I just saw my last Cannes film: "La Mujer Sin Cabeza" ("The Headless Woman"), from director Lucrecia Martel (2004's "The Holy Girl"). It's a minor but effective "Blow-Up" about an upper-class Argentine woman (Maria Onetto) whose life becomes unmoored after she possibly kills a young boy while driving on a country road. Onetto's quite special as bourgeoisette who drifts into and then out of a state of heightened clarity, and you can feel the anger burning away under the movie's cool glass surface. Perhaps Martel should have let more of it erupt onto the screen. There may be a cultural disconnect on my part, since the Argentine guys I sat next to during the screening roundly booed it. But movies are a blood sport here; that's part of the sadistic fun.

I leave tomorrow morning and head back to Boston -- believe me, I haven't built up the necessary physical endurance yet to do this festival from beginning to end. So I'll miss Steven Soderbergh's two-part "Che" biopic starring Benicio del Toro, as well as Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York" and "Wendy and Lucy," the new film by Kelly Reichardt ("Old Joy"). Plus all the good movies I won't even know that I'm missing. (II'll also miss walking the kilometer down the Rue D'Antibes from my rabbit hole to the Palais every morning while swifts circle overhead and emit piercing calls easily mistaken for the cries of rabid Italian journalists.)

Eastwood's "The Exchange" (see post below) continues to divide audiences, which is always a good thing. I'm still sorting my negative response to the film out -- I might have responded more favorably with a lead actress who didn't pack so much star baggage. That's arguably my problem more than Jolie's or Eastwood's, but, still: As dowdy as this star gets, it's impossible to deglamorize her, and that cuts into the sense of realism the filmmaker is purporting to create. Glenn Kenny begs to differ, and he's always a good read. He taps into something, though, when he points out that this may be Clint's angriest film since "Unforgiven". That anger results in portrayals of the villainous LAPD higher-ups (I'm giving nothing away here) that are as nuanced as Victorian stage heavies. In other words, if Jeffrey Donovan as Capt. J.J. Jones had a moustache, he'd twirl it.

Glenn points out something else I'd neglected to mention: James Gray's "Two Lovers" (see post below) is in fact based on Fyodor Dostoevsky's "White Nights," and in it's clammy Brooklyn way, manages to honor the source. Until the ending. I still say that ending's spinach.

Some housecleaning: "Los Bastardos," from Mexico's Amat Escalanto is "Funny Games" with an illegal immigrant political gloss: Two migrant laborers (Jesus Moises Rodriguez and Ruben Sosa) are hired by an unseen L.A. man to kill his wife (Nina Zavarin). Interesting, well-done, wholly painful to sit through, and not as intellectually savvy as it thinks.

"The Silence of Lorna," the latest from the beloved Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre et Luc, is pretty rock-solid, with the young actress Arta Dobroshi (a less porcelain Juliette Binoche; see photo up top) heartbreakingly effective as an Albanian illegal caught up in a complex green-card scheme in Belgium that forces her to recalibrate her morals. It's not top-drawer Dardenne -- the necessary tending to plot seems to have dulled their focus a bit -- but it's quite good.

"Liverpool" -- I walked into this one thinking it might be an unexpected companion piece to "Of Time and the City" (see post below). Silly me: it's a Lisandro Alonso movie, which means a total of 11 camera shots lasting seemingly 10 minutes each and a dead-end narrative about a prodigal son's dead-end return to a small snowbound village. It's my first encounter with Alonso, and I'm told his earlier movies, "La Libertad" in particular, are quite good. This one struck me as a Bela Tarr movie left to die in a snowbank.

Lastly, "The Pleasure of Being Robbed," one of the few SxSW/Sundance-y sort of American indies to unspool here. Low-fi in the extreme, with Eleanore Hendricks endearing in a completely maddening way as a New York City klepto-chick who drifts through life and other women's handbags, it's directed by Josh Safdie, part of the Red Bucket Films collective of depressingly recent B.U. graduates. Pretty much the whole gang's in Cannes and I'll be writing a piece on them for the newspaper, but here's a photo I took of them in a park, and, yes, they're as young and spilling over with beautiful cinema ideals as they appear. Oh, to be 23 and in love with the films of Robert Bresson.

Clint Eastwood's "The Exchanged" had its title unceremoniously changed from "The Changeling" two days ago. Maybe the studio was afraid the teen crowd would think it was a horror movie, but having watched it at 8:30 a.m. Croisette time, I'm not sure who the audience for this even is. Angelina Jolie completists who want to watch her express maternal panic with newfound insights? Los Angeles history buffs looking for a precision recreation of the City of Angels in 1928? Folks wanting a grueling tale of kidnapping, serial child killing, and the venality of the LAPD?

