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ELSEWHERE AT CANNES, the standing-ovation moment for true cinéastes was a live appearance by Michelangelo Antonioni, who at 91 is mostly paralyzed and unable to speak. With his 40ish wife holding his trembling arm, the director of L’avventura (1960), L’eclisse (1962), and other greats hobbled to a theater seat to the sentimental sound of monumental applause. He was there to see a newly restored print of his British-made classic, Blow-Up (1966), along with the world premiere of a brand new 15-minute work, "Lo sguardo di Michelangelo." This solemn, touching, black-and-white film arranges an encounter of the two Michelangelos. Antonioni, on camera, enters a Roman church, San Pietro in Vincoli, and contemplates the statues above him, an imposing funeral monument by the first Michelangelo with a titan-like Moses as its centerpiece.

There were more prime treats for cinéastes, including a Q&A with the legendary French filmmaker Philippe Garrel, who never travels to the USA. And a real crowd pleaser: a brand new version of filmmaker Sam Fuller’s World War II movie The Big Red One, with 59 jam-packed minutes that were cut out by the studio for the 1980 release. What had been seen the first time as a so-so picture with some arresting scenes now is a major epic, an important Hollywood film tracing one gritty Army unit as it battles its way across Europe, from Italy to Normandy Beach to Czechoslovakia, where it liberates a concentration camp. It wasn’t only film critics who came out for this one. In France, the late Worcester-born cult filmmaker (Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss) is well known to the public. In the USA, only cinema specialists have heard of him.

A QUICK ROLL CALL of some of the 40 to 50 new films I saw this year at Cannes:

Notre musique/Our Music. Jean-Luc Godard’s cinema essay is, for me, his best film in years. The first section ("Hell") is a digitized, weirdly colored collage of scenes of violence and horror from unidentified genre movies. The second ("Purgatory") involves a literary meeting in Sarajevo, the participants including Godard and also a distressed young Jewish woman trying to understand Israelis and Palestinians through the shaky reconciliation after the Bosnian-Serbian War. The third ("Heaven") offers an ironic paradise guarded over by American Marines. The movie is typically elegiac and sometimes inscrutable, but, what’s not always true of Godard, it has tenderness and heart.

La niña santa/The Holy Girl. Argentine director Lucrecia Martel’s follow-up to the heralded La ciénaga (2001) is a byzantine, Buñuelian story of an underage girl chasing after a doctor who has rubbed his crotch against her bottom in a crowd, never expecting she would acknowledge him. Also, he’s being romantically pursued by her mother. And he’s married with children.

Tarnation. My favorite American film at Cannes was Jonathan Caouette’s movie autobiography of his impossibly crazy life as a gay Southern street child in and out of mental institutions and of his beyond-the-Friedmans fruitcake family. It’s Tennessee Williams melodrama on an $218 production budget.

Moolaade. The renowned 82-year-old Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene returns to the cinema with a powerful, necessary tale of women in a rural town uniting to stop the genital mutilation of young girls. May this fictional movie be seen widely in every relevant country, for it can change lives.

House of Flying Daggers. Zhang Yimou’s entry into the sword-and-sorcery genre, with a Chinese princess being chased by hordes, and more hordes, of corrupt government troops. Ingenious battles and fabulous scenery, though it’s not nearly as moving as the film it aspires to match, Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

La mala educación/Bad Education. Pedro Almodóvar’s semi-autobiographical intrigue about gay doings at a boys’ Catholic School, and the aftermath in adulthood. One lad has become a famous film director, the other a ravished, heroin-shooting transvestite. Also, there’s a pedophiliac priest. The story is Vertigo-like, but it has so many cross-dressing twists, it becomes tiresome.

Diarios de motocicleta/The Motorcycle Diaries. This Sundance 2004 favorite is a shallow, feel-good, pseudo-Marxist fable about the early days of Che Guevara in Argentina, before he became a Castroite revolutionary. Directed by Walter (Central do Brasil) Salles, who’s among the very richest men in Brazil, it’s a fraudulent "for the people" movie with stereotyped noble peasants and, even worse, a noble leper colony. Unfortunately, it will be a middlebrow superhit, this year’s Shine or La vita è bella/Life Is Beautiful.