CANNES, France – When will the Cannes Film Festival begin? The question is on people’s minds. Officially, of course, the movies started last Wednesday, but opinion varies as to when things started to kick into high gear. Some are still waiting. Expectations run very high at Cannes, and attention spans run very, very short.

Yesterday I overheard an American ask “What does ‘Croisette’ mean in English?” The answer, of course, is “impatience.” Two or three days go by without a triumph, and people start getting cranky. After all, what’s the point of putting up with sleep deprivation, institutional humiliation, and a mortifying exchange rate if the cinema doesn’t reinvent itself every couple of hours?

The opening stretch wasn’t entirely hopeless. On Thursday, conversation in the Palais des Festivals revolved around when it was exactly that Woody Allen had made a film as good as “Match Point.” Ten years ago? Twenty? “Never” was the slash-and-burn assessment of one prominent critic, a master of the post-screening confab. The formulation of clever opinions is an extreme sport in Cannes.

Day three gave us our first juicy fiasco and a new question to toss around the Palais: Had Atom Egoyan ever made a film as bad as “Where the Truth Lies”? Someone suggested “Ararat.” Another said yes, “all of them.” Our extreme sport can get extremely silly.

Shaking off the Egoyan ughs, I joined my acerbic colleague in the Salle Bazin for a congenial primer on “Midnight Movies.” Watching a film about films at a film festival felt strangely like playing hooky; you’re supposed to be out mucking around in the movies figuring out what to say, not watching someone else do it. Still, as pleasures go, they come guiltier than enjoying clips from “El Topo,” “The Harder They Come,” “Eraserhead,” and “Night of the Living Dead” on a big screen.

J. Hoberman kept clear of the Bazin for personal reasons. Co-author of a seminal study of midnight movies himself, the Village Voice critic is a prominent talking head in the documentary and, quel surprise, the most eloquent. The sheepish scholar lingered for a while before heading off to a spectacle that didn’t entail every pore on his nose being writ large in front of the international press.

“If you see Jim later,” my companion whispered during the movie, “tell him he looked great. Oh, and remind me to tell you my ‘Eraserhead’ story when we get out of here.” The story, which involved a famous avant-garde filmmaker, an “insanely brilliant” academic, and large quantity of hallucinogenic mushrooms, I’m keeping to myself.

The full story on “Last Days” will have to wait until it arrives in New York later this year. Unlike everyone I know at Cannes, I wasn’t invited to a pre-festival screening of Gus Van Sant’s latest, and thus didn’t have the benefit of turning its haunting images over in my head before seeing it here.

Inspired by the final weekend in the life of Kurt Cobain, “Last Days” joins “Gerry” and “Elephant” to constitute an experimental trilogy on death – and one of the most remarkable aesthetic reversals in American cinema. It’s the knottiest and most dissonant of the group, and evidence that its director has fully synthesized the influence of Bela Tarr and made it his own.

Michael Pitt gives a remarkable physical performance as Blake, a smack-addled young rock god mumbling and stumbling his way toward suicide. Holed up in a crumbling mansion at the edge of a forest, Blake and his inner circle encounter various interlopers (a Yellow Pages sales agent, a pair of Mormon twins, Kim Deal), wander off on tangents (exquisitely Steadicam’d by Harris Savides), or slump into private, enigmatic reveries (your guess is as good as mine).

Chronology is fractured and looped, space is oneiric and cubistic. As in “Elephant,” the sound design forefronts musique concrete and trippy non-di agetic amplifications; “Last Days” is an avant-garde head movie. “Venus in Furs,” with its self-annihilating rapture and narcotic oblivion, is the emblematic song, but it’s a pair of astonishing musical performances by Mr. Pitt that invest “Last Days” with a gripping emotional undertow.

It was no fault of “Election” that I wasn’t gripped but slipping into sleep. By Friday night, the biorhythmic chaos of jet-lag and non-stop movie going overtook whatever determination I had to stay alert. (“Invisible,” the forgettable debut of former Cahiers du Cinema editor Thierry Jousse, hadn’t helped matters.) When I managed to snap back to consciousness, Johnnie To’s Triad procedural impressed with its gloomy neo-noir atmosphere and elaborately withheld genre catharsis.

It was my good fortune to get a proper night of sleep at the end of day three, for at exactly 8:30 the next morning, Cannes happened with a vengeance. Michael Haneke’s “Hidden” does everything right. A riveting thriller (albeit a minimalist, ambiguous one) about a family terrorized by surveillance videos, it is also a riveting political allegory about the war on terror.

Daniel Auteuil (Georges) and Juliette Binoche (Anne) are extraordinarily precise as a bourgeois intellectual couple who receive a series of unsettling videotapes of their home. They arrive packaged with violent, child-like drawings, a clue that will send Georges on an acrimonious hunt for his childhood friend Majid (Maurice Benichou). Mr. Haneke slowly lifts the lid off a Pandora’s Box of deception, violence, and misplaced anxieties, the political implications of which are superbly complex and evocative.

Mr. Haneke inches through his immaculate plot with Hitchcockian control and a terrifying sang froid uniquely his own. Such steely nerve comes as no surprise from the maker of “The Piano Teacher” and “The Time of the Wolf,” but “Hidden” brings to light an unprecedented integration of Mr. Haneke’s excoriating intellect and formal prowess. Genre discipline has controlled his didactic impulse. Lars Von Trier is quaking in his boots.

Movie-going at Cannes is a violent form of montage. Half an hour after bracing my mind to the analytical rigors of “Hidden” I was lazing in the deadpan yuks of “Factotum.” A deftly written pastiche of several Charles Bukowski novels, this wonderfully modest and terrifically funny comedy stars Matt Dillon as the alcoholic antihero Henry Chinaski, and Lili Taylor as his boozy gal Jan. Directed with pitch-perfect restraint by Norwegian director Bent Hamer (winner of the coolest name nom d’auteur at Cannes 2005!), “Factotum” gets the wounded macho camp of Bukowski just right.

The rest of the day was a wash, with James Walsh’s “The King” surely the most idiotic “study” of American life we’ll see this year. This bogus melodrama about “a tragedy of Biblical proportions” set amongst evangelical Texans stars Gael Garcia Bernal as a sailor named Elvis who goes in search of his long lost father, a preacher with a handle bar moustache played by William Hurt. No, for real.