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Sinking city

Brittany Murphy attends a photocall for Sin City at the Riviera Terrace in the Palais des Festival in Cannes. Photograph: Anthony Harvey/PA

• Xan Brooks, Guardian Unlimited Film editor

Sin City screened at Cannes last night, after a thunderstorm had drenched the streets and ominous clouds swept in off the Mediterranean. It made for the perfect, noir-ish backdrop for the film, which is "shot and cut" by Robert Rodriguez with a bizarre "guest director" credit for Quentin Tarantino. Based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller, Sin City is a dubious geek fantasy, teeming with hard-boiled heroes, googly-eyed monsters and kick-ass women. The whole thing is flagrant, OTT and borderline ludicrous. I loved every minute of it.

Inside the theatre, we run into Derek Malcolm, the Guardian's legendary, long-serving film critic (who now writes for the Standard, the turncoat). Each year Derek runs an unofficial betting book and sets the odds each day for the Palme d'Or. He says that the odds are currently shortest on Michael Haneke's Cache. The acclaimed Jim Jarmusch film Broken Flowers is a strong second favourite, while the movie with the longest odds is the Kurdish drama Kilometre Zero. Malcolm knows Cannes as well as anyone, but admits that nobody can predict the direction of the prizes with any real accuracy. Last year he was telling everyone that he would eat his hat if a documentary won the Cannes Palme d'Or. The award duly went to Fahrenheit 9/11.

I emerge from the Palais with ears ringing and my head full of film-noir pyrotechnics. It's been raining again and up ahead I see a woman trail her thousand-dollar dress through a puddle. Beside the red carpet the crowds are still gathered, soaking wet but undeterred. They come along the Croisette carrying stepladders to get a better view. They stand on their ladders and put up their umbrellas and stare at a patch of carpet in the hope that Salma Hayek, or Julie Delpy, or whoever will walk down it. For all its weird and wild flights of fancy, Sin City has nothing on these people.

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