We have it at last! A picture of Laurent Cantet, winner of this year's Palme D'Or, for his film 'Entre les Murs', a moving and critically acclaimed tale of a young teacher's struggles in the class room. François Bégaudeau, the film's lead actor, played himself in the film. The film was screened last night, and was greeted with warm applause by its first audience.

Brazilian actor Sandra Corveloni won the award for Best Actress for her role in Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas's Linha de Passe

Latin heart throb, Benicio del Toro, won the award for Best Actor for his work in Soderbergh's Che.

Best Screenplay went to the Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne for the Silence de Lorna 

Clint Eastwood and Catherine Deneuve were honoured by the jury with Special Prizes for lifetime achievement.

The Festival's Grand Prix went to the Italian director, Matteo Garrone, for his Mafia drama, Gomorra.

Meanwhile, the Turkish filmmaker, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, won the festival's award for Best Director for Three Monkeys.

And a small patriotic reminder that British filmmaker and artist Steve McQueen won the Camera D'Or for his film Hunger. McQueen won the prestigious Turner Prize in 1999 (the year Tracey Emin forgot to make her bed).

Steve McQueen, Winner of the Camera D'Or

Some applauded the seriousness and politically charged atmosphere of this year's biggest movie event: the 61st Cannes Film Festival. Others spoke of programmers audibly 'scraping the barrel' in order to fill the festival's two week schedule. When do people ever agree about such things, and can critics ever agree about anything anyway?

The festival jury, headed by Sean Penn, stated at the opening ceremony, that they wanted their response to the films selected at this year's festival to be informed by "the world they live in" - read political, relevant, committed. Many commentators have understood this to mean that Soderbergh's Che or Israeli animation Waltz with Bashir, will run away with tonight's biggest accolade, the Palme D'Or. At least for now, we here at Screenrush are not so sure...

The festival is coming to a close this evening, in a star-studded closing ceremony attended by a vast array of celebrities, from Catherine Deneuve to young Kosovan actress, Arta Dobrishi.

The contenders for this year's Palme D'Or were an illustrious bunch: some of them are old faces at Cannes, others are real newcomers. Steven Soderbergh, who won the coveted award for his feature debut Sex, Lies and Videotape in 1989, and the Dardenne Brothers (who've won the award twice) are old hands. But the first winner of the evening, British filmmaker Steve McQueen who has won the Camera D'Or (a prize for first time feature directors) for his harrowing, brave and moving film, Hunger, is a newcomer on the Cannes scene.

More awards are being announced as we write! Who's it going to be?!

One time enfant terrible of American cinema (he’s a little old for that now) and Cannes favourite Quentin Tarantino flew flamboyantly into town yesterday to deliver the annual lesson in cinema.

We didn’t have tickets and so after spending eight or nine lifetimes watching Steven Soderbergh’s marathon-like 'Che' we decided to kick back, rest up, drink a few coups de champagne, read the papers and get ready for today’s premiere of Synecdoche NY. 

We’ve scarcely been able to hide our collective excitement at the prospect of Philip Seymour Hoffman taking centre stage as a theatre director in the midst of a nervous and artistic breakdown in Charlie Kaufman’s first directorial outing. Kaufman is best known for scripting the bizarre Being John Malkovich and the brilliant Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and is a master of comedy, romance and winsome weirdness.

Although the rumourmongers have been spreading word that Synecdoche is unreleasable in its present form we stand (rather, sit) undeterred. We can’t wait! 

Expect the reviews to come fully loaded with discussions of the surprising accessibility of the film’s quirky ideas, its sweetness and the big laughs that mostly come from Hoffman’s chameleon like performance and a supporting cast including Dianne Wiest and Emily Watson.

Stay tuned all weekend as we bring you more news, gossip and reviews right up till Sunday night when we’ll let you know who Sean Penn and his jury have chosen as this year’s winner of the Palme d’Or.

Poor Steven Soderbergh.

He shot to prominence as the youngest ever winner of the Palme d'Or with his first feature film Sex, Lies & Videotape; he picked up the directing Oscar for his massive and highly impressive Altmanesque Traffic. And he's the man behind the enormously successful (though perennially disappointing) 'Ocean's' series. And yet Stevie wants more.

Whether his success here at Cannes in 1989 has deluded him we're not here to judge, but a man who can follow the taught and entertaining Out of Sight with pretentious sub-Tarkovsky dud The Limey and then top even that by daring to bungle a remake of the Russian master’s Solaris, has got to be seeing the world wrong. His general pattern ever since has been an Ocean film of ever-diminishing quality followed by an 'art-house' flick that even Stevie admits is not very good (cf. The Good German).

Benicio del Toro - the only good thing in Che?

Yesterday his labour of love, the four-and-a-half hour anti-biopic of Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevera,  has premiered at Cannes, the response has been less than positive. The word on the street is that Lawrence of Arabia (the reference point for all bio-(e)pics) it most certainly 'aint. But then this film was always going to be an unknown quantity: having initially missed the deadline, festival gods shined brightly on their favourite son Stevie (Cannes works like a family outfit, once you're in you're in) offering the unseen film a bye into the comp.

While these kinds of gambles on the part of festival organisers sometimes yield success and myth in equal measure (I'm thinking of Francis Ford Coppola's classic war-film Apocalypse Now - thought to be dead in the water, a dud, a car-crash - Coppola brought it to Cannes three years late, announced that it is 'not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam' and promptly won his second Palm) it seems this time the strategy has backfired.

It is now widely thought that this version of Soderbergh's exercise in anti-drama – it should be remembered that Che led an action packed life though Stevie has chosen to play down all sense of adventure! – will never be seen again. It also leads me to believe that Stevie has disppeared on a puff of his own misguided aesthetic aspirations!

Did David Lean or Hitchcock ever eschew commerciality, drama, suspense or beauty for the sake of a scantily clad ‘idea’ or in the name of an abstract formal experiment tentatively monikered ‘art’? And does Alain Resnais, a director Coppola name-checks as much as he does the fabulous success of his winery, and one Soderbergh undoubtedly adores, set out to make deliberately obscure films that bore and befuddle?

The answer to both these questions must surelyt be a resounding NO! - I wonder what the answer would be if we were to ask the same of Stevie ‘want-to-be-' Soderbergh.

Tune in later for more news and views from (what surely must now be) day 200 of the Cannes Festival de Film, 2008!