Surely there’s somebody that can manage to be cooler than Vincent Cassel for at least a couple of minutes, but even if statistically that might seem possible, whoever it could be is mighty thin on the ground at Cannes, historically a joint packed with the global moving-picture cool-oisie this time of year. Pictured top at the premiere of Ashgar Farhadi’s Histoires Parallèles (Parallel Tales) — with his Brazilian partner and the mother of his son Caetano, model Narah Baptista — Cassel is every inch one of the ensemble cast’s leads in Farhadi’s film. Histoires Parallèles, set in the aftermath of the November 2015 Paris terror attacks, isn’t France’s only artistic response to those events, but it’s certainly one of the more thoughtful projections. What onrushing dystopia? We’re already in one, is Farhadi’s and by extension, Cassel’s point.

Pictured below moments after his red carpet appearance with Baptista, Cassel offers the gentlemanly arm to accompany the reigning queen of French cinema and his fellow cast member in Histoires Parallèles, Catherine Deneueve, to her seat.

How cool is that? Think about it this way: Anybody foolish enough to try nailing a bigger cool-o-meter number than Vincent Cassel at Cannes had better give up that Sisyphean work and go hit a nice seaside boîte for a fine grilled loup de mer accompanied by a few flagons of flinty, well-iced “lip-stinger” Picpoul, which will vastly improve their view of the gulls wheeling out over the baitfish churned up by the tide. We recommend Le Cabanon, over on the Midi, for that.

As for La Deneueve herself, we can only hope that the more seriously stylish ladies will be taking her cue: A simple straightforward low-ish heel under an unassailable long black skirt, minimal make-up, all that. Less is definitely more.

Running a close second on the Cannes cool-o-meter — not that they care, or try — are cute Swedish/Irish/German couple Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender, pictured above at the May 17 Hope screening, in which both actors play, alongside Hwang Jun-min and Taylor Russell, among others. Talk about a director’s cut: The “epic alien thriller” by director Na Hong-jin ran two hours and forty minutes and received a seven-minute standing ovation, after which the director graciously thanked the audience for sticking with it.

Actor Cate Blanchett, here gracing the May 16 screening of James Gray’s Paper Tiger, definitely got the memo on the merits of the black sheath, and has kept the whole train/no-train/big-dress/little-dress debate begun at last year’s festival down to a dull roar.

Which is not to say that the 2018 Cannes feature-film jury president, a known intellectual and take-no-prisoners cultural critic, just let things lie with the black dress. At a staged festival talk-a-thon she kicked up some entertaining dust as she acidly observed that #MeToo was “killed very quickly” in Hollywood, which she termed with a certain hilarious flintiness as “very interesting.” You get the sense, this tough lady ought to know. Of course Hollywood-bashing by its own is a tradition that should be loyally upheld at all awards events, and not just by the TV-hosts-hired-to-roast, so kudos to the iconoclastic Ms. Blanchett for the salvo. Nobody can rock the boat with quite the same deft moves as she.

Did we mention that there are some men in Hollywood who actually make good, thoughtful movies, with the women and men in them portraying people who face familial difficulties together? Incredible as it seems, it does actually happen. On May 16, Armageddon Time director James Gray premiered his new Russian-mob/Gowanus Canal crime drama Paper Tiger, set in 1986 in, you guessed it, Brooklyn. Driver plays the rakish, down-on-his-luck ex-cop in need of swift and arguably filthy lucre, while Teller plays the more stable family-man engineer-brother who’s pulled into an increasingly dangerous game of footsie with a gaggle of late-Soviet-era expat-Russian mobsters, themselves then busy colonizing Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach and environs, a neighborhood slowly becoming known as “Little Odessa.”

The scam driving the narrative is a live one, featuring the Gowanus Canal neighborhood, the canal itself back then being New York City’s most polluted body of water, but the neighborhood surrounding it, splayed out a few dozen blocks north of Little Odessa, was cheap, dilapidated and super-ripe for development. In short, very fine mob-hijinks territory mapped out by the Queens-grown James Gray, who is of Ukrainian/Russian descent. AWOL from the Cannes premiere, though she likely has a very, very good reason for that, was co-star Scarlett Johansson, who plays Hester Pearl, Teller’s character’s wife and the mother of their children, the matriarch, in other words, of the family that Driver’s character does his level best to wreck.