Haneke Wins at Cannes for His Finest Work

Even in a vintage year for Cannes, Michael Haneke's new film The White Ribbon stood head and shoulders above the competition, writes Xan Brooks of the Guardian. The Austrian director has time and again missed out on the festival's top prize, but his "icy black-and-white" pastoral  set in pre-WWI Germany wasn't just the best movie on the Croisette; it's "the finest film from a director who has served his time and paid his dues," notes Brooks.

Haneke failed to win the Palme d'Or in 2005 for his surveillance thriller Hidden, which many critics called a masterpiece. But the "notoriously rigorous" director has outdone himself with his first German-language movie in years in his exploration of pointless violence by the generation that grows into Nazis. It's a deserving winner of the Palme d'Or, writes Brooks, and "a picture that will be viewed and discussed for decades to come." (More Michael Haneke stories.)