World leaders at a G7 conference politely bicker, copulate in the bushes and work on wafty, content-free speeches while a worldwide apocalypse commences — politicians, they’re just like us! — in collaborating Canadian directors Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson’s frequently hilarious latest feature.

Although they’ve kept busy with a steady stream of shorts, the trio haven’t made a feature with actors since the fantastical The Forbidden Room from 2015. With a proper beginning, middle and end, and barely any tributes to silent cinema or interactive tricksiness, Rumours may arguably be Maddin’s most conventional film ever, or at least since The Saddest Music in the World (2003). That is, if you can call a film conventional that’s got furiously masturbating bog zombies, a giant brain the size of a hatchback, and an AI chatbot that catfishes pedophiles. All the same, it’s a hoot, even if the energy flags in the middle.

For those who like to keep score on these sort of things, this is also the first film directed by Maddin, let alone brothers Evan and Galen Johnson, that’s been programmed in Cannes’ official selection. Apart from the fact that it’s a welcome rib-tickler that breaks up this year’s festival’s monotonous procession of poverty porn and disappointments by fading auteurs, Rumours’ path to the Croisette was almost certainly smoothed by the presence of major names in the cast including Cate Blanchett, Alicia Vikander, Charles Dance and French star Denis Ménochet (Beau Is Afraid, Peter von Kant). That cast and the festival showcase won’t do any harm to the film’s commercial prospects. Bleecker Street recently announced they’ve acquired the rights for U.S. distribution.

The satire here isn’t necessarily aimed at any specific politician given that the characters are all clearly living in a fictional world, one where ideology barely seems to matter. Nevertheless, there’s a distinct sharpness in the way the script, credited to Evan Johnson but based on a story by all three directors, pokes the bears. Pointedly it lampoons the airy, non-committal language of world summits, the promises that mean nothing, and the outcomes that achieve little in a world that, while admittedly always in crisis, really is on the verge of burning up thanks to climate change.

The film’s most consistent running joke — worked so hard it goes from guffaw-inducing to stale to weirdly suddenly hilarious again, as if through attrition — concerns how seriously the seven world leaders take the process of drafting a joint statement full of platitudes, corporate-speak, psychobabble and song lyrics as they sit in a little woodland gazebo. So absorbed are they in their work, broken up into subgroups like high-schoolers assigned a class project, that they don’t even notice that their aides and servers have all mysteriously disappeared, leaving them alone in the woods.

In other ways, the leaders resemble middle-managers enjoying their annual conference with its catering, photo opportunities and time off from troublesome spouses — a particular concern for Canada’s prime minister Maxime Laplace (The Forbidden Room’s Roy Dupuis, rocking a man bun with an undercut like an aging pop star). Broad hints are dropped that Maxime had a fling with the United Kingdom’s otherwise goal-directed prime minister Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird). This year he’s caught the thirsty eye of host-country Germany’s elegant Chancellor Hilda Ortmann (Blanchett, showing off strong comedy chops, even in the way she Germanicizes her vowel sounds).

The United States’ President Edison Wolcott (Charles Dance, slyly self-parodying) is more interested in getting some sleep and keeps nodding off, a gag that may be sheer coincidence but weirdly parallels what’s going on at the minute with Donald Trump at his criminal hush money trial. Another cute gag has the film never explaining why the American president has such a plummy British accent, and the one time he’s about to share why gets interrupted.

Rounding out the democratic world powers, Ménochet’s French President Sylvain Broulez is a grandiloquent blowhard who probably talks more than Japan’s reticent Tatsuro Iwasaki (Takehiro Hira) and Italy’s bumbling beta-male Antonio Lamorte (Rolando Ravello) combined. Both of the latter two, however, are aces as slow burns and understated reaction shots, especially Ravello.

Alicia Vikander, speaking only in her native Swedish for a change, shows up halfway through the film as the president of the European Commission, Celestine Sproul, when Maxime stumbles across her in the woods with the aforementioned giant brain, which you’ll have to watch the film to understand.

Not that understanding is really the point here. Rumours operates on a surrealist plane of its own, making up the rules of its universe as it goes along. Shall we have millennia-old boneless bog people who come to life and menace the guests, it asks itself, and the answer is yes, why not? What if the non-source music swells and bursts like the melodramatic score of a soap opera at times? Sure!

The whole thing sometimes feels like a skit show that just barely holds together until the filmmakers and cast bring it all home for a terrific climactic closure, in which all the buzzwords and banalities get to be rolled up into one triumphant speech shouted into the void as world burns. Like the best comic fantasies, Rumours has more than a grain of tragic truth to it.

