by Edward Lawrenson from Film Quarterly Fall 2010, Vol. 64, No. 1 According to the speculation that always accompanies the run-up to the announcement of the Cannes Film Festival program, the 2010 edition (May 12-23) was almost certain to premiere new films by Terrence Malick and Béla Tarr. In the event, neither Malick’s The Tree of Life nor Tarr’s The Turin Horse made it (the former wasn’t finished in time; the latter, who knows?), and these high-profile absences added to a sense of disappointment with a competition line-up that generally lacked big-name auteurs. Perhaps the competition wasn’t as rich as previous years; certainly there was no Antichrist-style controversy this time and no film generated the same acclaim as The White Ribbon or A Prophet did in 2009. I had bad luck with the two competition films I managed to watch: Bertrand Tavernier’s The Princess of Montpensier is a terribly creaky chivalric historical romance; and Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, a talky drama about a couple who may or may not be pretending to be lovers, sees the …