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  • ‘H Is for Hawk’ Review: Claire Foy Is Enraptured With Raptors in an Unconventional Yet Moving Grief Drama

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    “Looking for goshawks is like looking for grace: it comes, but not often, and you don’t get to say when or how,” writes Helen Macdonald in “H Is for Hawk,” a book I picked up by accident and which proved to be the greatest tool I had when one of my own parents passed away. When someone around you loses a loved one, it’s all but impossible to know what to say. I recommend reading “H Is for Hawk.”

    For Macdonald, that most eloquent of memoirs emerged from the death of her father, photographer Alisdair MacDonald. But what Helen really did to process her grief was to adopt a goshawk. The book is partly about what a wild and uncommon thing that is to do, but it’s mostly about what was going on in Macdonald’s mind through the process (which involves all kinds of engaging digressions into falconry, literature and the life of the writer T.H. White, who wrote “The Goshawk”). Sometimes our brains need something completely different to concentrate on, while our hearts do their mending.

    As a movie, “H Is for Hawk” — which stars Claire Foy as a headstrong and occasionally hard-to-take version of Macdonald — might have a similarly comforting effect for some, although it elides so much of what originally resonated with me (namely, the language, for which Macdonald has a remarkable gift). What is gained in exchange is a visual dimension entirely lacking from the book, as director Philippa Lowthorpe supplies footage of Foy enraptured with her raptor, whom she names Mabel — so much footage in fact that the 128-minute film stops being a work of philosophy and reflection, and becomes instead a more conventional portrait of a human with an exceptional pet (a word that ruffles Helen’s feathers, as she considers Mabel to be more of a companion).

    Fine. One thing I learned at the Telluride Film Festival, where the film premiered, is that no one — not a single person I queried — had read Macdonald’s book. So instead of bemoaning what’s missing, it’s best to recognize what is there. On that front, “H Is for Hawk” remains a moving account of one person’s eccentric interest in falconry, which she takes up in response to her father’s death. Brendan Gleeson plays “Ali Mac” as a benevolent parent, the only person who ever fully understood her.

    In flashbacks so warm, his passing may start to depress you too, Ali displays an artistic curiosity in all things: first the natural world, as he introduces young Helen to birding, but also the strange ways that humans have of inhabiting it (he proposes a project of photographing every bridge between the Thames’ source and the sea). “Room” screenwriter Emma Donoghue makes a recurring theme of Helen’s unique relationship to other living creatures, as in a scene where she scoops up a large spider and gently carries it outdoors.

    Moments later, Helen gets the call from her mother (Lindsay Duncan) where the tone of her voice delivers the news of Ali’s death before the words are spoken. You can’t prepare for how the loss of a parent will hit you, and in Helen’s case, it all but derails her academic career — her teaching responsibilities, the fellowship she’s applying for. Instead of wallowing in her misery, the movie accompanies her, like best friend Christina (Denise Gough), who checks in regularly with unconditional support.

    Macdonald never admits as much, but there’s a strange phenomenon by which losing a parent gives you wings — or, to torture the metaphor, allows you to fly in ways you wouldn’t have dared when they were alive. Helen had always loved birds, an interest she associates with her dad, but it’s only after her father passes that she feels compelled to adopt one. And not just any bird, but a dangerous predator. If Michael Crichton was right, this winged killer could well have been the next step in the evolutionary chain: a connection to something primeval.

    In the opening scene, Lowthorpe shows Helen studying wild goshawks through binoculars — looking for grace, you might say. The animals’ appeal is undeniable, but few would take the leap from observing to inviting a goshawk into one’s home. The movie takes us through all the stages — not of grief, but cross-species connection — from a shady exchange with a breeder (who advises “murder” as the key to managing these lethal creatures) to the long, slow process of gaining the bird’s confidence (presenting fistfuls of raw meat, while avoiding eye contact). Lowthorpe unhurriedly reflects Helen’s sense of wonder, taking the time to admire the bird’s plumage and the deadly weapons that are its talons and beak. Mabel is indeed magnificent, but also an all-consuming responsibility … and, let’s face it, distraction for Helen.

    It’s a rare privilege to spend so much time with Helen and her charge, and the footage of Mabel (played by two different birds, filmed by Mark Payne-Gill in the wild) hunting pheasants and so forth mesmerizes. But there’s arguably too much of it, dominating the film’s slightly excessive run time. As we grow impatient, her friends and family express their concern. According to Macdonald, at that moment, Mabel gave her purpose and a chance to process: “I’d closed the door on the world outside. Now I could think of my father.”

    The movie gives audiences room to do the same, as ideas Macdonald articulately explored over hundreds of pages are suggested by the nuances of Foy’s performance. The role required her to learn falconry, as there’s no faking Foy’s interaction with the animal, which bates wildly at first (twisting and flapping to escape her grasp), but returns to her glove once it trusts her. Helen obviously sees something of herself in the animal, though Lowthorpe doesn’t impose any one interpretation. Instead, Helen is allowed to be irritable and anti-social, chain-smoking and snappish, without the filmmaker casting judgment.

    A mental health angle reveals itself late in the film, which is helpful to acknowledge (especially for those seeking comfort for equivalent losses in their lives). But I can’t help wishing that “H Is for Hawk” had incorporated more of Macdonald’s related discoveries, from Ken Loach’s “Kes” (about a boy and his bird) to revelations about “The Once and Future King” author White, a queer hero whose biography is at least as interesting as hers.

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    Peter Debruge

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  • Jesse Plemons Says ‘Bugonia’ was “The Hardest Thing I’ve Ever Done”

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    Jesse Plemons is surprisingly energetic when I meet him on Sunday at the Telluride Film Festival. He’s just arrived for the weekend from Venice, Italy, where his film Bugonia had its world premiere. But the globehopping travel doesn’t seem to have affected him as much as I would have expected—though he admits it’s very surreal. “It’s a funny experience to take a boat to the airport in Venice and then take a [mountain] gondola later in the day,” he says.

    Plemons stars in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia as Teddy Gatz, a man who is convinced that aliens live among us. Teddy, who is also carrying immense grief, kidnaps a powerful CEO (Emma Stone), thinking that she is an alien who is attempting to destroy the planet.

    While the film is full of Lanthimos’ unique sensibilities and bold storytelling, it is also making a statement about the pressing environmental and social issues of today, including how capitalism and the global authoritarian corporate culture are ruining the planet in a way that’s likely irreversible.

    Plemons, who previously worked with Lanthimos in Kinds of Kindness, delivers a towering performance as Teddy, who is intense, intelligent, and highly unpredictable. The third act of the film is one of the wildest things you’ll see on screen this year, and Plemons admits it was demanding to pull off. He also reveals his new-found hobby, what he learned about conspiracy theorists, and talks about his current spiritual journey.

    Plemons in Bugonia

    Courtesy of Focus Features © 2025 All Rights Reserved.

    Vanity Fair: When did you first start talking to Yorgos about making another movie together?

    Jesse Plemons: Right after Kinds of Kindness, I picked up photography, to my surprise. Yorgos is also a great photographer, which is annoying. [Laughs] I’ve got kids and I started taking some film photos of them. And so then he was very generous and gave me a few tutorials over Zoom. And then maybe four or five months after we finished Kinds of Kindness, he told me about the script and sent it to me. I was floored by it, loved it. So we were doing press for [Kinds of Kindness] as we were rehearsing and it was kind of chaotic.

    What was it about the script?

    This current moment we are in is so strange and scary. I feel like I’m always looking for something to help me to sort through that that does it in a way that doesn’t feel preachy, that gets it right. And this just really seemed to. It came at this present moment in a sort of backdoor way that was surprising at every turn and leaves you with plenty to think about and chew on. And Teddy, I’ve been very fortunate to play some pretty complex characters, but he’s up there.

    What did you do for research to understand this conspiracy theorist?

    It’s not too difficult to, if you’re looking out for it, the internet has it all. And Andrew Callaghan has this YouTube channel, and he just places himself in really intense, interesting places and just has one of those personalities that is disarming enough for people. He’s even been to alien conferences and flat earth conventions. And then I had a friend that recommended this book by Naomi Klein called Doppelganger and it was just a perfect place for me to start.

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    Rebecca Ford

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  • ‘Ballad of a Small Player’ Review: A Fully Committed Colin Farrell Bets the House in a Too-Flashy Portrait of Addiction

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    When does a gambling habit become a gambling problem? Is it when you’re down to your last wadded-up banknote, which you keep stuffed in your sock till all else has been spent? Or maybe it’s that extreme moment you’re forced to fake your own death, just to throw off your creditors. Surely things have gotten out of hand when the British government sends a private detective (who looks an awful lot like Tilda Swinton) all the way to Macau to collect the fortune you swindled from an unsuspecting old lady to subsidize your addiction.

    In “Ballad of a Small Player,” Colin Farrell is a reckless high-roller, all flop sweat and false bravado, who’s taken up residence in a decadent Chinese casino hotel. He has three days to settle his HK$145,000 hotel bill, or else they turn him over the authorities. (For now, they won’t send another bottle of bubbly to his suite or let him use the house limo service.) Gambling is all about stakes, and these don’t seem quite high enough — at least, not until a body goes hurtling past the window of the dining room where he’s eating, and then we realize what rock bottom looks like: a corpse crumpled on top of a car in the parking lot below, having hurtled itself off the roof only moments before.

    Edward Berger’s polar-opposite follow-up to last year’s “Conclave” is also the polar opposite of movies that it would seem to resemble: films like “Leaving Las Vegas,” “Under the Volcano” and “Uncut Gems,” where desperate men (always men) burn the fuse right down to the quick. Farrell’s character calls himself Lord Freddy Doyle, though in fact, he’s little more than a fraud, spending other people’s money in pursuit of whatever thrill winning gives. But it’s not winning this man wants. It’s easy come, easy go where money’s concerned. Doyle is motivated by the fear of complete financial ruin and whatever consequences that might bring.

    The locals call guys like this gwai lo, or ghosts, which doesn’t feel quite right for Doyle, who’s anything but invisible, striding through town in his bespoke burgundy suit, neatly tied ascot and bright yellow gloves. This conspicuous foreigner looks like a cross between Quentin Crisp and a 1970s Harlem pimp. He doesn’t exactly blend in — although, to be fair, it takes a lot to compete with the garish neon casinos that rise up about him like the debauched skyline of Rouge City in Spielberg’s “A.I. Artificial Intelligence.”

    “Lord” Doyle is what we might call a cad. He believes that a man can reinvent himself in Macau, but his past keeps catching up with him. That’s what the private detective with the cheap shoes and designer spectacles, who calls herself Betty, but is really named Cynthia Blithe (that would be Swinton), serves to remind. She’s there to collect something like a million pounds, which Doyle owes her client. He has practically none to his name, but if she’ll just spot him 500 quid, he can turn it into enough to square his debts (well, some of them, at least).