Schmuel Gelbfisz, Lazar Meir and the Wonsal brothers are not names that immediately come to mind when thinking about Hollywood legends, but Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer and the Warner brothers are.

These monumental Hollywood figures changed their given Jewish names to ones they thought would be more palatable to Americans in the early 20th century in hopes of increasing their chances of success. While their studios had tremendous accomplishments, creating some of the best films of all time, these men’s birth names are not widely known.

The Academy Museum is aiming to change that.

A new exhibition titled “Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of a Movie Capital,” which opens Sunday to the public, explores the stories of the Jewish filmmakers and studio founders who helped cement the Los Angeles area as the world capital of entertainment. It will be the museum’s first permanent exhibition.

“We want people to come away with a richer understanding of how this city is so intertwined with this industry and also a deeper understanding of why this is specifically a Jewish immigrant story,” said Dara Jaffe, an associate curator at the Academy Museum, who spearheaded the exhibition.

The immersive exhibition traces the development of the major Hollywood studios and the golden age of film in the early 20th century through the perspective of Jewish immigrants who were at the heart of the industry’s establishment.

Since it opened in 2021, the Academy Museum has been dogged by criticism for scarcely highlighting or recognizing the predominantly Jewish group of filmmakers who developed the industry. The Eastern European Jewish immigrants who laid the groundwork for Hollywood and their first-generation American Jewish children were not featured in the museum’s ambitious exhibitions that emphasized and celebrated the work of groups often marginalized in Hollywood.

Jaffe said the museum had always planned to include the stories of the Jewish founders in their exhibitions eventually, but also understands the criticism over the lack of representation at the time of the museum’s opening. She said she welcomed feedback while curating the exhibition to ensure it was something the filmmaking and Jewish communities felt accurately represented the history.

“We completely feel it is foundational to who we are as a film museum, representing this industry, and it’s central to who we are as a film museum in Los Angeles,” Jaffe said. “It’s important to us that every visitor who comes can get this story of the founding of Hollywood and the Jewish studio heads.”

With the exhibition opening amid Jewish American Heritage Month and during a time of rising antisemitism, Jaffe said she wants visitors to leave the exhibition with deeper knowledge of the relationship between Jewish people and filmmaking — and to understand that the history of that relationship is not “fodder for further antisemitism.”

“There have been so many times over the past couple years where I wished this exhibition was already open so we could point to it and say, ‘Please, come learn more,’ ” Jaffe said. “It’s a relief that it finally will be open.”

Author and film critic Neal Gabler, who wrote 1988‘s “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood,” served as an advisor on the exhibition and will speak at its opening night event. In the widely cited book, Gabler wrote that Jews often faced barriers to entry in other industries, and entertainment was a field where they saw an opportunity to develop their own business.

Gabler wrote in his introduction that Jews created “their idealized America on the screen” — with strong families led by valorous fathers, ardent patriotism and resilience — and in doing so, American values became defined by their work.

Two sections of the exhibition’s three distinct parts spotlight these Jewish founders and their respective studios — Universal, Fox (later 20th Century-Fox), Paramount, United Artists and Warner Bros., to name a few — and how they built up the idea of the American Dream.

The “Studio Origins” section features multimedia displays that detail the founding of each of “the majors,” as they were often called, and dives into the stories of their respective founders. It also explores how the studio system operated in the late 1920s through the late ‘40s, when the eight major studios dominated production and often signed long-term contracts with actors and filmmakers.

The exhibition includes a short documentary about the studio founders’ lives and their experiences of immigration and antisemitism.

(Joshua White / JWPictures / Academy Museum)

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An original short-form documentary titled “From the Shtetl to the Studio: The Jewish Story of Hollywood,” focuses on the founders’ immigration stories and the challenges they faced as they built Hollywood. It details how experiencing antisemitism and oppression affected their careers. Ben Mankiewicz, the host of Turner Classic Movies and the grandson of “Citizen Kane” co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz, narrates the documentary, which features archival images and video clips.

The exhibition also includes an animated tabletop and projections to illustrate how L.A. evolved alongside the growing film industry. The immersive display maps the city from 1902, when the first dedicated movie theater was built in L.A., through 1929, the year of the first Academy Awards. Jaffe said she wanted to make sure the exhibition “organically balanced” the stories of the founders and the city.

“Hollywood is both a place and an idea. There’s the geographic city of Los Angeles and Hollywood as a mythological symbol,” Jaffe said. “There was filmmaking in Los Angeles before the Jewish founders established the studio system, but it was truly the studio system that transformed Los Angeles into the idea of the mythological symbol of Hollywood.”

