It’s been an odd year for the official competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Lars von Trier made his first completely boring movie (“Manderlay”). Michael Haneke (“Hidden”) and David Cronenberg (“A History of Violence”) made nearly the exact same film in radically different styles. (Thankfully, both are masterpieces.) There was a lousy remake of “Mulholland Drive,” directed by Atom Egoyan (“Where the Truth Lies”), and now we’ve seen a lousy Kiarostami movie directed by Amos Gitai (“Free Zone”).

Surprising no one and illuminating nothing, Israel’s most famous filmmaker addresses The Problem in the Middle East. Natalie Portman stars as an American woman in Jerusalem who’s just broken up with her Jewish boyfriend. Distraught in two languages (English and Hebrew), she persuades a brassy Israeli car driver (Hanna Laslo) to let her tag along on a symbolically loaded jaunt to Jordan.

For the next hour, Mr. Gitai plonks his camera in the driver’s side passenger seat and mounts one of those Metaphorically Stuck in the Car movies familiar from the Kiarostami oeuvre. Not content to borrow the form from “Ten” et al., Mr. Gitai experiments with extended multiple superimpositions that bring to mind the absurd floating baby faces at the end of “ABC Africa.”

Once the women arrive in Jordan, Hanna meets up with an elegant Palestinian (Hiam Abbass) who’s facilitating the payment of a large cash debt owed by a mysterious “American.” Will the sisters work it out? Will the American arrive and make things right? Will somebody please tell Middle Eastern filmmakers to park the stupid car already? I had to ask around for answers to these questions, as I bailed a couple minutes before the final scene. Mr. Gitai has a tin ear in one language; flailing in three proved intolerable. Plus the dude sitting next to me had halitosis like napalm.

Yes, things have been a bit stinky lately. At a long, dull German movie about a young academic who works as an anti-terrorist informant (“Sleeper,” indeed), an Englishman on my right leaned back for a stretch of the arms that announced his urgent need for a long, hot shower. It’s been raining on and off at Cannes, and a moldy smell permeates the screening room of the Director’s Fortnight. “It’s the Eau de Noga,” cracked James Quandt, esteemed programmer of Cinemateque Ontario, invaluable film critic, and the most congenial festival friend one could ask for.

If the atmosphere in the Noga Theater has been a little musty, the movies there shown have been among the freshest discoveries at Cannes. This is where “Factotum,” the splendid Bukowski adaptation, had its world premiere last week. More recently, Mitsuo Yanagimachi broke a 10-year hiatus with “Who Is Camus Anyway?” an effortlessly witty comedy that suggests how a Japanese Robert Altman might interpret the snarky teen horror flick. Much too long, but worth the wait for a head-spinning finale that justified some rather overemphatic self-reflexivity, “Camus” was, as Mr. Quandt remarked, little more than a divertissement. Exactly, and how splendidly diverting!

Joao Pedro Rodrigues’s deeply tragic and totally perverse “Odete” is not without a sense of humor, albeit a tortured, Fassbinderian one. Nuno Gil is Rui, a handsome young bartender whose lover, Pedro (Joao Carreira), dies in a car accident. Ana Cristina de Oliveira co-stars as Odete, a supermarket salesgirl on roller skates whose boyfriend (Carloto Cotta) refuses to impregnate her and walks out. The night Pedro dies, a portentous gust of wind flutters a curtain in Odete’s apartment and a strange impulse overcomes her. She feigns pregnancy with Pedro’s child and gradually takes over his identity.

On the one hand, “Odete” is a story about grief, love, and, perhaps, the transmigration of a soul. Something along the lines of “Under the Sand,” or “Talk to Her.” On the other, it’s a metaphysical black comedy about the looniest of fag hags and a paradoxical interrogation of gay male identity. Something along the lines of … who knows what?

Odete’s former relationship, if any, to Rui, Pedro, and his family isn’t clear on first viewing; as in Mr. Rodrigues’s remarkable debut “O Fantasma,” the plot is concentrated and elliptical. “Odete” is less stylized and more straightforward than its predecessor – though Mr. Rodrigues’s art is queer in every sense of the term. If he brings to mind Fassbinder and Almodovar, the young Portuguese director has a fully realized vision all his own, as well as an intuitive genius for making movies whose every frame feels dredged from the unconscious.

The problem with “Wolf Creek,” a brutal, buzz-heavy horror flick from Australia, also in the Fortnight, is its failure to dredge from those same, or any other, depths. As we all know, deranged hillbillies are bad news, but just because the one here has particularly vile killing techniques doesn’t make him any more interesting than the one in “House of Wax.” The hottie Aussie cast, however, are far more credible than one expects from the genre, and director Greg McLean’s hyperrealism is several cuts above the routine slasher flick. Hollywood, here he comes.

I wonder when the “The Sun” will shine on New York. Alexander Sokurov’s astonishing new film makes “Russian Ark” look like “Moulin Rouge.” The film played a single screening in the Market section of Cannes, where it drew a number of prominent critics and tastemakers, several of whom were shut out. At least one member of the New York Film Festival selection committee was in attendance (and loved it), but I’m told it failed to impress the critical taste of festival director Richard Pena when he saw it in Berlin.

It would be a great discredit to the New York Film Festival if they turned down this sublime picture. Take this with a grain of salt, but after a tough first reel or two, “The Sun” is unusually accessible and poignant by Sokurov standards. It is also, needless to say, a visually bizarre and intensely hermetic object, featuring such crowd-pleasing enigmas as a free associative riff on a dissected hermit crab and apocalyptic visions of flying fish.

Starring Issey Ogata as Emperor Hirohito, “The Sun” completes Mr. Sukorov’s portrait trilogy of dictators (“Moloch” and “Taurus”) and is, per the press release, the first time the Emperor has been “depicted intimately in film.” He is, in any case, magnificently depicted by Mr. Ogata in an ineffably subtle performance. (Were “The Sun” in Cannes competition – for shame that it’s not! – he’d easily walk off with the best acting prize.)

Set in a crepuscular bunker on the eve of Japan’s surrender in the World War II, “The Sun” makes a perfect companion piece to Gus van Sant’s hallucinatory meditation on Kurt Cobain’s “Last Days.” The latter film opens this summer; we’ll be lucky to see its better anytime soon. But rest assured, the next time I run into the NYFF committee crew on the steps of the Debussy, I’ll try to make “The Sun” shine.