Our longtime film critic J. Hoberman spent this year's Cannes filing regular dispatches. This is his last one.

Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void

Memorable for its in-your-face sensationalism, the 62nd Cannes Film Festival opened with the 3-D computer animation Up, saving the "Yours" for the final minutes of the competition's penultimate movie, Gaspar Noe's "psychedelic melodrama" Enter the Void.

The sad, tawdry, monstrously inflated tale of two traumatized club kids adrift in the neon wilderness of downtown Tokyo, Enter the Void climaxed, so to speak, with a wide-screen, simulated vagi-cam mega-close-up of a Brobdingnagian penis, thrustin' atcha. Perhaps it was the simple expression of the filmmaker's megalomaniacal desire to fuck the audience. But, having bitch-slapped viewers for the past two and a half hours with drug visions, strobe attacks, febrile sexual encounters, a graphic abortion complete with bloody fetus, a fatal shooting in a feces-smeared toilet stall (repeated three times), and a subjective view of a head-on car crash (four times)--everything but the latter shown from an overhead perspective with a nausea-inducing jittery camera--Noe's final gesture seemed more like his desperate last attempt to provoke a response--any response.

Our longtime film critic J. Hoberman is filing regular dispatches from this year's Cannes. The Festival is nearly over, but the question still remains: who will win the Palme?

Penelope Cruz in Broken Embraces: Is this Pedro Almodovar's year?

The marche has closed up shop, the trades have published their last daily issues, the fake snow beneath the palms on the Carlton's front lawn to promote Disney's forthcoming A Christmas Carol is ready to be vacuumed, and, yet to unveil a truly great or almost great movie, the competition heads into the final stretch.

With only a handful of contenders left to screen, the competition has a clear critical favorite and a sentimental choice-both French. Jacques Audiard's tough, straightforward prison drama A Prophet sits atop Screen Daily's "jury" of nine international critics and is even more highly regarded by the 15 French journalists polled in Le Film Français.

Our film critic J. Hoberman is filing regular dispatches from this year's Cannes Film Festival. It's time, finally, to hear about Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.

Inglourious Basterds--a World War II spaghetti western even more drenched in film references than blood

Wednesday dawned, Inglourious Basterds arrived, and, at the press conference immediately following the movie's first, packed screening, the uberbasterd, as Quentin Tarantino was introduced, immediately one-upped a rival laureate.

Two days before, Lars von Trier, maker of Antichrist, had used his press conference to anoint himself the greatest director in the world. Now, a few minutes into the love-fest, Tarantino declared that he was God--at least so far as the characters in Inglourious Basterds were concerned. Garrulous, expulsive, borderline hectoring, Tarantino was in his element. "I am not an American filmmaker. I make movies for the planet Earth!"

Our venerable film critic J. Hoberman is filing regular dispatches from this year's Cannes Film Festival. It's the beginning of week two and, so far, Hoberman's rendered judgments on Lars von Trier's Antichrist ("graphic, controversial, yucky"), Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank ("eminently respectable"), and the spelling of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. Now, Hoberman tells us about a film that aspires to be The Most Disturbing Movie of The 21st Century.

Kinatay

"Lars von Trier cuts a big fat art-film fart," Todd McCarthy wrote in Variety, rising to the bait--but despite its derisive reviews, von Trier's Antichrist is far from the most hated movie in Cannes. That distinction belongs to Filipino filmmaker Brillante Mendoza's Kinatay--a movie in which a young prostitute is abducted, beaten, tortured, raped, sodomized, murdered, and matter-of-factly dismembered in a 45-minute more-or-less real time sequence.

J. Hoberman is filing regular dispatches from this year's Cannes Film Festival. The first week was bloody.

Lars von Trier's Antichrist

It's been a blood-soaked first week at the Cannes Film Festival--at least on screen.

Six festivals ago, Lars von Trier galvanized a mediocre competition with his coup de cinéma, Dogville. Returning this year, again in the midst of an uninspired field, von Trier has managed to raise the stakes--for on-screen cruelty, that is.

Opening with the joke "Lars von Trier Antichrist" and closing with a punchline dedication to cine-saint Andrei Tarkovsky, the Danish stuntmeister's latest recounts the gruesome ordeal of a bereaved couple (suitably anguished Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg), who, having lost their toddler because they were too sexually engrossed to notice him climbing out the window, retreat to the woodland cabin they call Eden. He's a smug psychotherapist; she's borderline psychotic, consumed with guilt. Rather than finding solace, they wind up destroying each other, along with a chunk of von Trier's reputation.

Our veteran film critic J. Hoberman is filing regular dispatches from this year's Cannes Film Festival. It's day three and, so far, Hoberman has been underwhelmed. But more importantly, has he found those wild strawberries?

Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank: the 15-year-old embodiment of a bad attitude

A rainy afternoon, three days into the madness, the early competition has shaped up as an underwhelming match-up between Anglo-Saxon pluck and East Asian kink.

Despite its hype and early sweet spot, Lou Ye's Spring Rain turned out to be a disappointingly formless account of a gay-straight triangle (or trapezoid) that, although undoubtedly difficult to make in contemporary China, seemed to have shock value as its sole raison d'etre. More lurid (and crisply framed) but with even less heart, Park Chan-wook's feverishly baroque vampire flick Thirst inspired greater enthusiasm. But, despite AIDS and Catholic allegorizing, this overlong if intermittently comic gorefest is mainly about its rhapsodically staged pyrotechnics.

Our longtime film critic J. Hoberman will be filing regular dispatches from this year's Cannes Film Festival. Day zero: Hoberman plans his schedule, looks for strawberries, equates Quentin Tarantino's proudly misspelled Inglourious Basterds to a bad T-shirt.

Inglourious Basterds a/k/a I'M WITH STOOPID!!!

Things to do: find local strawberries, locate cheap couscous; cluster outside the Palais as several dozen locals seem to be doing a full 24-hours before the opening night film, Pixar's 3-D wonder Up; page jet-lagged through the festival catalogs, pondering the gnomic film descriptions and trying to plan a strategy.

No problem tomorrow when the only thing press-screened is Up. Complications begin Thursday. Opting for an early screening of Francis Ford Coppola's Tetro means standing on line and passing on the press premiere of both Andrea "Red Road" Arnold's teenage family drama Fish Tank and the official Un Certain Regard opener, Bahman Ghobadi's underground Iranian rock doc No One Knows About Persian Cats. (Or maybe it means catching Tetro in New York.)