It only takes two or three films to bring a festival alive. They don't even have to be touched by greatness, just talking points that make everyone glad to be here. Cache set Cannes buzzing last year. The Brown Bunny managed it on an unforgettable scale in 2003.

This year, a respectable roll call of competition titles all come with caveats and equivocations. Volver is sublime but it is really Almodovar's best? The Kaurismaki is slight. The Moretti is delightful but more like three films than one. The Nuri Ceylan is intensely beautiful but does it truly measure up as a masterpiece? Andrea Arnold's Red Road is a bracing discovery but it has its detractors.

Ironically, the wow factor appears to be all that is missing in a year that hindsight may judge to have been better than average. Too many films have been guilty of trying to bite off more than they can chew.

Ambitious auteurs are generally to be encouraged but perhaps not when they are intent on delivering the definitive statement on the human condition, the sorry state of the world and the impending demise of the planet or all three if the film is by Richard Kelly. The sprawl of Southland Tales caused widespread indigestion and even the supposedly provocative Fast

Food Nation left most people asking where's the beef?

Away from the Competition titles there has been a succession of small scale discoveries from Wang Chao's beautifully subdued Franco-Chinese melodrama Luxury Car and the endearing portemanteau love letter Paris, Je T©öAime in Un Certain Regard to Jens Lien's surreal Norwegian fable The Bothersome Man in Critics Week and a particularly impressive number of Quinzaine entries including Stefan Krohmer's acutely handled Germany drama Summer 04, Bong Joon-ho's ridiculously entertaining creature feature The Host and Ray Lawrence's Jindabyne, a mature, poised Raymond Carver adaptation that could easily have featured in the main competition. Festival programmers and arthouse distributors should have left the Festival armed with spoils for the coming year.