The closing ceremony said it all. An abundance of talent that most festival organisers would kill for co-existed with an administrative chaos that most festival organisers would kill themselves for, falling on their ceremonial swords with a cry of "Mea culpa!"

On prizes night, celebrities swarmed about on the stage of La Fenice, Venice's grand old opera house - Sophia Loren, Stanley Singin' in the Rain Donen (receiving a career award), Spike Lee, Scarlett Johansson - as the lions were fed to the victors. Gold went to Mike Leigh for Britain's Vera Drake, named Best Film. Silver went to Spain's Alejandro Amenábar for the euthanasia drama Mar Adentro, awarded the runner-up Grand Jury Prize, and to Korea's Kim Ki-duk, named Best Director for the Zen comedy 3-Iron.

Cups of an unnamed precious metal were handed to the stars in the first two films. Imelda Staunton, wonderful as Leigh's title abortionist, won Best Actress. Javier Bardem, splendid as the Spaniard pondering assisted suicide, won Best Actor.

Yet the night's real drama, or comedy drama, was surely the festival's continuing flair for falling over its own feet. There were mistimed entrances, prizes announced in the wrong order, scattergun bits of translation from a frightened-looking onstage lady, and at least one honoree who barely disguised his bewilderment and exasperation. "No time! No time!" wailed Donen, who said he had been told at the eleventh hour that he must drop his jokes, his titbits of Hollywood gossip and his carefully prepared dance routine.

Yet it was fun in a frightening way. It had been fun throughout this festival, even when Al Pacino made headlines by failing to get a seat at his own film. The film happened to be The Merchant of Venice, based on a well-known Shakespeare play that proved that administrative chaos began in this city 500 years ago.

I was there on Pacino night. I was also there when Vanity Fair began over an hour late, accompanied by a mysterious earth tremor that was surely W.M. Thackeray shifting in his grave. I was there when a print of the Nicole Kidman thriller Birth unspooled without a vital voiceover sequence that explained the whole plot.

I was there for the whole 12 days. Who would want to leave? When this much inadvertent entertainment is being offered you hardly need good films. That new festival director Marco Muller had good films may be a bonus to which he owes his survival in office. Vera Drake we have praised and appraised on this page already. Mar Adentro will come to Britain soon, borne on a tide of enthusiasm. Amenabar earned a place at the auteurs' high table with his last film, the English-speaking, Kidman-starring The Others. This is a worthy successor.

Other movies teeter on the brink of world adulation and need - surely - just a critic's gentle extra push. Kim Ki-duk's 3-Iron is a Korean charmer from the director of Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter . . . and Spring: the tale of a young burglar who leaves houses neater than he finds them. He washes laundry, fixes appliances and steals nothing more than a few eats from the fridge and, in one case, an abused young wife grateful to be purloined. This is a Zen comedy, full of beautifully distilled moments, about a transgressor touched with grace.

Taiwan veteran Hou Hsiao-hsien's Café Lumiere is even better. Some films are too good to win prizes. Cinema this gnomic needs more than one viewing, just as a great poem needs more than one reading. The director of City of Sadness and Millennium Mambo tells the deceptively simple tale of a newly pregnant Japanese girl drifting through the dawn of a new life. She is loved and watched by parents, a platonic boyfriend and the passing bustle of Tokyo life.

The film is about the kind of rebirth that goes almost unnoticed, because it happens so deeply inside. The force that begets this new chapter in her life is as elusive as the baby's own father - a Taiwanese student who went to America -because it is, essentially, everything.

All the magical intersections of the casual and everyday, symbolised by the mazy Tokyo rail system that is the new boyfriend's geeky study passion, form her new dreams and hopes, her new serenity. It is a film about happiness: something you can not see but something that Hou makes poetic, empowering and almost palpable.

The best film at Venice by a native Italian was Gianni Amelio's The House Keys, a tenderly crafted tale of parent-child love between a disabled 15-year-old boy and the father who has not seen him, for reasons we learn midway, since birth. As in his best-known film The Stolen Children, Amelio's subdued, fastidious naturalism keeps sentimentality at bay, though it is hard to feel unmoved by the final, poignant scenes of bonding.

Elsewhere there were sideshow surprises and main-competition disappointments. Worst of the latter was Wim Wenders's USA-set Land of Plenty, which processes post-9/11 trauma into a trite paranoia thriller with religious trimmings. Second worst was Jonathan Glazer's Birth, the daffy tale of a woman who thinks a 10-year-old boy is her reincarnated late husband.

Glazer, whose first film Sexy Beast had a savage wit, goes for doomed and glacial elegance. It is like being trapped inside a Faberge{'} egg, with someone telling tall stories. Todd Solondz's Palindromes also disappoints. This thinly conceived growing-up parable is surrealised by the device of casting eight different actors as its girl protagonist. Watching it is like listening to a gifted pianist practise scales for 100 minutes.

Perhaps Solondz is still in shock after having made that early-career masterwork Happiness. Someone should give him a cup of tea and tell him we love him, need him and want him to think great cinematic thoughts again.

Sleepers on the fringe included The 3 Rooms of Melancholia, a powerful Finnish-Russian-Chechen documentary about the way the world's children are fed to the world's war machine, from naval recruits in Kronstadt to recruits for Allah on Chechnya's borders. Two Spanish-language films also caught the eye, ear and mind. Alejandro Agresti's A Less Worse World is aperceptive, bitter-sweet marital tale about breaking-up and making-up. Pablo Trapero's slyly funny Rolling Family is a multi-generational road movie proving that the family that travels together unravels together. At least in volatile, hotheaded Argentina.

Eventually there was something for everyone at Venice 2004. Let's hope there is something for Marco Muller now or soon: a letter from the Mostra del Cinema board saying, "Teething troubles forgiven. Please come back to supervise the smiles and snarls of the Venice lion in 2005."