A film with a cast of inexperienced actors emerged to win the coveted Palme d'Or, providing a touch of magic at the end of the 61st Festival de Cannes

THE TRADITION BEFORE gala screenings in Cannes is for the film's director to lead the key cast members - rarely more than five or six - up the red carpet to be welcomed by festival director Thierry Frémaux and president Gilles Jacob. At the world premiere of The Class (Entre les Murs)on Saturday, director Laurent Cantet and principal player François Bégaudeau brought an entourage of the 25 teen actors from the film.

It was the last of the competition films to be screened at Cannes this year, and as the closing credits rolled, the 2,000-strong audience rose to their feet to give the director and his cast a sustained standing ovation. Just over 24 hours later, Cantet brought them all back on stage when he was given the coveted Palme d'Or.

The last time a French film won that prize was in 1987, when it was presented to director Maurice Pialat for Under Satan's Son. As Pialat came on stage, the predominantly French audience booed him. He responded by raising his fist and declaring, "I don't like you either." In sharp contrast, joy was unconfined in the Festival Palais on Sunday night when jury president Sean Penn announced that the unanimous decision was to award the Palme d'Or to "an amazing, amazing film", The Class. The excitement of the young cast, none of whom had any previous acting experience, was palpable - and infectious.

Substantially improvised through a workshop process, this fine film follows a year in the lives of a teacher and his class of 14-year-old pupils at a Paris school. As it addresses the hopes, dreams, failures and family circumstances of that multi-racial class, the film presents a microcosm of contemporary France. It's based on a book by François Bégaudeau, a 36-year-old teacher who wrote it while on leave of absence. Bégaudeau plays the central role of the teacher with such charisma that other roles surely will beckon and he may never return to the classroom. The film takes its French title from his novel, Entre les Murs, which translates literally as "between the walls". That is apt in the context of a film that never moves outside the school where it's set. Cantet's mobile use of HD cameras contributes to the energy it generates and ensures that the setting never turns claustrophobic.

Bégaudeau allows his character to be depicted as a man with a capacity for making mistakes, and his portrayal is far removed from the archetypal inspirational teacher too often found in such scenarios. His fictional students are similarly drawn as complicated characters alternately prompting the viewer's sympathy and disapproval.

The Classis the fourth cinema feature from Cantet, a director from whom we have come to expect the unexpected after his acute films on industrial conflicts (in Human Resources), a businessman's elaborate plan to conceal his newly unemployed status from his family ( Time Out), and middle-aged women as sex tourists in Haiti ( Heading South).

THE RUNNER-UP prize at Cannes, the Grand Prix du Jury, was presented to Italian director Matteo Garrone for Gomorra, his tough, edgy picture of the Camorra, the notorious Neapolitan equivalent of the Mafia. It was covered here last week, as were Three Monkeys, the riveting moral drama which earned the best director award for Turkish film-maker Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and Lorna's Silence, the affecting Belgian picture of exploitation for which Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne won the best screenplay prize.

Former Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti is the subject of the fascinating Italian film, Il Divo, which took the Prix du Jury. Ingeniously structured by writer-director Paolo Sorrentino, the movie opens on a briskly edited assembly dramatising the assassinations of, among others, journalist Mino Pecorelli, banker Roberto Calvi and another former prime minister, Aldo Moro.

Il Divois set primarily in the early 1990s, as Andreotti forms his seventh government and becomes implicated in a succession of scandals. "You're either the most clever man in the country because you never got caught, or the most persecuted man in the country," he is told at one point in Sorrentino's robust drama. It supplies multiple layers of information, which demands and repays the alert attention of the audience, but proves entirely accessible. Sorrentino's vibrantly stylised film features a bravura performance from the remarkable Toni Servillo (also featured impressively in Gomorra) as Andreotti. Servillo was a front-runner for the jury's best actor award, which went to Benicio Del Toro for his portrayal of Che Guevara in Steven Soderbergh's two-part, 248-minute epic, Che, one of the most divisive films at Cannes. It was shown without closing credits, suggesting that it's a work in progress and unlikely to be seen in this form again. There have been suggestions that it may be pared down to a single film, which will be difficult given that the two parts were shot in different ratios.

The practice of screening unfinished films at major international festivals is increasing, but generally with unhappy consequences as the directors of Southland Talesand The Brown Bunny, for example, discovered to their cost in recent years.

Despite the anticipation surrounding its world premiere at Cannes, Chehas not been acquired for US distribution.