    “How ’bout dinner and a dance?” he says. “We can come to some kind of arrangement.” Blithe obliges, and sure enough, like some kind of magician, Doyle starts winning. But he’s still a long way from a million, and Blithe (who doesn’t look like any detective we’ve seen before) gives him 24 hours. For a so-called small player like this, deadlines don’t mean much. Everything’s negotiable. And so the movie becomes increasingly tiresome, watching Farrell oscillate from low to high, as DP James Friend shoves his high-def camera right up in his pores, or else shoots the actor from halfway across town, so he’s nothing but a tiny speck in a world of excess.

    Adapted from the book by Lawrence Osborne, “Ballad of a Small Player” should feel like a film noir (Doyle could be lifted from one of Graham Greene’s novels), but Berger takes it in the other direction. Visually, it’s a stunning, vibrant film, as detailed and decadent as Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Great Beauty,” with the colors narrowed to a Wong Kar Wai palette. Hong Kong is just a stone’s throw away, after all, though Doyle is persona non grata there. He’s run out of options, having exhausted his credit at even the Rainbow Casino, where a filthy-mouthed grandma (Deanie Ip) wipes him clean at baccarat.

    Enter what the movie’s loose equivalent of a femme fatale, Fala Chen (Dao Ming), who lends money to losers at exorbitant rates, but sees something in Doyle that, frankly, the rest of us don’t. The two spend a night together by the shore, and Doyle awakens with numbers penned on his palm: a test of character that raises his already bombastic redemption/self-immolation several notches higher. It’s hard to follow how much of what’s happening from here on is real, as Berger never really established how gravity works in this world.

    We watch Doyle win his way back on top, but the roller coaster has gone off the rails by this point. One minute, he’s having a heart attack, the next he’s shoveling fistfuls of lobster into his face. It’s no fault of Farrell’s. The actor is fully committed to this anxious caricature of a man who doesn’t know when to call it quits, but Doyle’s psychology is all over the map. Compared to great portraits of people dominated by their gambling compulsion — “Bay of Angels,” “Bob le Flambeur,” “Mississippi Grind,” “The Cooler” — “Ballad of a Small Player” looks great, but lacks the fundamental human insight to make it a winner.

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    Peter Debruge

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  • ‘H Is for Hawk’ Review: Claire Foy and Her Bird Fly High in a Tender but Overlong Grief Drama

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    Helen (Claire Foy) is not the kind of woman to wallow in her emotions. After her beloved father (Brendan Gleeson) passes, she insists she’s not moping (“Dad would hate any kind of moping”); when loved ones ask if she’s okay, she dismisses their concerns and tells them she’s just fine.

    But a grief as large as Helen’s does not simply disappear because it’s denied language or tears. It simply finds other methods of expression. A few months after her dad’s death, Helen adopts a goshawk, one of the birds of prey she and he so used to love spotting on their bird watching expeditions, and immediately makes it her whole world.

    H Is for Hawk

    The Bottom Line

    A sensitive but slow portrayal of grief.

    Venue: Telluride Film Festival
    Cast: Claire Foy, Brendan Gleeson, Denise Gough, Sam Spruell, Emma Cunniffe, Josh Dylan, Arty Froushan, Lindsay Duncan
    Director: Philippa Lowthorpe
    Screenwriters: Emma Donoghue and Philippa Lowthorpe, based on the book by Helen Macdonald

    2 hours 8 minutes

    H Is for Hawk, directed by Philippa Lowthorpe and co-written by Lowthorpe and Emma Donoghue based on Helen Macdonald’s memoir of the same title, is the tale of that rather unusual coping mechanism. As an appreciation of birds and our connection to them, it’s engrossing and endearing — a fresher take, certainly, than yet another weepie about dog or cat owners. But as an exploration of grief, it’s hindered by a 128-minute run time that spreads its emotional potency too thin.

    Initially, Helen seems to be handling the death of her father, the photojournalist Alisdair Macdonald, as well as might reasonably be expected of anyone who’s just lost what she calls “the only person in the world who truly understood me.” She carries on with her teaching fellowship at Cambridge University, and makes plans to apply for a prestigious new job. She hangs out with her best friend, Christina (Denise Gough, here as likable as her Andor character is despicable). She even starts dating a handsome art dealer, Amar (Arty Froushan), whom she’s met on Twitter. (H Is for Hawk takes place in 2007, making them very early adopters.)

    But once Amar leaves, she falls apart, though the breakup seems less the cause of her breakdown than the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. It’s at this point that she decides to buy Mabel, the goshawk, and falls head over heels in love at first sight. To Helen, Mabel is no mere distraction, nor a pet, nor a hobby — Mabel is her hunting partner, as she’ll snap to anyone who dares invoke any of those other words.

    Especially at first, H Is for Hawk might seem a strong argument for taking up falconry. Mabel, or rather the trained bird actors who play her, is a delightfully magnetic presence on camera, with her wide alert eyes, her handsome feathers and her fascinatingly inhuman movements. DP Charlotte Bruus Christensen captures both Mabel herself and the gorgeousness of the forests and fields that she takes as her hunting grounds with a real sense of reverence. If anything, it’s harder to understand why others — like Stu (Sam Spruell), a friend and fellow falconer — had warned Helen against getting a goshawk in the first place, given that Mabel seems generally well-behaved for a wild predator.

    But the grief seeps through. The script, by Lowthorpe and Donoghue, is particularly well-observed when it comes to the almost comical oddness of mourning. In one scene, Helen tells a restaurant server her father has just died, and he returns with a plate piled high with desserts as if unsure what else to do. In another, Helen and her brother, James (Josh Dylan), choke back giggles over the funeral director’s somber question of whether they might want a “themed” coffin decorated in ridiculously tacky nature designs.

    Foy, who previously worked with Lowthorpe on Netflix’s The Crown, does an excellent job of capturing Helen’s stiff-upper-lip repression, with gestures as small as the way she brushes away the tears that occasionally leak through — as if they’re mere physical annoyances rather than reflections of inner turmoil.

    The more Helen becomes fixated on Mabel, the more she seems to dim in every other aspect of her life. She flakes on her job, ignores questions about her future, distances herself from her friends and family. On rare occasions when she’s forced to leave the house for non-Mabel reasons, she might bring Mabel with her — leading to the funny-sad sight of partygoers giving this woman with a bird a very wide berth — or else grit her teeth through an unbearable cacophony of mindless chatter and grating music.

    It’s a sensitive portrayal of a person’s slide into depression. The issue is that H Is for Hawk mistakes “gradual” for “slow.” The film feels baggy with a few too many repetitions of scenes or ideas we’ve seen already, making it hard for the film’s emotions to pick up the momentum they need; a tighter edit might have distilled those feelings down to a more powerful form.

    But then, the patience required is in keeping with Helen and her father’s favorite hobby. “Watch carefully so you remember what you’ve seen,” he tells her as they search the skies with their binoculars for interesting birds. Flashbacks to their happier days are interspersed throughout the film, triggered by details as small as the scrape on his arm that never had time to heal, or the seating arrangement in a car she’s inherited from him. Helen’s adoration for her dad casts him in a nearly angelic glow, frequently backlit by a bright white sun that might be beaming from the gates of Heaven themselves. But Gleeson’s relaxed performance nevertheless ensures he feels like a human being, rather than some sentimental symbol of parental perfection.

    The symbolism, instead, is left up to the bird. Mabel might be Helen’s dad, or Helen’s grief, or Helen herself; she’s a reminder that death comes for us all, or that nature is full of beautiful and awe-inspiring things. I found myself wondering what Mabel herself would make of all this messy human emotion. Then I caught myself, realizing I too was probably projecting too much of myself onto a bird who never asked to be here.

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    Angie Han

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  • Jeremy Strong’s Meme-Bait Monologue Cut From Springsteen Biopic ‘Deliver Me from Nowhere’: No More ‘Hole in the Floor’

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    Becoming a meme doesn’t guarantee you make it into the final cut.

    Jeremy Strong fans will learn this the hard way come October 24, when “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” hits theaters. Variety can report that a divisive monologue performed by Strong in the film’s official trailer has been snipped from the final product, the result of a creative decision by director Scott Cooper, per one source.

    Strong plays longtime Bruce Springsteen manager Jon Landau in the unconventional and emotionally charged biopic, which shows the rocker (played by Jeremy Allen White) coming to grips with his depression during the production of the 1982 album “Nebraska.”

    “When Bruce was little, he had a hole in the floor of his bedroom. A floor that’s supposed to be solid, he’s supposed to be able to stand on. Bruce didn’t have that,” Strong narrates in the still-circulating trailer. “Bruce is a repairman. What he’s doing with this album is, he’s repairing that hole in his floor. Repairing that hole in himself. Once he’s done that, he’s going to repair the entire world.”

    While the speech captures Landau’s hand in Springsteen’s personal and artistic development (stand-in father, consigliere, best friend), many took to social media to mock the prose and how it sets the film’s dramatic stakes. One user appropriated the monologue as an origin story for Fozzie Bear. It then became the latest and greatest use of the Mary Jane Defending Peter Parker template. The examples go on.

    An insider familiar with the film said that “in examining the film, it felt unnecessary.” A rep for the project had no comment on the matter.

    While it may be easy to take shots at Strong’s “Capital-A Acting” or even Cooper’s script adaptation, we should note that at Friday’s Telluride world premiere of “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” Strong elicited a positive response. His soft-touch portrait of Landau, sneaker-clad and with receding hair and concerned glances, tugged heartstrings. Others on the ground noted that the film is revelatory in how it shows, perhaps for the first time, Landau’s true influence on Springsteen (now a billionaire) and his place in history.

    Consider the hole in the floor repaired, but remember the friends we made along the way.

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    Varietymattdonnelly

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  • ‘Everywhere Man: The Lives and Times of Peter Asher’ Review: Documentary Traces a Remarkable Under-the-Radar Musical Legacy

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    I love when a project has a title that seems just a little off but offers a purposeful piece of wordplay. 

    It doesn’t have to be distractingly askew. 

    Everywhere Man: The Lives and Times of Peter Asher

    The Bottom Line

    Overlong and uneven, but filled with musical magic.

    Venue: Telluride Film Festival 
    Directors: Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine

    1 hour 57 minutes

    Take, for example, Everywhere Man: The Lives and Times of Peter Asher, the new documentary by Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine (Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song). It’s a title you could skim a dozen times without stopping and going, “Wait, isn’t the idiom ‘life and times’?” 

    It takes very little time into Geller and Goldfine’s slightly overstuffed and slightly imbalanced documentary to recognize what they’re doing. 

    Peter Asher is one of several figures who served as the Forrest Gump or Zelig or Chance the Gardener of the counterculture — people who pop up in the background of seemingly every photograph taken across several decades, whose names grace the liner notes of every significant album, whose accomplishments merit acknowledgment in countless award show speeches.

    If you’re a devotee of Swinging London of the ’60s or the Sunset Strip folk rock scene of the ’70s, he’s already an icon. But even if you’re not, his integrality to countless pop culture narratives beggars belief, because he has, indeed, lived many lives both in the spotlight and immediately adjacent. The pleasure of Everywhere Man is that every time you think you’ve seen the wildest piece of Peter Asher adjacency, the next chapter proves you wrong. Kinda.

