CANNES--A gripping French prison drama led the pack of contenders for Cannes' coveted Palme d'Or as the Riviera's 12-day film frenzy headed into its finale Saturday.

Tokyo's neon lights provide the setting for the last of 20 films competing for Cannes gold, a love tale about a contract-killer by Spain's Isabel Coixet, to screen Saturday along with an arthouse film produced by the Louvre.

But neither work was expected to unseat the top world directors favored to scoop the trophy awarded at a gala ceremony Sunday closing the world's biggest annual movie event.

Bleak prison drama "A Prophet" by France's Jacques Audiard, a film about a six-year jail sentence for an Arab youth that turns into an education in crime, remained the hottest ticket in Cannes, according to a foreign critics panel.

A win for Audiard would be a triumph for French cinema, a year after high-school docu-fiction "The Class" became the first French movie in more than two decades to pick up the Palme.

But foreign critics also gave a frontrunner slot to Austrian director Michael Haneke's "The White Ribbon", a chilling black-and-white portrait of a Protestant German village on the eve of the First World War.

Haneke's stark pre-Nazi drama, which kept critics glued to their seats, ranks second alongside Jane Campion's ode to John Keats, "Bright Star" according to a critics' panel in trade magazine Screen.

Critics were also impressed by Pedro Almodovar's drama "Broken Embraces" and Ken Loach's feel-good football comedy "Looking for Eric". French reviewers meanwhile had high hopes for veteran director Alain Resnais for "Wild Grass", and Quentin Tarantino's Nazi-slaying caper "Inglourious Basterds."

Closing the official competition late Saturday, Spain's Coixet takes viewers on a pre-dawn trip around the Japanese capital, starring Rinko Kikuchi -- made famous in the multi-layered drama "Babel".

"Map of the Sounds of Tokyo" is about a young woman's double life as contract-killer and fishmarket worker -- and how she falls in love with one of her targets.

Shot against a moody jazz backdrop, it offers a rich portrait of Tokyo, from the slicing of tuna and splash of hoses at the market, to a sex hotel in pastiche-Paris style or a karaoke bar.

But critics were unconvinced by the storyline, and the film earned boos mixed with a smattering of applause at a preview.

The seedier side of Tokyo was also on display Friday in the new film by France's Gaspar Noe, "Enter the Void," a psychedelic trip to the afterlife that provoked a love-it-or-hate-it reaction from Cannes audiences.

Seven years after a rape scene in his previous film "Irreversible" sparked walk-outs in Cannes, Noe's new work follows a young American drug dealer's journey after death.

Noe's film takes in its stride Eastern concepts about sex and reincarnation, as the main character's spirit leaves his body to retrace his life and watch over his stripper sister.

Many critics were put off by the film's meandering storyline and hard-to-digest psychedelic effects, but others were impressed with its visual virtuosity, with the New York Times calling it "exceptional."

Palestinian director Elia Suleiman also unveiled "The Time that Remains," a bitter-sweet farce on his family and the history of the Israeli Arabs, inspired by the diaries and letters of his mother and resistance fighter father.

For the festival finale, the Paris Louvre offered its first foray into film production, an arthouse work by Malaysian-born Taiwan director Tsai Ming Liang, but the movie flopped at a preview ahead of its Saturday premiere.

"Visage" (Face) is about a Taiwan director making a film at the Louvre based on the myth of Salome and is intended as tribute to French New Wave cinema.

But the film's series of static tableaux -- played by a French cast including top model Laetitia Casta and Jean-Pierre Leaud, who starred in New Wave classic "The 400 blows" -- fell flat.

"Although it occasionally sports a pretty 'Face', Tsai Ming-Liang's laborious Francophone feature winds up seriously irritating the skin without ever actually getting under it," Variety wrote.