A handful of films stood out at Cannes, but not all of them were among the winners, writes Michael Dwyer in his concluding report from the festival.

The composition of the jury at the 58th Festival de Cannes prompted a great deal of speculation throughout the event, given that the jury president was the volatile, temperamental, Sarajevo-born director, Emir Kusturica, and the other eight members included director Agnes Varda, novelist Toni Morrison and actors Javier Bardem and Salma Hayek, none of them known to be a shrinking violet.

Of the 21 movies in competition, three had attracted a groundswell of positive critical reaction, and the surprise when Kusturica announced the awards at Saturday night's closing ceremony was that there were few surprises - those three critical favourites took the most important prizes.

Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne received the Palme d'Or for their chilling, socially concerned drama, L'Enfant (The Child), in which a feckless young thief decides to sell his baby son for adoption on the black market. The best film to date from the Dardenne brothers, it is infused with a dramatic tension that maintains its hold from beginning to end.

This was the second Palme d'Or for the Dardennes, following their victory in 1999 with the equally tough social drama, Rosetta. They now rank among an elite group who have won the prestigious award twice, the others being Francis Ford Coppola, Bille August, Shohei Imamura, and Kusturica himself.

The runner-up prize, the Grand Prix du Jury, was given to Jim Jarmusch, one of many Cannes regulars back in competition this year, for Broken Flowers, the only comedy in a selection dominated by downbeat themes. It features a droll, impassive Bill Murray as a confirmed bachelor revisiting women from his past when he learns he has a 19-year-old son.

Austrian director Michael Haneke took the best director award for Cache (Hidden), his thought-provoking French drama starring Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche as a married couple whose comfortable bourgeois existence is unsettled when they receive a series of videotapes in the post.

The most significant omission in Saturday's awards was David Cronenberg's gripping and challenging A History of Violence. Arguably the most accessible film of Cronenberg's career, and the subject of much critical admiration, it was perceived in some quarters as too commercial to take a prize at Cannes.

Winning a Palme d'Or does not often translate into box-office success, and over the past 15 years, Fahrenheit 9/11, Pulp Fiction and The Piano are among the few winners that went on to attract a substantial audience around the world.

When the jury met the media in Cannes for a post-mortem on Sunday afternoon, Kusturica expressed a view widely held by critics at Cannes when he said with typical frankness: "We had a selection where I think the average wasn't very high. But we had three or four movies that, whatever we had done, we would not be ashamed. I felt that most of the films were a little less good than I expected."

After a weak start, the standard rose significantly in the central stage of the festival, only to decline again over the closing weekend, when the most popular competition film was The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, which marks Tommy Lee Jones's directing debut for the cinema at the age of 58. It took two prizes from the Cannes jury: best actor to Jones himself, and best screenplay to Guillermo Arriaga, the Mexican writer whose earlier credits include 21 Grams and Amores Perros.

One of three modern Westerns in the Cannes competition, it features Jones as a west Texas ranch foreman exacting protracted revenge on the US border guard (Barry Pepper) who has killed an illegal Mexican immigrant named Melquiades Estrada. Pepper is put through the mill as Jones forces him to accompany the decaying corpse through the rugged landscape and over the border to the dead man's home town. This is a rambling, over-extended movie, but Jones wisely followed Neil Jordan's example on his cinema debut with Angel, by hiring the gifted Chris Menges as his lighting cameraman, and Menges produces a succession of striking wide-screen compositions that add immeasurably to the movie's atmosphere.

The most ambitious and satisfying reworking of a Western in the Cannes competition was Cronenberg's A History of Violence, in its acute transposition of a classic Western theme - a man struggles to put his violent past behind him - to a relevant contemporary context. By far the weakest of the modern Westerns on show was the self-conscious and irritatingly whimsical Don't Come Knocking, which reunites director Wim Wenders and screenwriter Sam Shepard, the team behind the 1984 Palme d'Or winner, the superb Paris, Texas.

Shepard doubles as leading actor on Don't Come Knocking, playing an actor, Howard Spence, who is celebrated for his cowboy roles and working on a Western in Monument Valley when he flees the set. The notion that an actor can have a career as a modern movie star while working mostly in Westerns is the first of the film's many implausible elements. The next comes when Spence impulsively pays a visit to his mother (Eva Marie Saint) after a 30-year absence, and another is her casual revelation that a former lover phoned all those years ago to say she had had a child by Spence.

Conveniently, that woman (played by Jessica Lange) just happens to be working in the same Montana bar where they first met and, in another neat coincidence, his son (Gabriel Mann) is right there singing on stage and sounding like Roy Orbison. The recurring sight of Sarah Polley wandering around and cradling an urn containing her mother's ashes suggests that Spence has another offspring by another ex-lover.

