Opinion remains divided ahead of the award of the Palme d'Or at the concluding ceremony of this year's Cannes Film Festival on Saturday evening.
Festival watchers were reluctant to second-guess the jury headed by French actor Vincent Lindon which is set to announce the winner at 10:00 pm (2000 GMT).
"Triangle of Sadness," a satirical comedy by Swede Ruben Östlund - who won a Palme d'Or in 2017 - is certainly in the running. Set on a luxury yacht, it caricatures the world of the super-rich in lurid and at times disgusting detail. The audience was enthusiastic, the critics less so.
"Armageddon Time" by US director James Gray takes a more conventional emotional line in following the lives of the Jewish boy Paul and his black classmate Johnny in 1980s New York based on Gray's own youth.
The film deals with racism and social inequalities in the United States with a strong cast including Anthony Hopkins and Anne Hathaway. Nevertheless, one critic termed it "stagey and forced."
Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov's "Tchaikovsky's Wife," a dark drama on the composer's unhappy marriage, would under more normal circumstances have been a strong contender, but with sentiment over the war in Ukraine running high would be a controversial choice.
Hirokazu Koreeda's "Broker" returns to the theme of low-level crime on society's margins that gained the Japanese directer the top award at Cannes in 2018 with "Shoplifters."
It tells of a young woman who deposits her unwanted baby in a baby box, men dealing in a baby black market and two female detectives, but not all critics were convinced by its whimsical approach.
