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Much of that came down to timing. COVID postponed last year’s Cannes to July 2021 and, after Cannes being canceled altogether in 2020, there was a backlog of excellent titles waiting for their moment on the Croisette. However, studio films were all but absent; their distributors didn’t have much interest in spending to promote their titles in July. Led by “Drive My Car,” the films of Cannes 2021 showed unprecedented dominance in year-end critics’ surveys, including four of the top six in the IndieWire critics’ poll, four of the top five from Sight and Sound, and six of the top 10 at Cahiers du Cinema....

This year, the poster acknowledges a strange new world. Borrowing a frame from the climax of “The Truman Show,” when Jim Carrey’s sheltered protagonist finally reaches the artificial boundaries of the world he’s taken for granted most of his life, the poster seems to acknowledge that the the next chapter of the movies is a wide-open question that even Cannes itself can’t resolve. “The future is wide open for cinema,” festival head Thierry Fremaux told IndieWire via email on the eve of the festival....

In recent years, there have been several seemingly failed attempts to bring Till’s story to the screen by a handful of Hollywood players, each based on different source material. It makes sense; a screen adaptation of the tragic and brutal story of Till’s murder at the hands of a white mob, and the aftermath, couldn’t be more timely in the era of Black Lives Matter. And writer-director Chinonye Chukwu likely agrees....

The “King Richard” star and, later, the Best Actor winner rushed the stage after Rock made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s hair. Pinkett Smith was diagnosed with alopecia, a hair loss condition. Smith assaulted Rock as Rock was presenting the award for Best Documentary, and yelled, “Keep my wife’s name out of your fucking mouth” during the 94th Academy Awards on March 27. Smith has since apologized to both the Academy and presenter Rock in an Instagram statement....

Morrison, after inquiring about Wegner’s journey from the camera department to shorts to indie features — and professing her appreciation for the Wegner-shot Sundance breakout “Zola” — commented on how the choices off screen are often what can define a DPs’ career trajectory. “People often ask [what’s] the secret, and there really is no secret. I think so much of it is finding projects that you feel passionate [about], and choosing wisely and not getting sidetracked by the carrot [of] maybe a good paycheck, or your first studio film, if it doesn’t speak to you,” Morrison said....

In an email to staff obtained by IndieWire, Licht explained that the decision was made due to budgetary reasons and the cost of commissioning projects with outside partners. Going forward, long-form documentary content for the channel will now be produced almost entirely in-house — and instead, Amy Entelis, CNN’s executive vice president for talent and content development, will explore creating a studio focused on long-form content. “This was a very difficult decision to make, and it was based, in large part, on the ever-increasing cost of commissioning third-party premium content,” Licht said in the email....

“It’s a very sad state of affairs to call the environment political,” Aronofsky told IndieWire in a recent interview. “I don’t know how we lost control of that conversation.” The project started production in the aftermath of the election of the country’s president Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 and captures three years of internal conflicts as the Uru-eu-wau-wau struggle against the mounting existential threat around them, including the impact of the pandemic....