    The problem of having multiple lives, though, is that not all lives are created equal. At 117 minutes, Everywhere Man is a sprawling film, one that goes from exciting and unpredictable to the stuff of countless rock-n-roll biopics, but the directors treat everything equally — or else lack the material to make the second half of the documentary anywhere near as engaging as the first.

    The bold-type version of Asher’s career is that he went from one-half of the British Invasion duo Peter & Gordon — you’ll recognize “World Without Love” — to the legendary producer who steered artists like James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt to the biggest hits of their careers. He has called himself one of the inspirations for Austin Powers, and his list of celebrity friends includes … everybody.

    But it’s the little details and not the broad strokes that inspired Asher to write and perform the one-man show — or “musical memoir” — that Geller and Goldfine use as the spine of the documentary. 

    To hint at only a few of the head-scratching biographical oddities of Asher’s lives: His father was the physician responsible for identifying and naming Munchausen syndrome. He and his ginger siblings had acting careers promoted with the unlikely headshot promo “All Have Red Hair.” He contributed, directly or indirectly, to the relationships between Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull and John Lennon and Yoko Ono. He helped introduce Taylor to Carole King and helped convince Carole King to perform as a solo artist. 

    The first half of the documentary is a delightful and thoroughly unlikely progression through one of the most colorful artistic moments in recent history, steered by Asher’s own memories and appearances by friends including Twiggy, Eric Idle and many more. The music is wonderful and the archival footage a blast. 

    I compared Asher to Zelig and Forrest Gump and Chance the Gardener, but that’s reductive. Some parts of his rise were absolutely based on happenstance and circumstance: His sister was dating Paul McCartney (interviewed here in audio only), who allowed Peter & Gordon to record “World Without Love,” a Lennon-McCartney composition that Lennon hated. But however self-deprecating Asher often is, it’s clear that he was more than just in the right place at the right time. He was talented, and there were bigger-picture societal trends that he helped bring together. 

    Interestingly, as the documentary goes from the parts of Asher’s biography that might be interpreted as luck-driven to the chapters in which his genius is most obvious, it becomes less entertaining, albeit never unentertaining. 

    Taylor is a guarded, but appreciative interview subject, and if you’re interested in his growth from the first artist signed to the Beatles’ fledgling Apple label into one of the most significant figures in the ’70s folk movement, this is good stuff. Is it better than the 2022 documentary (Carole King & James Taylor: Just Call Out My Name)that gives Taylor and King full focus? Probably not.

    Ronstadt is a guarded, but appreciative interview subject, and if you’re interested in her growth from eclectic vocalist with a reputation for being “difficult” to one of the most versatile and beloved stars of the ’70s and ’80s, this is good stuff. Is it better than the 2019 documentary that gives Ronstadt full focus? Probably not. 

    The stories of his production innovations and inspirations are nerdy and cool, especially the talk of Asher being one of the first producers to insist on giving back-of-the-album credit to the individual musicians assisting bigger solo artists. But the stories of wild tours, drug use and the like are strictly old hat. Asher’s eagerness to talk about the good times and his immediate reticence to engage on the disintegration of his first marriage (the topic of a James Taylor song, “Her Town Too”) made me wonder what else was being left out.

    It’s also odd that after all of the depth given to Asher’s personal relationships with the Beatles and Taylor and Ronstadt, we reach the ’80s and ’90s and the documentary is pretty much, “And then he worked with Diana Ross and Cher and Neil Diamond and Billy Joel,” who are all absent from the documentary.

    Everywhere Man simply falls victim to Asher living such a conventionally impressive life after having already lived several unconventionally remarkable lives. What a pity!

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    Daniel Fienberg

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  • The Most Devastating Movie I’ve Seen in Years

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    Chloe Zhao’s adaptation of the novel Hamnet reimagines the poetic act of creating the greatest play in the English language.
    Photo: Agata Grzybowska/Focus Features

    We know next to nothing about William Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, other than the fact that he and his twin sister Judith were born sometime in 1585 and that he was buried in August of 1596, 11 years later. Even the cause of death is unknown, though the deaths of young children were not entirely uncommon at the time; three of William’s own sisters had died in childhood. Understandably, the scarcity of our insight into the life of Hamnet and his family has inspired writers and artists over the years to fill in the details with their own imaginings. As an opening quote from Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt reminds us, in both Maggie O’Farrell’s haunting 2020 novel Hamnet and Chloe Zhao’s new adaptation of it: “Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.” Which means we know one more thing about this boy: A few years after his death, his father wrote the greatest play in the English language, and it bears his name.

    Premiering at the Telluride Film Festival ahead of a November theatrical release, Hamnet is devastating, maybe the most emotionally shattering movie I’ve seen in years. The book was overwhelming, too, and going into a film about the death of a child, one naturally prepares to shed some tears. Still, I did not really expect to cry this much. That’s not just because of the tragic weight of the material, but because the picture reimagines the poetic act of creating Hamlet. Shakespeare’s play sits on the highest shelf, fixed by the dust from centuries of acclaim. It is about as unimpeachable as a work of art can be. And yet, here is a movie that dares to explore its inception. The attempt itself is noble, and maybe a little brazen; that it succeeds feels downright supernatural.

    Hamnet remains mostly faithful to the novel (O’Farrell collaborated with Zhao on the screenplay), but the two works center on different parts of the imagined timeline. The book ends with our first glimpse of Hamlet, and its final words belong to the Ghost of the play: “Remember me.” The film, on the other hand, directly grapples with the connections between real life and art, showing how the play (and his own role in it) became a vessel for Will Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) to confront his sorrow and help bring his wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley) out of hers. Hamlet is thought of, not incorrectly, as a work about vengeance and the conflict between thought and action; indeed, it was Shakespeare’s version of an already-existing and popular revenge play. But in shifting her focus, Zhao fully embraces something long evident but often overlooked: As reworked by Shakespeare, Hamlet is also a play about all-consuming grief, one driven at all levels by loss and guilt and questions of how to properly mourn.

    It’s a fascinating subject to imagine, but how exactly does one tell a story mired in such unspeakable sadness? Hamnet speculates that the child was a victim of bubonic plague, but it approaches the tragedy with a kind of magical realist sensibility. In this telling, the constitutionally weaker Judith (played by Olivia Lynes in the film) is the one who initially gets sick, and the loving and industrious Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe), who often traded clothes with her as a game to fool their parents, makes one final sacrifice, pretending to be his sickly twin sister and thereby drawing the disease out from her and into himself. Transference is thus at the heart of this story — narratively, formally, structurally.

    The novel jumps back and forth in time, but it keeps circling back to Hamnet’s death, as O’Farrell’s garnished prose transmutes a horrific event into something almost unreal, though no less heartbreaking; her efflorescent descriptions of nature capture something uncanny and sinister about the world (not unlike the doomed Ophelia’s florid songs of grief in Shakespeare’s play). Zhao’s film is more linear, so it doesn’t dwell as long on the details of the death itself. Instead, its breathless, queasy energy sweeps us along. Aided immeasurably by Max Richter’s score, Zhao finds melancholy not in stillness and reflection but in movement and activity. We see how young Will, a sensitive and shy Latin tutor, first met the headstrong Agnes, once a child of nature dismissed as “a forest witch” and raised by an uncaring step-mother. Buckley, an actor who can be both ethereal and earthy at the same time, makes an ideal choice for Agnes. This is a woman who doesn’t quite belong in the world and yet seems to have emerged out of its very soil. She loves to lurk in the woods with her pet falcon, she is proficient in herbs and remedies, and she possesses the gift of foresight.  Despite her reluctance to get married, Agnes has already seen that at her deathbed she will be surrounded by two children. But she has already had a daughter, Susanna, before Judith and Hamlet arrive, so the eventual birth of three children terrifies her to the core.

    Will, the “pasty-faced scholar” hounded for his meekness, sees and loves Agnes for who she is, but marriage and a family also mean a taming of her wild spirits. They are kindred souls: He too can work dark magic, just with his words. Zhao suggests that even though Will was rarely home, his family life fed his art. We see the kids doing the witches’ opening incantations from Macbeth, and of course Hamnet and Judith’s cross-dressing and play-acting echo the plots of many a Shakespeare comedy. All this could come off as corny, but the family is depicted with such loving specificity that we buy all of it. Many historians have been perplexed by how such a seemingly simple man as Shakespeare could have written works of such grandeur and depth. So here, then, is a home filled with wonder and play that could have inspired some of it.

    Which, of course, compounds the tragedy. Agnes might have access to certain powers, but she can’t bring Hamnet back. “He can’t have just vanished,” she says. “All he needs is for me to find him. He must be somewhere.” Will simply responds, “We may never stop looking for him.” But the film has already shown us where Hamnet is. As he hovers between life and death, we see a vision of the young boy wandering around a makeshift forest that is clearly a theater backdrop. He then steps into the dark void of a door at stage center, from which Will Shakespeare himself will later emerge, cloaked in white powder, playing the ghost of Hamlet’s murdered father. The undiscovered country is art itself.

    We sometimes forget what a phenomenal actor Mescal is. This is probably because he hasn’t made a good action hero yet, which is a scarlet letter in our day and age. But also, we love to quantify, classify, and dilute complicated performers into simple impressions; despite the fact that he’s only been acting in movies for five years, we think we already know what he’s all about. But he’s not really the softboi that’s been memed to meaninglessness. With his unexpected choices in both cadence and affect, he’s something closer to a young Christopher Walken. In Hamnet, his response at the first sight of his dead son represents some of the best acting I’ve ever seen; it’s matched later when he interrupts a rehearsal of Hamlet’s “Get thee to a nunnery” speech and delivers it himself with such snarling self-loathing (“I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not born me!”) that he instantly and convincingly reinterprets the world’s most famous play before our very eyes. Agnes accuses Will of not grieving enough, but Mescal makes sure we see that oceans of pain lie beneath his hesitancy: He is Hamlet. And yes, we do get to see the actor as William Shakespeare reciting Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy in this movie, one of two very different interpretations of the same speech that Zhao presents, as if to acknowledge that everyone has their own Hamlet.

    It won’t spoil anything to say that Hamnet concludes with a staging of Hamlet, one in which the play’s twisted reflection of the poet’s life becomes more evident and gains complexity. Perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay Zhao is that this recreation of such a familiar work still manages to surprise, because we see it through Agnes’s disbelieving eyes. The drama onstage doesn’t just echo and explain Will’s sorrow, it also serves as a kind of lifeline to Agnes — and when we view Hamlet as an effort by one grieving person to reach out to another, the whole thing opens up in magnificent new ways. There are references to other stories coursing through Hamnet, and one of them is the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, which Will tells Agnes during one of their first meetings. It’s a tale of resurrection, passion, and art, and how one final longing glance traps a lover in the underworld forever. As presented here, it doesn’t apply in any schematic or obvious way to the drama of Shakespeare’s life. But it does underline a fundamental truth in both Hamnet, and Hamlet: that to see and be seen is a joyous and terrifying thing.


