Word: wente
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Cannes Film Festival's highest honor, the Palme d'Or, went on Sunday to Michael Haneke for his film The White Ribbon - both establishing it as the best movie of the festival and triggering the annual debate among critics and fans over whether the award was a revelation or a gross miscarriage of justice on the part of the Cannes jury. 'Twas ever thus. (See a first review of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds...
...president, and her majority-female panel bestowed most of their benisons on difficult art films, not movies that strain to entertain. In a festival where 12 of the 20 competition films ran two hours or longer, and five clocked in near two and a half hours, the top honors went to a pair of these epic-length dramas. Austrian and French films received the top two prizes; an Austrian actor and a French actress took the awards for best performances, in English-language films. No American won anything. (See pictures of the red carpet at Cannes...
...There was little surprise that the main Palme went to The White Ribbon, an austere and lacerating tale of collective brutality and guilt in a small German village two decades before Hitler took power. This is a pure art film, daunting and demanding, spare and unsparing, making no concession to the prevailing popular taste - except, perhaps, film-festival taste. It was also, as we two Cannes veterans attest, the finest work in the competition. Writer-director Michael Haneke, a personally austere gent who has won prizes here before, with The Piano Teacher (starring Huppert) and Caché, was finally forced...
...runner-up Grand Jury Prize went to Un prophéte (A Prophet), a complex, absorbing, fairly conventional prison drama directed by Jacques Audiard. In the manner of last year's Palme d'Or winner The Class, set in a Paris junior high school, this is a documentary-style study of French minorities in an enclosed environment that sets its own rules. The main tension - and there's plenty in the schemings of rival ethnic gangs - comes from the relationship of a young Arab (Tahar Rahim) and his aged Corsican mentor (Niels Arestrup). When asked at the post-show press...
...everything is bad. Tsvangirai has made some progress in resurrecting Zimbabwe's all-but-dead economy. Schools that closed last September after teachers went on strike have reopened. Zimbabweans can now go to shops to buy basic goods that had not been available for 10 years, such as maize meal, sugar, cooking oil and salt (previously they had to be purchased in neighboring Botswana or South Africa and brought into the country). "I think they have done a lot," says economist John Robertson, "but prices must go down, and that will happen only when production improves." He adds, "Our [labor...