Everyone seems to agree that, for one reason or another, this is not Cannes’s best year. In fact, things are so slow that many critics are finding themselves writing not about the movies on display, but on the ‘system’ of Cannes, and why it is the way it is. Elvis Mitchell seems to be a bit sick of the commercial side of the fest, which is seldom reported on, but dominates the scene: “Many of those pictures won’t even see the light of day on the lowest rung of cable TV. Scanning the ads here in the trade papers like Variety and Film Français, several things are immediately evident. The saddest is that American violence is still one of our most exportable products.”