CANNES DIARY: MICHAEL DWYER reviews this week's screenings, including films from Tarantino, Almódovar and Loach – and speculates on possible winners of one of the festival's lesser honours: the Palme Dog

AWARDS speculation intensifies as the 62nd Festival de Cannes enters its closing weekend. The talking dog from Disney's animated Upis considered a contender, as is the dog from Fish Tank. The adorable cat from Bright Staris considered a dark horse, so to speak, while the talking fox from Antichristis a rank outsider.

The result will be announced at lunchtime today when the annual Palm Dog prize is presented in Cannes. The award takes the form of a dog collar, which Bright Staractress Kerry Fox modelled for a photocall during the week. The jury is made up of UK film reviewers James Christopher, Derek Malcolm, Kaleem Afjab and Peter Bradshaw.

Paris-based film journalist Toby Rose devised the Palm Dog award and says he’s in discussions with producers to organise “a star-studded canine glitterfest documentary” to screen at Cannes next year, the 10th anniversary of the prize. A documentary on last year’s prize-giving ceremony has been showing in the Short Film Corner at Cannes this week.

After that dog day afternoon comes the Rail d’Or. The award will be presented tonight to the best feature showing in the Cannes sidebar, Critics’ Week, and there will be Le Petit Rail d’Or for the best short. In a longstanding tradition, the jury for these awards consists of cineaste railway workers who come to Cannes every year and assess all the films in the sidebar.

The winner of the festival's coveted Palme d'Or will not be known until jury president Isabelle Huppert opens the envelope at the closing ceremony on Sunday night. There have been 21-year gaps between the last three French films to take the top prize: A Man and a Woman (1966), Under Satan's Sun (1987)and The Class (2008).

While some competition entries remain to be screened over the final days of this year's festival, I suspect a French film could win again this year, and that's Jacques Audiard's riveting prison drama, A Prophet.Then again, we know too well from experience how Cannes juries can produce quite bizarre verdicts when compromises are made to accommodate extremes of opinion.

REVIEW: INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

The winner of the 1994 Palme d'Or for Pulp Fiction,Quentin Tarantino was back in Cannes for Wednesday night's world premiere of his wartime adventure, Inglourious Basterds, which treats matters of historical fact with gleeful disregard. It opens in an appropriately fairytale-style with the caption: "Once upon a time... in Nazi occupied France." Structured in five chapters with multiple storylines that merge in the closing stages, the movie features Brad Pitt as a US lieutenant known as Aldo the Apache because he leads Jewish soldiers on a mission to murder Nazis and to bring back their scalps. Most of the other key characters are Europeans who just happen to have a strong connection to movies.

Diane Kruger sparkles as a popular German actress doubling as an undercover agent. Melanie Laurent is admirably feisty as a Paris cinema owner who survived a Nazi massacre. Daniel Bruhl is engaging as a German war hero celebrated in a new propaganda movie. Michael Fassbender adopts an amusingly clipped English accent as a film critic and expert on German cinema who’s serving with the British forces.

Tarantino proudly parades his cinephilia – yet again – in a movie awash with so many movie references that it would take several viewings to spot them all. His film is highly entertaining in that respect, and in his typically eclectic – and effective – use of music that runs from Ennio Morricone scores to David Bowie's Cat Peopletheme.

In an astutely chosen cast, Austrian actor Christoph Waltz steals the movie as a sly, smooth-talking and ruthless SS colonel known as “the Jew hunter”.

The violence is unrestrained as individuals get scalped, beaten to death with a baseball bat or have swastikas carved on their foreheads.

Running just over two-and-a-half hours, the movie gets bogged down in some pointlessly loquacious exchanges and features a quite superfluous outsized caricature of Adolf Hitler. Having been rushed to be ready for Cannes, it would benefit from re-cutting before going on release in August.

REVIEW: THIRST

No slouch when it comes to screen violence, South Korean director Park Chan-wook blends copious blood-letting with deliriously offbeat humour in Thirst, the tale of a missionary priest (Song Kanh-Ho) turned into a vampire after a blood transfusion. His resourcefulness for feeding his new habit extends to using an intravenous tube to drink the blood of an ailing hospital patient.