The most interesting coincidence raised by the film was that it screened in Cannes two days after Broken Flowers, in which Lange played one of the ex-lovers sought out by the Bill Murray character as the likely mother of the son he never knew he had.

There was another variation on this theme in James Marsh's handsome but disturbing Texas drama, The King, in which Gael Garcia Bernal plays Elvis, a 21-year-old former US navy recruit travelling to Corpus Christi to confront the father he has never met - an evangelist played with an admirable absence of caricature by William Hurt.

Elvis reveals his own thoroughly amoral nature when he courts his teenage stepsister (Pell James) and makes her pregnant, without telling her that they share the same father, and when he deals violently with her suspicious brother. The leading actors, and Bernal in particular, are so convincing that they paper over certain cracks in the screenplay.

Of the five Asian films in competition, the only one to take a prize - the minor Prix du Jury - was Chinese director Wang Xiaoshuai's Shanghai Dreams, a worthy but laboured picture of a family returning to Shanghai in 1983, having left there during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s.

Even more disappointing were Hong Sangsoo's meandering, repetitive and heavy-handed Seoul-set Tale of Cinema, and Hou Hsiao Hsien's visually striking but exceedingly slender Taiwanese picture, Three Times, featuring the same two actors in romantic stories, the first set in 1966, the next in 1911 and the last in 2005. Much of what happens is inconsequential and irrelevant, and so repetitive that the same songs are used twice in the opening segment.

One of those songs is Rain and Tears, performed by Demis Roussos when he was a member of Aphrodite's Child, and Roussos also turned up singing Nature Boy on the soundtrack of Peindre Ou Faire l'Amour (To Paint Or Make Love), the second feature from brothers Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu. Busy Daniel Auteuil plays a former meteorologist bored with his early retirement, and Sabine Azema is his wife, an amateur painter. When she meets the blind mayor (Sergi Lopez) of a small town and his uninhibited wife (Amira Casar), the two couples become close friends, so close that they switch partners. The consequences are trite, although the scenery is very nice.

It was odd to find such a forgettable French movie in competition at Cannes in a year when far superior French films were shown outside of competition - the excellent Joyeux Noel, of which I wrote last Friday and the subject of one of the biggest bidding battles among distributors at the festival, and Le Temps Qui Reste (The Time That Remains), the ninth feature film in eight years from the remarkably prolific and consistent 37-year-old writer-director, François Ozon.

At the centre of his new film is Melvil Poupaud's commendably committed portrayal of Romain, a gay, arrogant, cocaine-snorting fashion photographer who, at the age of 30, learns he has terminal cancer. Ozon firmly sidesteps the obvious sentimental pitfalls of this scenario, depicting Romain's many unappealing characteristics so unflinchingly that he keeps the viewer's sympathy at bay.

Nor does this inventively devised movie follow any predictable plotline, despite the inevitability of where it will end, and there are memorable digressions, as in a beautifully tender scene where Romain visits his grandmother (Jeanne Moreau) and when a waitress asks him to serve as a surrogate father.

One of the most exciting discoveries at Cannes this year was Kornel Mundruczo's Hungarian film, Johanna, shown in the Un Certain Regard sidebar. It opens with chaos, in the aftermath of a devastating traffic accident in Budapest, but this transpires to have been simulated as a training exercise for the staff of a hospital. One of the volunteers involved is Johanna (Orsi Toth), a young morphine addict who steals a fix from the hospital, overdoses and is near death when a doctor saves her.

Coming out of her coma, Johanna is a transformed woman who feels touched by divine grace. She becomes a nurse at the hospital, where she goes far beyond the call of duty, offering her body to the patients as sexual healing and causing more miracle cures than the protagonist of The Who's rock opera, Tommy.

Almost all of the dialogue is sung, too, in Johanna, an operatic reinterpretation of Carl Dreyer's 1928 masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc and quite possibly the first opera specifically composed for a feature film. Apart from the opening sequence, the film was shot within claustrophobic interiors and with a stark, stylised lighting scheme, which, when combined with a sung screenplay, prompted walkouts at its final Cannes screening on Saturday afternoon.

Those who stayed were rewarded with a work of daring and imagination, in which sex can be a cure and medicine an addiction, and Johanna is regarded as a witch doctor by the hospital staff and a saint by the patients. Toth is terrific in the title role, playing the most selfless and nobly suffering heroine in a movie since Emily Watson's dazzling screen debut as Bess McNeill in Lars von Trier's wrenching emotional drama, Breaking the Waves, which won the Grand Prix du Jury at Cannes nine years ago.