French Foreign Legions

I loved the exotic biosphere created by Tunisian filmmaker Moufida Tlatli in The Season of Men, an intimate drama about a society of women looking after themselves in the hinterlands while awaiting the yearly, monthlong return of their men from work in the big city. I was teased, with pleasurable anxiety, by the surface amiability and lurking menace of the title character in Harry, He's Here to Help, by German-born French director Dominik Moll. The strengths of The King Is Alive, by Dogma 95 charter member Kristian Levring, were obscured by the attention given to fellow Dane von Trier, but this hypnotic staging of King Lear in the desert, starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, is an unforced, effective pairing of technique and tone. For Willem Dafoe's tour de force as a vampire who stars in Murnau's Nosferatu, and for the cleverness of its movie-history fantasy, E. Elias Merhige's Shadow of the Vampire deserved its own cineast award.

Restless during the first hour of Jiang Wen's historical drama Devils on the Doorstep — one of the festival's much-remarked-upon long entries, from one of the festival's much-heralded Asian filmmakers — I found myself engrossed three(!) hours later in bloody violence, and a consideration of war reminiscent of Grand Illusion. In contrast, at half the length, Wong Kar-wai's unfinished sweet-pulp romance In the Mood for Love, set in 1960s Hong Kong, lost the through-line in the last half hour, despite the elegance of Maggie Cheung in must-have, mandarin-collared Chinese dresses.

Finally, I hope Cannes won't be the last stop for Songs From the Second Floor, a Swedish black comedy by Roy Andersson that could easily become a cult favorite, so startlingly funny and freshly surreal are its scenes of human frailty. And I hope everyone who sees Ang Lee's rousing martial-arts saga, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon — and you will, Sony Pictures Classics is releasing it — bursts into applause as we all did, critics and non-critics alike, for the sheer, soaring joy with which it invigorates a mighty Hong Kong genre.

After all, Cannes moviegoers may be an argumentative lot, but all of us appreciate the pleasures of kung-fu love at first sight.