-- "Sicko," Michael Moore's ferocious and funny attack on the U.S. health care system, got a warm welcome at the Cannes Film festival Saturday. At home, it has started a firestorm.

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"I decided to make a different film this time," Moore said. "I wanted a different tone and I wanted to say things in a different way.

"I got tired of all the yelling and screaming and not getting anywhere."

The film's emotional climax is a brilliant -- and, some will say, brilliantly manipulative -- sequence in which Moore and the New York rescue workers visit a Cuban hospital.

"The Cuba stuff is incendiary," said Boston Globe critic Peter Brunette, who predicted a savage response from some quarters in the United States.

Moore says the criticism of the Cuba trip is misplaced. He said he intended to take the workers to Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. naval base on the island where terror suspects are held -- and, the film claims, receive top-notch medical care.

"The point was not to go to Cuba but to go to America, to go to American soil ... being in Cuba was just an accident in a sense," he said.

Moore said he hoped audiences would focus on the film's message, not the controversy. He said it is both "a call to action" and a plea for a better, friendlier society.

"The bigger issue in the film is, who are we as a people?" Moore said.