While this seems unlikely to be a vintage year at Cannes, a number of promising movies yet to be screened may revise that impression

AS THE 61st Festival de Cannes reaches the halfway point today, the standard of films selected to compete for the Palme d'Or has been as variable as the unseasonal weather, with sunshine one day and rain the next. There have been thoroughly satisfying movies, and some long-winded efforts that may be returned to the cutting room before being allowed on release. And there has been an unusual lack of critical consensus in the lively impromptu post-screening discussions at Cannes, with every film having its supporters and detractors.

While this seems unlikely to be a vintage year for Cannes, that impression may well be revised after we get to see many promising selections yet to be screened, among them Clint Eastwood's Changeling, Steven Soderbergh's two-part epic Chewith Benicio Del Toro as Guevara, Atom Egoyan's Adoration, Philippe Garrel's La Frontière de l'Aube, and Paolo Sorrentino's Il Divo- which is not about the crossover quartet of pop/opera singers of that name, but former Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti.

The quality threshold at Cannes was raised significantly over the past few days by the Turkish entry, Three Monkeys, and the other Italian film in competition, Gomorra. Turkish writer-director Nuri Bilge Ceylan has built his reputation at Cannes in recent years with Usak (Distant)and Climates, and he makes a remarkable advance on both with the riveting moral drama that is Three Monkeys.

It begins by night when a man falls asleep at the wheel and causes a hit-and-run accident. The number of his car is reported to the police. The culprit is Servet (Ercan Kesel), a shifty, sweaty politician facing into a general election. He bribes his driver Eyup (Yavuz Bingol) to take the rap for him. While Eyup serves nine months in prison, his son Ismail (Ahmet Rifar Sungar) has yet again failed his university entrance exam and his mother Hacer (Hatice Aslan) disapproves of the company he keeps.

THE TITLE REFERS to seeing, hearing and speaking no evil, all of which becomes increasingly more difficult for the four key characters as their relationships become more complicated than they ever intended or could have imagined. The dilemma that triggers the drama builds to another even more complex predicament Three Monkeysbecomes all the more deeply intriguing, not least because of Ceylan's practice of selectively releasing information and keeping key events off-screen. There are ample clues along the way, as matters that seem merely incidental take on greater significance while the plot thickens. Ceylan's striking visual style has never been more effective, and his heightened use of sound effects amplifies the tense atmosphere in this finely acted contemporary film noir that builds to a jolting conclusion.

The title of Gomorraalludes to the latter half of Sodom and Gomorrah and doubles as word play on the Camorra, the notorious Neapolitan equivalent of the Mafia, who have been responsible for more murders - over 4,000 - in the past 30 years than any criminal or terrorist group. That claim is made in the film's basis, a best-selling book by Roberto Saviano, who has been under police protection since it was published in 2006.

Collaborating with a team of writers that included Saviano, director Matteo Garrone ambitiously - and adroitly - populates his picture with multiple characters whose fates become interlinked. They include a 13-year-old boy (Salvatore Abruzzese) who eagerly organises his initiation into the local Camorra gang, after which he is told, "Now you're a man." Two older teens (Marco Macor and Ciro Petrone), first seen acting out scenes from Brian De Palma's Scarface, foolishly imagine they can set up a criminal empire of their own. At the other end of this vastly lucrative chain are a master tailor (Salvatore Cantalupo) training sweatshop workers to fake designer clothing, and an unscrupulous operator (the excellent Toni Servillo) in the illegal disposal of toxic waste.

There is, inevitably, dishonour among thieves, and every gang killing prompts another in reprisal. Garrone's film is tough, edgy and violent, pulsating with energy and presenting a view of areas in Naples that is more disturbing than all we have heard about certain parts of Dublin and Limerick, for example. Even more unsettling is all the information in the closing credits detailing how the Camorra are getting away with it, in illegal activities at home and abroad.

Four years after Brazilian director Walter Salles was in competition at Cannes with The Motorcycle Diaries, he returned at the weekend with the clearly socially concerned but disappointingly heavy-handed Linha de Passe, which he co-directed with Daniela Thomas. The title is a Brazilian football term for passing the ball without letting it touch the ground.

