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Unselfconsciously yet unapologetically spiritual … Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Photograph: Eric Ryan/Getty

Cannes 2010 may have been a non-vintage year in many ways, but it yielded a glorious Palme d'Or winner in the form of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, by the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, an utterly beguiling film, bewitchingly mysterious and strange in his distinctive manner, and unselfconsciously yet unapologetically spiritual – a spirituality that the director quietly offers as an alternative to the belligerent nationalism and factious politics for which Thailand is now in the news.

1. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
2. Production year: 2010
3. Countries: France, Germany, Spain, Thailand, UK
4. Directors: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
5. More on this film

It is a compassionate film that combines gentle comedy with fantasy and offers a transcendental vision of love, which manifests itself most vividly at the moment of our death. Its success may modify the somewhat cliched critical view of Asian cinema at Cannes as something affectless and opaque. After the successive triumphs of his last two films, Tropical Malady and Syndromes and a Century, this showed a film-maker whose imagination is at its strongest and most confident: his creative idiom pulses like a powerful heartbeat. After watching this movie, I was so swooningly captivated, I almost felt like going to live in some sort of tent near the director's home in Chiangmai in Thailand, a true believer, like one of the followers of Tolstoy encamped near his home at the beginning of the last century.

The film is loosely inspired by a pamphlet entitled A Man Who Can Recall Past Lives, which the director found in a monastery in north-east Thailand, about an old man called Uncle Boonmee who helped at the temple and told gentle tales of his past lives and past incarnations as humans and animals. Weerasethakul's movie imagines a widower called Boonmee, played by the non-professional Thanapat Saisaymar, who is suffering from a terminal disease and has come to the remote forests of his boyhood – the location, as he believes, of his past spirit lives – to die. But his memory of these past lives is not merely a case of earlier incarnations being presented as a kind of mystical "flashback", but his memory of those lives which are now lost to him: his dead wife and lost son. His encounter with these past lives is gently comic, strange, dream-like and deeply moving. I write about this film in more detail here.

The Grand Prix for Xavier Beauvois's Of Men and Gods was for me another very satisfying award: a fictionalised version of the true-life story from 1996 of French Cistercian monks being kidnapped by Islamic fundamentalists from their monastery in Algeria and finally murdered in circumstances that have never been fully explained. Boldly and powerfully, Beauvois makes of this case a religious and Catholic parable, almost like TS Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, with the monks being progressively menaced by extremists, but refusing to leave, refusing to abandon their calling; yet declining to modify their respect for the traditions of the Qur'an, and reluctant to abandon the local people who have come to depend on them. Gradually, they make themselves ready for martyrdom. The final sequence has a delirious, inspirational quality, an extravagant and explicit reference to the last supper: the monks enjoy some unaccustomed red wine at their modest supper, as Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake plays – an almost Kubrickian flourish – and Beauvois's camera lingers on their careworn faces as they realise what must be in store for them all. Are they achieving something for which they have yearned throughout a lifetime of prayer: a state of grace? It is a very powerful movie, and I look forward to seeing it again when it is released in the UK.

I'm afraid I can't exactly praise the jury's decision to give the best actress prize to Juliette Binoche for her performance in Abbas Kiarostami's odd romantic adventure Certified Copy: she plays a gallery owner in Tuscany who strikes up an intense relationship with a visiting British author whom she has agreed to show around. Of course, Binoche is a wonderful performer, and appearing on the poster for this year's festival as she does, she is a virtual talismanic presence in Cannes. You don't expect anything less than a first-class contribution from Juliette Binoche, and that is what you get from her here. But I must frankly say that she is hobbled by the strange oddity of the film that she appears in, by the uneasy, uncertain quality of the dialogue – Kiarostami is working for the first time in English – and the fact that she has to act opposite William Shimell, an opera singer who here makes his debut as a film actor. Shimell gives of his best: he is obviously someone with presence and intelligence, and his performance was liked by many in Cannes. But I have to say I think he is returning to opera after this. The scene in which Binoche retreats to the ladies' room to get herself glammed up with lipstick and earrings was hugely praised by critics: I found this enthusiasm really quite baffling. Certified Copy was a semi-successful curiosity; Binoche's performance was semi-successful also. I would have preferred to see the best actress prize go to the Korean performer Youn Yuh-jung, playing the sinister housekeeper in Im Sang-soo's elegant suspense thriller The Housemaid.

