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Following the end of the Cannes Film Festival by less than 48 hours, award-winning Iranian director Jafar Panahi's reported release (on bail) from the Iranian prison where he had been imprisoned for over two months as an opponent of the regime, attests to the world spotlight that the annual festival can command and the publicity it can martial. Panahi had been invited to serve on this year's jury at Cannes; his empty seat was symbolic throughout the 10-day festival and his name was invoked repeatedly during Sunday's closing ceremonies. With his new film Certified Copy in competition, Panahi's fellow director and former mentor Abbas Kiarostami had used his press conference to call for his colleague to be set free, and there were persistent rumors the Iranian authorities were, in fact, poised to do just that. Panahi, whose films include The White Balloon, The Circle, and, Offside, was the international film world's most celebrated political prisoner in the 40 years since the Soviets jailed Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov. Although freeing Panahi shows that the Iranian regime does have concern for its image abroad, it should not be forgotten that thousands remain imprisoned in this brutal theocracy.

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Making the best of a weak slate of movies, the jury at the 63rd Festival de Cannes bestowed its Palme d'Or on the strongest movie in the competition. Jaded journalists shouted with joy when jury president named Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives--a low budget, part-Buddhist part-animist fantasy by the 39-year-old Thai director whose fans call him "Joe."

Accepting the award, Weerasethakul called the moment "surreal" (an adjective sometimes attached to his films) and thanked "all the many spirits and ghosts in Thailand" as well as the jury president Tim Burton, adding in English, "Mr. Burton, I really like your hair style." Burton, a disarmingly unprepossessing presence, was repeatedly prompted by emcee Kristin Scott-Thomas to name the winners and also had some problems with his microphone. Nevertheless, the prizes given by his jury seemed both reasoned and fair--and, unlike in previous years, went to generally small films.

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Compared to the ultra-sensationalist 2009 festival, 2010 has been a calm year at Cannes. The competitive screenings wind up tomorrow with no clear favorite for the Palme d'Or--and also no rumored discord on Tim Burton's jury. The competition did get a late jolt from two wildly disparate entries. Still, although easily the freshest movie in competition, and possibly the most Burton-friendly as well, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives--a faux primitive Budddhist comedy about death and the transmigration of souls--seems a long shot at best. Another late-screening entry, Rachid Bouchareb's Outside the Law--an initially shocking but ultimately conventional melodrama about the Algerian revolution as played out in France--would be a purely political choice. Apparently responding to rightwing threats (or the threat of threats), the festival dramatically ramped up security at the movie's press screening; a substantial police presence was augmented by pat-downs and multiple bag searches.

The press favorite is clearly Mike Leigh's middling ensemble piece Another Year. A pair of French movies, Bertrand Tavernier's period piece The Princess of Montpensier and Xavier Beauvois's anti-intolerance docudrama Of Gods and Men, have also been widely praised. Old festival hands expect Juliette Binoche to be named best actress for her role in Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy--although her presence on the festival poster might be a problem, in which case the award could go Lesley Manville, the most voluble performer in Another Year. Having suffered through Biutiful, Javier Bardem would seem to have a lock on Best Actor; it's my guess that, with something for everyone, this overwrought multi-culti mystical melodrama, shot in Spain by yet-to-be-laureled Alejandro González Iñárritu, is the likely winner, with consolation prizes for former winners Leigh and Kiarostami and honorable mention to a serious Asian film like Poetry or even Uncle Boonmee--who's lived through this before.

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Political drama took center stage as the 63rd Cannes Film Festival entered its final act, with a pair of non-competitive epics, Olivier Assayas's Carlos and Andrei Ujica's The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu, combining for 8½ hours of screen time.

A three-part telefilm, made for the widescreen, Carlos evokes the thrilling days when militant crazies brought bazookas to the airport and blew up planes on the runway. The movie tracks the career of the Venezuelan-born terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez ("Carlos the Jackal"), from his first pro-Palestinian bombings in London and Paris through the spectacular hostage-taking of the OPEC oil ministers in Vienna to his capture, two decades later, in Khartoum.

Carlos is a controlled tumult, not unlike Assayas's thrillers demonlover and Boarding Gate; not much psychology (or historical perspective) but Venezuelan actor Edgar Ramirez is convincingly authoritative as a rock-star terrorist--as well as world-class womanizer, putting a succession of pretty young actresses under "revolutionary discipline" or getting them to, literally, lick his grenade. Destined for an American opening, most likely by way of the New York Film Festival, Carlos is gripping stuff, despite its incongruously fashionable rock soundtrack and a grossly over-played final section. The extended account of the OPEC caper includes the festival's best hour of filmmaking this side of Godard's Film Socialisme and would make a terrific movie in its own right.