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    Bilge Ebiri

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  • ‘H Is For Hawk’ Review: Claire Foy Soars High In True Drama About A Woman And A Goshawk Who Bond Over Life And Loss – Telluride Film Festival

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    Movies about the relationship between a person and one of God’s creatures is becoming a virtual genre of its own. My Penguin Friend, Penguin Lessons, The Starling and Penguin Bloom are recent examples, the latter starring Naomi Watts who was also on hand in Telluride last year with another similar story, this time with a Great Dane in the sublime The Friend. This year, we have Claire Foy and the goshawk in H Is For Hawk, which world premiered Friday at the Telluride Film Festival and has much to offer, not just for bird lovers but for those suffering sudden loss and learning how to deal with grief.

    This one is a true story based on a 2014 memoir by Helen Macdonald (played in the film by Foy), detailing her bonding with a goshawk after the sudden death of her beloved father (Brendan Gleeson) as a way of somehow replacing this void in her life. Helen is basically inconsolable, her life turned upside down until she sees a way out, or so she hopes. With memories still so vivid of going out into nature and birding with her dad, she meets with a breeder (Sean Kearns) and takes home a goshawk named Mabel, one she plans to train for a life in the wild, and at the same time give her hope to move beyond her despair. It starts out rocky with the restless and anxious bird, but we can tell through Foy’s fearless and dedicated performance that this is a woman who will not easily give up. And, of course, it is something that will connect her with dad, a professional and celebrated photographer, who often took her out into nature with camera in hand to capture moments with feathered friends and others.

    Dealing with others in her life who try to be sympathetic, if a little skeptical, is another part of the story. There is Lindsay Duncan as Mum, warm but offering advice to keep her daughter from going completely off the rails, as well as best friend Christina (a sharp Denise Gough), who tries in every way to be supportive in this venture. Since the death of Dad is very early in the picture, nearly all of Gleeson’s role is told in frequent flashbacks of their time together, and the actor is charming, perfectly believable as a parent who truly loves being a dad. In fact, this is a rare kind of film that shows the unique and very universal relationship between a father and daughter rather than son, which is usually the Hollywood way.

    Scenes outdoors as Helen continues to train Mabel, making her comfortable to find her own food and thrive in the wilderness, are remarkably captured with some of the most beautiful cinematography of any film this year. Behind the camera is Charlotte Bruus Christensen, whose previous work in films like A Quiet Place and Far from the Madding Crowd indicate she was the perfect choice to take on this challenging assignment shooting the exquisite photography involving the lead hawks and Foy. Mark Payne-Gill contributed the wildlife cinematography. Rose Buck and Lloyd Buck were the hawk trainers so integral to the film’s authenticity. Regarding Foy, not only does she convince as someone learning the ropes of training a goshawk, and then developing true skills along the way, she also takes on a role that is not only highly emotional, but also challenging given a co-star whose behavior is not always so predictable. She’s nothing less than splendid in what is her best screen work to date.

    The impressive thing about Philippa Lowthorpe’s assured direction and the script she co-wrote with Emma Donoghue is its resistance to easy sentimentality. This is undeniably a story about grief, loss and trying to cope with it all. In lesser hands, the film could have gone for cute animal stuff to lighten the load, but H Is For Hawk never succumbs to that temptation, and quite frankly, goshawks don’t make it easy for that to begin with it. Coming from Plan B productions, Film 4 and others, this is a film that doesn’t pander for tears, but genuinely earns them. It is the stuff of life.

    Producers are Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner. It is looking for distribution.

    Title: H Is For Hawk
    Festival: Telluride
    Director: Philippa Lowthorpe
    Screenwriters: Phillipoa Lowthorpe and Emma Donoghue
    Cast: Claire Foy, Brendan Gleeson, Lindsay Duncan, Denise Gough, Sam Spruell, Sean Kearns
    Sales agent: Protagonist Pictures (international); UTA
    Running time: 2 hrs 10 mins

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    Pete Hammond

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  • Shakespeare and Springsteen Lead the 2025 Telluride Film Festival Lineup

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    The Telluride Film Festival always brings A-list actors and filmmakers to the picturesque Colorado mountain town. This year, the festival’s also welcoming two larger-than-life icons: William Shakespeare and Bruce Springsteen.

    The 52nd Telluride Film Festival—which, per tradition, doesn’t announce its titles until the day before it begins—will feature world premieres of not only a new take on Shakespeare’s Hamlet (starring Riz Ahmed), but also Hamnet—Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s bestseller inspired by Shakespeare’s wife.

    Hamnet stars Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal as Agnes and William, following the couple as they suffer the loss of their son, Hamnet.

    Springsteen’s story will come to life in Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, which follows the Boss as he writes and records his 1982 album Nebraska while battling memories from his past. Directed by Scott Cooper, the film stars Jeremy Allen White as Springsteen and Jeremy Strong as his longtime manager. “It is such a good movie,” says Telluride Festival director Julie Huntsinger. “He really is firing on all cylinders. I’ve always admired him, but I feel like this is his most successful film, for sure.”

    Other world premieres at the festival, which runs over Labor Day weekend, include Ballad of a Small Player, which stars Colin Farrell as a gambler hiding out in Macau; Tuner, starring Leo Woodall and Dustin Hoffman; and H is for Hawk, starring Claire Foy. Films that debut at Telluride often go on to have healthy awards campaigns that lead to Oscar nominations and wins, such as last year’s Conclave and Nickel Boys.

    The festival always showcases some of the most groundbreaking and fascinating documentaries, and this year will be no exception, with debut docs helmed by Morgan Neville, Ken Burns, and Ethan Hawke.

    Hawke, who also stars in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon at the festival, will be one of Telluride’s Silver Medallion honorees, individuals who are celebrated with special tributes. Jay Kelly writer-director Noah Baumbach, and Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi (whose latest film, It was Just an Accident, will screen at the fest) will be honored as well.

    Several films from Cannes and Venice will also screen at Telluride as they make their way toward awards season runs. But as always, Huntsinger recommends looking beyond the high-profile premieres to find some hidden diamonds in the lineup. “Get your movie-watching eyes ready. We’re going to have so much fun,” she says.

    Here’s the full Telluride Film Festival lineup:

    • A Private Life (directed by Rebecca Zlotowski, France, 2025)
    • Ask E. Jean (directed by Ivy Meeropol, US, 2025)
    • Ballad of a Small Player (directed by Edward Berger, Hong Kong/Macau, 2025)
    • Blue Moon (directed by Richard Linklater, US/Ireland, 2025)
    • Bugonia (directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, UK, 2025)
    • Cover-Up (directed by Laura Poitras, Mark Obenhaus, US, 2025)
    • Everywhere Man: The Lives and Times of Peter Asher (directed by Dayna Goldfine, Dan Geller, US/UK, 2025)
    • Ghost Elephants (directed by Werner Herzog, Angola/Namibia/US, 2025)
    • H is for Hawk (directed by Philippa Lowthorpe, UK/US, 2025)
    • Hamlet (directed by Aneil Karia, UK, 2025)
    • Hamnet (directed by Chloé Zhao, UK, 2025)
    • Highway 99 a Double Album (directed by Ethan Hawke, US, 2025)
    • If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (directed by Mary Bronstein, US, 2025)
    • It Was Just an Accident (directed by Jafar Panahi, Iran/France/Luxembourg, 2025)
    • Jay Kelly (directed by Noah Baumbach, Italy/UK/US, 2025)
    • Karl (directed by Nick Hooker, UK, 2025)
    • La Grazia (directed by Paolo Sorrentino, Italy, 2025)
    • Lost in the Jungle (directed by Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin, Juan Camilo Cruz, US/Colombia, 2025)
    • Lumière, le Cinéma (directed by Thierry Frémaux, France, 2024)
    • Man on the Run (directed by Morgan Neville, US, 2025)
    • Nouvelle Vague (directed by Richard Linklater, France, 2025)
    • Pillion (directed by Harry Lighton, UK, 2025)
    • Sentimental Value (directed by Joachim Trier, Norway/France/Denmark/Germany, 2025)
    • Shifty (directed by Adam Curtis, UK, 2025)
    • Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere (directed by Scott Cooper, US, 2025)
    • Summer Tour (directed by Mischa Richter, US, 2025)
    • The American Revolution (directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, David Schmidt, US, 2025)
    • The Bend in the River (directed by Robb Moss, US, 2025)
    • The Cycle of Love (directed by Orlando von Einsiedel, U.K./India/Sweden, 2025)
    • The History of Sound (directed by Oliver Hermanus, US, 2025)
    • The Mastermind (directed by Kelly Reichardt, US, 2025)
    • The New Yorker at 100 (directed by Marshall Curry, US, 2025)
    • The Reserve (directed by Pablo Pérez Lombardini, Mexico/Qatar, 2025)
    • The Secret Agent (directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil/France/Netherlands/Germany, 2025)
    • This Is Not a Drill (directed by Oren Jacoby, US, 2025)
    • Tuner (directed by Daniel Roher, US/Canada, 2025)
    • Urchin (directed by Harris Dickinson, UK, 2025)

    The following short films will screen in the main program:
    • Last Days on Lake Trinity (directed by Charlotte Cooley, US, 2025)
    • Sallie’s Ashes (directed by Brennan Robideaux, US, 2025)
    • Song of My City (directed by David C. Roberts, US, 2025)
    • All the Empty Rooms (directed by Joshua Seftel, US, 2025)
    • All the Walls Came Down (directed by Ondi Timoner, US, 2025)

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    Rebecca Ford

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  • The 20 Most Promising Movies at the 2025 Fall Film Festivals

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    We’re just one day away from the kickoff of fall-film-festival season—considered the most wonderful time of year for Oscar obsessives like us.

    This year’s crop is full of promise, with a slew of previously Oscar-nominated directors debuting new projects. Some are making much-anticipated returns, like Kathryn Bigelow, who hasn’t released a film since 2017. Others are finally bringing to life long-awaited passion projects, like Guillermo del Toro with Frankenstein. Noah Baumbach and Bradley Cooper are both back in the mix with personal projects, and Yorgos Lanthimos and Paul Greengrass are also aiming to surprise audiences with their new films.

    Basically, there’s something for everyone. Here, Vanity Fair rounds up the 20 most promising films debuting at the Venice International Film Festival, the Telluride Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, and the New York Film Festival.

    After the Hunt (Venice, New York)

    The ever productive Luca Guadagnino returns with a thriller-drama about a college professor caught in a controversy of campus ethics. After the Hunt, with a script by Nora Garrett, has been touted as a #MeToo movie—Andrew Garfield plays a professor accused of some kind of impropriety with a student. But knowing Guadagnino, it’s likely that the film will venture into some less obvious corners too. And while that all sounds intriguing enough, it’s the presence of Julia Roberts that really has us curious. Roberts, one of the last great movie stars, doesn’t go dark like this very often. But it’s typically a thrill when she does. —Richard Lawson

    A House of Dynamite (Venice, New York)

    The first woman to win a best-director Oscar hasn’t released a film in eight years. Kathryn Bigelow’s last effort, Detroit, was a bleak and controversial drama that very few people saw. Here’s hoping her latest, about an American presidential administration dealing with an impending (and likely nuclear) missile attack, restores Bigelow as one of the premier purveyors of procedural, technical suspense. A House of Dynamite also sports a, well, dynamite cast: Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Greta Lee, and Kaitlyn Dever are among the reliable names. Early buzz for this one is strong enough to suggest that the film is not only a jangly fall thriller, but also a true Oscar contender. —R.L.

