It’s Thursday and we’re fully in the swing of the Cannes Film Festival. Wednesday saw the debut of one of the festival’s most anticipated features — a follow-up from “I Saw the TV Glow” auteur Jane Schoenbrun. Plus, there was more talk about artificial intelligence’s impact on the industry and craft. Catch it below.

“Teenage Sex and Death” debuts

Schoenbrun’s highly anticipated “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” debuted on Wednesday night in the Un Certain Regard section to a rapturous response (in the room, at least). Schoenbrun, who directed A24’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”-indebted “I Saw the TV Glow,” wrote and directed this new feature, which will be released by Mubi later this summer. Described as a love letter to 1980s slasher movies and an introspective portrait of the trans experience, the film stars Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson, along with “Sorry Baby” breakout Eva Victor, Zach Cherry, Sarah Sherman, Jasmin Savoy Brown and Jack Haven.

Our reviewer was utterly enraptured by the movie, which follows a filmmaker (Einbinder) who is hired to direct a remake of a long-running series called “Camp Miasma” and looking to secure a reclusive star (Anderson) to participate. (She played the “final girl” from the original movie, so maybe it’s less remake than legacy sequel?)

“It’s hard to totally accept, let alone fully digest, a new gospel when you first encounter it, but the gift of work like Schoenbrun’s is that, above all else, it is characterized by a charitable spirit of invitation. Settle into their assured and madcap wavelength and watch the scales fall from your eyes,” wrote Zachary Lee from Cannes.

And the love was definitely felt on the ground, with some reporting that the standing ovation lasted for a whopping nine minutes. Apparently Einbinder attempted to thank the cast and crew over a three-minute period during that ovation. Anderson and Schoenbrun were also in attendance and introduced the movie earlier in the evening.

But speaking of those standing ovations …

Enough already

Our own Steve Pond writes that it’s time to do away with the effusive standing ovations that accompany nearly every Cannes Film Festival premiere (even the really dodgy ones).

“Once upon a time, the essential tools for a reporter or critic covering a premiere at the Cannes Film Festival were a notebook and a pen. These days, though, there’s a necessary but regrettable addition to the list: the stopwatch app on an iPhone,” Pond laments.

While, yes, this could be interpreted as an instance of an old man yelling at a cloud, Pond asserts that the compulsion to stand up and clap for a movie has altered the entire dynamic of the festival. He writes: “It’s gotten to the point where a four-minute standing ovation is a sign of weakness; if members of the audience aren’t on their feet for at least five or six minutes, the knee-jerk conclusion is that they didn’t really love the movie they’d just seen.”

But who’s to blame?

In Pond’s estimation, for the most part, it’s the media’s fault.

“It’s almost laughable, sitting in one of the press rows in Lumière and watching fellow reporters whip out their phones and start their timers as soon as a movie ends, gathering intel that’s of questionable significance beyond the inevitable stories,” Pond writes, pointing to articles that are routinely written about how a performer or filmmaker is responding to the overly generous standing ovations.

Terry Gilliam once expressed a similar sentiment to Pond after the 15-minute-plus standing ovation that greeted the Cannes premiere of his troubled “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote,” a movie that he tried for years to make and, when he finally did, barely anybody acknowledged. Except, of course, for that Cannes crowd.

“The problem was, I was standing there saying thank you and all this bulls–t, and thinking, Why are we getting that response?” Gilliam said. “Was it because it’s a really good film, or was it about my endurance? I was only interested in: Did they like the film? That’s what I wanted to know. But I had to stand there and smile, and then wave, and then turn to the cast … I just made a fool of myself. It was absurd.”

A rights-first AI platform debuts

Conversation has flitted around Cannes — in press conferences, while bumping into industry people getting coffee at a local café — about the arrival of AI and what it means for the industry. So it makes sense that a company called Flawless took to the festival to unveil what they are describing as “the industry’s first rights-first AI platform for filmmaking,” which they say will “position the company at the center of a rapidly evolving debate over how AI should enter cinema.”

Flawless, which calls itself “Hollywood’s leading ethical AI company,” is expanding “from pioneering studio-grade AI editing tools into a broader end-to-end platform designed to help filmmakers, performers, studios and technology companies adopt AI responsibly, transparently and at scale.”

They claim that the platform was built in collaboration with Hollywood guilds and major studios, which remain unnamed, “to ethically integrate transformative AI tools into professional production workflows while safeguarding the human rights, creative ownership, and consent structures that underpin the entertainment industry. “

According to Flawless, the new platform “unifies filmmakers, performers, studios and third-party AI technologies into a secure, rights-based ecosystem designed to protect artists, ensure consent and enable transparent, copyright-compliant AI workflows through Flawless’s Artistic Rights Treasury (A.R.T.).” Hey, it’s worth a shot.

“Human creativity is the backbone of the film industry, and it’s always been our goal to empower that creativity, not replace it,” said Flawless Co-CEOs Scott Mann and Amit Kapur in a joint statement. “This Assistive AI platform represents a major expansion of Flawless’ offerings, from a collection of separate tools to a comprehensive ecosystem rooted in artist rights, security, and scalability. We believe AI can unlock enormous growth in filmmaking and storytelling, but only if artists remain at the center of the system.”

As for why the company’s new platform is debuting at Cannes, the official statement said that as Cannes “increasingly becomes a focal point for conversations around the future of storytelling and artificial intelligence, Flawless is positioning itself not simply as another AI company, but as the trusted infrastructure layer for the next generation of filmmaking, one built around artist rights, transparency and creative partnership.”

Just don’t tell Guillermo del Toro.

More reviews!

Want some piping hot reviews? Because we’ve got them!

Steve Pond reviewed Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s “A Woman’s Life,” which is playing in the Main Competition track of the festival. Pond enjoyed it although wondered about its chances going up against some of the heavier hitters at the festival, especially in competition, remarking that it “feels pleasurable but perhaps too slight to survive the onslaught of auteur-driven films to come. There’s much to admire in its embrace of a thorny character, its judicious use of music and its control of pace and mood, but it rarely prompts the passion on display in its opening image.” (The opening image, by the way, is a woman having an orgasm, with the shot so tight that you can’t even tell what part of her body you’re looking at.)

Pond also reviewed Pawel Pawlikowski’s latest “Fatherland,” which is also in competition. The director of such modern classics as “Ida” and “Cold War” returns to the velvety black-and-white and boxy aspect ratio of his earlier films and to the thorny moral grey area that he loves so much. His latest film follows “German writer Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika as they travel across a fractured Germany in 1949, when the defeated country had been partitioned into East and West and become a central battleground in the Cold War,” according to Pond.

But did he like it?

“As usual for Pawlikowski and his regular cinematographer, Łukasz Żal, the artful style of the film comes in its framing. A typical Pawlikowski/Żal image positions the characters in the bottom half of the nearly square frame; the opposite of panoramic shots, they are dominated by the space that hangs over the characters’ heads, physically and psychically,” Pond wrote.

We’re excited to see it. Mubi will be handling its domestic release later this year.

This year’s Cannes Film Festival is an unusually animation-heavy one, with nine animated feature films playing. Chase Hutchinson reviewed “We Are Aliens,” calling it a “remarkably crafted, deeply painful, coming-of-age portrait” and “the animation discovery of the festival thus far.” We’ll take it!