The French word frisson describes something English has no better word for: a brief intense reaction, usually a feeling of excitement, recognition, or terror. It's often accompanied by a physical shudder, but not so much when you're web surfing.

You know how it happens. You're clicking here or clicking there, and suddenly you have the OMG moment. In recent days, for example, I felt frissons when learning that Gary Coleman had died, that most of the spilled oil was underwater, that Joe McGinness had moved in next to the Palins, that a group of priests' mistresses had started their own Facebook group, and that Bill Nye the Science Guy says "to prevent Computer Vision Syndrome, every 20 minutes, spend 20 seconds looking 20 feet away."

Everyone seems to believe that Tim Burton and his festival jury did the best they could with slim pickings. The 2010 winners at Cannes were for the most part fair, well-distributed, uncontroversial and safe. You could say the same about the films in the festival.

Last year I left Cannes having seen "Up," "Precious," "Antichrist," "Inglourious Basterds," "Broken Embraces," "A Prophet," "The White Ribbon," "Police, Adjective," "Thirst," and many other good films. Of the first "Antichrist" screening, I wrote: "There's electricity in the air. Every seat is filled, even the little fold-down seats at the end of every row."

I am but a naive outsider. I don't fully understand the working of the "derivatives" and "credit swaps" that we have heard so much about in recent months. I'm not alone. But I'm learning. I gather that these are ingenious computer-driven trading schemes in which good money can be earned from bad debt, and Wall Street's Masters of the Universe pocket untold millions at the same time they bankrupt their investors and their own companies.

The days dwindle down to a precious few. At 6 p.m.on Friday, Cannes is oddly silent. The tumult on the streets a week ago today is forgotten. There are empty seats at some screenings. The locals of Cannes know this is the time to stand in the ticket lines. The daily editions of Varsity and Hollywood Reporter ceased Thursday. Friends are in Paris, or London, or home. Some few diehards stay for the award ceremony Sunday night.

There's something in the UK called the Campaign for Real Ale. It was started in The Guardian in the 1970s by Richard Boston, a journalist (naturally) who was alarmed by traditional British pubs being taken over by mass-produced, heavily marketed, rapidly brewed beer.

The real thing, he said, was not carbonated, was brewed in its own time, and had a distinctive flavor. It was drawn up by gravity from a cooled cellar, not forced through hoses under pressure. It wasn't tweaked to make it taste like all other beers, matching some international formula like Budweiser or Heineken's. I've tasted it. It went down smoothly, and you didn't belch.

Of the 12 films I've seen at Cannes, the most warmly cheered has been the South African "Life, Above All." That's possibly more significant than in other years.

The audiences at Cannes this year have been oddly restrained, and there's less clapping at the names of directors; even Jean-Luc Godard received only perfunctory applause. Is this becoming less a directors' festival and more a trade fair?

When I began as a film critic, Jean-Luc Godard was widely thought to have reinvented the cinema with "Breathless" (1960). Now he is almost 80 and has made what is said to be his last film, and he's still at the job, reinventing. If only he had stopped while he was ahead. That would have been sometime in the 1970s. Maybe the 1980s. For sure, the 1990s. Without a doubt, before he made his Cannes entry, "Film: Socialisme."

The thousands of seats in the Auditorium Debussy were jammed, and many were turned away. We lucky ones sat in devout attention to this film, such is the spell Godard still casts. There is an abiding belief that he has something radical and new to tell us. It is doubtful that anyone else could have made this film and found an audience for it.

Mike Leigh has long been a great director, but now he is surely at the top of his form. "Another Year" has premiered here and is the film everyone I talk with loves the most. It is so beautifully sure and perceptive in its record of one year in the life of a couple happily married, and their relatives and friends, not so happy. After "Vera Drake" (2004) and "Happy-Go-Lucky" (2008), Leigh cannot seem to step wrong.

A women at the press conference asked Leigh (left) "did you have to make Mary so sad?" She might as well have asked, "did you have to make Tom and Gerri so happy? "

The way Michael Douglas and Oliver Stone explained it to me, modern Hollywood is doing the same thing modern Wall Street is: Trading for its own benefit, and not for the good of its customers.

"Let put it this way," Stone said. "If you look at the figures at Goldman Sachs, 67% of their profit in 2008 came to their own house. They made most of their money for themselves and 11% for their customers. That's a huge difference from

I walked into Cinema Arcades, behind our hotel, for a Cannes market screening of "The Illusionist" and saw the magically melancholy final act of Jacques Tati's career.

Tati of course was the tall Frenchman, bowing from the waist, pipe in mouth, often wearing a trench coat, pants too short, always the center of befuddlements.

If you've seen "Mr. Hulot's Holiday," you know who he was, and if you haven't, it belongs in your holding pattern.

I interrupt my regularly scheduled programming to try explain again what I believe about the issue of the American flag t-shirts in California schools.

In my earlier piece, I made the mistake of using wit and irony. I found many readers who do not receive on those wave lengths. There's a compulsion in some precincts of the Right to find others guilty of crimes out of proportion to the perceived offense. Anyone who is a liberal, as I am, must therefore be socialist, racist, and so on.

Fifty years ago, the Palme d'Or winner at Cannes was Fellini's "La Dolce Vita." More every year I realize that it was the film of my lifetime. But indulge me while I list some more titles.

The other entries in the official competition included "Ballad of a Soldier," by Grigori Chukhrai; "Lady with a Dog," by Iosif Kheifits; "Home from the Hill," by Vincente Minnelli; "The Virgin Spring," by Ingmar Bergman;" "Kagi," by Kon Ichikawa; "L'Avventura," by Michelangelo Antonioni; "Le Trou," by Jacques Becker; "Never on Sunday," by Jules Dassin; "Sons and Lovers," by Jack Cardiff; "The Savage Innocents," by Nicholas Ray, and "The Young One," by Luis Bunuel.

And many more. But I am not here at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival to mourn the present and praise the past.

Would I want to start over with a new face? Would I like to eat, drink, talk, and look like a normal person? Even if that person were a stranger? In theory, this is now possible. I've been thinking of it, on and off, for the last two weeks. I regularly visit several science websites, and from New Scientist, the invaluable British magazine, I happened upon this story:

"Yesterday it emerged that a farmer in his thirties in Spain who accidentally shot away the lower part of his face has become the first person to receive an entire face transplant. According to yesterday's press conference, he is