    The Wizard of the Kremlin (Venice, Toronto)

    Journeyman oddball filmmaker Olivier Assayas takes aim at Russia in his new film, an adaptation of a novel about a reality TV producer turned highly connected official in Vladimir Putin’s government. Paul Dano plays the calculating master of misinformation, while Jude Law takes the Putin role. Assayas is not the most obvious pick for material like this—his films tend to have an idiosyncratic tempo that feels like an ill fit for a political process movie—but maybe his dash of Euro madness is just what a story about an almost absurd real-world government requires. Good or bad, the movie is sure to stoke controversy when it premieres in Italy. —R.L.

    Frankenstein (Venice, Toronto)

    Guillermo del Toro takes a crack at Mary Shelley’s sci-fi monster novel, going for baroque as usual. Oscar Isaac plays misguided resurrectionist Victor Frankenstein, while Jacob Elordi, one of the pretty boys du jour, plays Frankenstein’s monster. An early trailer suggests something focused more on action than on gothic considerations of the Industrial Revolution, which is probably fine. A visually ravishing del Toro spectacular is never unwelcome, even if this film does not initially appear to be the serious, high-minded take on a classic text for which some had hoped. —R.L.

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    Rebecca Ford, David Canfield, Richard Lawson

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  • The Best Films of the Fall Fests: From Mike Leigh to Pedro Almodóvar

    The Best Films of the Fall Fests: From Mike Leigh to Pedro Almodóvar

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    The Venice Film Festival continued its ascent this year, rivaling Cannes — long the undisputed king of all film festivals — in its capacity to draw stars, spark debate and drive sales of first-rate art films. While some of the bigger titles fizzled (Todd Phillips’ gonzo musical sequel to 2019 Golden Lion winner “Joker” disappointed, and Kevin Costner’s second “Horizon” installment went largely unnoticed), Spanish master Pedro Almodóvar finally claimed a major festival’s top prize.

    Meanwhile, high in the Rocky Mountains, Telluride has lost a bit of its award-season luster. For a decade, practically every best picture winner — from “Slumdog Millionaire” to “The Shape of Water” — screened there. Last year, Telluride pulled out all the stops for its 50th anniversary, which meant this year’s ultra-selective lineup was inevitably going to sparkle less, especially in a post-strike year. Even though the elite fest still delivers excellent fare, Oscar pundits may want to hop the Atlantic next year.

    Fortunately, Toronto seems to have gotten its mojo back this year. After teetering through the pandemic and losing lead sponsor Bell, TIFF managed to secure several significant launches, including DreamWorks Animation’s “The Wild Robot,” Hugh Grant’s against-type A24 horror movie “Heretic” and Mike Leigh’s terrific return-to-form “Hard Truths” (rumored to have been turned down by Venice and Cannes). It helps that TIFF organizers relaxed the rules on premiere status — a smart move, since many festgoers still view Toronto as the one-stop spot to catch the year’s best offerings, whether they’re premieres or simply the buzziest titles from earlier in the festival calendar (like Palme d’Or winner “Anora” and Annecy breakout “Memoir of a Snail”).

    Those three festivals remain incredibly competitive with one another, but always bring an embarrassment of riches. Here, Variety’s critics share their favorites from the Venice, Telluride and Toronto lineups.

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    Peter Debruge

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  • Telluride: Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Karla Sofía Gascón on ‘Emilia Pérez,’ Breaking Barriers and Yearning to Be Seen Differently (Exclusive)

    Telluride: Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Karla Sofía Gascón on ‘Emilia Pérez,’ Breaking Barriers and Yearning to Be Seen Differently (Exclusive)

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    On Sunday, for the first time since the Telluride Film Festival’s North American premiere of Jacques Audiard’s one-of-a-kind musical Emilia Pérez on Friday, the three principal stars of the top-tier Oscar contender — Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón and Selena Gomez — sat down for an extensive group interview about their lives, their careers and the film for which they and costar Adriana Paz were jointly awarded the Cannes Film Festival’s best actress prize in May.

    Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, the ladies reflected on the special bond that they formed while co-creating Audiard’s film, which revolves around a frustrated lawyer and a cartel leader who recruits her to help carry out a covert operation without the cartel leader’s spouse finding out.

    They also discussed — candidly and, at times, emotionally — the different hurdles they each faced en route to Emilia Pérez; the most daunting aspects of playing their characters in the film; and the ways in which the project is already reshaping their careers, and has the potential to bring about even greater changes.

    The comments of Gascón, 52, Saldaña, 46, and Gomez, 32, can be read in the transcript below, which has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity, and reflects a translator’s rendition of Spanish-speaker Gascón’s words.

    I’ve observed many selfies, hugs and kisses between the three of you this weekend! Can you talk about the bond that you share? I imagine it formed during the making of the movie, and perhaps was rekindled at Cannes, but even three months after that, you seem to really enjoy being with each other.

    SELENA GOMEZ I’m so grateful to have women around me that lift me up in every way. And yes, I have a special connection with these women. I feel so grateful that I get to go on this journey with them. We’re also happy for each other and we cheer each other on, and I love that. That can be rare.

    ZOE SALDAÑA I think that the award that we all received in Cannes was only possible because of the collaboration and camaraderie that we had. Everybody had their own respective journeys, of course. But we were rooting for each other from the beginning, and that was palpable. And for that to be seen and recognized? It’s really nice.

    KARLA SOFÍA GASCÓN We are a nice family. I’m so happy to be associated with these amazing people and actresses. And we’ve gotten to see each other every five minutes here in Telluride, which is such an incredible place! We’re in the middle of these high mountains, with incredible greenery all around us, and cinemas full of people. I never suspected that I could find cinemas so crowded in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere at the far end of Colorado.

    I want to go back to the very beginning, if we can, and talk about how this film was pitched to each of you, because I think it’s — in the best way — complicated to explain it to someone even after seeing it…

    GASCÓN They did a lot of work to show us what we would need to do in the movie. They had already pre-recorded something that I would label a video novel — there was the music; there were the dialogues, acted out — and this gave us a deeper idea of what we needed to do.

    Zoe, I read something in which you said the film was originally intended to be more of an opera?

    SALDAÑA Well, first, just going back to what you said, “when they pitched you this movie” — we were pitched to Jacques. (Laughs.)

    GOMEZ Yeah, that’s true.

    SALDAÑA Jacques doesn’t pitch you anything. Jacques shares with you his excitement, and then, if he invites you along, you say “yes.” It was an opera, and they were all going to have their own journeys, but there was going to be an intertwining along the way. Once I heard the songs, as an American person, I was like, “Well, this sounds like a musical.” But once I read the script, I realized, “It’s an opera.” But it kept evolving — throughout the journey of us rehearsing with Jacques, then learning the choreography, recording our songs, shooting, and then going back to the studio, these songs kept evolving as our characters kept growing. And Jacques never allowed any of us — even himself — to get in the way of that. And that process was quite scary, because there was a lot of improvising.

    GOMEZ No, it’s very true.

    Selena, you’ve been acting for your whole life. Have you ever been a part of any other project that evolved in a way similar to this one?

    GOMEZ I had a similar feeling when I did [Harmony Korine’s 2012 film] Spring Breakers. What I mean by that is because of the way Harmony directs, I felt challenged as an actor. That’s when I realized I had the bug, and that I’d rather be a part of something in the smallest way with the greatest filmmakers and actors and wonderful people I could meet, than needing to be the center of attention.

    I heard somewhere that when Jacques approached you, it was because he had seen and liked you in Spring Breakers, but didn’t really know anything else about you. Is that right?

    GOMEZ That’s correct, yes.

    What did you make of that?

    GOMEZ I thought it was really refreshing, and it made me feel like I earned the part. Like Zoe said, it’s Jacques who picked us — we were the ones begging — so it was really exciting.

    Karla, in America people are just getting to know you, but you’ve been acting for a long time. Can you explain what was going on in your life and career at the time that this film first crossed your radar?

    GASCÓN I was doing what any actress does: I was doing the best I could every day — and my life was definitely much more tranquil than it is now! [laughs] I was working in Mexico. I had just finished shooting a Netflix series indeed called Rebelde. And I was able to go to the supermarket and do my own grocery shopping. Then this whole whirlwind started. It’s a dream. I don’t know if it’s going to turn into a nightmare …

    GOMEZ No!

    SALDAÑA No!

    GASCÓN Or stay a dream.

    Karla, Jacques has said that meeting you really made him reimagine the character that you ended up playing, and that speaking with you helped him to provide a more sensitive and accurate depiction of the trans experience…

    GASCÓN As an actress, I was given a character that is incredible, with such an arc — it’s something that any actor or actress would dream of coming across in their life, a kind of character that Marlon Brando or Meryl Streep or Al Pacino or Javier Bardem would play. I never thought that something like that would come into my life. The role was just too wonderful to be true. When I had my very first meeting with Jacques, for me, it was love at first sight — like when you meet the girl of your dreams, and you stare into her little eyes, and you think she’s perfect, that was exactly what happened between the two of us. And then when we started building the movie. Jacques is the kind of filmmaker that builds a movie little by little. He’s very open to changes. And when I came into the picture, and then Zoe and Selena, he composed the film around our strengths. He has this uncanny talent to identify people’s strengths and build on them, which draws the best out of his actors and actresses. So yes, the story changed when I came into the picture, but not so much because of me. All I did was do what I’ve done my entire life: the best I could.

    Zoe and Selena, I know that your family roots are in Spanish-speaking places. Selena, you’ve sung a bit in Spanish. But have either of you ever previously been asked to act in Spanish as much as in this film? And was it exciting or daunting or something?

    SALDAÑA No, but it was always a wish. It’s my native tongue. But the older I’ve gotten, I’ve found it’s like ballet — if you don’t use it, you lose it. So I jumped at the opportunity to be able to do this, and to combine all the mediums of art that I love, that I watch and that I live for. It was like God was listening. I never thought that something like this was going to ever come my way, so when it did I went all in.

    GOMEZ I was very terrified to meet Jacques. I probably rehearsed for three months, and I didn’t think I’d get this role because I’m not fluent. When I got on board, I started working with Jacques and, with the help of everyone else, started figuring out what my character could be that would best suit me. We found this really good middle-ground of me [her character] being younger [than her character’s husband, played by Gascón] and having family in America [hence her character’s tendency to speak English]. And that’s very true to me even now [during our interview, listening to Gascón speak Spanish] — I can understand some of it. I’m part of that generation, I guess, where Latinx [people living in America are] half in, half out. It’s something, like Zoe said, that you have to practice every day. But I do appreciate who I am and where I came from.

