasses he always wears, to watch the new Hou Hsiao-Hsien. Perhaps these aren't moments that would strike many people as glamorous, but they did it for me.

The prizes? Nanni Moretti deserved his Palme D'Or, if nothing else for making the only film that everyone seemed to agree was good. Michael Haneke's triple triumph (Grand Prix, best actor, best actress) is not undeserved in terms of technical accomplishment, but disappointing nonetheless - I can't help but regret the passing over of Godard and Rivette, not to mention Makhmalbaf. Still, Atanarjuat's Camera D'Or makes up for it all.

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