Cannes they be serious?

Film festivals as big as Cannes are natural magnets for controversy, albeit contrived and pre-packaged to be dangled before the eager noses of thousands of international journalists. Sometimes this backfires, as happened two years ago when David Cronenberg's Crash arrived in Cannes ablaze with anticipation of moral indignation, only to be dismissed with derision.

This year, however, in his role as president of the festival jury, Cronenberg delivered controversy in spades at last Sunday night's awards ceremony. This was by no means a vintage year at Cannes, but there was a general consensus that there were at least three films out of the 22 in competition which warranted the jury's major awards.

But the only one of them to receive any recognition from the jury was Pedro Almodovar's All About My Mother, which took the award for best director.

The jury decided to ignore entirely the considerable achievements of the other widely-admired movies, David Lynch's The Straight Story and Atom Egoyan's Felicia's Journey. As the awards ceremony trundled on, jaws dropped all over the Festival Palais as the jury gave nothing to any of the seven English-language films, gave all three of the night's acting awards to non-professionals, and spread five major awards over two resolutely bleak and austere European movies, Rosetta and L'humanite.

Written and directed by brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Rosetta, the Belgian film which won the Palme d'Or, was the last of the competition films to be shown at the festival, and it was not even granted a black-tie evening screening with all the attendant Cannes hoopla. At its sole official screening last Saturday, it was greeted by polite applause - and a few dozen walk-outs. Made with a rough, hand-held energy, it follows the humiliations experienced by the 18-year-old Rosetta as she struggles to hold down one poorly-paid job after another. Shot in a de-saturated colour scheme against a grim industrial backdrop, and employing an editing style that reflects Rosetta's edginess, it captures the emptiness and hopelessness of her life in the trailer park where she lives with and regularly rebukes her alcoholic mother.

This modest, gritty and unduly repetitive picture might well have deserved a minor prize, but to give it both the Palme d'Or and the best actress award - which went to Emilie Dequenne, an elocution and recitation student when she was cast - is to overstate its achievements. That is also the case with Bruno Dumont's cinematic but ponderous L'humanite, which received not only the runner-up prize, the Grand Prix du Jury, but also the best actor and shared best actress awards - again to non-professionals: Emmanuel Schotte and Severine Caneele.

However, so wide is the gap now between Cannes prize-winners and the international cinema-going audience, that the jury's overstatement of achievement now appears to have become a given. There was a time when the Palme d'Or generated a genuine excitement in the films which won, but only very rarely in recent years. It seems certain that Cannes will find it a great deal harder than ever next year to find high-profile film-makers willing to risk the humiliation of being dismissed by the festival jury.

One of the most glaring of the jury's omissions this year was The Straight Story, David Lynch's richest, most satisfying film since Blue Velvet, and his most gentle and tender since The Elephant Man. Relating a story that could hardly have been invented were it not based on fact, The Straight Story features Richard Farnsworth - who worked as a stunt-man in movies for over 30 years before getting his first speaking part - in a beautifully judged and dignified portrayal of Alvin Straight, an ailing 73-year-old from a small town in Iowa.

Learning that his older brother (Harry Dean Stanton) has had a stroke at his Wisconsin home, he vows to visit him and patch up the feud which has kept them apart for 10 years. Too weak-sighted to hold a driving licence anymore and too proud to accept a lift, Alvin decides to travel aboard a 1966 John Deere lawnmower. The journey, which takes six weeks, involves encounters with disparate characters en route and travels through a changing landscape that's handsomely photographed by Freddie Francis in this affectionate, philosophical and cherishable film.

Another American maverick, John Sayles, takes his three principal characters on a journey of self-discovery in Limbo, which is set in Alaska and brings together a former fisherman (Sayles regular David Strathairn) who's still guilt-ridden after a fatal boating accident 25 years earlier; a nomadic bar-room singer (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), and her disaffected teenage daughter (Vanessa Martinez). Mastrantonio has rarely been so impressive, and she reveals a fine singing voice in this moody, involving drama.

Daft is the word for Peter Greenaway's shallow and rambling Fellini homage, 81/2 Women, in which John Standing tries to remain deadpan in the role of a widower businessman encouraged to pursue his sexual fantasies by his son (Matthew Delamere), who gathers an assortment of women for their pleasure-seeking.

Greenaway attempts to enliven this trite and grossly self-indulgent yarn with copious nudity and unlikely sexual situations, and he saddles the characters with some truly ludicrous dialogue. Its selection for the Cannes competition was quite inexplicable.

Showing out of competition in the official selection, Ron Howard's EDtv features Matthew McConaughey as Ed, an easy-going video store clerk whose life becomes the subject of a 24-hours-aday television show. The difference between Ed and Truman Burbank is that Ed is aware that he is being filmed and has agreed to it. Agreeable and diverting as EDtv proves, it remains firmly overshadowed by the far superior The Truman Show.

Another out-of-competition official selection, Kevin Smith's Dogma, was expected to stir it up in Cannes with its satire on Catholicism, but the result was a loquacious, uneven and sometimes very amusing comic fantasy which could well benefit from re-cutting.

Unless you get upset at the idea of casting Alanis Morissette as God, there was little to offend in this tale of fallen angels (Ben Affleck and Matt Damon) finding a loophole to re-enter Heaven. Linda Fiorentino steals the show as a woman of failing faith who is chosen to save the world.

Showing in the Directors' Fortnight sidebar, Summer of Sam is Spike Lee's most provocative, though least preachy movie for some time. The setting is New York during the summer of 1977 as the city sweats through a heat-wave and the fear instilled by the serial killer known as Son of Sam. The killer story is employed, not always persuasively, as the recurring backdrop to the fictional story of two fiery young Italian-Americans in the Bronx.

One (John Leguizamo in terrific form) is a sexually-insatiable hairdresser who regularly cheats on his wife (Mira Sorvino); the other (Adrien Brody) is bisexual and an early convert to the new punk movement.

The Directors' Fortnight closed last weekend with the world premiere of Agnes Browne, based on Brendan O'Carroll's novel, The Mammy. Set in Dublin in 1967, it is directed by Anjelica Huston, who also plays the eponymous Moore Street trader struggling to raise seven children after the death of her husband.

The film is at its most successful in etching the firm friendship between Agnes and another trader, Marion, and the two women are appealingly played by Huston and Marion O'Dwyer. The downside of the movie involves a stock villain played by Ray Winstone, a pervasive air of forced jollity, and a distinct whiff of rare-ould-times phoniness.

The movie's crude humour derives from mispronouncing "ejaculate" as "evacuate" and "orgasm" as "organism", for example, or from a character introducing himself as O'Toole - all of which had many of the Cannes audience in hysterics last Saturday afternoon. Chacun a son gout.