    I’d like to ask each of you about some of the other specific challenges that you faced. Karla, you play Emilia both before and after her transition. I wondered if that, for a trans actress, was daunting, painful, or just part of the job?

    GASCÓN For me, all of it was challenging. I had to give 300 percent of myself. It’s a movie in which I sing, and I’m not a singer. It’s a movie in which I dance, and I move like Robocop. I had to change my voice twice, because even in the Emilia register [as opposed to the Manitas register], she speaks with much higher-pitched tones than I do. So the movie was full of challenges for me — but that’s why one is an actress or an actor. You do it so that you’re able to insert yourself into other people’s lives; and then, thanks to them [those characters], and the help of others, you evolve. So that wasn’t something that gave me fear. Rather, it’s something that allowed me to sharpen my chops. And I put a lot of myself into my character, so what truly cost me is leaving the character. I was deeply immersed into the abyss that is Emilia Pérez. So the most challenging part for me was actually getting out of the character.

    A quick follow-up, Karla. Movies are rarely shot in sequence, but I can see that posing real issues for you and your performance. Were you having to go back and forth between the pre-transition and post-transition character, or were you able to shoot all of one part and then the other?

    GASCÓN We did try to shoot it as chronologically as possible, but as you know, when you’re shooting a movie, that’s impossible to do all the time. There were many times where we had to go back and forth, where I had to do the transition to Manitas and then go back to Emilia in the present, and then to Emilia in the past several times. But I found that to be a lot of fun. This is what makes me want to be an actress. When I would sit down in the make-up chair and see the prosthesis that they would put on me, I was so impressed. I would look at myself and say, “Wow, this is why I chose to do this job, to put myself into another person’s skin and to understand another person better.”

    Zoe, I know you have a background in dance, but even so, that big opening number, in which you also sing, must have been a big undertaking. And I read that you had very little rehearsal time?

    SALDAÑA There was rehearsal — not as extensive as we would want to have in order for us to be able to do this with our eyes closed — but that is what made way for just the nuances that would come up. Sometimes when you over-rehearse something, it just becomes stale. And even performances can become stale if you don’t rediscover them. So Jacques kept us on our feet, in that sense. But also, I think he knew that he wasn’t done writing the story. Sometimes he would just get up and leave, and you’re like, “Where’s he going?” Sometimes he would send you an email in the middle of the night, because he was up and something came to him. So he was constantly living with this story, and that inspired us all to live with our characters. And there were things that were coming up for me about Rita. I recognize her. So many women are like her — women that live around the abuse and misuse of power by men, that live as quiet warriors, that always have to get things done — and their life is more real in their imagination than it is in real life. Rita navigated this relationship with power. She was drawn to it, and yet she hated it, defending all these crooks around her. So this thing that she has with Emilia was: “What would happen if I get really close to a power that is so big and violent and can hurt me? What if it works? What if I pull it off? Can it free me?” It was always a question. Every day, things kept coming up. That’s what led me to sometimes go home and get in an Epsom salt bath and go, “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing but I’m just going to do it. I’m just going to feel it. I’m not going to think about it. I’m just going to be moldable.” In the end it was like, “Don’t fucking think. Just feel.”

    Selena, I imagine that singing — which we get to hear you do in this film, most notably with “El Camino” — might have been a little less daunting of an assignment for you than for the others. So other than that, what, for you, was the most daunting thing that you had to figure out?

    GOMEZ I guess kind of all of it. I really did my best in my audition, and I hadn’t heard anything, so I really didn’t think that I would get it. When I did, I felt like I needed to let go of everything, so I stopped working on my music and anything else, and solely focused on this. And the music [that she performs] in this movie would make me feel better, because I am comfortable in that area, but it was still a little daunting to go into a space where I didn’t speak the same language as the director [French] and I wasn’t fluent Spanish. Every day I’d wake up and rehearse the lines over and over again. And I’d call, in the middle of the night, my Spanish teacher. That part was probably the most daunting, but it was also fun.

    Finally, let’s talk about what the response to the film has meant to each of you. There was the shared best actress prize in Cannes — only the fifth time that a Cannes jury has shared that prize between costars. There’s now the fall film festivals, where the film is continuing to build momentum. And there’s the whole awards season to come, which you guys and your film will clearly be a central part of. What do you make of it all?

    SALDAÑA I am happy that this industry that I’ve been a part of for almost 20 years is getting to see a very fundamental part of me that I felt I never got to showcase. I’m proud of my journey. I would never change it. Please understand, I like being in space! [A reference to her roles in the blockbuster Avatar, Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy film franchises.] But I love Jacques Audiard, and I love art. And getting the recognition? Just having people that I look up to be like, “Oh, hey! You?!” I spent so many years wanting it, and then I stopped wanting it. I thought it was never going to happen. So having someone like Jacques kind of go, “I see you”? It’s healing, because I’ve had to navigate this world and feel kind of, at times, invisible. There is a place that I’ve existed in, and I’ve been told by a lot of people in positions of power, “No, this is what you can do. This is all you can do.” And last summer I was like, “I hear you — but I’m going to do more.” For that to have been acknowledged? For us to have been acknowledged? I was watching it [the Cannes awards ceremony] live in Texas ’cause I was shooting. I was with my folks and my husband’s folks and my children and my sisters and my dog and my cat. And to see my sons crying because they called my name? [chokes up] I don’t know where this is going to lead, but it led here today, and I’m taking it day by day. I’m so grateful that this movie brought me back to ballet and brought me back to myself. And anything else? I’m here.

    Selena, you’ve been celebrated for your music and for your great TV program Only Murders in the Building. But to be celebrated for work in film, which I know you’ve been wanting to do more of, must be particularly meaningful to you.

    GOMEZ I hope that this is just the beginning. I really, really tried my hardest to throw myself into this. And I was so grateful [for the Cannes recognition] — Zoe was the first to call me to tell me and congratulate all of us for the award. And I remember thinking, “Oh, I think this is something special that we have here.” And we don’t take a second of it for granted.

    Karla, you were the spokesperson for the group at that awards ceremony. Any final thoughts?

    GASCÓN Well, I’ve been reflecting these last few days, what I’ve been thinking about is that beyond what can happen to myself or to my career as an actress, there’s so much more. I sort of feel that I’m the true embodiment of the Joker. If you think of the Joker character, he was a character who spent his whole life being mocked and being insulted and being the victim of violence — and then it ended up with him making a revolution. Well, I feel that way. I am somebody who has spent her whole life being insulted, being rejected and being a target of violence. And now, all of a sudden, I have this opportunity in my hands to be able to change things for the better, to change other people’s lives, as well.

    GOMEZ Amen.

    Well, thank you guys so much. I really appreciate it.

    SALDAÑA I’m going to go cry.

    GOMEZ Me too. Have some tea and cry.

    GASCÓN Thank you so much.

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    Scott Feinberg

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  • ‘Conclave’ Review: Ralph Fiennes Gives a Career-Best Performance in Edward Berger’s Gripping Vatican-Set Drama

    ‘Conclave’ Review: Ralph Fiennes Gives a Career-Best Performance in Edward Berger’s Gripping Vatican-Set Drama

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    Director Edward Berger, who made one of the best movies of 2022 with a vivid adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front, shifts gears rewardingly to a movie set almost entirely inside the Vatican. Conclave, adapted from the popular novel by Robert Harris, demonstrates Berger’s versatility and also offers one of the best roles of his career to Ralph Fiennes, who is supported by an expert ensemble.

    The recent Oscar-nominated movie The Two Popes also took us inside the Vatican to examine the true story of the ascension of Pope Francis (played by Jonathan Pryce). That was essentially a docudrama, whereas this film is pure fictional speculation about the behind-the-scenes machinations involved in choosing a new pope after the death of the previous pontiff. Fiennes plays the Dean of the College of Cardinals, who is charged with overseeing the election.

    Conclave

    The Bottom Line

    A riveting peek behind the curtains of religious power.

    Venue: Telluride Film Festival
    Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Isabella Rossellini
    Director: Edward Berger
    Screenwriter: Peter Straughan

    2 hours

    Screenwriter Peter Straughan (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) keeps the story moving swiftly. A collection of intriguing characters supports Fiennes’ Cardinal Lawrence. He feels a close bond with an American cardinal, charmingly played by Stanley Tucci. Both men are suspicious of the Canadian cardinal played by John Lithgow, who is campaigning feverishly to be the next pope, but who seems motivated more by personal ambition than by any humanitarian or spiritual impulses.

    A surprising contender is a cardinal from Nigeria, played by Lucian Msamati, and many in the Vatican see possibilities in the election of the first African pope. But there are other, more conservative cardinals like the Italian contender, played by Sergio Castellito, who would do almost anything to stop this upstart from dismantling the European hierarchy.

    And then there is a mysterious newcomer from Kabul, played by Carlos Diehz. None of the cardinals even knew of the existence of this priest, who was apparently invited to Rome by the former pope before his death. And many of them are wary of a Catholic priest from a predominantly Muslim part of the world. Old prejudices die hard.

    As the power plays grow more intense, a nun played by Isabella Rossellini turns out to have an important role in challenging the male hierarchy of the Catholic Church. The film raises timely issues of sexual and racist prejudices within organized religion, while also acknowledging the sexual scandals that have rocked the Church in recent years.

    Fiennes gives a superb performance as a man beginning to have doubts about his faith as a result of all these scandals, and when he emerges as a top contender to be named pope, his crisis of conscience intensifies. We can see that he may be the most qualified candidate, partly as a result of these thoughtfully articulated doubts, but he may not have the stomach for the job.

    Berger does a fine job controlling all of these performances, and he also creates a rich atmosphere for the production. The Sistine Chapel and other parts of the Vatican were reconstructed at Cinecitta Studios, brought to life by cinematographer Stephane Fontaine and production designer Suzie Davies. Although the elegant, cloistered world of the Vatican is invitingly captured, a more violent world intrudes when a terrorist bombing in Rome comes much too close for comfort. Editor Nick Emerson keeps the action hurtling forward. Composer Volker Bertelmann, who won an Oscar for his score for All Quiet on the Western Front, demonstrates his expertise as well as his versatility with his work here.

    Even viewers who may guess the identity of the next pope will be surprised by the final twist, which is very much in keeping with the film’s ambition to bring the certainties of the past into an unpredictable, dizzying, but essential new future.

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    Stephen Farber

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  • Zoe Saldaña Has Arrived for Her Oscar Moment in the Best Picture Contender ‘Emilia Pérez’

    Zoe Saldaña Has Arrived for Her Oscar Moment in the Best Picture Contender ‘Emilia Pérez’

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    For nearly 20 years, Zoe Saldaña has starred in some of the most financially successful films in history, including “Avatar” and “Avengers: Endgame.” You’d think an actress with such an impressive résumé would have scripts and prominent roles constantly coming her way. Yet, in Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez,” where Saldaña plays Rita Moro Castro, she sings and dances, and in one high-energy number, “El Mal,” she shows the ferocity that shows the depth of her talent. It was a moment that left me incredibly frustrated with Hollywood. Despite her box office success, Saldaña has rarely been allowed to showcase the full range of her abilities. Why are we only learning about this now?

