{niftybox background=#8FBC8F, width=365px} Every day of the festival, the critics found something to sink their teeth into. Beloved at this festival, the Coen brothers, who presided over the jury, can do no wrong; yet there was disappointment, even among the French contingent, when the Palm was awarded to Jacques Audiard's Dheepan, a story of desperate Sri Lankans who have to pretend to be a family in order to flee their country. {/niftybox}

When they finally make it to a suburban slum outside Paris where the Tamil Tiger fighter "father" finds a job as a janitor, they discover that life in France is no better than the turmoil they have fled; they have landed in another war zone. Audiard's characters are archetypes: the suffering "wife," the "daughter" who does well at school, and the Tamil hero, played by Jesuthasan Antonythasana, who wins out against the forces that oppress his newly created "family."

{niftybox background=#8FBC8F, width=365px}After the Palm was announced, the press ran stories detailing how, at the ultimate moment of voting, Frémaux had given some extra words of advice to the jury, to the effect of "follow your heart, not your head."{/niftybox}

Both Audiard's film and Hungarian László Nemes's Son of Saul, a first film, are about families that are fictional but symbolic. The jury awarded Son of Saul the Grand Prix, but could have shown true courage by awarding the Palm to this film that takes viewers someplace they don't want to go without any timely political statement. Nemes's debut was the shock of the competition: it's a story set in the bowels of Auschwitz-Birkenau in October 1944 when the German guards couldn't burn bodies fast enough.

Armed with a steadicam, Nemes takes the audience to the lower depths of the camp where the Sonderkommando is preparing a rebellion. In the chaos and din, Saul, played by Géza Röhrig, spots the corpse of a boy he instantly claims is his son. It's as if he had stumbled upon something precious in the darkest place on earth, and a piece of humanity in himself. He searches for a rabbi to say Kaddish over the boy and his fevered search, his obsession, takes over the film.

{niftybox background=#8FBC8F, width=365px}Critics emerged from the press screening stunned by the power of Son of Saul. That doesn't mean they loved it or agreed with the filmmaker's premise; they were hit hard. Overnight, there was news that Claude Lanzmann had given his blessing to Son of Saul and that the prestige distributor Sony Classics had bought it.{/niftybox}

Surely the most ravishing film in the competition was Taiwanese Hsiao-Hsien Hou's (we usually say Hou Hsiao Hsien and Shu Qi) The Assassin (he won Best Director), shot among silver birches and lakes with Qi Shu as the ninth-century woman warrior sent out in the world to kill corrupt politicians. A master of long takes and mysterious spaces, Hou has made a marvelous film—you never know where you are, or even quite grasp what is happening, and it doesn't matter at all. Afterwards, I thought of his earlier films with their mysterious maze of interiors; here, again, every moment is a wonder.

The jury awarded Vincent Lindon Best Actor for his performance in Stéphane Brizé's La loi du marché. ("The Measure of a Man"). Lindon is superb as a laid-off worker trying to get a foot back on the ladder. It was good to see the actor, who tends to overexert himself, play this role with restraint. Brizé's film is a fine one; it's about humiliation in today's dog-eat-dog work market. As Brecht put it in The Threepenny Opera, "What Keeps a Man Alive? He lives on others!"

Though a great year for France, this was not a good year for Italy. Neither Nanni Moretti's Mia Madre nor Matteo Garrone's Il Racconto, nor Paolo Sorrentino's Youth, won favor with the jury. Garrone's fable, overpopulated with witches, monsters, and weird sisters, looked like the kind of feast of special effects and make-up that leads to indigestion.

Moretti's Mia Madre, about a director played by Margherita Buy, trying to finish a film as her mother is dying, is one of his finest. John Turturro plays a marvelous nutty visiting star who can do just about everything except remember his lines. It is a film for our times, about children well past middle-age—with Moretti as the son—letting go of their mother.

As for Sorrentino, his films look terrific—who can resist Roman rooftops and Alpine retreats?—but feel over the top. In Youth, a kind of 8½, Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel play old lions boring themselves to death at a magnificent mountain spa.

