As Cannes ends, themes emerge and likely winners shine

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The 68th Cannes International Film Festival comes to a close on Sunday night, and the nine-member jury will crown a Palme d'Or winner, an event that means little to the box office, but is a major notch in the tree of film history.

As with every good year at Cannes, the winning film is the centre of a larger conversation that carries on through to the best-of-year film lists.

Common themes transcend time periods and cultures. Two Italian filmmakers, Paolo Sorrentino (Youth) and Nanni Moretti (Mia Madre), have made films that juxtapose the professional difficulties of making art under the shadow of mortality.

Youth features an ensemble of characters at a spa; so does Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos's The Lobster, only the latter's characters are about to be turned into animals. People are transformed into other creatures in Matteo Garrone's collection of Renaissance fairy tales, Tale of Tales. Immigrants struggle to adapt to the point of losing their souls in Chinese director Jia Zhangke's Mountains May Depart and in Jacques Audiard's tale of a Tamil refugee in France, Dheepan. Stoic young female warriors balance a skill for violence with a conscience in Sicario, a contemporary drug-war thriller directed by Quebec's Denis Villeneuve, and in Hou Hsiao-hsien's The Assassin.

The question in many of the films is: What kinds of creatures are we and how much can we change without losing what matters?

Controversy erupted over some women being stopped on the red carpet for not wearing heels, but it's evidence of the festival's ongoing gender problem and dated ideas about ceremony and propriety. Some of Cannes's other old-fashioned ideas are worth preserving, including the notion that some films are better than others, not just more popular, and that film is best when it recognizes its international range and roots.

The final awards are still an enigma wrapped in a sequestered celebrity jury wrapped in a hotel. Because of a rule that films should not win multiple awards, the runner-up Grand Prix and the directing and acting awards often serve as consolation prizes at Cannes.

What follows here is not so much a prediction as part of the continuing conversation, my personal picks and likely contenders.

Palme d'Or

My pick: The Assassin – The first film in eight years from Taiwan's Hou Hsiao-hsien is a ninth-century martial arts fable. This extraordinarily beautiful film is occasionally baffling, but it conveys a sense of time and subtle tension that puts it in a class by itself.

Contenders: Saul Fia (Son of Saul) – First-time director Laszlo Nemes has made a film about the Holocaust that feels like something genuinely new, managing to create a film experience that is immersive without being overwhelming.

Carol – Todd Haynes's restrained adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's lesbian love story stars Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara and is filled with a beautifully seedy style and quiet anguish.

Best director

While there isn't a better-directed film than The Assassin in the competition, and Son of Saul and Carol are both excellent, don't rule out Villeneuve for Sicario. This tense thriller stars Emily Blunt as an FBI agent on a mission across the Mexico border.

Best actor

My pick: Michael Caine, in Sorrentino's Youth, reminds us how subtle and witty an actor can be, with the full weight of richly lived 82 years behind him.

The contender: Veteran French actor Vincent Lindon, who stars in The Measure of a Man, portrays a working-class man dealing with the humiliation of late-career unemployment with a gruff, heartbreaking credibility.

Best actress

My pick: As much as I love Blanchett and Mara in Carol, there's no one quite like Zhao Tao in Jia Zhangke's family saga Mountains May Depart. Zhao plays a woman who ages from a coquettish 25-year-old to a wealthy divorcée and, finally, to a woman in her 50s in the final sequence of this three-part, time-shifting tale.