It's only rock and roll, but the 58th Berlinale Film Festival liked it. Getting Shine a Light as its opening film - one that unites the Rolling Stones, rock's most infamous survivors, with Martin Scorsese, cinema's greatest user of rock music - was a media coup. And if it turned out mostly to be a crisply shot but routine concert by a band well past their prime, it didn't stop a grinning fiesta atmosphere prevailing in its wake. 'This is the only Scorsese film that doesn't feature "Gimme Shelter",' quipped Mick Jagger. Watching the retirement-age dandy throwing himself around for a couple of hours, you had to gape in amazement, even if the ever-shambling Keef looked like he'd lost his knitting.
Patti Smith was as charismatic as ever in the self-documentary Dream of Life, and Madonna restirred media frenzy midweek with her amateurish direction of the undistinguished romcom Filth and Wisdom
Probably the biggest hit of the festival was Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky. Sally Hawkins plays a primary school teacher whose relentless cheeriness can be grating. You warm to her, however, as you meet her tight circle of girlfriends caught up in the booze culture of young London. Though one of Leigh's lighter films, featuring one of his funniest scenes ever - an explosively passionate Spanish woman trying to teach uptight English women flamenco dancing - its themes of education and psychological damage are put into high gear when Hawkins takes lessons from Eddie Marsan's monomaniacal driving instructor who finds her chitchat infuriating.
With its telling wit and masterly control, Happy-Go-Lucky shows Leigh to be an expert film-maker of many registers. It also bears resemblance to the work of French New Wave directors Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer. You could call it Céline and Julie Go Camden.
Also Rohmeresque was Night and Day by Korean director Hong Sang-Soo, best known in the UK for his festival hit, The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well. Having been named as a pot smoker to the Korean police, Sungnam, a painter, absconds to Paris, leaving his wife behind in Seoul. Though at first he hides away, the French capital soon beguiles him, as do several Korean women residents, presenting him with a series of moral dilemmas played out in gentle grace notes. Night and Day featured a sparrow trapped indoors, a symbolic event that, by bizarre coincidence, also featured in three other films.
Two of these disappointed: Marseilles-based director Robert Guédiguian clumsily fashioned a Melville-like thriller in the ponderous Lady Jane; Majid Majidi's neorealist fable The Song of Sparrows followed the determined struggle of a sacked ostrich farm worker, but stayed on one note. Johnny To's The Sparrow, however, had a twinkle in its eye. A sweeping Michel Legrand-type score underpins a lighthearted tale of pickpockets ('sparrows') bedazzled by a mysterious beauty under the thumb of a gang boss. This isn't one of To's usual bloodbaths, rather a choreographed ballet of romantic gestures, and when its hero finds a bird in his room, it's a colourful finch, not a dowdy sparrow. The Jacques Demy influence is obvious. You could call this one The Pickpockets of Cherbourg.
A decade ago, French director Erick Zonca achieved John Cassavetes levels of emotional intensity with The Dreamlife of Angels. If anything Julia, his tribute to Cassavetes's Gloria, is even more charged, with Tilda Swinton as an alcoholic who loses her job after one too many post-binge blackouts and falls into a crazy scheme to kidnap the grandson of rich man.
At two hours and more, most of it with Swinton at her highest pitch - on the run in Mexico with the kidnapped boy - we have to wait too long for the kidnap genre and alcoholic redemption elements to coalesce.
Philip Roth's The Dying Animal, in which an ageing literature professor sets out to conquer a Cuban beauty, is the weak exception in a run of brilliant latterday novels. In her adaptation, Elegy, director Isabel Coixet softens Roth's misogyny and concocts clumsy dialogue, especially between Ben Kingsley, the professor, and Dennis Hopper, 'a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet', as Kingsley reminds him in case he didn't know. Penélope Cruz's high-maintenance allure convinces, however.
Berlin's big problem is that it cares too much about its huge European film market and, on this evidence, not enough about the programme. If the underwhelming competition did pick up a little towards the end, particularly with Antonio Grimaldi's dryly humorous and affecting grief study Quiet Chaos, there was barely any buzz from the more risk-oriented strands.
It used to be that all the world wanted to make American indie cinema; now, many want to make New Wave French cinema. Neither seems a forward-looking option.
Nick James is editor of Sight and Sound.