The moment that the lineup for this year's Cannes Film Festival (which ran May 14–24) was unveiled, oddsmakers predicted the Turkish drama Winter Sleep as the most likely winner of the festival's top prize, the Palme d'Or. In part, that was because its director, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, has a history of winning awards at Cannes (for such films as Distant, Climates and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia), but had never taken home the big magilla. Mostly, though, it was because Winter Sleep, at three hours and 16 minutes, was the longest film in competition, thereby making it appear to be the most important and ambitious.

In any case, the oddsmakers were right. A jury headed by Jane Campion (whose film The Piano itself won the Palme d'Or two decades ago) handed Winter Sleep the coveted honor, unbothered by its seemingly endless dialogue scenes between a passive-aggressive hotel owner (Haluk Bilginer) and his discontented wife (Melisa Sözen) and sister (Demet Akbag). Ceylan remains a visual master—the primary location here, with its magnificent hotel seemingly carved from the side of a hill, is astounding—but his characters' epic Chekhovian debates are too much of a good thing, going on at a length that's as wearying as it is realistic.

Revealing the protagonist's dickish nature a bit at a time, Bilginer ought to have won Best Actor. Instead, that prize was awarded to Timothy Spall (also excellent) in Mike Leigh's absorbing Mr. Turner, about famed British painter J.M.W. Turner. Like Leigh's Topsy-Turvy, this is less a biopic than an exactingly detailed portrait of a particular time and place, anchored by a creative personality; if it's not quite as impressive as the earlier film, that's because it tends to focus more on character than on process. Best Actress went to Julianne Moore, playing a high-strung, aging actress in David Cronenberg's feeble Hollywood satire Maps to the Stars, with a script by Bruce Wagner (Scenes From the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills) that takes laborious potshots at pop culture's most obvious targets, from self-help gurus to entitled teen stars.

Meanwhile, by far the best film in this year's competition was entirely ignored—though that's not too surprising, since its directors, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, have already won five prizes at Cannes (including the Palme d'Or twice, for Rosetta in 1999 and The Child in 2005), and the jury may have felt inclined to recognize some other filmmakers for a change. All the same, nobody else could touch the sublimely simple Two Days, One Night, in which Marion Cotillard plays a laid-off worker who needs to persuade more than half of her fellow employees to give up their annual bonuses so that she can get her job back. Collectively, these door-to-door encounters—which find some people supportive, others hostile, and include just about gradation in between—represent human nature in all its messiness; if the film could somehow be required viewing for everybody, the world would surely be a better place.

Surprising performances from American actors were another highlight of this year's festival. I wasn't as impressed as others were by Bennett Miller's Foxcatcher, based on the true story of wrestling star Dave Schultz's senseless murder at the hands of billionaire John E. DuPont, but it's definitely bracing to see Steve Carell, stripped of all his usual comic mannerisms (and outfitted with a distracting prosthetic nose), as DuPont; his flat, recessive take on power and privilege will likely loom large come the fall awards season. Even more remarkable, in its own low-key way, is Kristen Stewart's subtly intuitive work in Olivier Assayas' Clouds of Sils Maria, in which she plays the personal assistant to a famous actress (embodied by actual famous actress Juliette Binoche). The Twilight franchise didn't give Stewart much of a chance to demonstrate that she can act, but she evinces a fascinating mix of empathy and opacity here.

As is often the case at Cannes, some of the best films premiered not in competition but in the sidebar sections (Un Certain Regard, Directors' Fortnight, Critics' Week), where they garnered comparatively little attention. Pascale Ferran's Bird People, a diptych set in a Hilton near Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, juxtaposes the midlife crisis of an American businessman (The Good Wife's Josh Charles) with the, uh, existential crisis of a French maid (Anaïs Demoustier); the direction this singular, superb film takes is too magical to be spoiled. The experience that's really followed me home, however, is It Follows, the second feature by David Robert Mitchell (The Myth of the American Sleepover). Horror movies don't come much creepier than this one, which posits a sexually transmitted curse that sees the recipient constantly pursued by a creature that can take any human form; this thing moves only at a quick walk, but it never, ever stops coming. At a mere 94 minutes—less than half the running time of Winter Sleep—It Follows may not look terribly important, but there's more to excellence than ambition, even at the most renowned film festival in the world.