The 67th Cannes Festival was capped with a lively closing ceremony last night. There were tears, there was comedy and there was scandal. Some of the night's victories were well-deserved—Timothy Spall's winning of the best actor prize was a fait accompli, his turn as the British painter Turner in Mike Leigh's romanticized biopic being well above exceptional. Upon receiving his prize Spall did a very entertaining (but unintended, perhaps?)

It would be difficult to write a review of this year's Nuri Bilge Ceylan Cannes film in the space we normally intend for this type of article in Screen Comment. Our reviews are usually about 350 words and this word count just would not do it justice (plus, there's always another movie to go watch during Cannes). Instead, I'll give some impressions of it, by far my favorite one in this 67th edition of

Spotlight on this year's Cannes Selection and who the Palme winner will be. What's playing out in the jurors' hotel suite as I type these words is anyone's guess. How Robert De Niro will steer his jury is hard to tell. When Tim Burton was at the helm last year, people guessing "Uncle Boonmee" by Apichatpong Weerasethakul wouldn't have been too far off. Burton responds to dream-like, fantasy-related content, and the bewitching but slow movie by the Thai filmmaker was right up his alley. And "Boonmee" did win in the end. But De Niro? "Taxi driver," along with "Easy Rider," was one of the best-known movies out of the first independent cinema surge. Since then the "Meet the Parents" actor has usually worked with large, well-heeled movie productions. At the same time, he and Jane Rosenthal started Tribeca Film Festival which tends to showcase little-known filmmakers.

The buzz on the street has Lars Von Trier winning for "Melancholia." That's unlikely, considering what took place earlier this week (see our News article). I don't think De Niro would hand him the Palme given the Danish director's outrageous comments during the film's press conference.