From Kanye beach concerts to more Adolf Hitler jokes, this year's Cannes provided plenty of twitter-feed filling festivity. With the all the champagne flutes in the dishwasher and the black bow ties back to the rental houses, here's a quick look at what really had people talking at this year's festival - the movies!

Cannes opened with one of the fest's most divisive films alongside one of its least. Julia Leigh's Emily Browning (mostly topless) starrer Sleeping Beauty had many praising it as gorgeously composed while others found it too pointless to stomach. On the flipside, Woody Allen's latest Midnight in Paris - which top lines Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, and Marion Cotillard - was pretty uniformly liked if not quite absolutely loved.

The film with the most buzz heading into the fest was Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. Audiences were a bit split heading out of the film with some having a hard time seeing past its glacial pace while others were wowed by its brilliantly contemplative nature. For the most part, the discourse that followed focused more on the scattered booing that followed the film's first screening than the merits of the film. This all changed when in a slightly surprising move, the Robert De Niro lead jury gave the film their top dog Palme d'Or prize. The film opens in theaters this Friday May 28th with a six week national roll out that should have the film in every city by July 8th.

Click Here to view the list of all Cannes award winners.

Michael Hazanavicius's black and white silent film The Artist had people talking early with it big prefest sale to the Weinsteins. The film had just about everyone smiling when it played to great aplomb a week later. There wasn't a soul on the Croisette who didn't think it was the best black and white silent film in decades. Buzz was also heavy for Tilda Swinton's performance in Lynne Ramsey's We Need to Talk About Kevin with many making early predictions about Swinton's Oscar hopes (again). The heavy subject matter of the film, however, met with a more mixed response. (See links to Todd's reviews of both of these films and more below)

On the action side, Peter Chan's highly anticipated Wu Xia turned out to be a bit more of a detective noir with a few good fight scenes than an out-and-out martial arts epic. That didn't seem to bother the many people who liked it or the Weinsteins who snapped it up for US release. The other especially good news is that Nicholas Refn's Drive came out sounding like a real crowd pleaser. The film stars Ryan Gosling as a stunt driver who turns to a life of crime. It co-stars Carey Mulligan and will play at the LA Film Fest before opening across the country in September. Unfortunately, the news wasn't as good for Takashi Miike's Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai 3D. While hopes were high after 13 Assassins, it appears Miike drifted a bit too far into the melodramatic to really connect with audiences.

Of course the 800 pounder at this year's fest was played by a personality used to such lime light. Lars von Trier was on hand to debut his latest film Melancholia starring Kirsten Dunst (who won the Best Actress award) and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Again, critics were quite mixed on the film, though all agreed it is much less controversial than Antichrist. Fearing that he might lose the spotlight to some of the better reviewed films of the fest, von Trier decided to joke around at the press conference about sympathizing with Nazis and Adolf Hitler (more here). Later he backtracked and released a formal apology - but the damage was done and the festival organizers went so far as to ban him from future fests. Mmm hmm, we'll see.

Finally, a few words about some films that found a lot of love: Aki Kaurismaki's Le Havre was the odds on favorite for the Palme going into the final weekend. While it came up empty, audiences loved the sweetness of this politically tinged subtle deadpan comedy. Audiences also enjoyed Mexican Gerardo Naranjo's tale of drug crimes and beauty pageants, Miss Bala. Nadine Labaki's follow up to Caramel, Where Do We Go Now? was met with praise though some found its mix of comic and tragic tones uncomfortable. And lastly, Pedro Almodovar's The Skin I Live In was generally very well liked and Banderas's performance called his best in years.

For much more, see all the Twitch stories from Cannes 2011 and all of Todd's Reviews below:

Guilty of Romance review
The Artist review
Melancholia review
Code Blue review
Wu Xia review
The Prodigies review
We Need to Talk About Kevin review
The Other Side of Sleep review