As the Austrian director's Cannes-winning The White Ribbon arrives in UK cinemas, a long-overdue viewing of his film of The Castle has opened my eyes to another thread running through his workMichael Haneke's new film The White Ribbon is to be released next week. With the director's steadily advancing reputation, his big commercial success here with his 2005 film Hidden, and of course the Cannes Palme d'Or for his new movie, this could all mean that he is approaching a kind of cultural critical mass. He appears to have reached a tipping point at which people outside the gated arthouse community have really heard of him – heard of him the way they've heard of Roman Polanski and Stanley Kubrick. ...