    I expressed these sentiments to Telluride executive director Julie Huntsinger during an interview with Variety, and she confidently replied, “That all stops now.”

    Read: You can see all Academy Award predictions in all 23 categories on one page on the Variety Awards Circuit: Oscars.

    The Latina star is likely to be at the forefront of the Oscar race, depending on where she ultimately decides to campaign as either lead or supporting actress. Saldaña’s performance in “Emilia” harks back to the moment we watched Catherine Zeta-Jones’s portrayal of Velma Kelly in “Chicago” (2002), which led to an Oscar win. There’s a sense that Saldaña could follow a similar path this awards season.

    But the compelling musical crime film isn’t just about Saldaña.

    Writer, director, and producer Audiard received the Silver Medallion Tribute at Telluride on Friday evening, launching Netflix’s quest to nab the auteur his long overdue Oscar nom. Sometimes described as the “French Martin Scorsese,” the 72-year-old has won the Palme d’Or twice but has never been nominated for an Academy Award. This year, that could also change, as Audiard may find himself in the running for best picture, director or screenplay. He would become the latest triple crown recipient which has netted wins for The Daniels (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”) and nominations for Christopher Nolan (“Oppenheimer”), who won two out of three.

    The ensemble cast includes Karla Sofía Gascón in the titular role, Selena Gomez, and Adriana Paz. Along with Saldaña, the four shared the best actress prize at Cannes, making them strong contenders for Academy recognition.

    Gascón aims to make history as the first trans woman nominated for best actress. Her presence on the circuit will help propel her in the lead actress race, which is sure to be overflowing with well-known artists and former nominees and winners, including Saoirse Ronan, who will also be honored at Telluride for her performance in “The Outrun.”

    “Emilia Perez“
    Netflix

    Gomez’s arrival in Telluride on Thursday didn’t go unnoticed by her fans. A neon orange sign stapled to a pole on Main Street, addressed to Gomez, read, “Please sing the National Anthem at one of [the] home games: Friday (6 p.m.) and Saturday (1 p.m.)” and was signed by the Telluride High School volleyball team. Whether Gomez has seen the sign or plans to surprise the team remains unknown, but with Audiard’s tribute during the Friday slot, Saturday might be their only hope.

    However, the team may have to forgive her as the Emmy-nominated actress from “Only Murders in the Building” is likely to be busy schmoozing at the festival. As Jessi Del Monte, Emilia’s wife, Gomez has two standout moments, particularly with the song “El Camino,” that could have the Academy responding to her work. She’ll need to continue putting herself out there, shaking hands and mingling with voters, as campaigning can make a difference. Notable, the supporting actress category has had two Oscar nominees from the same movie approximately 33% of the time. That could push Gomez into the lineup alongside her co-star.

    In a year filled with musicals, including “Better Man,” “Piece by Piece,” “The End” and the upcoming “Wicked,” Audiard’s film stands out. Netflix acquired the film at Cannes and is going full throttle, hoping to snag its first best picture Oscar with this unique drama.

    Expect “Emilia Pérez” to be an across-the-board contender at the Oscars, with potential nominations for cinematography (Paul Guillaume), editing (Juliette Welfing), and music by the composing duo Clément Ducol and Camille.

    The Spanish-language film is also vying to be France’s official selection in this year’s international feature race. It’s been over 30 years since France, once a source of Oscar winners, last won the category. After two consecutive years of controversial selections — “Titane” over “Happening” and “The Taste of Things” over “Anatomy of a Fall”— Netflix remains hopeful that the selection committee will recognize the potential of “Emilia Pérez” to bring the victory back to France.

    As the weekend continues, we’ll see how attendees respond to the film as it begins its long trek on the awards circuit and, possibly, to the 97th Academy Awards.

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    Clayton Davis

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  • Documentary Zurawski v Texas Reveals the Personal Devastation of Antiabortion Laws

    Documentary Zurawski v Texas Reveals the Personal Devastation of Antiabortion Laws

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    When filmmakers Maisie Crow and Abbie Perrault heard that it seemed likely that Roe v. Wade would be overturned, they sprang into action, thinking about how they could explore the devastating repercussions of that decision. “We really felt like we needed to couple the trauma and devastation with some sort of hope,” says Crow. “And we found that in Molly Duane and the case that she was filing in Texas.”

    The pair, who had previously worked together on the 2021 documentary At the Ready, met attorney Duane through the Center for Reproductive Rights. She represents a woman named Amanda Zurawski, who nearly died when a Texas law prevented her from receiving an abortion after her pregnancy became nonviable. Zurawski subsequently joined with four other women and two doctors to sue the state.

    Zurawski v Texas, which covers the case and will have its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, is a deeply moving film investigating how Texas’s antiabortion laws have caused grief, loss, trauma, and in some cases near-death experiences. The laws prohibit most abortions even when a woman’s pregnancy is deemed unviable.

    With executive producers that include Hillary Clinton, Chelsea Clinton, and Jennifer Lawrence, Zurawski v Texas takes one of the nation’s most pressing issues and makes it personal, told through the brave women who share their stories of loss and heartache. “Policies and war, they can just seem such faraway issues that will never happen to us. And that’s why films like this can be so impactful—to show the actual lives that are affected,” says Lawrence. “Not just how easily it could happen to you or someone you love, but to be a true witness to what happens when you’re not just failed by your government, but condemned by it.”

    Samantha Casiano learned at a 20-week ultrasound that her fetus had no chance of survival.

    Like many people across the nation, Chelsea Clinton learned of the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade when the Court’s draft opinion leaked in May of 2022. “I was sitting on the edge of my bathtub and just sobbing hysterically,” she says. “And I think what I was really grappling with that night was, ‘I’m not surprised, but I still am so completely shattered by what we’ve allowed to happen to women in our country.’”

    She woke up the next morning determined to jump into action. Through their production company HiddenLight, which she founded with her mother, the pair joined the Zurawski v Texas team as executive producers. “No pregnant woman should ever be denied necessary medical care. The health care emergencies these women faced know no political boundaries; they affect all of us, our daughters, mothers, friends, and entire families,” says Hillary Clinton. “I hope that millions of people will watch Zurawski v Texas because I know it will help bring to life what is happening to women across the country at the most fundamental human level.”

    In the film, we watch Duane as she fights in the court system for more clarity on antiabortion laws, which have left medical practitioners unsure of what abortion procedures are allowed. Zurawski’s water broke at 18 weeks pregnant, but she was denied an abortion even as her health rapidly declined. It wasn’t until she became septic that she was able to end her pregnancy. Another woman followed in the film, Samantha Casiano, learned at a 20-week ultrasound that her fetus had no chance of survival. Yet she was forced to carry her baby to term, and watched her daughter suffer for the four short hours of her life.

    In an exclusive clip debuting here, Duane is captured practicing for the court case, as we see many of the women also preparing to appear in court. Throughout the film, Duane reveals the emotional toll that the case takes on her as well. “It became clear how much she threw herself into her work,” says Crow. “It didn’t take very long for her to be comfortable in front of the cameras.”

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    Rebecca Ford

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  • The 14 Best Movies From the Fall Film Festivals

    The 14 Best Movies From the Fall Film Festivals

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    For some movies playing at the fall film festivals in Venice, Telluride, and Toronto, the events are a chance to continue a conversation that started earlier in the year, with world premieres at festivals like Sundance and Cannes. On the first day of TIFF, for example, Cannes holdovers like La Chimera, The Zone of Interest, and Perfect Days had the chance to thrill new audiences, while Anatomy of a Fall sold out screenings in Telluride on its way to playing to packed houses in Toronto.

    Awards season is intended to celebrate films from across the entire year, and we’ll have plenty of time to look back at Past Lives, Asteroid City, and other earlier-in-the-year releases as the season continues. But with Toronto wrapping up and Venice and Telluride still recent memories, we’re taking stock of the 14 best world premieres we saw across all three festivals. From riotous comedies to heartbreaking romances to biopics that defy definition, these are all films worth anticipating when they make their way to broader audiences later this year.

    For much more on the fall festivals, revisit our festival live blog, which includes reviews, interviews, Oscar speculation, and a whole lot more.

    VENICE FILM FESTIVAL

    Poor Things

    Once again creating a rich, quirky world all his own, director Yorgos Lanthimos centers his latest work on Bella (Emma Stone), a woman who is brought back to life by a mad scientist (Willem Dafoe) and eventually embarks on a wild adventure full of sex, exploration, and hard lessons about the reality of the world. The zany black comedy features a career-best performance by Stone, who fully commits to playing a woman whose mind starts out as a baby’s. Poor Things became the first best-film winner of the fall season, nabbing the coveted Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and with it having amassed strong reviews from the critics as well, we have to assume there are many more accolades to come.  —Rebecca Ford

    Priscilla

    If Sofia Coppola’s film is to be viewed as a companion piece to Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, those companions are awfully estranged. Luhrmann’s film is loud and celebratory, whereas Priscilla is still, quiet, haunted by pain and doubt. The film, based on Priscilla Presley’s memoir about her time with Elvis, is a sober but lovely depiction of a young woman caught up in the storm of someone else’s fame, a girl realizing that her marry-a-rock-star fantasy has come at quite a steep cost. Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi do finely tuned, subtle work as Priscilla and Elvis, never losing themselves in flashy mimicry. Priscilla may be too small and interior to garner much Oscar attention, but it’s a sterling addition to Coppola’s canon of films that look at lonely young women struggling for meaning. —Richard Lawson

    Maestro

    Due to the ongoing actors strike, Bradley Cooper couldn’t be at the Venice Film Festival in person, but his second directorial effort at the event was just as successful as his first. Maestro, a film about iconic composer Leonard Bernstein, was met with a warm reception, particularly for Cooper’s transformative performance as Bernstein and Carey Mulligan’s as Bernstein’s wife, Felicia Montealegre. Instead of making a traditional biopic, Cooper has chosen to center the story on the partnership between Bernstein and Montealegre, often diving into fantasy elements in a romantic swirl of a movie that should charm audiences when it hits theaters in November and Netflix in December. —R.F.

    Hit Man

    Richard Linklater’s small but spry noir riff premiered to enthusiastic audiences in both Venice and Toronto, suggesting that it could be a big theatrical success if picked up by the right distributor. (As of this writing, the film is still for sale.) Glen Powell, a charismatic presence in everything from Linklater’s own Everybody Wants Some!! to Top Gun: Maverick, explodes into full movie stardom as Gary Johnson, a mild-mannered IT guy who winds up pretending to be a hit man to help the New Orleans police. His scenes with Adria Arjona, the love interest he meets when she tries to hire him to kill her husband, crackle like scenes in the best screwball comedies. It’s a treat from start to finish. —Katey Rich

    Ferrari

    While Michael Mann’s biopic isn’t exactly one of the beloved director’s sleek wonderments, it still packs a grim punch. Adam Driver plays Enzo Ferrari as a stubbornly ambitious man in his late 50s, obsessed with his cars’ racing prowess while his company’s commercial business falters. Back home, Ferrari struggles to make peace with his jilted wife, played with vigor by Penélope Cruz, and attend to his mistress (Shailene Woodley) and their young son. Mann ably balances the domestic with the public, staging argument scenes with as much crunch and fire as he does two film-defining car wrecks. Ferrari may not feature any cool crooks talking tough, but it does entertain and, in its own way, enlighten. —R.L.