Jolie plays Christine Collins, a single mother whose 9-year-old boy goes missing one day. After two months, the LAPD -- embattled by charges of corruption at all levels -- produces a child. Problem is, Collins maintains it's not her child. Before the movie's over, she'll have been railroaded into a mental institution straight out of "The Snake Pit," befriended a helpful whore (Amy Ryan), been abetted by a fire-breathing local minister (John Malkovich!), and taken on the entire civic structure of greater Los Angeles. There's also a subplot about a creepy mass murderer out in the desert (Jason Butler Harner channeling Peter Lorre in "M").

This is based closely on real events, although "The Exchanged" doesn't mention that anywhere in the movie - I hear Eastwood wants the story to stand on its own. The problem is that it doesn't; without that admission of actuality, it's a grim tour through heartbreaking loss, madness, bureaucratic fascism, and the torture of innocents. Even with the knowledge that "it actually happened," you never feel a compelling reason for sitting through the film: it's trying to be too many things at once. Jolie is very good in some scenes and too carefully overwrought in others, and the ultimate open-endedness of the story is frustrating after 140 minutes of uneven drama. "The Exchanged" is a "Zodiac" that also wants to tell a tale of gutsy heroism in the classic Hollywood tradition, and the two aspects don't square.

The production design is pitch perfect though, even without Eastwood's longstanding PD aboard -- the late Henry Bumstead. (There's a diner in the film named "Bummy's" in his honor.) There are some defenders of the film to be heard in the hallways of the press section -- Scott Foundas of the L.A. Weekly, notably -- but most people seemed to come out feeling that Clint has aimed for another "Mystic River" and missed.

Another lumpy American film played last night: James Gray's "Two Lovers," with Joaquin Phoenix as a Brooklyn schlub torn between a nice Jewish girl (Vinessa Shaw) and a crazy blond neighbor (Gwyneth Paltrow). The moral's pretty simple: shiksas are trouble. They love Gray in France, perhaps because his dour crime-inflected dramas ("The Yards," "We Own the Night") feature dialogue that sounds ponderous in English but archetypal with French subtitles. "Two Lovers" shows him loosening up a little, and I enjoyed the movie reasonably as a enjoyable romantic/fatalistic genre wallow. Couple of points, though: the cast are about ten years too old for their roles, Shaw is too chicly gorgeous to be believable as a Brighton Beach lonelyhearts (Betsy Blair in "Marty" would have been about right), and the final scenes provide a feel-good closure that the rest of the movie just hasn't earned. Phoenix's Leonard should have wound up like Edward G. Robinson in an old Fritz Lang film -- totally hosed. But as they say in "The Exchanged," "People like happy endings."

As the Guvernator might say, I interrupt Ty's "Cannes-age" with some thoughts from Mark Feeney about that new Indiana Jones movie we watched together yesterday. The movie put my central processing unit to sleep. Fortunately not Mark's.

The most bizarre plot element in ?Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? doesn?t have anything to do with extraterrestrials or the existence of El Dorado or even Shia LaBeouf?s comb-wielding hommage a Marlene Dietrich in ?Dishonored? _ all of which do figure in the movie. No, it?s a thankfully short-lived subplot about the FBI suspecting Indy of being a security threat.

How can such a thing be, an all-American hero like Indy, a subversive? Well, this is 1957, and his miraculous escape from a squad of tommy-gun-wielding Soviet soldiers in Area 51 (their presence is the movie?s second most bizarre plot element) raises suspicions. A pair of feds, one of whom bears a curious resemblance to Red-baiter
Roy Cohn, give Indy a grilling and clearly have doubts about where his loyalties lie.

Back in the classroom -- yes, that is New Haven, but Yale wasn?t coed back then, so maybe it?s the Connecticut campus of Hollywood High -- Indy finds himself put on administrative leave because of the government accusations. His dean (Jim Broadbent) resigns in protest. It?s a simple, if clunky, way to balance the hoary Red-menace aspect of the plot with an equally hoary jab at McCarthyism. Not to mention give the movie a slight but unmistakable homeland-security vibe.

The problem is, on the evidence of Indy?s own words, he is a communist. He?s packing his bags to leave when the dean asks him what he?s going to do. First, Indy says, he?s going to London, then there?s a job offer from the University of Leipzig he might well take. Leipzig is in what was then East Germany. Indy wants to defect!

Of course, this may account for Indy?s ability to hold up so well at such a ripe old age through all his physically demanding adventures _ he had access to those drugs the East Germans were using on their Olympic athletes. Not only is Indy a commie, he?s a juiced commie.