I didn’t get to see all the highly-rated Cannes films, but for what it’s worth I agree completely with L.A. Times film critic Kenneth Turan’s statement that “perhaps the best of the slighted films [among the Cannes Film Festival award-winners]” was Guillermo del Toro‘s Pan’s Labyrinth. But as del Toro told me last Thursday evening, Labyrinth‘s accomplishment was simply being shown in Cannes, given the snobbish attitudes that have long prevailed about films with fantasy-and-FX elements, and that a possible award was never realistically in the cards. “The winners have already been spoken for,” del Toro declared. Turan, by the way, has made a small error in describing del Toro as “the Mexican writer-director of Chronicles and The Devil’s Backbone .” Del Toro was one of five producers of 2004’s Chronicles (better known as Cronicas), but he wrote and directed 1993’s Chronos, a masterful vampire film that I presume Turan was referring to. I also wonder about a quote in Turan’s piece from Cannes Jury chief Wong Kar Wai, which is that Ken Loach‘s The Wind That Shakes the Barley “was the unanimous choice for the top prize” — i.e., the Palmes d’Or. I share the same view that Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson expressed last Sunday night: “I suspect that the jury locked over Babel vs. Volver and wound up giving the Palme d’Or to eight-time competition entrant Ken Loach, who had never won the big prize.”