I'm home from the Cannes Film Festival now, after nearly two weeks of great movies, interesting interviews, and lots of conversation with many very smart film folks over dinner, drinks at the La Petit Majestic, or lingering cups of cafe au lait at cutesy cafes. This was my first year at Cannes, and I think it's now my second favorite film festival (I don't think any fest will ever take first place over Telluride in my little film-geek heart).

Your first time at Cannes can be overwhelming; there's much to learn and assimilate, and you have to do it pretty quickly. I had to get by on my shockingly limited knowledge of the French language, since I took German in high school (hey, I hung with the punk crowd, and we weren't going to take French with all the preppies). Fortunately, I had James Rocchi there to guide me and act as my interpreter; he jokes about his French being poor, but I assure you, he does quite well.

Gallery: Cannes 2008 -- The Wrap-Up

Can a love story for the geriatric set be as engaging as an affair romp about sexy young people? It certainly can, at least in Andreas Dresen's brave, remarkable Wolke 9 (Cloud Nine), a tale about an older woman who has an affair and falls in love with an even older man. The film opens as Inge (Ursula Werner), a seamstress, delivers a pair of pants to Karl (Hosrt Westphal). He tries on the pants, she makes an adjustment, and next thing you know, the two of them are rolling around on the floor in the throes of torrid passion.

Inge returns to her husband, Werner (Horst Rehberg), and tries to slip back into her day-to-day existence, but she can't get Karl out of her head, nor can he just forget about her. As the two continue their affair, Inge struggles with her feelings of betraying her husband of 30 years, but can't let go of the joy she finds in her relationship with the charming and affable Karl.

In James Gray's Two Lovers, Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix) is torn between two women, each of whom is right for him, and wrong for him, in different ways. When we meet Leonard, he's jumping into the river in a suicide attempt; he changes his mind at the last minute, struggling to the surface and gasping for air.

It's a scene that tells us much of what we need to know about Leonard: This is a man torn between the desire to end the pain in his life, and the equally strong desire to fight against it. Leonard, we come to learn, was engaged to be married, but when he and his fiancee both tested positive for the gene that carries Tay-Sachs syndrome, her family called off the engagement and she disappeared. Leonard's mother, Ruth (Isabella Rossellini), hovers protectively over her only child, trying to help him move on, while at the same time clinging to him with a fierceness that may not be in his best interest.

Director Kelly Reichardt's much-anticipated follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2006 fest circuit hit, Old Joy, continues to show Reichardt's remarkable gift for classically simple, deeply engaging storytelling. Wendy and Lucy is the story of Wendy (Michelle Williams), a down-on-her-luck girl who's hoping to turn things around for herself with a summer job at a fishing cannery in Alaska.

Wendy's making the trek from Indiana to Alaska in her beat-up Honda, accompanied only by her dog, Lucy, and about $600 to make the entire trip. When her car breaks down in a small Oregon town, Wendy is forced to make a series of increasingly difficult choices, and to rely upon the kindness (or not) of strangers to resolve her plight.

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's film Three Monkeys, playing in competition at Cannes, uses the metaphor of the proverbial three monkeys (see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil) to explore ideas about errors of judgment that blow up into unexpected consequences. The film's opening shot is a man driving a lonely road at night. Half-asleep at the wheel, he runs over a pedestrian in the road. Shortly after, another car drives up, sees the body on the road, but drives on, pausing only to take the license number of the car that hit him.

The hit-and-run driver, as it turns out, is a politician in the midst of a re-election battle. He calls his driver, Eyup (Yavuz Bingol) and convinces him to take the fall for the accident, with the promise of a hefty payday after he finishes a nine-month stint in prison for his boss's crime.

During the roundtable interviews for Synecdoche, NY today, actor Tom Noonan, who plays one of the "wild things" in Spike Jonze's adaptation of Maurice Sendak's classic children's book, Where the Wild Things Are, chatted with us a bit about the film.

Noonan confirmed that the film was not shot using motion capture, but is "mostly live action -- they shot us (the actors) in a room, they video-taped us doing the parts, and then they trained acrobats and dancers and had them imitate our gestures, then put them in the costumes and had our voices coming out."

Sergey Dvortsevoy's Tulpan won the Un Certain Regard category at the Cannes Film Festival tonight, with Tokyo Sonata taking the Jury Prize. Well, darn ... it figures that one of the few films we didn't manage to catch at the fest ended up winning the category.

The film is a Kahzakstanian tale of a young man who must marry before he can become a shepherd, but the only prospect he has is Tulpan, the daughter of another shepherding family, who doesn't like him because his ears are too big.

Adoration, the newest film by critically acclaimed filmmaker Atom Egoyan, is a beautifully evocative film, though some may find its convoluted storyline distracting. In many respects, the film very much evokes one of my favorite films, The Sweet Hereafter, Egoyan's 1997 Palme d'Or and Oscar nominee*. Where The Sweet Hereafter dealt with the impact of guilt and grief in a small community following a tragic school bus accident, in Adoration Egoyan deals with grief and loss on a more personal level, while also blending in ideas about the subjective nature of reality and identity in a technological age. In a world where who we are can be invented, reinvented, and broadcast to the world via chat rooms and virtual reality avatars, can we ever really know another person -- or even ourselves?

Early this morning, Charlie Kaufman's newest film, Synecdoche, NY, screened for press, and man, is that film two hours of mental-mindf*ck. I'm not the only critic here wishing the fest had screened this film last week; everyone is way too fried at this point to really sink their teeth into a film requiring this level of intellectual attention, and most of the folks I talked to after the screening felt they really need to see it at least once more to really wrap their minds around it.

Gallery: Cannes in Photos: Synecdoche, NY Press Conference

I'll have a full review up of Kelly Reichardt's new film, Wendy and Lucy, up later, but a quick note on tonight's screening of the film. Reichardt made 2006's critically acclaimed Old Joy, and Wendy and Lucy was one of the films I was most looking forward to checking out here at Cannes.

The big movies are great, but the joy of seeing a smaller film like this at a fest like Cannes is one of the best parts of attending this festival. All I'll say for now is that I liked Wendy and Lucy even better than Old Joy, and Michelle Williams's performance (which is pretty much the entire film) is great.

Williams, looking absolutely lovely in a lacy gold dress, showed up briefly in the Salle Debussy theater with the cast and crew to wave at the crowd from the stage. Audience response to the film was positive, though I didn't really expect any boos with that much of the cast, and particularly Williams herself, in attendance.

I don't believe she stayed for the screening, though -- the pic above was taken on the red carpet for the premiere of Adoration, which was screening tonight next door at the Lumiere (with Cinematical's James Rocchi covering the red carpet for IFC), so I expect she quietly slipped out when the lights went down to attend that.

Upcoming: Review of Atom Egoyan's Adoration; tomorrow is the screening of Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, NY, and the Sony Pictures Classic lunch/roundtable for Adoration, followed by Wim Wenders's The Palermo Shooting.