Yes, the rumors are true. The Cannes Film Festival is still going. But Tuesday had a number of noteworthy happenings, from Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut to the return of a filmmaker who’s been imprisoned/muzzled for the last 20 years.

Scarlett Johansson premieres Eleanor the Great

Tuesday marked the world premiere of Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut Eleanor the Great, and the reception was pretty warm. The film stars June Squibb as a widow who’s struggling to get over the loss of her best friend, and who finds community in surprising places. It is, by most accounts, an understated character piece so there are no visual flourishes per se, but our critic Ben Croll praised Johansson’s focus on Squibb for the film in his review.

“Coming from any other first-time director, this same film, scene for scene and shot for shot, wouldn’t exactly scream for such an auspicious global launch. But coming from Johansson, this Holocaust survivor tale just took a long bow in Cannes.”

Croll continued: “Audiences in Cannes walked out knowing little more about Johansson’s directorial voice – but they also walked out in tears. The movie star wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Johansson was visibly moved by the reception to the film, largely to do with its 95-year-old star Squibb.

The return of Jafar Panahi

This week, filmmaker Jafar Panahi made his first in-person appearance at Cannes since 2010, when he was given a 20-year ban on making movies and a prison sentence by an Iranian court for allegedly making “propaganda.”

Panahi returned with his new film It Was Just an Accident, which follows a group of individuals who abduct a man they are convinced was an interrogator in Iranian prisons during a time when dissidents were imprisoned, tortured and killed.

TheWrap’s Steve Pond wrote in his review that the film is one of the festival’s best, and finds Panahi blending his humanity with a confrontational approach.

“The bracing thing about It Was Just an Accident  is that it has married Panahi’s wit and humanism with real anger; if many of his previous films lulled you into realizing his points about oppression and injustice, this one is downright confrontational, from the moment its action begins with a man driving away from a city in the dead of night and accidentally hitting and killing a dog.”

The sentences against Panahi have been invalidated and he still lives in Tehran, but continues to refuse to work inside the system that requires films be submitted to the Islamic Guidance Ministry for approval. It Was Just an Accident was made clandestinely, in secret.

In an interview with THR, Panahi said his time in prison changed him.

Kevin Spacey accepts an award, rails against Hollywood blacklist

A surprise: Kevin Spacey made a splash in Cannes, not in any official capacity but by accepting an award from the non-Cannes-affiliated Better World Fund Gala.

“I’d like to congratulate [Better World Fund founder Manuel Collas de La Roche] for the decision to invite me here tonight to accept this award,” the “House of Cards” actor said. “Who would have ever thought that honoring someone who has been exonerated in every court room he’s ever walked into would be thought of as a brave idea. But here we are.”

Spacey was accused of multiple instances of sexual misconduct in recent years, but was found not liable in a 2022 New York civil lawsuit and acquitted of criminal charges in 2023 in London. He has yet to land a major studio role since, but is working again in independent and international films.

In his remarks, Spacey compared himself to Dalton Trumbo, who was blacklisted in the 1947-1960 Communist scare.

“It was a long, long time ago, but we have to think about the pushback that [Kirk Douglas] received after he made the brave decision to stand up for fellow colleague, two-time Oscar winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo … He couldn’t find work in Hollywood for 13 years.”

The Plague director talks tackling male adolescence

Made adolescence is certainly a hot topic of conversation at the moment thanks to the aptly named Netflix series, but it’s also the subject of the new film from director Charlie Polinger who spoke to TheWrap about the subject matter.

“I see a lot of movies about 12-year-old boys that are often either a little more ‘Goonies’-style biking around at night [that are about] this kind of carefree feeling or a little more bro-y hangout kind of movies. My sense of being 12 was it was more like [a] social anxiety hellscape,” Polinger told Executive Awards Editor Steve Pond at TheWrap’s Cannes Conversations in partnership with Brand Innovators.

“You see that [represented] more commonly, I think, in movies about women or about young girls, [movies] like ‘Carrie’ and ‘Raw’ and ‘Eighth Grade.’ You don’t see it as often in films about boys because there’s a certain vulnerability to [being] the object of terror or to [feel] insecurity in your body. There’s sort of a fear of that vulnerability being shown [when it is] centered around masculinity,” Polinger observed. “I thought it could be exciting to kind of take a genre that I’ve seen more with women and apply it to a story about boyhood.”