This year's festival was dogged by controversy, perhaps for all the wrong reasons. Shane Danielsen, the Director has been under fire from reviewers who claimed the festival has lost both its status and pulling power. Sales remain high but this year's focus on new British films was entirely underwhelming with very weak opening and closing Galas and little worth watching, UK-wise, in between. Matters were made worse when some critics praised a private viewing of Scot Richard Jobson's Edinburgh-shot DV romance A Woman in Winter – strangely not selected for the festival at all. Events took a further wrong turn when James Toback, whose latest NYC fable When Angels Fall was featured along with his 1976 Fingers, made a no-show for his much-touted Reel-to-Reel appearance. The knives sharpened. Other signs surfaced. Unusually, the audience award and the Michael Powell UK premiere award both went to the same film. The trouble is it wasn't really British at all but South African. Tsotsi, a township saga adapted from Athol Fugard by writer-director Gavin Hood, is a tense, fast-paced feel-good movie with great locations about a teen gangsta-with-heart-of-gold. City of God it was not but a fair sight better than anything on view this year from the sceptred isle.

On the credit side Danielsen brought to the festival great movies which the press here cravenly ignored: Bergman's last film and masterpiece Saraband; Goran Paskaljevic's harrowing post-war Serbian gem Midwinter's Night Dream (San zimske noci); the best Italian film in years La Spettatrice, a debut feature about female obsession and solitude set in Turin and Rome by Paolo Franchi; and one of the sharpest American Indies since Elephant, Robinson Devor's Police Beat shot on SP Beta in a dream-like Seattle. Devor pitches in Malick-like fashion the bemused voice-over of a Senegalese bicycle cop, (in his native language with English subtitles), against disconnected images and events around the city culled from actual police records. It is the incomer making strange the everyday life of West Coast America and artistically a triumph in a minor key. The festival also lined up two of the controversial features currently on the European circuit, for UK premieres. The Carlos Reygadas follow-up to Japón, Battle in Heaven (Batalla en el cielo) was more than matched as a talking-point by the experimental, unclassifiable Russian 4, a debut feature from Ilya Khrzhanovsky.

As a bonus, and a necessary one, the documentary section was as strong as ever. Two very different studies in American psychosis stood out, Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man and the retro-rock documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston. Both were topped however by the disturbing study of the effects of war on Russian and Chechnyan children by Finnish director Pirjo Honkasalo, The 3 Rooms of Melancholia (Melancholian 3 huonetta). And the documentary tradition was further bumped up by a retrospective on Bostonian filmmaker Albert Maysles that included his great cameos on Marlon Brando and Mohammed Ali. As a high point, his 1969 Salesman exactly bridged the gap between Death of a Salesman and Glengarry GlenRoss in its gloss on the tight money ethic of American life.

Quality-wise it was the veteran auteurs, Bergman, Paskaljevic and Herzog who triumphed here. Let us take their achievements one by one. Saraband is not only a sequel thirty years on to Scenes from a Marriage it is a far better film. Its poetics of ageing, failed artistry, familial cruelty and incest provide an explosive mix the earlier film with its one-dimensional fixation on adultery, had always lacked. There is none of the earlier smugness here or the anal retentiveness of a film edited out of a prolonged television soap. This is one of Bergman's great chamber films, a fitting coda to the mid-career period that ran from Through a Glass Darkly to Autumn Sonata. All its four central characters, Marianne and Johan in old age, Johan's musician son by his second marriage and his son's musical daughter encounter one another separately and sequentially, as if the film was a rhythmic series of intense musical duets. It starts with a feint as Marianne re-unites with Johan by reminiscing about old times but then discovers his life since is something beyond her with alarming skeletons in the new family cupboard which she will never fully discover. We in fact discover more than she ever does, but at key junctures Bergman also leaves us very much in the dark, but also wishing he had made other movies after Fanny and Alexander.

Herzog's Grizzly Man is a European meditation on the dementia of the American dream, in this case the publicity-seeking Timothy Treadwell who fell in love with Grizzlies in remote Alaska because he had come to hate humans in West Coast America. Wishing to mutate into one, he was eaten alive by one instead, along with his off-camera lover who barely gets a mention. Like Capturing the Friedmans this doc layers its narrative with the found footage of home movies, here in the wild, for the self-promoting Treadwell was a mouthy exhibitionist who practically foretells his own fate. Herzog uses his voice-over differently here than in previous work to mark out the difference in his own sensibility and that of his insane New World Double. Even for the reckless German, this was one misadventure too far.

Finally we can say that Midwinter's Night Dream is one of the most powerful films to come of central Europe since Kieslowski's A Short Film about Killing. Indeed it seems to endow the grey grubby textures of post-war Belgrade with the look and feel of the Dekalog, an anti-Kusturica move if ever there was one. It is a tragic story of parallel lives destroyed by unjust war. A hardened deserter, haunted by images of the massacre in which he has refused to participate, emerges ten years later from prison (sent there for a killing in a bar brawl) to reclaim his mother's apartment from a woman and her teenage daughter who had succumbed to autism at the start of the war. These indeed are parallel lives that will not heal. The man hopes impossibly the girl can be saved without realising until the very end that not only is she incurable he too cannot be 'cured', or transcend the past. At both public screenings audiences who normally scramble to the exit during the credits were pole-axed and stuck in their seats. If this film gets no distribution here it will be a disgrace, but also a grave error of judgment on someone's part for this was indeed great and compelling cinema.

John Orr