Sightseers is the third film by the young British director Ben Wheatley and the first that might be deemed a comedy; that said, as befits the man who made Down Terrace and Kill List, it is a decidedly twisted one.

Chris (Steve Oram) and Tina (Alice Lowe) are a new couple embarking on their first holiday together, a caravan trek around the country to visit his favourite sites. The Critch Tramway Museum and the Keswick Pencil Museum may give some cause to yawn, but this is a big deal for Tina, who is desperate to escape the clutches of her monstrous mum.

It’s quite a coincidence when two of the competition films in Cannes take place almost entirely within a stretch limousine. Then again, considering that the movie stars here travel the most ridiculously short distances in such vehicles, it’s entirely appropriate. Following on from Holy Motors, in which the limo doubled as a changing room for an actor-for-hire as he’s driven between assignments, in David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis it serves as office, doctor’s surgery and love nest for a Wall Street billionaire on a 24-hour self-destruct.

The last time that actor Brad Pitt and New Zealand director Andrew Dominik teamed up it was for the epic and elegiac western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Their new one, in competition in Cannes, couldn’t be more different.

Michael Haneke likes to challenge and provoke us, whether it’s with intellectual puzzles (Hidden), bleak character studies (The Piano Teacher) or a brand of horror that makes us feel uneasily complicit (Funny Games). He’s a brilliant director, and a tough one. So while Love may not be a sudden ray of sunshine, it still feels like a departure for the Austrian, a softening of the provocateur, in which he eschews his customary ironic distance for an intimate and essentially positive account of love in adversity.

It’s a normal day in Cannes, which means that I’ve just chatted to Mexican heart-throb Gael García Bernal on the beach, while a mini sand storm battered the doors of our marquee. Bernal is in town with his new film, No, about the events leading to the fall of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. But he took a moment to reminisce about his first year here, in 2000, when Amores Perros took Cannes by the scruff of the neck. The film that helped to ignite the Mexican New Wave was not even in the official competition that year, but it was the title on everyone’s lips.

It's a real pleasure to see Tim Roth strutting his stuff in Cannes, on screen and off. Roth knows the place well, having been here as an actor in Pulp Fiction, and as the director of The War Zone. This year he’s president of the jury for the un certain regard section of the festival – the second rung of the official selection, but often containing the more adventurous material. The role suits a man whose own career choices have been constantly edgy and surprising.

The first full day of Cannes started with a cracker, appropriately by a Frenchman and one of my favourite contemporary directors, Jacques Audiard. Rust and Bone features a love story between a woman who’s had her legs bitten off by a killer whale and a man who makes his living from illegal street fighting. It ought to be preposterous; Audiard, typically, makes it profound.

The 65^th edition of the Festival de Cannes opens today, with Wes Anderson’s latest slice of leftfield whimsy, Moonrise Kingdom, and continues for almost two weeks of frantic film-going, star-spotting, wheeler-dealing and beach partying. For these days in May a usually somnolent seaside town becomes the cinema city that never sleeps.

Freak storms battered the Croisette in the run-up to Cannes this year, wrecking many of the tents, marquees and beach-front cafés that create a rim of exclusivity between the Med and the mainland in this well-populated corner of the Côte d'Azur. That, the ongoing volcanic ash disruption and a slight paucity of celebrity wattage were enough to convince some that the 63rd Festival du Film was peculiarly ill-starred, a suspicion organisers may have inadvertently stoked by selecting Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood re-do for their opening night gala.

Freak storms battered the Croisette in the run-up to Cannes this year, wrecking many of the tents, marquees and beach-front cafés that create a rim of exclusivity between the Med and the mainland in this well-populated corner of the Côte d'Azur. That, the ongoing volcanic ash disruption and a slight paucity of celebrity wattage were enough to convince some that the 63rd Festival du Film was peculiarly ill-starred, a suspicion organisers may have inadvertently stoked by selecting Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood re-do for their opening night gala.