After the Boos: Reviewing the Cannes Film Festival CANNES, France - On the last day of the Cannes Film Festival, festival attendees swap last-minute guesses about who will win the Palme d'Or and catch up on any of the selections in the main competition during the reprise screenings. By this point, the festival has largely cleared out, save for journalist laggers and, of course, those winners who have stayed in town hoping for a callback to the evening awards ceremony. The market, where thousands of titles are bought and sold by thousands of industry professionals closed Friday, and many journalists are already back home, where doubtless some will decide (as usual!) that this year really wasn't as bad as it sometimes seemed. Even before the festival opened on May 15, this year's edition had come in for critical skewering because none of the movies in the main competition were directed by women. In an open letter, a French feminist activist group, La Barbe, denounced the lack of representation and compared this year to last, when, as the letter witheringly put it, "doubtless due to a lack of vigilance, four women somehow sneaked in among the 20 people nominated in the official competition." However righteous this protest - it's impossible to overstate the gender imbalance that has long plagued the movies - the greater problem is that those who bankroll projects simply don't hire enough female directors, including for the tent-poles and comic-book diversions that dominate the international market. A few days after the protest, and it was Cannes business as usual as each day critics staked their claims, declaring this a masterpiece, that a fiasco and much of it mezzo mezzo. Perhaps it was all the rain, but the booing sounded angrier this year, with the competition entry "Post Tenebras Lux," from the Mexican director Carlos Reygadas ("Silent Light"), coming in for the harshest reception I've heard here since Vincent Gallo's "Brown Bunny" in 2003. "Post Tenebras Lux" has a stunningly beautiful opening - in the first 20 or so minutes, a tiny girl toddles across a field amid a menagerie of barking, mooing animals and a red devil enters a house carrying what looks like a toolbox - but it's also narratively opaque. All I know is that I hope someone buys it so I can see it again. Another title that deserves a second look from critics is David Cronenberg's latest, "Cosmopolis," yet another under-loved competition title and a movie that will probably, as is often the case, be received more warmly when it opens commercially. Based on the slim 2004 Don DeLillo novel, it stars that blank beauty, Robert Pattinson (Edward the vampire, from the "Twilight" franchise), as Eric Packer, an ultra-high-net-worth individual who has set himself one goal for the day: a haircut. To that banal end, he slips into his bulletproof, nearly soundproofed white stretch limo that's both his office and something of a carapace, and from which he impassively watches the city slip by. Along the way, he also has sex, drinks, considers his rapidly depleting fortune and has a prostate exam. Tightly controlled and line by line often funny, with sentences lifted intact from the book, "Cosmopolis" is set in 2000, the year that the dot-com bubble burst. Packer works in currencies and is facing his own crisis, initially with dead-eyed calm. The yuan is giving him grief (in the novel it was the yen), but he seems largely preoccupied with other matters, including his equally blank, frosty wife (Sarah Gadon) and a lover (Juliette Binoche), who he wants to help him buy, absurdly, the Rothko Chapel. His 48-room apartment, he says, is big enough to hold it. But, his lover protests, the chapel, an ecumenical place of worship, belongs to the world. "It's mine if I buy it," Parker says. Mr. Cronenberg does wonders with both the camera, especially inside the tight confines of limo, where many of the scenes are set, and with his star, coaxing a performance from Mr. Pattinson that perfectly works for the movie's sepulchral air. Initially, when Packer slides into his limo, he seems like another master of the universe with shades, a bespoke suit and the otherworldly air of the super-rich. Yet as the limo inches across the city, where the traffic has been slowed to a creep by a presidential motorcade, a celebrity funeral and anarchist outrage, you begin to realize this is a man being chauffeured to his own funeral. As a diagnosis of what ails us, "Cosmopolis" would make an excellent if slightly nauseating double-bill with Mary Harron's Wall Street horror shocker, "American Psycho."