It’s been a routine day of egomania in Cannes. Instead of walking up the red carpet like every other Leonardo, Dick and Harvey, U2 take out their guitars and play an impromptu concert on the steps of the Festival Palais. Over cocktails on his penthouse terrace, the producer Harvey Weinstein suddenly declares that he is suing the United States Government under the Freedom of Information Act. And I’m nearly crippled on the Croisette by a man in a motorised wheelchair who must be 15 times over the legal limit.

There is a bullish atmosphere about this Cannes that I have never felt before. The competition for the Palme d’Or is living up to expectation. And the Hollywood big beasts are modestly pounding around the party circuit with greater efficiency than the 08.33 from Manningtree to Liverpool Street. For better or worse, my new best friend, Weinstein, is a useful barometer for the global health of independent cinema. You know things must be going swimmingly if he can take the mickey out of Disney and the American Government at the same time.

When his lawyers confirmed that he could sue the US Treasury for trying to impound Sicko, Michael Moore’s attack on the private health system, Harvey had what he calls an “LSD flash-back. Can you imagine Michael Eisner [the Disney chief and, until recently, Harvey’s boss] on the phone going ‘You’re what?!’ before sending his goons to lock me up,” guffaws Harvey.

Tessa Ross, the controller of film and drama at Channel 4, is equally upbeat. She seems to have every happening British writer, actor and director involved. At a select reception at her villa – the best parties this year are fashionably intimate – the glamorous tyro divulges that she has just signed up a new Michael Winterbottom project called Seven Days, a film that will take five years to shoot. It will chart the fortunes of a married couple, played by Shirley Henderson and John Simm, who are torn asunder when he is sent to prison.

Winterbottom claims he is seeking a raw and novel edge. He is fascinated by how this couple and their young children will age, and relate, over the five years. The rest of us are worried about what the actors’ living arrangements might be, or how they might explain this to their respective agents and partners.

The conversation on the terrace of the Martinez Hotel inevitably returns to Winterbottom’s documentary reconstruction of the kidnapping and decapitation of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Karachi in 2002. A Mighty Heart is an important film for many reasons, not just the fact that journalists are now prime targets for terrorist groups who know they can milk such snatches for maximum publicity. It also illuminates just how difficult it is to defend against this type of propaganda “warfare” – the Prince Harry story is another shining example.

Dramatically, it contains the most impressive performance of Angelina Jolie’s career. She plays Pearl’s wife, Mariane, and she is electric in the part.

An undersung feature of this year’s 60th edition of the festival is the number of high-profile stars behind or fronting films that address serious issues. Brad Pitt is a producer on A Mighty Heart. Leonardo DiCaprio is a producer and the narrator of a harrowing conservation documentary, The 11th Hour. You can sense a Hollywood sea-change in the number and calibre of actors and directors willing to get involved in projects not necessarily designed to entertain or please. The serious pleasure is how gripping and well made these films are.

What’s so surreal about Cannes is stumbling out of a bleak meditation into a town of seemingly endless froth. Take drinks at the Martinez bar: a squiffy Roman Polanski toddles by with a glass of champagne and casts a twinkling eye at a beautiful female director I know is trying to raise money for a picture about child soldiers. One dreads to think where that particular conversation might end if it started.

Quentin Tarantino saunters in looking much beefier in the flesh than he does on screen. And Gérard Depardieu arrives 20 minutes later, presumably to compare the local plonk to his own fruity vintages.

Meanwhile a thrusting young film-maker called Steve has half convinced me that one of the artistic themes of the festival is the number of characters who suffer unfortunate slices of luck. In Moore’s lopsided Sicko a man has to choose between a new car and the medical cost of sewing back on the fingers he has cut off by accident. Gus Van Sant’s terrifically understated thriller, Paranoid Park, features a railway guard who is still able to pull himself along the ground after a train has parted him at the waist. And the leg that bounces down the road after a car smash in Tarantino’s Death Proofgot a round of applause.

But the most devastating piece of surgery occurs in a terrific Chinese film by Li Yang called Blind Mountain. It’s an unforgiving insight into a rural scandal that clearly haunts China to this day. Huang Lu plays a young student who is drugged and sold to a peasant family light years from civilisation. It’s an unnerving account about how an entire rural community conspires to keep illegal practices alive, and a damning insight into the servitude experienced by uneducated Chinese women.

Its hardcore realism is eloquently matched by a stunning Romanian film courtesy of Cristian Mungiu called 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Here, a friendship between two young female students is tested beyond endurance by the need of one girl to get an illegal abortion, and the other to seal the deal with a mercenary quack and then dispose of the evidence. It sounds as bleak as a cement wall, but mere words can't tell you how brilliantly composed and riveting this film is.

I wasn’t quite as shaken by the Gothic excess of Tom Kalin’s drama, Savage Grace, but it’s quite mad to compare the two films. Kalin’s account of the extraordinary family tensions between Mr and Mrs Baekeland – socialite heirs to the Bakelite plastics fortune – and their gay son Tony is a true biographical sensation. The film is Tony’s close-up view of the emotional crunch between his parents, Stephen Dillane’s icy Brooks and his steamy wife Barbara (Julianne Moore). Moore is the magnetic centre of this dys-functional trio who dip into insanity, adultery and incest as if they were a tray of hors d’oeuvres.

I’m glad to say that the 60th Cannes hasn’t all been sensation, alcohol and gloom. I found a golden morsel of comfort at a late-night screening of Terence Fisher’s Dracula (1958), starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Ben Thompson from the BFI National Archive minted this spanking print. And the midnight gift to take home? A large bulb of garlic.

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