Everything moves quickly in Cannes. On Tuesday Variety reported the bizarre news that Werner Herzog had signed on to remake Bad Lieutenant (with Nicolas Cage!), and already there’s a poster for the film in front of the hotel that houses Directors’ Fortnight.

In another case of prescience, yesterday IFC announced that it had acquired Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale for U.S. distribution, despite the fact that the film hadn’t yet screened for Cannes press. It was a good bet: As a fan of Desplechin’s Esther Kahn and someone who admired, but had doubts, about his frantic Kings and Queen, I was won over instantly by this engrossing, novelistic family melodrama, which finds Desplechin channeling his virtuosity into a more stable structure. The film concerns an extended family from which one son (the hilarious Mathieu Amalric) has been banished (his sister, played by Anne Consigny, paid a family debt on the condition that she never see him again). But now Mom (Catherine Deneuve) needs a bone marrow transplant, and the search for a matching donor occasions a family reunion, which stretches from high comedy to Greek tragedy and back again (with brief forays into biology and mathematics for good measure). It’s proof that Desplechin can be a master of pacing as well as of surprise, and based on the reaction from colleagues this morning, it’s probably the first legitimate contender for the Palme d’Or.

Meanwhile, the Un Certain Regard selection Soi Cowboy aggressively contends for the title of "this year’s Brown Bunny." Initially a protracted, black-and-white exercise in watching nothing happen—at length—the film observes the daily routines of an obese Dane and his pregnant, disturbingly young-looking girlfriend. He showers, he sits on the couch, he searches the Bangkok streets for a DVD of Inland Empire. Director Thomas Clay supposedly drove audiences here up a wall with his 2005 film The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, and Soi Cowboy likewise eagerly tries to throw off its audience at every turn. (In a self-flagellating joke, the main character talks to someone on his cell phone about making a deal with the Weinstein Company.) Influenced by—and possibly a parody of—Tropical Malady’s fissuring narrative, Cowboy extends a true middle finger to viewers who leave during the first half. Me? I had to leave 10 minutes before the end to catch my next movie, and it’s possible that if I’d stayed the film would have morphed into something else entirely.

Speaking of metamorphoses: The film I went to catch was Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona. It’s possible relocating to a new city renews Allen’s creative inspiration (Match Point, Allen’s first London-set movie, premiered here in 2005 and was somewhat overenthusiastically hailed as his return to form). In any case, the Barcelona-set Vicky is the director’s most enjoyable and fluid film in a long time—and certainly evidence that he hasn’t lost his comic timing. The story of two Americans in Spain (Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson) who get roped into a romantic…pentagon by a mysterious painter (Javier Bardem), the movie is nearly stolen by Penélope Cruz—and not because she and Johansson make out while developing photos together. Their brief sapphic scenes are hardly as salacious as you’ve been led to expect—but the movie’s a lot better than you might expect, too.