So once again, the decisions of the Cannes jury are wildly different from the social-media-fuelled consensus of the Anglophone press, and certainly my own predictions were horribly wrong. It was disappointing that Cate Blanchett’s jury could find nothing for Lee Chang-dong’s brilliant mystery thriller Burning or for the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan and his deeply sympathetic and beautifully filmed homecoming fable The Wild Pear Tree. But there is something very satisfying about the Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda getting his Palme d’Or for the rich, and complex family drama Shoplifters.

That would not have been my exact choice, but it is still an excellent film. Kore-eda is a film-maker who has been a presence at Cannes for almost 20 years and the intelligence and subtlety of his films have been an important contributor to the Cannes gold standard of world cinema.

Shoplifters is about a rascally man and his boy who make a living stealing from supermarkets; one winter evening after a hard day’s thieving, they see a homeless little girl and this man resolves to take her home and look after her in the bosom of his extended, and rackety family. Is this a redemption? A right turn on the path to morality? Not exactly. He wants to “steal” this little girl in the way he steals every thing else, and, Fagin-like, train her up in the ways of shoplifting. And his own extended family is not what it seems. Kore-eda delivers an extraordinary, almost M. Night Shyamalan-type surprise twist, but does it so calmly, so matter-of-factly, that the audience is rubbing its eyes, wondering what’s happened. It’s a very complex film – one which pays its audience the compliment of treating them like intelligent people who are prepared to engage intensely with his film. Kore-eda has to be considered a great Japanese master, and spoken of in the same breath as Ozu and (his own personal model) Naruse.

Spike Lee’s fierce knockabout satire BlacKkKlansman won the Grand Prix, and this was a period movie based on the true story of the black police officer who masterminded the infiltration of the KKK in Colorado. Of course, Lee reinvents this as a parable of present and future times, a story stuffed with unsubtle – but often very funny and certainly pertinent – premonitions of Donald J Trump. It is an angry film, a strident and passionate film and one that insists that there is no value in talking about the historical past, or in reviving the Blaxploitation tropes of 30 or 40 years ago, if these references are not put to the service of the present – of attacking the current situation, and the dangerous complacency, narcissism and chauvinism of America’s political masters in 2018. Clearly, the passion and anger of BlacKkKlansman spoke to this jury.

The Jury Prize surprised and disappointed me a little – especially given the calibre of films which had been overlooked – although Nadine Labaki’s Capharnum had certainly melted critical hearts harder than mine. It is a poignant and emotionally direct story of a boy in present-day Beirut, who runs away from home, fetches up with an illegal Ethiopian immigrant who is then imprisoned, and who then winds up looking after her baby. It is a story with a silly framing device, about this boy launching a lawsuit against his parents from prison, but there is no doubt that it lands an emotional punch in the solar plexus, and it has its own ethical and emotional integrity. UK audiences will have the chance to make up their own minds when it reaches British cinemas, as it surely will.

For me, the single biggest hitter on this list is the Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski, whose Cold War got him the director’s prize – the story of a star-crossed love affair in the gloom and drear of postwar Poland. It is a brilliantly made and passionately acted film.

My own choice for Palme d’Or was Alice Rohrwacher’s sublime and beautifully conceived fable in the style of Olmi – Happy As Lazzaro. It didn’t go away empty –handed, sharing a screenwriting prize with Nader Saeivar and Jafar Panahi, co-writers of the Panahi-directed Three Faces.

The brilliant Italian actor Marcello Fonte was a highly popular choice for best actor as the nerdy little dog-groomer and mobster coke-dealer in Matteo Garrone’s extravagantly exciting Dogman. Fonte could be the Roberto Benigni of his generation. Samal Yeslyamova, the star of Kazakh director Sergei Dvortsevoy’s Ayka, won the actress — beating out the much-fancied favourite, Joanna Kulig from Cold War — for her performance as the eponymous Ayka, a woman who gives birth in conditions of almost unimaginable squalor and poverty and has to contend with menacing loan-sharks and heartless landlords. It was a much-admired performance which certainly commanded assent among the jury.

You would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at Jean-Luc Godard being given the “special” Palme d’Or for his challenging, sulphurous, angry, bewildering, and disorientating essay-film Image Book. The jury’s attempt to timidly offer up a “special” top prize is unconvincing – and one can only imagine the great director’s frosty lack of gratitude or even interest. Perhaps Godard is at once too special or not special enough for the actual Palme d’Or or any prize actually commensurate with his actual worth.

But it is, at any rate, satisfying and heartening to see such respect lavished on Hirokazu Kore-eda, one of the great Japanese film-makers of the modern age.