At Cannes, the search goes on for a knockout or at least a decent ending

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CANNES, France — Cannes is technically half over and the hunt for a masterpiece continues.Critics on the Croisette are starting to resemble that classic comic-strip panel in which an explorer crawls desperately across the sand toward an oasis that’s only a mirage.This far into an underwhelming festival, good films have a way of looking like great ones, such as James Gray’s “Paper Tiger,” a grimy thriller with Adam Driver and Miles Teller playing two brothers in 1980s New York who get mired in a scheme to sanitize the Gowanus Canal.

Driver’s ex-cop knows the codes of cutting deals with the Russian mob; Teller’s engineer is the square who can’t grasp how doing things the right way just makes the situation worse.As the normies, Teller and his naive wife, portrayed by Scarlett Johansson, feel like kids playing dress-up.

(Johansson’s perm is a bit much.) Still, the script is tense and tight — and at this point, I’m happy to see anything with a plot.Movies Director Na Hong-jin’s latest, a sci-fi adventure co-starring Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander, brings a huge sense of blockbuster scale to his filmmaking.Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s “The Beloved” has two of them: It’s a film-within-a-film about a famous director (Javier Bardem) who casts his estranged actor daughter (Victoria Luengo) in his latest project.

The fictional movie looks stiff, a period epic about Spain’s colonialist withdrawal from the Sahara in the 1930s, which doubles as a metaphor for the father’s destructive absence from his now-adult child’s life.A boozer, she’s not stable enough to stand up to the scrutiny of his sudden attention.

Luengo herself holds the camera splendidly even in her character’s weaker moments, turning her charisma off whenever her father needs her to turn it on.Consider it a shot and chaser to “Garance,” which stars a vibrantly sloppy Adèle Exarc...