lot amid $140 million of blockbusting equipment to live as an extra for a day on a big-budget movie And not any old big-budget movie. My predicament seems like a rite of passage, something each extra must learn for himself the hard way early on. Note to self: Before going on set, don't nervously gulp down six cups of coffee. As I struggle to my feet amid the throng searching for missing wives, brothers and daughters, however, one thought keeps intruding with the brutish force and graceless inevitability of a reality-TV show: To heck with your loved ones I need a bathroom now! OK, rookie mistake. Dozens of dazed and bloody people stumble about, trying to adjust to this horror Blood trickles down my face and neck.

I'm close enough to a thigh-high wall of fire to roast a marshmallow on my tongue. In the middle of the floor, which used to be the ceiling, crushed chandeliers slump like twin crystal wedding cakes left in the sun too long Broken glass and broken bodies are scattered everywhere. Which is good, because it momentarily distracts me from the severe distress rippling up from my abdomen. From my prone position, I push myself up on my right elbow to get a look around. This place is wrecked - an entire ballroom flopped on its head. The chorus of agonized shrieking and groaning quickly becomes deafening. With an explosion of light, the screaming starts.

Maybe it's time for the hard-living maestro to change his brand of vodka.j.romney independent.co.uk. Even his dog actor didn't have quite the canine charisma of his previous mutt thesps. And my own personal sorrow was that lovable old Finnish gloomster Aki Kaurism?, in Lights in the Dusk, came up with something less than business as usual, a hard-times story unleavened by his usual sardonic wit. Nanni Moretti's The Caiman was an 81/2-style satire about Silvio Berlusconi. It's strident, messy and coarse, but on the credit side, released in Italy earlier this year, the film no doubt played a part in getting its target out of office.US indie stalwart Richard Linklater offered Fast Food Nation, a fictionalised treatment of Eric Schlosser's book on the US meat racket, but Linklater might have done better with a documentary: this was contrived, shapeless and laden with sophomore slacker polemic. This time, however, as the team shove their characters into harrowing, predictably interlinked crises, the result feels manipulative and forced. One French critic complained that the film summed up the current parlous state of world cinema; indeed, this self-important exercise is world cinema in the same way that Peter Gabriel is world music.Other big names produced disappointment after disappointment.

If you've seen Amores Perros and 21 Grams, you'll know what to expect: but this multi-strander starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Gael Garcia Bernal takes the formula to a global level, with episodes set in Morocco, Mexico and Japan. Witty, sparky, torridly sexy, she's a European star in the grand old-school mode of Sophia Loren.The other critics' favourite for Palme d'Or is Babel, the latest from Mexican director-writer duo Alejandro Gonzalez I?itu and Guillermo Arriaga. Cruz is dazzling, more than making up for all those dodgy English-language performances. It's a pleasure, if hardly a revelation, but it shows the man of La Mancha simplifying his game after the confused Bad Education. Penelope Cruz plays a Madrid housewife with her Marigold kitchen gloves laden with trouble - murdered husband, mother returned from the grave, lunch to cook for 30 - and all one can say is, "¡Que mujer!". Veteran actor Giacomo Rizzi scuttles around a surreal provincial landscape as the ancient, goblin-like protagonist, while Sorrentino orchestrates a sometimes baffling narrative of corruption, exploitation and sexual betrayal.Visually and narratively, it's popping with ideas, arguably too many to accommodate coherently, but I sincerely hope this fevered dream of a film gets a British release, as well as the Cannes recognition it deserves.By Sunday night, we'll know who won the Palme d'Or, and smart money is on Volver, the latest from Pedro Almod?. I can't begin to say how crazy and inspired this film is - a fragmented, Fellini-esque parable about a loathsome yet oddly sympathetic moneylender.