Our roving reporter James Mottram has now fully recovered from the sun, sea and screenings of Cannes 2009, and here's his exclusive insider report on the films that set the festival alight. Watch out for them coming your way soon...

In the end, jury president Isabelle Huppert bestowed the festival’s top prize on another Cannes regular, Michael Haneke. A filmmaker yet to claim his first Palme d’Or, Haneke has edged his way towards the honour across the years. The Piano Teacher (2001), which won Huppert Best Actress in Cannes, took the Grand Jury Prize. The masterful Hidden (2005) took Best Director. While Huppert was always going to risk accusations of favouritism for giving a former collaborator the main award, few would disagree with the choice.

An examination of a Protestant village in northern Germany on the eve of World War I, The White Ribbon felt like a film Haneke has been working towards his whole career. As so often in his work, in everything from Funny Games (1997) and its US remake, to Benny’s Video, violence is the topic. In this case, a strange series of increasingly grim events start to puzzle the inhabitants. As a doctor is felled from his horse by a trip-wire. A barn is set on fire. A young boy is abducted, strung up and beaten. Worse is to follow.

Shot in crisp black-and-white, and narrated with solemnity by Ernst Jacobi, the film is an austere examination of the German character in the time before enormous social and political upheaval. If, as it seems, the village at the core of the film is a microcosm for Germany at the time, then it seems Haneke is probing just what contributed to the rise of National Socialism and the ultimate support of Adolf Hitler. With layers of meaning left open to interpretation, The White Ribbon represents Haneke’s finest achievement to date. It’s reward of the Palme d’Or was nothing less than it deserved.

By the time Haneke’s film played on the second Wednesday of the festival, there had been a rich tapestry of offerings – from Jacques Audiard’s prison drama A Prophet (which took the second place Grand Jury prize) to Ken Loach’s crowd-pleasing Looking For Eric (due out here in June) to Ang Lee’s gentle hippie comedy Taking Woodstock. Typically, however, three directors shared the limelight when it came to controversial offerings: Quentin Tarantino’s WWII fairy-tale Inglourious Basterds, Gaspar Noé’s Enter The Void and Lars von Trier’s Antichrist.

No question, the most talked about film of the festival was by Danish provocateur Von Trier. No stranger to controversy, he didn’t disappoint with this Gothic psychological horror. Aptly unveiled on the middle Sunday of the festival, Antichrist caused a storm, eliciting a chorus of boos at the screening. As a blood-covered fox tells star Willem Dafoe – in one of the film’s more bizarre moments – "chaos reigns", a sentiment echoed when the subsequent press conference saw one journalist from the Daily Mail rage at Von Trier, telling him to justify his film.

"I don’t think I have to justify it," Von Trier replied. "I cannot justify myself. I make films, and I enjoy making them very much. I don’t have very much to say. I think it’s a very strange question that I have to excuse myself. I don’t feel that. You are all my guests. It’s not the other way around. That’s how I feel. I work for myself and I do this little film that I’m now kind of fond of. And I haven’t done it for you, or for an audience. So I don’t think I owe anybody an explanation."

Signing off with the phrase "I am the best film director in the world", it caused the aforementioned journalist to storm out of the conference. Either way, Antichrist – which, Von Trier maintains, came after he suffered from a period of depression – was full of talking points. Primarily, it’s a two-hander between Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, who wound up winning Best Actress for the film – another brave decision from the jury but quite right, given the courage of her performance.

The story shows what happens when Dafoe and Gainsbourg retreat to a cabin in the woods, following the death of their young child (shown in the bravura black-and-white opening sequence). What follows is not for the feint-hearted: torture, self-mutilation and more besides. Whatever you think of the dubious moral tightrope that Von Trier treads, the film is a technical masterpiece. Returning to the stylised works of his early career, such as Element of Crime (1984) and Europa (1991), it’s a welcome departure from his dour post-Dogma films, like Dogville (2003) and Manderlay (2006).

Certainly Antichrist was arguably the most outrageous film to hit the Croisette since Gaspar Noé arrived in Cannes was 2002 with Irréversible. While that featured the brutal rape of Monica Bellucci, his latest film Enter the Void felt like a full-on extension of that. Graphic penetrative sex, drug use, murder and rape, this Tokyo-set story of a drug-dealer and his stripper sister was a no-holds barred experience that undoubtedly will never make it to these shores in its completed form. Still, that’s probably a good thing; at 165 minutes, the film is wildly indulgent.

