1 A Prophet (Dir Jacques Audiard)

Jacques Audiard’s tough-talking prison drama sliced through the Cannes competition like a switchblade to the throat. Brutal, unforgiving and utterly gripping, this is genre filmmaking at its most intelligent and confident. The film tells of the rise through the ranks of a gauche young prisoner who arrives without friends and without a clue and leaves the prison a force to be reckoned with. The central performance, from newcomer Tahar Rahim, is extraordinary. He grows from a scared kid whose only saving grace is his animal cunning, into a career criminal and an orchestrator of chaos, all within the walls of his cell.

2 Dogtooth (Dir Yorgos Lanthimos)

This magnificent Greek film by Yorgos Lanthimos is one of the creepiest stories ever painted on screen. It's like being at home with Rose and Fred West. A perfectly respectable middle-class couple, for reasons titillatingly beyond our ken, have raised three grown-up children in total isolation of the outside world. The youngsters dare not set foot outside their gated family home, complete with large garden and swimming pool, for fear of being eaten alive by stray domestic cats. The film has just won top prize in Un Certain Regard because it redefines the meaning of sadistic repression. The two "girls", simply called Elder and Younger, and their over-sexed brother, dream about escaping to other lives. The ghastly tragedy is that they have no real idea what another way of life entails beyond picture books and whatever they're deranged parents tell them about life beyond the fence. It's a salutary tale about familial responsibility that will shock you to the bone.

3 The White Ribbon (Dir Michael Haneke)

Some directors make films that are inviting and inclusive, the movie equivalent of a hug. Not Michael Haneke. The Austrian auteur specialises in alienating and chilly intellectual exercises. And there is nobody currently working who can do austere rigour like Haneke. His latest, a period drama set in a small German village on the brink of World War 1, is a meticulously measured study of human cruelty. Shot in luminous black and white, it’s a demanding piece of cinema, but one that rewards in spades. Like Haneke’s previous Cannes title Caché, expect the film to leave you with questions rather than answers.

4 Vincere (Dir Marco Bellochio)

Marco Bellochio's tale about the rise and rise of Benito Mussolini minces newsreel footage into a terrific true story about his love affair with Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno). The glamorous socialite was scratched from the history books as crudely as she was scratched out of his life. The Fascista carted her off to a loony bin the moment she became a political inconvenience. Bellochio's harrowing film charts these events, from a dangerous first kiss, to the death of their bastard son. The actor who plays Mussolini, Fillipo Timi, does it with a relish that is not entirely healthy. Indeed it's a stand-out performance in an unloveable part. Bellochio's brilliant touch is to film the iron wheels history grinding wrecklessly and unstoppably onwards.

5 Samson And Delilah (Dir Warwick Thornton)

This quietly devastating Aboriginal drama has an almost mythic quality. The setting is an isolated indigenous community near Alice Springs; the problems faced by the eponymous teenagers are contemporary issues – solvent abuse, neglect. But there is an almost timeless quality to this story of redemption. Samson is a live wire – a firecracker of a kid with wild hair. Delilah is compassionate, the archetypal earth mother whose nature is to care for others. Their courtship is practically wordless; their stoic companionship is everything, particularly when times inevitably get tough.

6 A Brighter Summer Day (Dir Edward Yang)

Martin Scorsese's season of lost gems, lovingly restored, was one of the unexpected highlights of this year's festival. Edward Yang's 1991 film about street gangs in Taipei in the early 1960s is four hours long. Yet it was one of the easiest watches I've ever seen. It frames a stand-off between two groups of over-excited youths in a terribly repressed and fiendishly unexciting corner of Taiwan. Boys and girls being tutored at a military school are routinely bullied by the local lads who run the only dance hall within six hundred square miles. What's so arresting is the pace of the film. It doesn't rush anywhere. But the fights and romantic shocks are still amazingly fresh. A collector's item.

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