The prizes at this year's Berlin Film Festival should have been handed out by a jury wearing full battle gear. As well as protecting Team Costa-Gavras - the judging panel led by the director of Z and Missing - from festivalgoers who disagreed with their choices, the armour would have suited those choices.

The Golden Bear and runner-up Special Jury Prize both went to movies about different kinds of war. José Padilha's Elite Squad from Brazil, named best film, is a rampaging realist epic about police violence in Rio de Janeiro. American documentarist Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure is a bleeding slice of investigative non-fiction about Abu Ghraib, and the first documentary ever shown in the Berlin competition. I reviewed both films in my last dispatch, though tipping neither for top honours. As usual at Berlin, the jury wrongfooted the critics. We all expected the golden grizzly to go to Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood . That had to be content with a Best Director prize.