To be fair, the first hour is masterful. Billed as a "psychedelic melodrama" by Noé, as the low-level dealer Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) indulges in the drug DMT, the director delivers one of the best trip sequences since Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. But as Oscar is killed in a police raid, we begin to see everything from his spirit’s ‘overhead’ perspective. An increasingly tiresome conceit, as the ethereal character watches his sister deal with the fallout around his death, the film concludes with another sure-to-be-talked about moment – as a giant phallus is seen from the interior of a vagina, before ejaculating onto the screen. As we follow the sperm to watch the conception of a child, the phrase ‘Pretentious – moi?’ sprang to mind.

The biggest surprise about Inglourious Basterds was how tame it was. Like Enter The Void, running at 150 minutes, it was anything but nippy – and, rather like Tarantino’s last film Death Proof, needed some judicious editing. But nobody says ‘no’ to Quentin, it seems. Strangely, though, for a film about a group of Nazi-hunting Jewish-Americans – the Basterds of the title – Tarantino kept the violence in check. Sure, there’s a gruesome baseball scene here, some scalping there. But despite the Sergio Leone-inspired style – the prologue says ‘Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France’ – it found Tarantino in relatively restrained mood.

Like Von Trier’s Antichrist, the story is divided into chapters. It begins as a young Jewish woman, Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), witnesses the slaughter of her family and narrowly escapes death at the hands of Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), a ruthless SS Colonel known to all as ‘The Jew Hunter’. Loosely inspired by Enzo G. Castellari’s 1978 Italian effort The Inglorious Bastards, this so-called wartime spaghetti western is a highly uneven work that testifies to the fact that Tarantino has worked (and re-worked) the script for years.

In truth, Inglourious Basterds lives up to its ensemble nature. Enjoyable cameos (Mike Myers’ British officer) nestle next to pointless characters (Michael Fassbender’s fellow Brit). As the Basterds and Shosanna both separately plot to bring down Landa, Brad Pitt – who plays Lt. Aldo Raine, the leader of the Basterds – is completely outshone by relative unknown Waltz. Acting his part with verve in Italian, French, German and English, Waltz was the undoubted highlight of a very mixed bag. Again, credit to the jury, who awarded him Best Actor

Watch Inglorious Basterds Clips

Waltz aside, what was so pleasing about this year’s Cannes were the other new discoveries. British director Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank – which shared the Jury Prize with Park Chan-wook’s stylish but overlong vampire movie Thirst – introduced us to Essex first-time actress Katie Jarvis. Discovered on the platform at Tilbury railway station, not far from where the film was shot, while having an argument with her boyfriend, Jarvis gives a stunning performance as the sulky Mia, a 15 year-old living on a rough council estate with her mother Joanne (Kierston Wareing) and young sister.

A coming-of-age tale, sensitively yet viscerally crafted, Fish Tank confirms the promise Arnold showed on her 2006 debut film Red Road. But it was Jarvis who walked away with the acting plaudits, even outshining co-star Michael Fassbender (who made such an impact last year in Cannes with Hunger) who plays Joanne’s roguish boyfriend. Adding even more fuel to the fire was the fact that Jarvis, now 17, could not attend the festival because she just gave birth to a baby. Should she decide to carry on acting, her future looks bright.

The other great discovery was Alden Ehrenreich, the star of Francis Ford Coppola’s new film, Tetro, which opened the Director’s Fortnight strand of the festival. Now 19, Ehrenreich was actually first discovered by Steven Spielberg, when he met him at a Bar Mitzvah years ago. But it was Coppola who took a chance on him, casting him as a young cruise ship waiter who pitches up in Buenos Aires to find his estranged older brother (played by Vincent Gallo, back in Cannes after leaving with his tail between his legs, following the disastrous reception of his 2003 film The Brown Bunny).

Looking like a young Leonardo DiCaprio, Ehrenreich is quite marvellous as the naïve Benjamin, who grows in confidence as the film goes on. Shot in glorious black-and-white, it’s arguably the most personal, intimate film of Coppola’s long career. It’s also self-indulgent, bordering on pretentious, but there’s true artistic vision here. Returning to themes of family he famously explored in The Godfather, it’s warmly written by Coppola in what is his first original screenplay since The Conversation. Like this year’s festival as a whole, it was an unexpectedly pleasant surprise.

James Mottram