It features mostly non-professional actors in its picture of the hard lives of a poor family, single mother Clueza (Sandra Corveloni) and her four teenaged sons, in present-day Sao Paolo. She is pregnant again and threatened with losing her job as housekeeper to a well-off doctor, even though, martyr-like, Clueza risks her life cleaning the doctor's windows many storeys above the ground. There are no father figures in this family, even though at least two men have played a part in their existence.

Clueza's sons are a motorcycle courier, already a father himself but unable to support his child; a petrol station attendant excessively jibed for his involvement with an evangelical movement; an aspirant soccer star who discovers that scouts have to be bribed if he is to progress; and the youngest, aware from his darker skin that he has a different father, whom he is obsessed with finding. All he knows is that he's a bus driver in a city of 20 million people.

The movie is glaringly obvious in scenes such as one where that boy gets a demonstration of driving a bus. We know it's only a matter of time before he steals a bus, as he does, unconvincingly driving it with uncommon skill.

That's one of the implausible contrivances in a worthy film that's expertly photographed in its action sequences, but crucially lacking the emotional engagement Ken Loach would have brought to its scenario.

THE NADIR IN the competition has been 24 City, the new film from Chinese director Jia Zhang-Ke, whose growing status as a significant auteur remains baffling to me, for one. He inexplicably won the Golden Lion at the 2006 Venice festival with Still Life, a dramatic film on the dislocation of people who had to move home when a Sichuan city was flooded for a huge hydroelectric project.

The theme is not dissimilar in Jia's new film, which is even more ponderous and more dubious in its blurring of documentary and fictional cinema, as it addresses the closure of a state-owned factory after 50 years of servicing the Chinese military and air force, to make way for a luxury apartments complex known as 24 City. The film awkwardly blends interviews with five people who worked at the factory, and fictional monologues from three women played by actresses. One is set in a theatre where the interviewee reminisces while, for no apparent reason, two men are playing tennis on the stage.

Another is on a moving bus where the only visible passenger explains that she's retired, but does some sewing from home to supplement her pension. When the unseen interviewer asks what work she does, she repeats that it is sewing and that he must have seen the sign indicating that when he visited her.

So it goes in a film that is deeply self-indulgent and so boring that watching paint dry just might be exciting by comparison. It has its ardent admirers, though, but I doubt - and hope - they will not include this year's Cannes jury chaired by Sean Penn.

Michael Dwyer continues his Cannes 2008 reports inThe Ticket on Friday.

Woody's back . . . with his 40th film in 40 years
A NEW WOODY Allen movie has become as regular a fixture in the calendar as Christmas. Now 72, he has written and directed a film for each of the past 40 years, and acted in most of them. Anyone producing such a prolific output is entitled to lapses along the way, and these have become more frequent for Allen, so much so that some of his recent films ( Hollywood Ending, Anything Else, Scoop) failed to get a cinema release in Ireland and Britain.

Resilient as ever, Allen bounces back yet again with his latest picture, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which had its world premiere in Cannes at the weekend, shown out of competition in keeping with his avowed avoidance of awards ceremonies. It doesn't belong in the pantheon of Allen's outstanding work, but it provided welcome humour and cheer at a festival heavy on downbeat treatments of weighty themes.

The premise is simplicity itself. Two young Americans, Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) spend a summer in Barcelona as guests of Vicky's relatives (Patricia Clarkson and Kevin Dunn). Engaged to be married to a corporate type (Doug Messina) in New York, Vicky is practical and level-headed, or so she thinks. Cristina, who has squandered 12 months making and acting in a 12-minute movie "on why love is so hard to define", is more open to adventure.

That opportunity arises within days, when a seductive Spanish painter (Javier Bardem) responds to Cristina's eye contact, and within minutes of meeting them, suggests a threesome in the Asturian town of Oviedo. He, however, has not recovered from the traumatic break-up of his marriage to the fiery, volatile Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz).

What follows is an enjoyable souffle - or more appropriately in the context, a tapas menu - compared to Allen's deeper, introspective serious comedies. It is light, breezy and sunny, and peppered with witty one-liners. The cast sparkles, in particular Hall and the deadpan Bardem, as Allen, after all his many valentines to Manhattan, pays heartfelt homage to Catalonia.