The best actor prize was divided between Javier Bardem for Alejandro González Iñárritu's intense underworld drama Biutiful and to the young Italian Elio Germano for Daniele Luchetti's La Nostra Vita (Our Life). Again, I'm out of sympathy here. Biutiful is a madly over-the-top rhapsodic tragedy that piles on the woe. Bardem plays a street hustler in Barcelona who is running a crew of Senegalese illegals selling drugs and is also working with some Chinese wiseguys who have a whole warehouse cellar packed with illegals working in a sweatshop. Bardem's character has also the (genuine) gift of seeing dead people, and makes a few euros on the side contacting the departed for grieving relatives: he himself is dying of prostate cancer. He has access to huge hidden stashes of cash, but lives in poverty. We are persistently invited to see him as a sympathetic, flawed character with raw integrity, despite the fact that he is complicit in a horrendous event that occurs three-quarters of the way through the movie; he does not give himself up to the police, is not seen making amends in any other way and the movie never appears to regard him as guilty in any sense. It is an exasperating performance in a basically exasperating movie.

Elio Germano, in La Nostra Vita, is a dynamic, charismatic, endlessly watchable actor. He plays Claudio, a construction worker, happily married with two kids and a third on the way. Everything is great in his life, although he could do with a little more money. Then an awful thing happens and Claudio makes a decision to cover it up, and carry on with his modest life as best he can. It's not a bad film, though finally much more sentimental and lenient than the audience might expect from its shocking opening. Germano is great – it's not stretching things to compare him to the young De Niro in Mean Streets.

Mahamat Saleh Haroun won the jury prize for his excellent film A Screaming Man, which was thought by some in Cannes to be over-schematic, but whose directness and simplicity I found entirely compelling. In fact, I should have liked the best actor prize to go to Youssouf Djaoro, playing Adam, the sixtysomething pool attendant at a luxury hotel in Chad, whose son works alongside him. But when Adam loses his job, and is then pressured by the authorities to send his son off to war to fight insurgent rebels, Adam is put into a painful, complex situation.

I'm sorry to say that the jury gave the best director prize to Mathieu Amalric for his directing debut On Tour, an emotionally flat, not-very-well-acted-or-directed vanity project in which Amalric plays a former TV producer who is taking a troupe of neo-burlesque strippers from the US on a regional tour of his native France, and wondering whether to bring them to Paris, where he must confront his past and slay personal demons. I found this film boring, with a negligent, lazily extreme performance from Amalric himself. He is usually such a treat. Not this time. The directing prize should surely have gone to Mike Leigh, whose Another Year was one of the very best films in Cannes.

Lee Chang-dong won the best screenplay prize for his film Poetry, about a sixtysomething woman who has been told that she is in the early stages of Alzheimer's, and conceives a passionate desire to write a poem about her life, before the powers of language and memory desert her utterly. It is, intermittently, an affecting film, though in my view clotted with plot strands that were clumsily over-dramatic and superfluous.

This was a year in which many felt that the competition list was upstaged by a very interesting Un Certain Regard section, dominated by the defiant glitter of Jean-Luc Godard's Film Socialism, and by the polemics out of competition from Lucy Walker, with her anti-nuke documentary Countdown to Zero, and from Sabina Guzzanti with her brilliant attack on Berlusconi: Draquila – Italy Trembles. In competition, auteur heavy-hitters like Kiarostami and Loach produced only middling work. But there were gems like Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Of Men and Gods and Another Year – all demand to be seen when they are released in Britain.