"Being a vampire just means having a different palate," he remarks as he adapts to his condition in this movie which lacks the cohesive narrative power and force of Park's 2003 Cannes prize winner Old Boy, and it is needlessly protracted. That's unfortunate given the creepy pleasures it yields, its wildly surreal imagery and twisted laugh-out-loud humour. It's accompanied by a thunderous score that's aptly overblown in the context.

REVIEW: LOOKING FOR ERIC

Ken Loach has found glimmers of humour in the most downbeat of his socially-concerned screen dramas. He deftly demonstrates his flair for serious comedy in Looking for Eric, a deceptively light picture featuring a Manchester postman, Eric Bishop (Steve Evets), suffering a midlife crisis because of all his personal complications.

In despair, he unburdens his problems through talking to a poster of his football idol, Eric Cantona, who magically responds with drolly-delivered nuggets of wisdom. They are formed in adages inspired by Cantona’s famous proverb about seagulls and sardines (which is featured in the closing credits).

The device recalls Play It Again, Sam,in which the neurotic film critic played by Woody Allen turned to Humphrey Bogart in times of trouble. It's a calculated risk, and Loach pulls it off with the benefit of Cantona's charismatic portrayal of a version of himself. The tone shifts uncomfortably in a later, shoehorned subplot, but even then, the movie rebounds in Paul Laverty's neatly-devised, good-natured screenplay.

REVIEW: BROKEN EMBRACES

Broken Embraces( Los Abrazos Rotos) features a suffering but resilient woman, a downtrodden gay teen, an established film director and screenwriter, and a suffusion of movie references and clips that would keep Tarantino preoccupied. Welcome back to the familiar world of Pedro Almódovar, for what could be a greatest hits compilation of his favourite themes and motifs packaged in a single movie.

It is not his greatest achievement or close to it, but middle-range Almódovar is never less than intriguing and generally satisfying. The film glides between the past decade and the present, and between Madrid and Lanzarote, for a modern film noir, albeit one with a distinctively rich colour scheme.

Penélope Cruz is radiant and endearingly sympathetic as an aspirant actress drawn into an unhappy relationship with a wealthy, domineering older man (hard-faced José Luis Gomez) and embarking on a secret affair with a film director (Lluis Homer) when she features in his production, Girls with Suitcases. Amusing clips from that movie suggest a risibly soapy spin on Almódovar's exuberant Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

REVIEW: KINATAY

The bottom of the barrel in the Cannes competition last year was Filipino director Brilliante Mendoza's Serbis, set among a family living in the porn cinema they run. Mendoza plumbs new depths this year with Kinatay, which purports to expose police corruption in present-day Manila.

It introduces a young police cadet living with his fiancee and their baby, and desperate for money. He gains some on the side from drug dealers, and then he is drawn into the abduction of a prostitute.

What follows graphically depicts her being brutally beaten and raped before being murdered and dismembered. That extended sequence is deeply and deliberately disturbing, all too convincingly depicted in a film that challenges the viewer not to look away, and is utterly meretricious and repellent.

REVIEW: I LOVE YOU PHILLIP MORRIS

Shown in the Directors' Fortnight sidebar at Cannes this week, I Love You Phillip Morristells the kind of unfeasibly tall tale that invariably prompts such tags as "stranger than fiction" or "only in America". Its protagonist, Steven Russell (Jim Carrey), leads an improbably eventful life packed with drama, deception, crime and lust. One of the most surprising of its many revelations is that it's all true.

Haunted by childhood rejection when his mother sold him for adoption in a car park, Russell adopts a chameleon-like approach to every situation. In Georgia, he marries a devoutly religious woman (Leslie Mann) and they have a daughter, but he is gay and having it off with men in motels.

An incorrigible liar who’s quick to learn the essence of survival and intent on an extravagant lifestyle, he gets deep into financial fraud. Even being sentenced to prison in Texas has its upside because Russell, an incurable romantic, falls head over heels for a blond, blue-eyed gay inmate (Ewan McGregor).

Scripted and directed by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, who wrote Bad Santa, this nimbly-paced and even more provocative comedy dares to take risks and pulls them off, benefiting immensely from Carrey's virtuoso performance at its pulsating heart.

• Michael Dwyer's Cannes diary is in Weekend Review tomorrow. He reports on the Cannes awards on Monday's News pages and concludes his reports from the festival on Tuesday's Arts page