CANNES, France – There was no film I anticipated more at Cannes than Atom Egoyan’s “Where the Truth Lies,” stirred up as I was by the director’s own description: “‘Mulholland Drive’ meets ‘Marnie.'” Although I admire “Calendar” (1993) and “Exotica” (1994).

I’m not a big fan of Mr. Egoyan; his work often strikes me as silly and grandiose. But imagining a hybrid of Mr. Lynch’s fever dream about stardom, love, and betrayal (which dazzled the critics at Cannes 2001) and Hitchcock’s unhinged late masterpiece about a frigid kleptomaniac promised sheer cinephilic rapture – the kind you hope for at Cannes, the sole reason for crossing an ocean and enduring the countless frustrations of the festival bureaucracy.

But have I mentioned that “Where the Truth Lies” is based on a novel by Rupert Holmes, he of “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)” fame?

“Where the Truth Lies” stars Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth as Lanny Morris and Vince Collins, a Lewis-and-Martin type duo tainted by a scandal involving a dead young woman in a bathtub in a New Jersey hotel in 1957. Cut to 1972: an enterprising journalist named Karen O’Connor (Alison Lohman) sets out to unravel the tawdry incident, shuttling between Los Angeles and New York, the 1950s and the 1970s, and her real name and her alias (the heroine’s use of two different names, as far as I could tell, was the only connection to “Marnie”).

Replete with mobsters, booze, and drug freak-outs, Mr. Egoyan’s film aims for the lurid “Hollywood Babylon” nightmarishness Mr. Lynch achieved so supremely. Yet hobbled by its insufferable voice-over (Mr. Bacon: “We weren’t just heroes – we were gods”), show-biz inanities (Mr. Bacon again: “Having to be a nice guy is the hardest job in the world when you’re not”), and a terrible performance by Ms. Lohman, “Truth” has all the insight of an E! expose.

If only Mr. Egoyan had used a Jackie Collins novel as his source material.

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With no time to recover from this colossal disappointment, I dashed from the Grand Theatre Lumiere to the Salle Bunuel only to be treated to more voluble voiceover, idiotic Tinseltown truisms, and homo hysteria in the out-of-competition “Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang.”

The directorial debut of screenwriter Shane Black (the “Lethal Weapon” movies, “The Last Action Hero”), “K2B2” stars Robert Downey Jr. as small-time New York crook Harry Lockhart. He heads to L.A., where he joins forces his with first love, aspiring actress Harmony Faith Lane (Michelle Monaghan), and a private detective, Perry Van Shrike, alias, um, Gay Paree (Val Kilmer), to solve a murder. Filled with tired meta devices, gay jokes, and tidy moments of comeuppance, this is nothing more than a smug hit-and-run.

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Completing my trilogy of movie misery, Marco Tullio Giordana’s mawkish, politically naive “Once You Are Born You Can No Longer Hide” was the first film I saw that was booed (I worried that the Spanish journalist sitting to my left, who squirmed and sighed throughout, would detonate at any second).

On a sailing holiday in the Greek Isles, wealthy pubescent Sandro (Matteo Gadola) falls overboard and is rescued by illegal immigrants packed into a boat headed for Italy. The privileged youth learns Valuable Life Lessons and vows to do right by his new Romanian refugee friends. Cue strings, tears, and hugs – and this critic’s search for a restorative crepe with Nutella.