Indiana Jones won’t visit the Croisette until tomorrow, but today one sensed that the festival was already in full swing. On Wednesday, you couldn’t get into Sean Penn’s press conference; today you could barely get a spot at one of the televisions showing Woody Allen’s. The reception to his Vicky Cristina Barcelona is all over the map. (Bear in mind that my enthusiasm is based in part on expecting, say, another Cassandra’s Dream.) Given one of the movie’s subplots, it’s natural that someone would ask the Woodman if he was himself was interested in menage a trois. "It’s hard enough to get one person," he replied.

Crowds are everywhere, and this morning even pink-badge wearers were turned away from a press screening of Jia Zhangke’s 24 City, which had been programmed in the tiny Salle Bazin. Getting shut out of the movie slowed me down (and prevented me from catching that wacky Van Damme movie in Market, alas), but Jia’s film—shown again later in the afternoon—was worth the wait. Sort of the Chinese director’s Spoon River Anthology, the film features interviews with ex-employees of a factory that was demolished to make way for a housing complex; their remembrances, interspersed with monologues by actors (including Joan Chen and Zhao Tao), comment on a broad swath of Chinese history. Like Jia’s 2006 Dong and Still Life—which also combined fiction and documentary—24 City is concerned with the art of writing history and memorials. The stories themselves blend into one another; the movie is more about capturing images. It’s cinematic portraiture.

A slightly more conventional documentary was shown last night—specifically, James Toback’s Tyson, which consists of nothing more than the bad-boy boxer talking to the camera, with archival footage providing illustration. It’s much more compelling than it sounds. If nothing else, the movie suggests that Tyson could challenge Muhammad Ali for the designation of boxing’s brashest word slinger (though Ali has more of a knockout wit). Toback knows enough to stand back while Tyson slags Don King and the woman who accused him of rape in 1991, and also when he remembers having an urge to break things during a contentious interview with Barbara Walters. The film offers some sympathy for him, too; Tyson talks at length about his upbringing in a tough Brooklyn neighborhood, which shaped his fighting style. The boxer and Toback received a curtain call after the premiere last night, but one suspects that the reception was less for Tyson—the movie never asks you to like him, after all—and more for his spectacular showmanship.

TOC at Cannes image: Nadine Nakanishi