Time to go home but not before a last report on Doug Liman's thriller Fair Game, starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, a movie version of the true story of CIA operative Valerie Plame who paid the price for her husband's reaction to the evidence that launched the Iraq war during the Bush Cheney years.

In today's Cannes movie round-up: Ken Loach's Route Irish, Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, Sergei Loznitsa's Schastye Moe, Vikramaditya Motwane's Udaan, Stephen Kijak's Stones in Exile, and seven words on Olivier Assayas's Carlos.

It's all been going so well and now I'm not quite feeling myself, mainly because I no longer am myself apparently.

Stephen Woolley, legendary British producer whose epic back catalogue of cinematic brilliance includes Mona Lisa, Angel, Scandal, The Big Man, Little Voice, and The Crying Game - not to mention his own directorial debut Stoned (that Rolling Stones movie you didn't see), lends us an insider's perspective on the festival after more than a quarter century of Croisettes.

Three reviews today: Kitano's Outrage, Godard's Film Socialisme and Kiarostami's Copie Conforme and one of them is by far the worst film at Cannes this year with days left to go...

Stop press: there's now a serious contender for Best Actor in Alejandro González Iñárritu's Biutiful, and as a special treat I get to chat with one of my heroes, Fernando Trueba, the man behind the overlooked Mad Monkey, and now completing an animated movie in collaboration with the brilliant Spanish artist and designer Javier Mariscal.

On a diet of about four films per day including Mike Leigh's Another Year, Gregg Araki's Kaboom, the cultish possessed car tyre movie Rubber, Woody Allen's You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, and Hideo Nakata's Chatroom, I can't argue that most food groups aren't being served this year, but who is looking like Chef of the Cannes kitchen at the halfway point?

While my job here is to attempt a rational critical opinion of tons of movies against a backdrop of hysterical anticipation, others are doing the serious business of trying to raise the money to complete them: movies such as John Landis's Burke and Hare starring Simon Pegg, Isla Fisher, and two-time Kermode Award winner Andy Serkis. I caught up with the former Gollum, King Kong, and Ian Dury aboard a yacht - which frankly is hardly a natural environment for either of us.

Two years ago they promised the moon... would deliver a Nazi invasion. And this year the lunacy is real. Let's review the pitch: the Moon, UFOs, Nazis, Udo Kier... Yes the Iron Sky is finally about to fall on our heads and I couldn't be happier.

Where's the best place to form a considered critical opinion of a movie like Oliver Stone's new Wall Street movie? How about in the middle of an overexcited, overdressed crowd of film buffs while a brass band plays cover versions of old movie themes?

The festivities are begun, but with Robin Hood and an excoriating documentary about Silvio Berlusconi among the treasures already banked, a sheen of sanity prevails. For now.

Two years ago I sent daily blog reports from the belly of the beast that is the Cannes Film Festival. After a brief one-year sabbatical the summons has again been issued, the family must be left behind, and I must gird myself to face the creatures of the Croisette. On the other hand there's a new Mike Leigh, a new Takeshi Kitano, a last minute Ken Loach Iraq War movie, Route Irish, Ridley Scott's Robin Hood, and even Oliver Stone's new Wall Street movie, a timely sequel to his often willfully misinterpreted 1987 diatribe against unfettered individualism . Hey, maybe there's some good there after all...

Coming home to your comments on coming home in the movies was like, well, coming home. It really is a special feeling, and one that is apparently evident in everything from After Hours to District 9 via The Warriors and even, so it is argued, The Exorcist...

Is it true that all you need for cinematic success is a big two-hander (insert your own "Kermode mitts" gag here), or even a three-hander, or does that only work if you have the likes of Gemma Arterton and the wonderful Eddie Marsan, as in The Disappearance of Alice Creed?

About a year ago when X Men Origins: Wolverine was released I argued that the way to stop movie piracy was to release them on all formats simultaneously. But when a film comes out that I really, really, really like, I'm not so sure anymore.