There was much talk in Cannes about Todd McCarthy's angry column in Variety, in which the magazine's chief film critic wondered if Hollywood studio bosses even see the films they release.
McCarthy's j'accuse came after a particularly nasty stretch of mass-market releases in which the stars were buried in excrement, stuck their arms into the anal orifices of unhappy animals, or - in the notorious Freddy Got Fingered - swung a newborn baby by its umbilical cord. These actors do things on-screen the geeks in circus sideshows would have turned down.
It is in this melancholy climate I attend a London conference on US classic films, with speakers discussing On the Waterfront, Dr Strangelove, Chinatown and Raging Bull, four films that surely would not have found financing today. US mass-market releases are currently dominated by gross and stupid movies aimed at teenage boys who attend early and often, helping those pictures "win the weekend".
They're forgotten two weeks later, but not before they've driven good films out of the marketplace.
For every silver lining there is a cloud. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon grossed more than $100 million in the US - a record for a subtitled film - but the year before, all subtitled films together grossed less than $50 million, $20 million less than the first weekend's take of The Mummy Returns. It used to be said that imported films didn't play many cities; today they don't play many states. The US independent movement, aka the Sundance generation, regularly produces interesting films that sink in the marketplace. Home video and cable are the lifelines that allow good movies to break even.
And yet there is hope. If you look at the movies themselves and not simply at the box office, US films are in an emerging golden age. It is possible to see inventive and even important new work every week of the year - if you live in a city with good cinemas, or have a cable system that offers indie movies. Directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Spike Jonze, Curtis Hanson, Julie Taymor, Ken Lonergan, Alison Mac Lean, Steven Soderbergh, Todd Solondz, David Gordon Green and Darren Aronofsky are doing work as interesting as the 1970s golden-agers such as Scorsese, Coppola, Altman and Malick.
The movies are there. It is just that they have to fight so hard for distribution. At Sundance every January, there are 120 US movies, and sections for world cinema and documentaries. The festival has been haunted by the Blair Witch phenomenon - the prospect that a film with a budget the price of a mid-sized car can gross $200 million. But the fact that it happened once is almost proof that it can never happen again.
More likely is a moderate hit, such as Lonergan's wonderful Sundance winner, You Can Count on Me, which got an Oscar nomination for Laura Linney and paid a nice return on investment. Most Sundance "hits" don't do so well. You Can Count on Me shared the grand prize with Girlfight, Karyn Kusama's story of a young Puerto Rican girl who wants to be a boxer. It sank at the box office.
At Sundance and again at Cannes, North American film critics gathered in gloom this year. We know there are good new films, we can name them, we do all we can to spread the word - and the audience sleepwalks into some flashy but empty blockbuster. All the same, midway through Cannes, I arrived at the melancholy conclusion that the US indie movement is able to put together a more interesting week of premiΦres at Sundance than the rest of the world is able to do in the official selection at Cannes.
At the Montreal film festival, we debated whether there is an audience in "middle America" for the film that opened Cannes, Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge. Will middle Americans think Moulin Rouge must be a French film with subtitles - and will they understand how a woman could be a romantic heroine and a whore at the same time?
Professor Edwin Jahiel, who teaches cinema at the University of Illinois, says that when he showed Godard's My Life to Live to his students, many of them had never heard of a "pimp". The general level of information possessed by the average US moviegoer has been eroding year by year.
They want films that, in Hitchcock's phrase, "play the audience like a piano". The slightest challenge or complexity causes them to shy. I noticed this tendency years ago, when my phone rang at the Chicago Sun-Times and a reader asked what I knew about Bergman's Cries and Whispers. I said I thought it was the best film of the year. Reader: "That doesn't sound like anything we'd like to see."
Where is there room for hope? The problem is not with making the films, but with finding distribution and audiences. One innovation in the US is the Shooting Gallery film series, which twice a year takes a six films out for two-week runs in Loews cinemas in 22 cities.
Another idea is to integrate the production of indie films with the cable channels that will eventually show them. The production arm of the Independent Film Channel financed two of the most interesting films at Sundance this year, both by Richard Linklater (director of Slackers and Dazed and Confused): Waking Life, involving 30 artists, and His Tape, a digitally-filmed three-hander. The word "digital" brings up another possibility: if films were supplied on cheap high-definition discs, the same title could play simultaneously in 50 cities. Even as an opponent of digital projection of big-screen, mainstream movies, I can see how this would help the indies sneak around the multiplex gridlock.
If experiments like this aren't tried, the North American indie generation will continue to be locked out of national distribution. A thinly stretched network of independent houses, museum programmes, film societies and the rare art multiplex - each operating on small margins - is all that stands between US independent films and oblivion.
Roger Ebert is film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times