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One of the evening’s most incredible moments was a trenchant version of Bob Dylan’s “Blind Willie McTell,” also calling back to the Big Easy, delivered with authority and depth, and rich with color and shading.

Smith understood how her features cut into and through a role – wide eyes amply lidded, trenchant cheekbones, features that one might associate with snobbery.

Her work builds on a simple but trenchant observation: In the long history of Western painting, monumental portraits of Black women are almost nonexistent.

But the most spirited discussions at Cannes are over whether the movie is trenchant or skin-deep.

Another of them, rendered almost invisibly in shellac on deep cobalt blue moiré, circles around to give the exhibition its trenchant title: “Now then, as I was about to say …”