English-language debut by Romanian director who triumphed in 2007 with 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days takes top prize

Nineteen years after his searing abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days won the top prize at the Cannes film festival, Cristian Mungiu’s English-language debut, Fjord, has repeated the trick.

The film – which stars Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan as Romanian religious parents who relocate to Norway, where they find themselves accused of child abuse – makes Mungiu, 58, the 10th director to have received two Palmes, following Alf Sjöberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Bille August, Emir Kusturica, Shōhei Imamura, the Dardenne brothers, Michael Haneke, Ken Loach and Ruben Östlund.

The conservative tycoon’s grip on media and cinema is unhealthy. An EU fund could protect democracy in perpetuity

The shadow of Joseph McCarthy’s “red scare” loomed over the storied steps of this year’s Cannes film festival. Echoing the mid-20th-century blacklist, which shut out about 300 suspected communists from Hollywood, the French media group Canal+ announced an effective ban on twice that many French cinema professionals, including actors such as Juliette Binoche and film directors such as Jean-Pascal Zadi and Arthur Harari. Their crime? An open letter denouncing the growing influence on French media and cinema of conservative tycoon Vincent Bolloré, Canal+’s main shareholder.

The Canal+ chief executive, Maxime Saada, justified punishing the signatories on the basis that their claim was an “injustice” against the staff of Canal+ – who were, he said, committed to the organisation’s independence.

Cannes film festival: This could be better paced but the crisis which descends on an up-against-it dairy farm is delivered by some very memorable goons

There’s nothing like a home-invasion suspense thriller to provide a change of pace in the Cannes competition, and Léa Mysius’s film – adapted from the French bestseller Histoires de la Nuit by Laurent Mauvignier – isn’t at all bad, although it runs out of narrative steam in the third act and one particular shock-twist appears to unshock and untwist itself. Yet the film certainly delivers some sinister rural strangeness in the France profonde countryside and some gonzo shootouts; plus there is a ripe turn from Benoît Magimel, who with every film seems to morph further into a cross between Gérard Depardieu and Christopher Walken.

In a very remote bucolic village, Thomas (Bastien Bouillon) is a hardworking dairy farmer who took over the family smallholding after his father killed himself. After a whirlwind romance, he married Nora (Hafsia Herzi), a rather glamorous city-slicker of a woman who just showed up in the neighbourhood; they have a daughter, Ida who has recently irritated Nora by posting a wacky video of the three of them doing a goofy “family dance”, which has gone viral. The family gets on very well with an elegant artist who lives alone next door, played by Monica Bellucci on pretty stately form. Thomas has clearly got money worries; we see him on the phone trying to borrow cash from someone who has reluctantly helped him out before, as he needs €300 to pay for Nora’s approaching 40th birthday party. On the day itself, three sinister tough guys show up in the house, played by Magimel, Paul Hamy and Alane Delhaye. We might think we know who they’ve come to see and why – but things are a little more complicated than that.

Cannes film festival: Valeska Grisebach’s complex drama tracks an archaeologist whose mountain dig is interrupted by an old friend with rather dirtier hands

The digging up of the past – and the hiding of secrets in the present – are the themes of Valeska Grisebach’s complex, subtle, opaque new drama which seems to withhold some of its narrative meaning from the audience, moment-by-moment. It is set, like her previous film Western, in Bulgaria’s remote and beautiful mountainous country, where memories of the Balkan wars (and the communist era before that) are still fresh and where there is money to be made and resources to be exploited for those who are ruthless enough.

As with Western, Grisebach uses nonprofessionals for many very likable supper-and-drinking-and-reminiscing scenes with people gathered round tables shooting the breeze, scenes that don’t need a particular reason to exist, other than their easy, garrulous energy. And as before, Grisebach shows an interesting reluctance to conform to conventional narrative templates – though while this film actually does conform to Chekhov’s ancient rule about what happens to the gun produced in act one (well, act two in this case), the denouement isn’t the usual arthouse flourish of violence. I felt however that in the course of this film, Grisebach was feeling and improvising her way through all this ambient detail towards a meaning that she (and we) didn’t really reach.

Cannes film festival: Lukas Dhont’s first world war-set gay romance is a heartfelt examination of cowardice and lives lived in secret amid the brutality of battle

The word of the title is not used at any time in this film, but the relevance is clear. On the western front in the first world war, Belgian soldiers get permission to form a theatrical troupe, often in drag, to entertain their comrades when they are behind the lines and raise their morale (not entirely unlike the now despised 70s BBC TV comedy It Ain’t Half Hot Mum). The director is Lukas Dhont who explored gay and transgender issues in movies such as Girl and Close, and this story of a gay affair in the army is heartfelt and well acted, if rather earnestly researched.

The motley “band of rejects”, evidently excused frontline combat duty for various reasons, is led by Francis (Valentin Campagne), a tailor in civilian life who has now ecstatically flowered in the new role the war has given him. He is exuberant, mischievous, imaginative and genuinely committed to his theatrical art. The resulting entertainments look professionally accomplished. (Did these first world war gang shows really have people playing flute and clarinet?) One stolidly handsome, shy soldier called Pierre (Emmanuel Macchia) is fascinated by these theatrical types and by Francis himself; he deliberately stabs his own hand with a bayonet on the field of battle so he can join their group.