In the weeks leading up to the 65th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, the critical fraternity was licking its lips in anticipation.

This promised to be a vintage year. The question was whether an Auteur World XI – including Cronenberg, Kiarostami, Mungiu, Haneke, Audiard and Loach – would deliver. At the final whistle, I'd say the answer is a score draw.

One of the most striking aspects of this year's festival is the number of films that have engaged audiences with fundamental stories of day-to-day dilemmas, told in ways that are accessible and highly emotional. My tip for the Palme d'Or – the results are announced this evening – would be a case in point.

Michael Haneke's Love is an incredibly moving film, if also a tough one to watch, as it concerns an octogenarian couple whose comfortable life falls apart as she becomes terminally ill and he is forced into the role of carer. Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva are phenomenal, she expertly essaying the physical and mental disintegration of a proud woman, he presenting a rainbow of emotions – tenderness, concern, frustration, bewilderment and love – for much of the time without a foil. This sees a much softer, less cynical side to Haneke, who nevertheless directs with his usual precision. The Austrian won the top prize here with The White Ribbon, three years ago. He deserves to repeat the trick.

Rush And Bone, by Frenchman Jacques Audiard (A Prophet), offers a proposition so preposterous that few would be able to pull it off. Here's the pitch: a woman has her legs bitten off by a killer whale, but finds a reason to live when she meets an illegal street fighter. Nutty, but Audiard develops his story with so much conviction and fine judgement that we are utterly absorbed. It doesn't hurt that he has the luminous Marion Cotillard as his heroine, a feisty woman whose return from despair becomes gorgeously and tearfully life-affirming.

Thomas Vinterberg (Festen) is on good form with The Hunt, starring the marvellous Mads Mikkelsen as a kind-hearted kindergarten teacher who is the victim of a young girl's imagination. Suddenly the teacher finds himself accused of indecent assault, not only of the girl but others in her class; this is one of those situations where parental fear meets by-the-numbers bureaucracy to create a witch hunt. In many ways a conventional drama, it excels in the rendering: Vinterberg reveals the extent of the teacher's problems by degrees, building tension and even horror as his community engulfs him. And Mikkelsen, who often plays bad guys (including a Bond villain) portrays such dignity and decency in adversity that his suffering is heartbreaking.

One of my favourite films was not in the competition, but ought to have been. The Chilean Pablo Larraín completes his trilogy on his country's dictatorship years, which started with Tony Manero and Post Mortem, with No. The film takes its title from the No campaign in the 1988 Chilean referendum on whether to grant General Pinochet a further eight years in power. Gael García Bernal plays an ad man whose stroke of genius was not to focus on the pain and suffering of the previous 15 years, but on the upbeat message that "happiness is coming". Larraín draws on the spirit of that campaign to make his most accessible film to date, and a very funny one at that. This is that rare thing, a political and worthy film that is at the same time enormously entertaining.

Another non-competition film that wowed me was Beasts Of The Southern Wild, a beautiful, deeply strange story, derived from but not about Hurricane Katrina, concerning a Louisiana community with no intention of abandoning the bayou, despite the brewing storm. Mostly played by non-professionals, it has a magical air about it, and is one of the few films here that dares to experiment with style and narrative form. Also outstanding was The Mexican After Lucia, a disturbing story about school bullying that sets the phenomenon in the context of family relationships and the day-to-day, violent instincts that are taken for granted in society. It packs a very powerful punch.

Those films put some of the competition entries in the shade. With the prohibition drama Lawless, director John Hillcoat (The Road) and writer Nick Cave fail to impose their usually leftfield, intelligent sensibilities on the genre. The result is a fairly average yarn, despite fulsome performances by Gary Oldman, Tom Hardy and Guy Pearce. The Romanian Cristian Mungiu's attack on orthodox Christianity, Beyond The Hills, was interminable, and Iranian Abbas Kiarostami's attempt to transpose his camera-in-a-car style to Japan in Like Someone In Love just felt lazy.

Much better were two films that spoke to the economic crisis. Andrew Dominik's Killing Them Softly is a fruity, funny, character- and dialogue-driven crime drama, in which the robbery of an illegal card game leads to a damaging lack of confidence among the underworld; Brad Pitt plays the enforcer who needs to find a fall-guy for the crime and, much like the government and its bail-outs, get the bad guys back in business. David Cronenberg's adaptation of Don DeLillo's dystopian satire Cosmopolis sees Robert Pattinson chillingly convincing as a Wall Street billionaire on self-destruct – with no-one about to shed a tear.

Finally to Ken Loach's comedy The Angels' Share, which is released in the UK next week. Enough to say, for now, that among such serious and often gloomy content it truly lifted the spirits on La Croisette. It may be simply too much fun to win a prize, but it's a must-see for home.