Daniele (Romanzo Criminale) Luchetti's My Brother's An Only Child is a wittily observed story of family conflict between two brothers - one on the far left, the other a neo-fascist - set in small-town Italy in the 1960s.

Love Songs is an off-beat musical evocative of Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, in which all the emotions are voiced in song. Catherine Breillat's provocative costume drama An Old Mistress is set in the same period as Dangerous Liaisons. Denys Arcand's satirical assault of consumerism, The Age of Darkness, is a follow-up to The Barbarian Invasions.

Other notables include Nicolas (�tre et Avoir) Philibert's documentary Return to Normandy, veteran Italian director Ermanno Olmi's parable 100 Nails, which he claims is is last movie, and Chacun son Cin�ma, a homage to the 60th anniversary of the Cannes festival in which 35 directors contribute threeminute vignettes about the movie-going experience - a rare compilation movie that ranges from the good to the inspired, with hardly a dud.

Cannes juries, of course, are notorious for preferring the unknown or the obscure to the more obviously appealing. With quite a few outstanding movies in the official selection for this year's 60th anniversary festival, there were no real shocks. Cristian Mungui's compelling $800,000 abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days, following a day in the life of two girls in Romania in the last days of Communism, was a deserving winner of the Palme D'Or.

Another favourite of mine, The Diving Bell And The Butterfly, a true story of a French journalist who suffers a stroke and communicates by blinking one eyelid, won New York painter Julian Schnabel the best director prize, while The Edge of Heaven, the second part of German/Turkish director Fatih Akin's powerful immigrant trilogy Love, Death and the Devil, took the screen-writing prize.

There was no prize left for Gus Van Sant's wonderfully perceptive Paranoid Park, dealing with the nightmare of a young skateboarder who accidentally kills a security guard, so the jury chaired by Stephen Frears awarded him a special 60th anniversary prize. Persepolis, based on director Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical graphic novel about an outspoken Iranian girl during the Islamic Revolution, shared the Jury prize with Carlos Reygadas's stunningly visual Silent Night, while the Grand Jury prize went to the Japanese director Naomi Kawase for Magari No Mori, the story of a social worker who becomes involved with a senile man with a troubled past.

My only disagreement was over the acting awards to Konstantin Lavronenko for The Banishment and to Do-yeon Jeon for Lee Chang Dong's Secret Sunshine, arguably the two most self-indulgent and pretentious movies in competition. Although Joel and Ethan Coen's contemporary western No Country For Old Men won nothing despite being a critical and popular success - it will likely become a huge hit on its release at the end of this year.