Hirozaku Kore-Eda's Our Little Sister (Umimachi Diary), starring Haruka Ayase, Masami Nagasawa, Kaho, and Suzu Hirose, was just such a film for me. Adapted from Akimi Yoshida's graphic novel Umimachi Diary, three sisters living together in a big house travel to their father's funeral, where they meet for the first time a young half-sister and take her back to live with them. She affects them deeply and makes them aware of the loneliness of their lives, orphans all. This delicate story of simple lives set among the cherry trees has a whiff of Chekhov, with a kind of mourning beauty. It's a subtle film that may lack the brio of Kore-Eda's Like Father, Like Son (2013), his popular last work, but which takes us to the heart of a family without cynicism. It is a film that perhaps seemed too simple because it is about humble lives, but it is alive.

For some inexplicable reason, the Jury Prize went to The Lobster, a kind of satiric moral tale by Yorgos Lanthimos about a Brave New World that has a strict set of rules for human behavior; people must couple, all loners will be punished. I enjoyed the first part when the hero, played by Colin Farrell, accompanied by his faithful border collie, is admitted to a chic hotel and learns the rules: he has to find a mate fast or he will be turned into the animal of his choice.

{niftybox background=#8FBC8F, width=365px}I liked the movie less when his dog is done in and turns out to have been his brother. In a long second act, he takes to the woods to meet Léa Seydoux, a kind of refusenik girl guide, but by then, I had lost my bearings and was happy to hide in the woods and take a little nap.{/niftybox}

Alas, there were similar misadventures in the woods in Gus Van Sant's TheSea of Trees, with Matthew McConaughey and Naomi Watts as a dysfunctional couple for whom you can muster little sympathy. When she dies, he takes a voyage to the foot of Mount Fuji to find peace or redemption, or whatever, in a forest known as the Sea of Trees. One esteemed French critic claimed that, for him, this film evoked the visceral experience of Dante's Inferno. France's great Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu, who first met on screen in Bertrand Blier's Les Valseuses (Going Places, 1974), were reunited in Guillaume Nicloux's Valley of Love. The story concerns divorced parents who meet up in a motel in the Valley of Death at the bidding of their dead son, who has left a letter with instructions. Huppert exhibits once again what a fine actress she is, Depardieu exhibits his belly; one knows there is much more to him, but he is not given the room to show it. They have a couple of moving moments, but the rendezvous is a sad occasion for all—including, alas, the audience.

To top off this fortnight of hard-hitting drama, the competition came to a close with Justin Kurzel's Macbeth, a movie that looked and sounded monochrome and monotone, shot in the rusty hue of dried blood with a soundtrack full of swords whooshing and clashing in the wind. No doubt the director wanted to make Macbeth his own, as an action movie that takes place on the battlefield. The camera focused sometimes on Michael Fassbender, who can do no wrong, and sometimes on Marion Cotillard, looking like a widow in an Iranian film and speaking an arid English that sounded like a foreign language. I prefer my Macbeth in black and white with Orson Welles and the weird sisters. But in all fairness, at this ultimate moment of the competition, even critics had perhaps had enough sound and fury and were starting to shut down.

{niftybox background=#8FBC8F, width=365px}Every evening, once the festival has hit its stride, a cry rises from the Salle Debussy where the press screenings take place. It comes at a moment when the films seem to be talking to each other, speaking the same language, and excitement rises to a pitch: maybe this evening's film is going to be the one everybody's been waiting for. Just then, somebody will shout, "Raoul," like a call of the wild. And then, an echoing cry may sound, "RAOUUUUL!" to applause. Perhaps this cry signals solidarity, or hope being expressed for the film about to be shown? It may also be wailed in reaction to a surfeit of disappointing movies. When I asked an old-timer about the origin of "Raoul," he said he thought it was in tribute to the days when the audience called upon Raoul Coutard, the great director of photography for Godard and Truffaut. "If a film appeared out of focus they called on Raoul to fix it. At least I think that's what happened," he added, "but I do know that 'Raoul' is only shouted during the press screenings and only in the Salle Debussy, never in the Palais."{/niftybox}