Oscars 2009

It's a wrap: Amid froth of the Cannes Film Festival, movies explored our age of anxiety

There was Brad Pitt and Nicole Kidman, red carpet glamour and a crop of new Academy Award contenders — but this was also the year the global financial crisis exploded onto movie screens at Cannes.

"La Crise" — as the French call it — bedeviled Robert Pattinson's disaster-bound billionaire in David Cronenberg's "Cosmopolis," the unemployed Glasgow youth in Ken Loach's "The Angels' Share," the bare-knuckle boxer in Jacques Audiard's "Rust and Bone" and the worried mobsters in Andrew Dominik's "Killing Them Softly."We live in anxious times, and that feeling was reflected at the French Riviera film festival that's a byword for frocks and froth, as well as for serious cinema.The mood seemed to be mirrored by the weather. Several days were unseasonably cold and stormy, turning red-carpet photocalls into rain-lashed ordeals.In the face of this angst, the jury rewarded love, giving Cannes' top prize, the Palme d'Or, to Austrian director Michael Haneke for "Amour," a starkly powerful film about ...

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