Women at the heart of a festival love-in

Pedro Almodovar is in fine form in Cannes, both on and off screen, writes Michael Dwyer in his second report from the film festival

Pedro Almodovar returned to Cannes in triumph at the weekend with his 16th feature film, Volver, which must be assured of taking a major prize at the festival awards ceremony next Sunday night. In the leading role, Penelope Cruz gives the outstanding performance of her career to date, and she has to be a formidable contender for the best actress prize, while the film itself stands a strong chance of securing Almodovar his first Palme d'Or.

Almodovar and Cruz cooed over each other as they climbed the red carpet at the official gala screening, he dressed all in black, she in an elegant, full-length, white dress, and their press conference turned into a mutual love-in.

"I sound like a groupie," Cruz admitted at the end of a long, gushing account of how wonderful it was to work with him.

Love was all around at the press conference, as Almodovar and Carmen Maura also paid tribute to each other. His original muse, she starred in five of his first six movies before they fell out. Hatchets were finally buried when they reunited to work on Volver, their first film together in the 17 years since his international breakthrough with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

The title of Volver, which translates as "to return", is appropriate not just because of their reunion. It returns Almodovar to his favourite theme, women, and it brings him back to his birthplace in La Mancha. The film opens there in a windswept cemetery where dozens of women are busily cleaning and polishing tombstones and arranging floral bouquets.

It is an apt setting to begin a story that deals with a number of deaths, from natural causes and by accident and by design. Cruz plays Raimunda, a hard-working woman who has left her home town for Madrid, where she holds down several low-paid jobs while her unemployed husband guzzles beer and watches football on television.

Despite dealing so prominently with death - "the merciless disappearance of all that is alive", as Almodovar puts it - his film is, time and again, very funny, often where one least expects humour to surface, and there are even moments of impeccably staged farce. And he takes a well-judged barbed swipe at reality TV and how it exploits human frailty to appease voyeuristic viewers and boost ratings.

This cherishable movie is, above all, a celebration of women, as they struggle to cope with the hardships of daily life, and of their resilience, resourcefulness, humanity and camaraderie. Raimunda remains radiant even in the depths of adversity, and the camera caresses Cruz from head to toe.

Almodovar surrounds her with a splendid ensemble: Lola Duenas (from The Sea Inside) as her hairdresser sister, a deserted wife; veteran Chus Lampreave as their elderly blind aunt; Blanca Portillo as a troubled family friend; and Maura on superb form as a character with more than a few big secrets to reveal. The warmth of this stylish, endearing movie is enhanced by a gorgeous score from Alberto Iglesias.

Whereas men are virtually peripheral to Almodovar's film, they are to the forefront of Nicole Garcia's Cannes competition entry, the engrossing French drama, Selon Charlie (Charlie Says). Her film is formed as an intriguing mosaic that charts the experiences of six men and a boy over an eventful few days. It, too, begins with a return home, of a celebrated scientist (Patrick Pineau) to his birthplace in an unnamed town on the Atlantic coast.

The other men include the self-serving mayor (Jean-Pierre Bacri in a ripe performance); the scientist's long-time friend and former colleague (the excellent Benoit Magimel), who is a teacher in the town; a bumbling, paroled thief (Benoit Poelvoorde); a rising young tennis star (Arnaud Valois) worn down by a gruelling training regime; an avid adulterer (Vincent Lindon); and his 11-year-old son, Charlie (Ferdinand Martin).

The boy is the catalyst in this satisfying film pervaded by an ominous sense of imminent conflict as the destinies of all six men converge in a narrative that gradually reveals layers of information about all of them. Garcia reflects acutely on masculine insecurity as their various ambitions, frustrations, disappointments and betrayals simmer to the surface, although the intersecting resolutions fall somewhat short of the catharsis they seemed to promise.

THE TITLE OF the Turkish film in competition, Climates, is ambiguous in that it charts the seasons from the heat of summer to the heavy snows of winter, and the shifting relationship between a couple that turns glacial in sunshine and seeks a renewal of warmth as the temperature drops. Climates is the second Cannes selection written and directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose Distant (Uzak) took the runner-up prize for best film and the best actor award for its leading players three years ago.

