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It must say something about the anxious state of the movie world that two of the hottest tickets at this year\u2019s Cannes Film Festival draw inspiration from ancient Rome. In George Miller\u2019s \u201cFuriosa: A Mad Max Saga<\/a>,\u201d Chris Hemsworth zips around a wasteland like a heavy-metal charioteer, while in Francis Ford Coppola\u2019s \u201cMegalopolis<\/a>,\u201d Adam Driver plays a guy named Cesar. That each movie offers a vision of a culture in decline seems too on the nose for this festival, where attendees celebrate the art amid nervous chatter about the state of the industry.<\/p>\n This year\u2019s festival opened Tuesday under gray skies, as if nature itself were mirroring all the gloom and doom. Yet while the opening-night movie, the unfunny French comedy \u201cThe Second Act,\u201d was a dud, the hourlong ceremony that preceded it was unexpectedly touching. The show\u2019s focus on women that night was instructive, and it suggested that Cannes, a festival that has long promoted the cult of the male auteur, is trying to do a better job of righting a historical gender imbalance. Mind you, the number of female filmmakers who get a chance to strut the red carpet remains low: There are only four in the main competition.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Yet things do seem better here, and at least the festival is keen to show its support for women filmmakers. During the ceremony, which was hosted by the French actress Camille Cottin (\u201cCall My Agent\u201d), an emotional Juliette Binoche presented Meryl Streep with an honorary Palme d\u2019Or, and the festival went bonkers over Greta Gerwig. She\u2019s heading this year\u2019s competition jury, which includes two other women filmmakers: the Turkish screenwriter Ebru Ceylan and the Lebanese director Nadine Labaki. When it came time for Gerwig to appear, the festival played a highlight reel of her work and, in giant letters beamed on an even more giant screen, announced that she had \u201cconquered the world in three films.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It was corny, but, reader, I teared up. Among other things, the love for Streep and Gerwig was a break from the drumbeat of bad news about the American movie business. Heading into 2023, Variety had predicted an \u201cextremely bumpy<\/a>\u201d year for Hollywood; 12 months later, it changed the diagnosis to \u201crocky\u201d and a conveniently concise headline<\/a> explained why. \u201cStrikes, Box-Office Bombs and \u2018Huge Leadership Vacuum\u2019: Hollywood Says Goodbye to Worst Year in a Generation.\u201d Even Jerry Seinfeld, in an interview<\/a> with GQ, said \u201cthe movie business is over.\u201d I\u2019d already booked my Cannes hotel and flight, so I went anyway.<\/p>\n That\u2019s because while the American entertainment business is in the midst of another of its recurrent crises, this hasn\u2019t stopped artists around the world from making movies. The festival as well as several other programs outside the official selection are presenting more than 100 new movies this year from celebrated veterans and untested directors alike, some who may soon dazzle us. In other rooms in and around the Palais \u2014 the hulking center where I spend most of my time here sitting in the dark \u2014 an estimated 14,000 industry representatives, including buyers and sellers, have some 4,000 finished movies and projects on the table in what is the world\u2019s biggest international film market.<\/a><\/p>\n Each year, no matter the ratio of good to bad movies I end up seeing at Cannes, I leave the festival feeling exhilarated. It\u2019s early days, but I\u2019ve already watched some very good movies, including two that I\u2019ll be thinking about for a long time. The first, \u201cBird<\/a>,\u201d the latest from the British director Andrea Arnold (\u201cAmerican Honey\u201d), is a beautifully shot, delicately moving coming-of-age story about a 12-year-old girl, Bailey (Nykiya Adams), that takes an unexpected detour into magical realism. An exuberant Barry Keoghan, covered in tats, plays her careless if loving father, while the great German actor Franz Rogowski plays the title character. He shows up in a skirt and, scene by scene, breaks your heart.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n As in \u201cBird,\u201d the female protagonist in Rungano Nyoni\u2019s \u201cOn Becoming a Guinea Fowl<\/a>\u201d has a near-mystical connection with the natural world that suggests that women \u2014 like all the creatures in these movies \u2014 necessarily exist in a realm apart from men and their violence. \u201cBird\u201d features a veritable menagerie that includes birds but also horses, dogs, a toad and what I swear was a smiling fox. In \u201cGuinea Fowl,\u201d the title animal refers to a grim childhood incident that Shula (a terrific Susan Chardy) revisits during a trip to her family\u2019s home in Zambia. That incident slowly emerges from the shadows during an elaborate funeral for an uncle, a framing that Nyoni uses to explore the devastations of patriarchy as she subtly and artfully joins the personal with the political.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n There is something wonderful about being in crowds of excited movie lovers \u2014 the applause for both \u201cBird\u201d and \u201cFowl\u201d was rightly enthusiastic \u2014 who are all grooving on the same wavelength during the festival\u2019s 12 days, sharing tips and chatting about what they\u2019ve loved or loathed. In his interview, Seinfeld said, \u201cFilm doesn\u2019t occupy the pinnacle in the social, cultural hierarchy that it did for most of our lives.\u201d I assume he never made it to Cannes.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t to dismiss the profound changes that have affected the industry, not at all. It\u2019s tough out there, and nobody knows anything<\/a> (still!) about what will work or why. The only certainty is that it\u2019s hard to produce, distribute and exhibit movies, perhaps especially now given that people can just pull out their phones and watch something as reliably delightful as baby elephants<\/a> being bottle fed. Yet the truth is, film hasn\u2019t occupied the pinnacle Seinfeld mentioned in a long time. It\u2019s often estimated that in the mid-1940s, some 90 million Americans went to the movies each week; by 1970, that number had dropped to 20 million<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The 1970s are justly remembered as an extraordinary decade in American cinema, a time of towering artistic success and business adventurousness. Three of the most celebrated filmmakers of that era are on the Cannes docket this year. Coppola is in the main competition with his audacious \u201cMegalopolis,\u201d his first movie in a dozen years. His old friend and collaborator George Lucas is receiving an honorary Palme d\u2019Or<\/a> on May 25. And their friend Steven Spielberg is here, too, in a fashion: A restored print of his 1974 crime thriller, \u201cThe Sugarland Express<\/a>,\u201d is screening in a section called Cannes Classics.<\/p>\n That all three filmmakers are represented at Cannes may be a coincidence, but this virtual reunion gave me pause. Together with directors like their East Coast friend Martin Scorsese, and their compatriot Paul Schrader \u2014 whose latest, \u201cOh, Canada<\/a>,\u201d is in the main competition \u2014 Coppola, Lucas and Spielberg were main figures in what became known as New Hollywood<\/a>. It\u2019s more complicated than I can do justice to here, but basically during this artistically fecund period, a group of largely young, male filmmakers thrived in the effective ruins of the old studio system. By 1980 or so, the story often goes, the good times were over; VHS would soon permanently change how people watched movies, just like streaming has.<\/p>\n The changes in viewership mean that the American studios take few risks these days, preferring to bank on the safe and the familiar, which is why they mostly release either blockbusters or cheap genre fare. In Hollywood, as Ben Fritz put it in \u201cThe Big Picture<\/a>: The Fight for the Future of Movies,\u201d his 2018 book, \u201cAnything that\u2019s not a big budget franchise film or a low-cost, ultralow risk comedy or horror movie is an endangered species.\u201d That\u2019s still true, but while directors like Gerwig, Arnold and Nyoni are working in a very different industry than Coppola and his cohort did back in the day, as Cannes reminds me each year, there are always filmmakers ready to conquer the movie world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n