It’s become something of a movie fashion to forestall the title credits until well after an establishing sequence, if not deeper into the film. But when the title appears onscreen in Blue Sun Palace, at the half-hour point, there’s nothing self-consciously stylish about it: It marks a dramatic, ground-shifting change in perspective, a gut-punch of a narrative fracture, and one that writer-director Constance Tsang executes with assurance.

At the helm of her first feature, Tsang has made a sharp and tender story about dislocation, centering on a trio of hardworking Chinese immigrants in New York. In the movie’s first 30 minutes, Tsang draws us into the intimate orbit of her expatriate characters: a construction company employee and two colleagues at a massage parlor. Then, the sudden absence of one of them sets everything askew. Absence is the current that drives the narrative: absence from family, from homeland, from purpose. The world these characters inhabit, within an enclave of Flushing, Queens, is a place of in-between, captured in the evocative half-light of Norm Li’s cinematography, suggesting the cool-hot glow of the title’s blue sun. The poignant chords of Sami Jano’s elegantly lean score further fuel the angsty mood.

The Blue Sun Palace is a restaurant outside the movie’s main New York setting, making its appearance late in the proceedings. It’s in another, unnamed restaurant that the film kicks off, without ceremony, in a remarkable sequence. The eatery itself is barely seen, Li’s camera moving between Hunan native Didi (Xu Haipeng) and Cheung (Lee Kang Sheng), from Taiwan, holding them close as they dig into spicy chicken and fall into each other’s gaze.

It will be a while before we know their names, or who they are to each other. There’s a sense of established emotional intimacy between them, but at the same time they’re still getting to know each other. Eventually, the likely deduction is that he’s been a client of hers at the massage parlor she runs. When he speaks of his loneliness, his words are muted and restrained, and her eyes well with compassion, the play of feeling on Xu’s face breathtaking. This is not your standard first date. But it is a turning point, the infatuation deepening during an entranced karaoke duet. Didi and Cheung’s morning-after pillow talk is a beautifully played depiction of awakening and connection, mischievous and light even as it delves into the weightier territory of hopes and dreams, a conversational turn sparked by a calendar photo on Didi’s wall.

For Didi, some of those dreams involve Amy (Wu Ke-Xi), her closest friend at the massage parlor and the third key character. Amy is a gifted cook, and she and Didi talk of opening a restaurant together. In the meantime, they, along with Josie (Murielle Hsieh) and Fei (Zheng Lisha), spend their days and nights massaging the bodies of their male customers. A sign on the front door warns, “No Sexual Services,” but exceptions are made — sometimes grudgingly. And, as one tense scene demonstrates, not every client is respectful, to put it mildly.

As to the business’ unseen proprietor — it’s unlikely that the four women have ownership stakes — the movie offers no information or hints. There are a couple of other instances where Tsang could have made the narrative details less hazy, although these lingering questions don’t unmoor the story or lessen its impact.

What is clear is the bond among the parlor’s four women, the sisterly humor that gets them through the workaday hours and helps them withstand the overall sense of displacement. In ways both obvious and offhand, they nurture one another. The feast Amy prepares for Lunar New Year evokes fond and tearful memories of home for Josie. In the here and now, Didi’s maternal warmth is the glue holding everything together. But things break apart, and, as one character notes, “It’s funny how quickly the people you love become strangers.”

Picking up the story after a specific cataclysm and an unspecified length of time, Tsang turns her focus to the question of how to go on, and whether devotedness can devolve into clinging to what’s gone. Amy, obsessed with repairing a ceiling leak, worries it like a wound. Cheung, who has only one friend at work (Leo Chen), fields mirthless calls from his wife and daughter in Taiwan that are always about money, nothing else. When he takes Amy to the restaurant from the opening scene, you might call it a dramatic version of an Annie Hall joke, the bit where Alvy’s attempt to duplicate the romantic hilarity of a lobster dinner with Annie falls numbingly flat with another woman. Cheung’s disappointment aside, for Amy the fraught dinner gives way to the simplest and most difficult realization of all: “I just need to change something.”

While Xu’s compelling vibrancy suffuses Blue Sun Palace, her co-stars offer thornier portrayals. Playing in an unpredictable register, Wu (Nina Wu) gives pulsing life to Amy’s wary brittleness and its eventual melting. Lee, the longtime muse of Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang, carries Cheung’s yearning and joy, his guilt and sorrow, in a performance that’s all the more gripping for being measured and contained.

As to the resolution of these characters’ story, it remains an open question in the subtly moving final scenes. In massage parlor reception areas and backrooms, working-class restaurants and karaoke bars, Tsang and her strong cast, with superb contributions from production designer Evaline Wu Huang, have captured something evanescent and life-giving, and grounded it in kitchen clatter and workplace chatter, the gritty day-to-day.