English-speaking critics are spoiled rotten at film festivals. Not only has their language become the top choice for subtitling - in Berlin it was once German, in Cannes French - but every non- Anglophone director seems to end up working in the world's prevailing lingo. Here at Berlin they include Patrice Chereau, directing Mark Rylance and Kerry Fox in the London-set Intimacy, and Sweden's Lasse Hallstrom guiding a cast led by France's Juliette Binoche through two hours of Oscar-shortlisted whimsy set in a French village scripted for gently accented English. (Think 'Allo Allo lite).

The dominance of English-language cinema has been cited as one factor in the imminent departure of Berlin's festival boss of 21 years, Moritz de Hadeln, who was told last April that this would be his last event. Though Hadeln has lassoed top Hollywood films annually - this year they include Traffic, Hannibal, Quills and the Costner-starring Cuban Missile Crisis drama 13 Days - Germany's cine-purists finally cried "Enough." If their top cine-junket was not to become Tinseltown East, it must look, they decided, more to other countries, other tongues.

Yet as the best films at Berlin 2001 show, language and national identity are in meltdown across the world. Does such a thing exist as a pure, unspoiled, unwest- ernised culture? And isn't this climate of confusion one reason why opening-day audiences loved Denmark's Italian for Beginners, the first outright comedy from the Dogma 95 stable. Lone Scherfig's film bolts from its stall shaking friendly anarchy through the air with its tale of six Copenhagen-dwellers who fall in love across barriers of class, temperament and even language. (One is from Italy; all are learning Italian). Sex, funerals, football and haircuts are important themes, as they are in all our lives. The script has a scatty, insouciant vitality: imagine Mike Leigh crossed with early Milos Forman, with topical Eurobabble complications.

At the festival's mid-point I would give Lone Scherfig's film the Silver Bear and save the Golden for Catherine Breillat's A Ma Soeur. Here is another film in which an Italian interloper destabilises the natives. But this one is darker and the language explored is one whose demonic mysteries none of us ever fully sound: sex. A vulnerable though voluptuous-looking teenager loses her virginity to a young cad - the Italian - while her puppy-plump 12-year-old sister almost literally looks on. Sharing the same bedroom in the family's South of France vacation village, the younger girl has her romantic fantasies bruised by the reality of a sibling who is half seduced, half date-raped, in two long nocturnal scenes of astonishing emotional intimacy.

Breillat's new film is less explicit visually than her Romance, though one condom-donning shot will have Aunt Edna keeling over in a faint. Psychologically, though, the gaze is unflinching. The director refuses to ignore the subtle cruelties that sex can involve: the endearments and deceptions, the frontline blend of emotional passion with physical pain and coercion. The film's final segment is even more startling. A long, eerily discomforting motorway journey ends in an act of violence so shocking - yet cunningly related to all that goes before - that you are still collecting your jaw from the floor when the credits roll.

Chereau's Intimacy ups the ante even on Breillat's graphic approach to male- female relations. English actor Mark Rylance reveals all, in varied states of arousal, as he and Kerry Fox flesh-grapple in the tale of two London lovers who meet weekly for anonymous sex. You could call it Last Tango in Battersea, though the geography is as vague as the characters' backgrounds. In this upmarket Europudding the hero's best friend is a heavily-accented French barman (why?) and Marianne Faithfull, no less, is required to don blowsy make-up and fishwife accent as Fox's best mate. Messy and portentous, though with moments of brave erotic candour.

Other European movies have felt like objects in a patisserie window, pretty, golden-baked and vapidly appetising. Giuseppe Tornatore's Malena must be the millionth Italian rite-of- passage comedy about a boy discovering l'amore through a curvaceous older woman. Ferzan Ozpetek's Le Fate Ignoranti (Ignorant Fairies) labours an initially piquant plot about a young widow learning that her husband had a gay second life.

If we are to have comedies of error about sex, better Britain's out-of-competition Late Night Shopping, debut-directed by Saul Metzstein, the spry tale of four young friends who meet up Diner-style each day to compare their love lives and incubate fresh campaigns and disasters. Small but pleasingly formed.

Other sideshow standouts were two US documentaries looking into the rear-view mirror of past screen culture. Adam Simon's The American Nightmare interviews half-a-dozen late 1960s/early 1970s horror directors - including Romero, Cronenberg and Carpenter - to see if there was a rhyme between contemporary fact (Vietnam) and guerrilla low-budget screen fiction. Shelley and Vincent Fremont's Pie in the Sky: the Brigid Berlin Story uproariously portrays the actress/ artist/heiress - daughter of William Randolph Hearst's right-hand executive - who lent her full-blown presence to The Chelsea Girls, stabbing herself through the jeans with a drug needle, and became a Warhol friend and co-worker. She further scandalised her family by taping her telephone rows with her mother, which supplied the script for Warhol's play Pork. An unrepentant Brigid, slimmed down, is interviewed in the present.

Back in the Competition, the people's choice for pure entertainment has been The Tailor of Panama. John Boorman's John Le Carre adaptation returns us to our "countries in meltdown" theme with a big budget and beatific cast. Pierce Brosnan, playing a scoundrelly 007 variant, comes to Panama to recruit an agent for MI6, then connives in the web of lies that this spy's spy (Geoffrey Rush) spins, formed from delicately fictionalised threads of his marriage to diplomat Jamie Lee Curtis and his job as tailor to a top politicos. Finally Brosnan sets everyone against everyone else, running off with the money as the cobweb unravels. At the press conference Le Carre said that turning a novel into a film was like "turning a cow into a bouillon cube." He was happy with this cube; so were most of us. Brosnan and Rush, in an unlikely twinning of action man and actor man, make a memorable double act.

Competition disasters have been few, though Spike Lee's latest comes top of the list. Bamboozled starts as a sprightly skit on the atavistic racism lurking under Political Correctness - a racism brought into the light when a TV executive (Damon Wayans) conceives and creates a pseudo- satirical "nigger minstrel show" with black performers reverting to blackface and banjo stereotype - but loses its courage halfway and turns into a god-awful blend of sermon and melodrama. A band of black terrorists; a girl TV assistant (Jada Pinkett) who rails against the network's emergent Uncle Tom-ism; a climactic outbreak of shouting, shooting and message-mongering. The high-speed Swiftian satire of early scenes turns into a nasty pile-up on Holier-Than-Thou Highway.

Out on Retrospective Boulevard this year's honorees are Fritz Lang and Kirk Douglas. They glower at each other on opposing posters, the monocle versus the chin-dimple, reminding us that many great Hollywood things come from Europe. (Douglas, ne Issur Danielovitch, was the son of Russian Jews). But the Berlin Film Festival has long specialised in reminding us of things we shouldn't forget, from political horror to pop-culture heritage, from the darkness of the Holocaust to the sunshine of Hollywood. Cinema has a hundred different ways to tell us about history. Let's hope a new Berlin festival regime sustains the event's unique character as a recording angel of time, change and destiny.