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The increasingly bleary world press dutifully assembled Monday at 8:30 a.m. for the latest by the Mexican mega melodramatist (director of Babel and onetime Cannes discovery) Alejandro González Iñárritu: Biutiful (as in "Life is"). Javier Bardem stars as a suffering Brando type--a leather-jacketed man about Barcelona who traffics in undocumented immigrants and feels their pain, in part because he's pissing blood and possibly dying of cancer. Adding to the misery, this sensitive thug is saddled with two small kids and a crazy ex-wife (who might complement the bi-polar chatterbox played by Lesley Manville in Mike Leigh's Another Year.) Iñárritu is not without talent, and this blatantly artistic movie isn't just awful but confidently so--overwrought in every sense and just bad enough to win.

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Just like Wall Street, Cannes never sleeps. Thursday brought a string of three terrific films: Manoel de Oliveira's The Strange Case of Angelica (a sublimely autumnal comic masterpiece based on a script the 101-year-old director wrote 60 years ago); Radu Muntean's adulterous triangle Tuesday, After Christmas (the Romanians do it again!), and South Korean oddball Im Sang-soo's The Housemaid (a perverse remake of South Korea's most famously perverse cult film). Then came Friday and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (even if you might).

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​The Festival de Cannes is noted for many things--the size of the press corps, the prestige of the prizes, the magnitude of the hype--but rarely the quality of its opening night film. To open the world's premier film festival, a movie must be big enough to catch the eye (and keep itself out of competition) yet bland enough to offer something for everyone. This year's opener, Ridley Scott's Robin Hood--a/k/a Robin des Bois--was no exception, featuring a couple of Oscar-certified stars (grim and rumbling Russell Crowe, tempestuous yet dignified Cate Blanchett), a whole lotta action, a bit of roistering, a tad of historical revisionism, some nifty digital pageantry, a soupcon of romance, and not quite enough drama to sustain my interest for 140 minutes.

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​Tonight's SXSW Film Awards began with a speech, apparently conceived at the last minute, by SXSW co-founder and <em>Austin Chronicle</em> editor Louis Black. With negative buzz building against the festival's overcrowded screenings (lines routinely circled blocks, and at some highly-anticipated screenings in small venues, reportedly only a small number of paying customers made it in the door after press and VIPs snagged their seats), Black gave some much-needed perspective on SXSW's history, both distant and recent.

Founded as a "little regional music event" in the hopes that it might draw bands from a handful of neighboring states, Black said, "by the third year, we were international." With the music festival a success,  "after seven years we decided to start this cute little film festival." But the SXSW team again thought too small.

"We weren't paying attention, but suddenly Austin had a nationally known film community," Black said, citing big, local names like Richard Linklater, Robert Rodriguez and Mike Judge as members. "In the old days, we used to all have parties together. Now, we're too busy to even <em>have</em> parties."

According to Black, when overcrowding emerged as the major issue of SXSW 2010 during its first weekend, the festival was once again unprepared for thier growth spurt, and though they couldn't immediately solve the problem of too much demand for a limited supply of seats, they took instant steps to stop the bleeding. "When we sold out the Paramount Theater on badges alone, we immediately took film badges off sale. And started to worry."

It remains to be seen whether or not SXSW Film will be able to solve their scaling problem by next year's festival. And in this distribution climate, it's by no means guaranteed that even the most in-demand films screened here will ever be seen by a mass audience. But tonight's the grand prize winners sure as hell deserve to be.

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"It's good to be back home in Austin, Texas,' said Jorma Taccone, Saturday Night Live writer and director of Macgruber, the sketch-to-film starring Will Forte and Kristen Wiig that debuted at SXSW last night. He paused for applause. "Actually, I was born and raised in Berkeley, but you guys make it feel like a home here."

It was the final pause for reaction of the evening. Macgruber, which Taccone said screened not-entirely finished, is an 80s action film spoof played straight, so much so that at last night's packed Paramount screening a good half of the dialogue was inaudible thanks to laughs carrying over from the deadpan joke just before.

Which is not to say that Macgruber is necessarily any good, but as dumbass comedies go, it was an effective palate cleanser after a weekend of uneven indies. The film was given the late-inning, big theater festival time slot that SXSW often accords to studio comedies expected to skew nerdy. The question is: will Macgruber break out like previous SXSW premiere Knocked Up? Or will it go the way of last year's entry Observe and Report--loved by a few, hated by some, and by the vast majority completely dismissed?

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James Franco was a no show on Sunday night for the SXSW world premiere of his feature-documentary directorial debut, Saturday Night, a behind-the-scenes look at the week-long production of a December 2008 episode of Saturday Night Live. In his absence, Franco sent an introductory video, shot from a hotel room in Salt Lake City, where he's apparently shooting Danny Boyle's 127 Hours. Oddly fractured and cheerfully winky (as if to offer evidence as to how much he's suffering by not being in Austin, Franco complains of Utah, "I can't even watch porn on the internet, because it's blocked!"), Franco's video embodied the spontaneous, non-sequitur spirit that fuels so much hip, successful contemporary comedy. Ironically, the intro made the process documented within the feature seem that much more stodgy and solipsistic.

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