It was the only one of the four US movies competing at Cannes to receive one of the festival's annual awards. A once-off special prize was devised to honour two unique talents, both veterans with new films at Cannes - Catherine Deneuve and Clint Eastwood - but Eastwood, who did not attend the awards ceremony, deserved better for his enthralling 1920s-set kidnapping drama, The Exchange.

Eastwood is more likely to receive recognition at the Oscars next spring, as happened last February when Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Menwon four Oscars, having been passed over for any awards by the 2007 Cannes jury. As a result, high-profile US directors may well be reluctant to show their films in Cannes.

The compelling new film from Atom Egoyan, Adoration, also went unrewarded at Cannes. While it does not belong with his finest films such as Exoticaand The Sweet Hereafter, it certainly marks a return to form after a few disappointments. The starting point is a class assignment given by a high school French teacher (Arsinée Khanjian) for her students to translate a news story about a terrorist who planted a bomb in the airline baggage of his pregnant fiancée.

This has a profound effect on one pupil, Simon (Devon Bostwick), who has been living with his uncle (Scott Speedman) since the death of his parents in a car crash that Simon suspects was intentional. Egoyan reveals this narrative in the form of a jigsaw as his intriguing film tackles issues such as personal identity, internet lies, and post-9/11 security and paranoia.

It was difficult to make head or tail of The Headless Woman, Argentine director Lucrezia Martel's rambling picture which begins when a driver is distracted by her ringing mobile. Later she wonders if she may have been responsible for a hit-and-run. The consequences make for frustrating viewing in a wilfully obscure movie.

EQUALLY PRETENTIOUS was Philippe Garrel's tiresome French film, Frontier of Dawn( La Frontiere de l'Aube) in which a lonely young celebrity (Laura Smet) is smitten by a handsome photographer (Louis Garrel, the director's son) and embarks on an adulterous affair with him. The film turns bizarre and patience-stretching, and is only partly redeemed by striking black-and-white cinematography.

Eric Khoo's Singapore production, My Magic, was simplicity itself in its picture of a bright schoolboy (the engaging Jatishweran), who funds his food by doing homework for his classmates while his alcoholic father (Bosco Francis), a retired magician, squanders his meagre earnings on booze. Guilt prompts the father to make more money by resuming his magic act, which involves chewing glass and fire eating before his employer subjects him to increasingly sadistic tortures that are revoltingly violent.

The only first-time director in competition this year was Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter of Being John Malkovich, with Synecdoche, New York. Philip Seymour Hoffman immerses himself in the role of a theatre director with aspirations as a playwright and ever-increasing intimations of his own mortality. The distinction between his life and art become as blurred for him as for the viewer when he gets a grant that allows him to embark on a production that is as sprawling and self-indulgent as the movie itself - which arguably makes more references to toilet functions than the entire series of Carry Oncomedies.

Hoffman and a strong cast - notably Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, Emily Watson and Hope Davis - gamely work to inject some life into the movie. Like Che, Kaufman's film has yet to find a US distributor. And it lost out to a much more meritorious winner, Steve McQueen's Hunger, for the Camera d'Or award given annually to the director of the best first-time feature at Cannes.

Robert De Niro presented the final award, the Palme d'Or, at Cannes, after which he chewed up the scenery with aplomb in the film industry satire, What Just Happened?Re-edited since its critical drubbing at the Sundance festival in January, the movie is not as incisive in its portrayal of Hollywood mores as Robert Altman's scathing The Player,but it is entertaining and provided welcome light relief at the end of a festival heavy on downbeat themes.

The screenplay by veteran producer Art Linson - whose many credits include Heat, Fight Cluband The Untouchables- is based on his memoir, Tales from the Front Line. De Niro plays a producer frazzled as he tries to deal with his ex-wives, a blunt-spoken studio head (Catherine Keener), and a vain actor (Bruce Willis playing himself), who refuses to shave a long beard that he claims to be an expression of his artistic integrity.

There's also a coarse English director (Michael Wincott) determined to impose an unhappy ending on his new movie, Fiercely, which stars Sean Penn and has been selected to have its world premiere at Cannes. That is where Levinson's breezy comedy ends, appropriately for the movie bringing down the curtain on the Festival de Cannes for another year.

61st Cannes Film Festival winners
Palme d'Or: The Class (Entre les Murs)
Grand Prix: Gomorra
Special Prize:Catherine Deneuve; Clint Eastwood
Best Director:Nuri Bilge Ceylan ( Three Monkeys)
Jury Prize: Il Divo
Best Actor:Benicio Del Toro ( Che)
Best Actress:Sandra Corveloni ( Linha de Passe)
Best Screenplay: Lorna's Silence
Camera d'Or: Hunger