While there’s no out-and-out masterpiece this year, and at times more fun to be had watching the audience fighting, Sean Baker’s acid class comedy, Jacques Audiard’s drug-lord musical and India’s first Palme d’Or contender in decades are knockouts

“Which film is this?” the burly US critic asks twice, as the house lights go down inside the Bazin cinema. The first time he’s half-joking, the second time he’s in earnest. His immediate neighbours don’t know, or simply don’t want to tell him. But now the picture is starting, the festival ident is playing and everybody has settled except for this lone panicked critic. He stands in his row and implores the spectators. He says: “Can anybody please tell me what film I am in?”

What film are we in? Does it matter much any more? As the 77th Cannes film festival pitches into its final straight, the tightly packed schedule is a blur and the guests rattle between screenings in search of that elusive late masterwork. In Cannes years of plenty, everybody’s blissed out. This year they’re like survivors in Furiosa’s post-apocalyptic Australia. They’re fighting for purchase, seeking an oasis in the desert.

The actor and film-maker talks from Cannes about swapping Rain Man and Hot Shots! for an arthouse epic about a pansexual femme fatale

Valeria Golino rolls into her Cannes hotel late, trailing cigarette smoke and apologies. She hasn’t even had time to check in when a publicist steers her into the garden and plumps her beneath an awning. She’s being rained on a little and has to reposition her chair. “Let us sit very close together,” she says, which is lovely when she is still and faintly alarming when she’s not. Her emphatic hand gestures almost take my nose off.

Golino won the best actress prize at Venice (for Francesco Maselli’s A Tale of Love) when she was still a teenager. She has appeared in arthouse European films and Hollywood spectaculars alike. These days she’s primarily known as a film-maker, having played in Cannes with her first two features (Miele, Euforia). I last saw her on screen in Portrait of a Lady on Fire; she’ll next appear in Pablo Larraín’s Maria Callas biopic, opposite Angelina Jolie. In between those films she’s been working. “Mostly three years on one project.”

The cinematic legend died the way he lived – in a blaze of inscrutable, impossible film-making. We meet the team who helped shoot the final scene of his swansong just before his death by assisted suicide

On Friday 9 September 2022, Jean-Luc Godard had one last wish. He needed a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre to complete his film, Scénarios, but the book was missing from the shelf in his Swiss home. Time was pressing: he was up against a hard deadline. The film’s final scene was to be shot on Monday. On Tuesday, the director would die by assisted suicide.

Fabrice Aragno takes up the story. As Godard’s longtime collaborator, Aragno was his eyes and his ears, his trusted technical advisor. Surely he would be able to find the book from somewhere. “So on Friday 5.30pm, I drive very fast to Lausanne, 20 miles away,” he recalls. “I park the car and I’m sweating. I run to the library but the library is closed. I run to a secondhand bookshop but they don’t have the text. It’s out of print anyway. And I’m running for my life. Or not my life, for Jean-Luc’s life.”

The weather didn’t play ball, but Magnus von Horn’s fierce fairytale and Andrea Arnold’s kitchen-sink take on English mysticism should count among the first-week highlights for Greta Gerwig’s jury

The Cannes film festival opens just as the heavens do, too. It’s raining on the red carpet and on the black limousines and on the immaculate white pavilions that line up on the beach. The rain falls on the A-listers as they climb the stairs to the Palais, and on the stoic huddled masses who gather behind the police cordons. Everybody’s bedraggled and windswept; it feels as though the whole town’s been at sea. “My main wish is that we see some great films this year,” says Iris Knobloch, the festival’s president, casting an anxious eye at the sky. “But also I’m wishing for a little sunshine as well.”

If it’s raining in Cannes, it means there’s a glitch in the script. It’s one of the event’s in-built paradoxes that a festival which predominantly plays out in darkened rooms should be so dependent on good weather; so in thrall to its complementary circus of photocalls, yacht parties and open-air film screenings. All it takes is a downpour to trigger a disturbance in the force, a creeping sense of existential dread. The punters came expecting Technicolor. But the scene is all wrong: the world has gone monochrome.

An office drone must suffer the machismo of an Australian coastal town in this barmy, low-budget thriller about a would-be wave-chaser

Here is a gloriously demented B-movie thriller about a middle-aged man who wants to ride a big wave and the grinning local bullies who regard the beach as home soil. “Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” they shout at any luckless tourist who dares to visit picturesque Lunar Bay on Australia’s south-western coast, where the land is heavy with heat and colour. Tempers are fraying; it’s a hundred degrees in the shade. The picture crash-lands at the Cannes film festival like a wild-eyed, brawling drunk.

The middle-aged man is unnamed, so let’s call him Nic Cage. Lorcan Finnegan’s film, after all, is as much about Cage – his image, his career history, his acting pyrotechnics – as it is about surfing or the illusory concept of home. The Surfer sets the star up as a man on the edge – a sad-sack office drone who desperately wants to belong – and then shoves him unceremoniously clear over the cliff-edge. Before long, our hero is living out of his car in the parking lot near the dunes, drinking from puddles, foraging for food from bins, and scheming all the while to make his way down to the shore.