The writer-director stretches himself further in Climates, taking on the leading role of Isa, a quite smugly self-absorbed university lecturer involved with a younger woman, Bahar, a TV production designer played by his off-screen wife, Ebru Ceylan. On a summer holiday in Kas that disintegrates into nagging and sniping, the historical ruins they explore double as a metaphor for their own disintegrating relationship.

As the couple drift apart, Climates recalls Ceylan's formal style in Distant, with its long takes from fixed camera positions, precisely framed landscape compositions, measured pacing and pregnant pauses. Then, back in rainy Istanbul, after Isa meets another couple and turns up at the home of the woman in that other relationship, his teasing abruptly leads to what seems to be a violent rape while a thunderstorm rages outside.

Ceylan himself gamely immerses himself in the unsympathetic role of a man quite content to lie through his teeth to get the woman he wants, and his character suffers from - and is - a pain the neck. Ebru Ceylan has minimal dialogue, but her silences are as eloquent as her copious tears seem to be real in this accomplished low-key observational drama with a striking visual style.

THE FIRST OF the four US competition entries to be screened at Cannes this year, Richard Linklater's provocative Fast Food Nation, tackles a similar theme to that of the Morgan Spurlock documentary, Super Size Me, but in its all-out attack on the US fast-food industry, its range is much broader. Fast Food Nation is based on Eric Schlosser's non-fiction bestseller of the same name, which has been reshaped as a narrative feature film.

Its overlapping stories deal with people at different levels on the fast-food chain. Greg Kinnear plays a conscience-free marketing executive at the fictional franchise, Mickey's Burgers. When the company receives reports of bovine excrement in their burgers, he is sent to Cody, Colorado, "an all-American town", according to a welcoming billboard, and the headquarters of the largest meatpacking plant in the US.

Meanwhile, a group of illegal Mexican immigrants (among them a young couple played by Catalina Sandino Moreno and Wilmer Valderamma) make their way over the border and earn every cent they make working at the plant.

A third story focuses on a bright high-school student (Ashley Johnson) who works nights at a Mickey's outlet.

Ethan Hawke, Bobby Cannavale, Avril Lavigne, Kris Kristofferson and Bruce Willis all feature in this energetic and didactic picture, which pulls no punches in depicting the production of fast food as disgusting and dangerous. Cinema has never produced such a convincing argument for vegetarianism.

The challenge facing the distributors of Fast Food Nation is in reaching an audience that extends beyond the converted, a task that also applies to Davis Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth, a compelling filmed record of Al Gore's touring multimedia presentation on the causes and dangers of global warming. It was shown out of competition at Cannes on Saturday evening, with Gore in attendance.

His "slide show", as he calls it in an extreme example of understatement, employs a high-tech assembly of data, charts and graphics to drive home a series of pertinent points. Shaking off the stiffness associated with his image when he was US vice-president to Bill Clinton, Gore is relaxed and even witty as he persuasively and articulately delivers his timely wake-up call to the world, and the US in particular.

Paranoia is rampant in Bug, screened in the Directors Fortnight sidebar at Cannes and marking a return to form for director William Friedkin after a series of forgettable films, although it will not restore him to the status of his early 1970s heyday, when he made The French Connection and The Exorcist. Then again, Bug is much more modest than either of those movies in terms of scale and ambition, being based on an off-Broadway play with just five characters.

Even though most of the movie takes place in the same motel, it is to Friedkin's credit that his treatment of the material is so cinematic that it's hard to imagine it ever working as a play. Ashley Judd engagingly plays a bar worker traumatised by the disappearance of her young son years earlier and fearing the return from jail of her violent husband (a musclebound Harry Connick Jr).

A lesbian co-worker (Lynn Collins) introduces her to a shy drifter (impressive newcomer Michael Shannon), a Gulf War veteran who is steeped in conspiracy theories and becomes convinced that the motel room is infested with insects and that there are dastardly schemes at play. Playing a potentially sinister doctor, Irish actor Brian O'Byrne completes the cast of Friedkin's neat genre exercise, which goes wildly over the top, as it has to, for its delirious finale.

Michael Dwyer continues his Cannes reports in The Ticket on Friday