In this year's official selection at Cannes, few if any, of the international entrants produce work quite so distinctively unique as Pedro Almodovar, who makes his first outing to the festival with his 13th feature film, All About My Mother, which is sure to figure prominently at next Sunday night's awards ceremony, possibly earning him the Palme d'Or.

The film is stamped with his trademark flourishes, from the elaborate opening titles which preface the introduction of Manuela (Cecilia Roth), a devoted single mother settling down with her son, Esteban (Eloy Azorin) in their Madrid home for yet another shared re-viewing of their favourite movie, All About Eve.

It is the eve of Esteban's 17th birthday, for which Manuela buys him Truman Capote's Music For Chameleons and takes him to see a stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire starring an actress, Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes), they both admire. After the show, running through the rain to get the star's autograph, the boy is killed by a car. As Manuela reads his notebook she realises that his most cherished wish was to meet his father, who never knew the boy existed.

Returning to Barcelona to seek out the father, she is drawn into the worlds of La Agrado (Antonia San Juan), a one-time close friend and former truck driver who's now a transvestite prostitute; a young nun (Penelope Cruz) who is pregnant and has AIDS; and the actress, Huma Rojo, who is now performing Streetcar in Barcelona with her junkie lesbian lover.

Dedicated to all the actresses who have played actresses on screen - and specifically to Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands and Romy Schneider - All About My Mother is all about women and transvestites as they struggle to cope with the complexities and upheavals of their lives.

This lovingly crafted melodrama is the most mature and sensitive to date from Almodovar, an entrancing experience which draws its characters with great affection and compassion. Superbly performed by an impeccable cast, it is sprinkled with Almodovar's offbeat visual and verbal humour, with lines like "I think Prada is ideal for a nun".

The third film directed by the actor, Tim Robbins, Cradle Will Rock received loud, sustained cheering at a packed 8.30 a.m. press screening on Tuesday morning - a response that baffled some of that audience who, like me, found it uneven, sprawling and deeply disappointing. A highly ambitious and factually based production set in New York in 1936, it deals with the problems besetting the staging of a socialist musical, The Cradle Will Rock, by the young Orson Welles and John Houseman in the face of opposition from right-wing politicians.

At times, however, and all too often, Robbins allows his film to be as naive as the sub-Brecht musical at its core, and he overloads the baggage by introducing a superfluous sub-plot involving the deteriorating relationship between Nelson Rockefeller (John Cusack) and Diego Rivera (Ruben Blades), whom he commissioned to paint a vast mural in the Rockefeller Centre.

The movie's glibness and heavyhandedness evoke unhappy memories of previous Cannes entrants such as Alan Rudolph's picture of the Algonquin set, Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle, and John Turturro's film about a turn-ofthe-century theatre company in Illuminata.

There are over a dozen principal characters in Robbins's film and many of them are reduced to caricature, most gratingly in the insulting mimicking of Welles and Houseman by Angus MacFayden and Cary Elwes, respectively. Only Emily Watson, Cherry Jones and Hank Azaria emerge with credibility from a cast that also includes Susan Sarandon, Bill Murray, Vanessa Redgrave, Joan Cusack and John Turturro.

THE most demanding endurance test in the Cannes competition has been L'humanite, the second feature directed by Bruno Dumont after his award-winning La Vie de Jesus. Set in a grim town in the industrial northeast of France, it centres on a glum police officer (Emmanuel Schotte) who seems quite incapable of investigating the brutal rape and murder of an 11 year-old girl in the vicinity.

As in his first film, Dumont's pacing is so slow as to be virtually static, sometimes interrupted by graphic sex scenes. Some other scenes are utterly irrelevant, as when the camera follows Schotte as he goes out for a cycle, then cycles home again to eat an apple. Given Dumont's evident gift for framing striking widescreen compositions, it is a shame that there is so little to fill them in this patience-stretching 150-minute film.

By contrast, the British entry, Wonderland, is packed with incident and directed with an infectious energy by Michael Winterbottom as it weaves together the interconnected experiences of 13 characters over four days in London, a city which registers just as strongly as a character within the narrative. Shot with a minimal crew and a hand-held camera, and without lights or extras, Wonderland deftly juggles its multiple characters as skilfully as Short Cuts and Happiness. Laurence Coriat's succinct screenplay takes on marital collapse, big city loneliness, professional dissatisfaction, random violence, communication breakdown and impending birth. All of the interlinked scenarios mesh beautifully on the fourth day and offer some surprising revelations in this small gem of a movie that's accompanied by a gorgeous, swelling Michael Nyman score and features an admirable cast that includes Molly Parker, Kika Markham, John Simm, Gina McKee, Ian Hart, Shirley Henderson and Stuart Townsend.

Another multi-charactered London-set scenario, Beautiful People, has proved to be one of the most significant discoveries at Cannes this year, where it's in the sidebar, Un Certain Regard. It introduces a notable new talent in its Bosnian-raised, London-based writer-director, Jasmin Dizdar. Although set in 1993, the movie bristles with an urgent topicality.

In an arresting, scene-setting opening, a Serb and a Croat recognise each other on a London bus and a vicious fight immediately breaks out. While the film deals persuasively with themes drawn from English life (overworked hospital staff, Tory lifestyles, class divisions, soccer hooliganism), it is at its most effective and most chilling when a stoned young Londoner (Danny Nussbaum) unexpectedly finds himself detoured into the terror and chaos of the Srebrenica conflict.

Oddly screening out of competition, although in the official Cannes selection, Steven Soderbergh's The Limey is a droll and stylish entertainment which is altogether more prize-worthy than many of the competing entries. It cleverly brings together two 1960s cultural icons from opposite sides of the Atlantic, Terence Stamp and Peter Fonda, for a cool revenge thriller in which an English career criminal goes west to track down the Los Angeles record producer responsible for his daughter's death.

The hard-boiled dialogue of Lem Dobbs's witty screenplay is littered with sharp throwaway humour hinged on Stamp's Cockney rhyming slang, which baffles the Americans even more than his philosophical outbursts. In Soderbergh's adroit, time-shifting structure, the flashbacks to the Stamp character's earlier life ingeniously employ footage of his performance in Ken Loach's Poor Cow.

A fine supporting cast includes Lesley Ann Warren, Luis Guzman, Barry Newman and Joe Dallesandro, and the soundtrack aptly features old hits from The Who, The Hollies, The Byrds, Steppenwolf and Boston, with Stamp, who is on rare form, singing Donovan's Colours.

Michael Dwyer reports on the Cannes prize-winners on Monday and concludes his coverage of the festival next Friday.