    Evil Does Not Exist

    In just two years, Ryusuke Hamaguchi has gone from a relative unknown outside of his native Japan to one of global cinema’s most decorated, celebrated auteurs. His astounding 2021 doubleheader of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and Drive My Car won him countless placements on critics’ top 10 lists, as well as Oscar nominations for best picture, director, and adapted screenplay. Now this striking follow-up, arriving sooner than anticipated, has already taken home a big award too, Venice’s Grand Jury Prize (the competition’s runner-up honor). The less said about Evil Does Not Exist, a gently brilliant study of man and nature, probably the better—it zigs and zags, playing with red herrings and a sprinkling of character studies, through to its bold denouement. But trust that it’s a film further showcasing its director’s range while emphasizing his signature feel for philosophical realism. —David Canfield

    TELLURIDE FILM FESTIVAL

    All of Us Strangers

    Andrew Haigh has made gorgeous, if unsung, films focused on the charge of new queer love (Weekend) and the agony of unfinished family business (45 Years), so it feels only right that the movie poised to deliver him a new level of acclaim and attention offers a poignant fusion of the two subject areas. All of Us Strangers follows a 40-something gay writer named Adam (Andrew Scott) on parallel journeys: the romance he strikes up with a neighbor (Paul Mescal) in their otherwise abandoned apartment building, and the reunion he experiences with his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell), who died long ago, in his childhood home. Haigh lulls viewers into this tender metaphysical realm, stacking heartbreaking scenes of connection and loss atop one another like an emotional Jenga tower. By the final scene, it doesn’t come crashing down so much as it explodes—expanding both the film’s devastating impact and, perhaps, our view of Haigh’s capabilities behind the camera. —D.C.

    The Holdovers

    Alexander Payne is back in fine form with this charming holiday season film that’s set in the 1970s. Starring the director’s Sideways lead, Paul Giamatti, as a curmudgeonly boarding school teacher who’s tasked with watching the boys left behind during the holiday break, The Holdovers won over the Telluride Film Festival with its classic filmmaking of days gone by, as well as its memorable performances from Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, and breakout star Dominic Sessa, himself a recent graduate of a New England boarding school. —R.F.

    The Mission

    This searing new film from the directors of Boys State flew a bit under the radar at a Telluride packed with major titles, but it deserves a spotlight as one of the best documentaries of the year. Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss revisit the life of John Allen Chau, an evangelical missionary whose obsession with a conversion trip to North Sentinel Island—whose Indigenous population lives in voluntary isolation, with no outside-world contact—led to his untimely death. Interweaving a smart array of narrators and using animation that turns vital in the telling of Chau’s doomed mission, the movie walks the very fine line of interrogating extremist faith without mocking Chau’s earnest, fatally flawed belief system—and finds within that the deeply sad story of a family ripped apart and a father trying to find peace in the aftermath. —D.C.

    TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL

    American Fiction

    It’s a surprisingly busy season for movies about frustrated academics and their thwarted dreams. But even in that saturated milieu, Cord Jefferson’s directorial debut stands out. The Emmy-winning TV writer based his first film on Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, about a down-on-his-luck professor named Thelonious “Monk” Ellison who finds inadvertent fame and fortune when his joke manuscript—a parody of Black poverty porn like the novel Push—becomes a bestseller. It’s a prickly, challenging role, and one American Fiction star Jeffrey Wright was born to play. He’s surrounded by an ace supporting cast, including versatile performers like Sterling K. Brown and Erika Alexander, whose storylines balance Everett’s sharp literary satire with a more grounded family drama. American Fiction is as ambitious as the young writers Monk despises. But unlike them, it’s got a brain and a heart as well. —Hillary Busis

    His Three Daughters

    A crowded New York City apartment becomes an ideal staging ground for family strife, and eventually intimacy, in the latest from writer-director Azazel Jacobs. It was one of the biggest surprises among the TIFF premieres, with audiences exiting screenings audibly weeping, and seemingly no one able to choose a favorite performance among those of the three lead actors—Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen, and Natasha Lyonne. With the right distributor and a good campaign, though, we’d love to see this film as a chance for Lyonne, doing scaled-back, revelatory work as the black sheep sister of the family, to get her first Oscar nomination. —K.R.

    Sing Sing

    Colman Domingo was one of the few stars in attendance at TIFF this year, even though his big fall biopic, Rustin, is being released by Netflix, making it a project very much affected by the strike. That’s because he also had the intimate, achingly beautiful prison drama Sing Sing, an independent production still seeking release as of this writing. Domingo’s performance in Sing Sing is a showstopper, as I wrote in my review, but the film is a true ensemble effort, cowritten by director Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley in collaboration with two Sing Sing prison alumni, one of whom plays himself in the film. It’s a film full of small miracles that deserves a long life beyond the festival. —K.R.

    The Boy and the Heron

    Perhaps the wind has been taken out of this animated masterpiece’s sails just a tad due to the news that The Boy and the Heron may not be Japanese genius Hayao Miyazaki’s final film after all. Regardless, the movie’s dreamy (and occasionally nightmarish) visuals and poignant story give it remarkable staying power. The story revolves around young Mahito (Soma Santoki), who is hounded by a trickster demon in the form of the titular bird (Masaki Suda) after his mother dies. Really, though, plot is beside the point. The Boy and the Heron’s pleasures lie in Miyazaki’s singularly creative creatures and set pieces, which overwhelm Mahito particularly after he takes a perilous journey into the heron’s magical realm. You may not understand what’s going on, but you won’t forget the way it makes you feel. —H.B.

    One Life

    A solid, traditional British period piece—about Nicholas Winton, a London stockbroker who organized the rescue of nearly 700 Czech children at the dawn of World War II—is given awards-y luster by Anthony Hopkins, who continues his recent streak of sharp, focused performances. One Life was one of the big tearjerkers in Toronto, giving other standouts like His Three Daughters a run for their money in the “make film critics cry in the middle of the day” race. The film is about a remarkable thing that actually happened, which is always a benefit where the Academy is concerned. While some people may find the beginning stretches of the film a little slow, its final 20 minutes are a knockout, sending audiences out of the screening feeling awed and inspired. —R.L.

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    Rebecca Ford, Richard Lawson, Katey Rich, David Canfield, Hillary Busis

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  • With ‘The Bikeriders’, Jeff Nichols Rides Into Uncharted Territory

    With ‘The Bikeriders’, Jeff Nichols Rides Into Uncharted Territory

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    Nichols cast Comer in the role before he’d seen her Emmy-winning work on Killing Eve, and long before her one-woman Broadway show Prima Facie won her a Tony. Her Bikeriders performance as the outspoken Kathy has been the talk of Telluride. “Jodie’s a worker,” says Nichols who recalls that one day on set, she left her notes behind and he took a peek. “I realized that she had taken every word in the scene that she spoke and phonetically broken it down, and it just went on for pages, for pages, for pages. A lot of people can do hard work, but then she makes it invisible.”

    Comer had the rest of the cast in awe too. Nichols recalls how in one of her first scenes with Hardy, she has to his character Johnny, who is president of the club, that she wants her husband Benny (played by Austin Butler) to belong to her. Nichols asked who wanted to shoot their part of the scene first, and Comer said she would. “She came in and it was like a double barrel shotgun to the chest,” says Nichols. “I think Tom at one point missed a line because we were all just kind of watching her do this thing.”

    Nichols also cast Butler before the release of his breakout film Elvis, though Nichols had gotten an early look at the trailer. Benny is a brooding man of few words, but a dedicated member of the motorcycle club. “At this point in my career, I’ve been around a lot of famous people, and they all have an energy to them, they all have a charisma, and he definitely has it,” says Nichols. “It goes beyond just being a movie star. You just wanted to be with him.”

    Benny is in a lot of ways desired by both Kathy and Danny, who want so much for him and put their desires on him. “He’s a bit of an empty vessel,” says Nichols, who says he can’t wait to work with Butler again. “I know there’s more gears there.”

    The biggest challenge for Nichols was stepping into a world that was so far from his own. He wasn’t even alive when these photos were taken, and he was not familiar with motorcycle culture. He and his actors studied the photos, audio files and did other research to get to know this subculture. And the actors went to motorcycle camp so they could ride with the confidence of a member of the club. “These bikes are 50, 60 years old. They’re not precision instruments at this point. They are very difficult bikes to ride,” he says.

    The Bikeriders, which 20th Century Studios will release in theaters on Dec. 1, feels like a step back into time, and into a society created by and for outsiders. For Nichols, who hasn’t released a film since 2016, Bikeriders feels a bit like new territory for him too. “I’m really proud of this film and I think it does what I’ve set out to do, which is just dip you in this world and this feeling, the same feeling I got from these photos,” he says. Now he’s just got to learn to sit with the feeling of it being out in the real world, too.

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    Rebecca Ford

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  • Saltburn Is Stylish and Intriguing, With Barry Keoghan In Full Command

    Saltburn Is Stylish and Intriguing, With Barry Keoghan In Full Command

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    Writer-director Emerald Fennell’s blazing, blaring debut feature, 2020’s Promising Young Woman, presented a kicky setup—a traumatized woman getting revenge on predatory men by faking helplessness and waiting to pounce when they try to take advantage of her—but eventually lost its narrative way. Though she won a screenplay Oscar for her troubles, Fennell couldn’t figure out a satisfying way to land the plane.

    For much of Fennell’s new film, Saltburn, we feel we are in steadier, more confident hands. This time, Fennell’s premise is less reliant on zeitgeisty social commentary, which relieves some of the pressure that Promising Young Woman, in all its #MeToo alertness, buckled under. We’re back in the early 2000s at Oxford, that furnace of intellect, wealth, and on occasion wealthy intellect. Familiar characters are introduced: Oliver (Barry Keoghan) is a shy nerd from a troubled, decidedly un-monied background while beautiful golden god Felix (Jacob Elordi) is the scion of a noble family. Felix is louche and alluring to all around him, but perhaps especially to lonely Oliver, who casts furtive glances Felix’s way but otherwise remains a distant admirer.

    Until, of course, a chance encounter, and suddenly Oliver is swept up in Felix’s intimate attention. Fennell teases at the implied queerness of this collegiate dynamic, letting it hang in the air as, perhaps, one of the film’s great questions. A character plainly states the literary allusion, but they needn’t have: everything about Saltburn, at this point, is an obvious modernization of Brideshead Revisited, Eveyln Waugh’s great novel of money and desire and burbling homoeroticism.

    That becomes glaringly clear when Oliver is invited to spend the summer at the country manor—castle, really—where Felix’s family spends their days languid and blithely snobby, indulging in drink and cigs (and no doubt other things) while they regard Oliver with a wary curiosity. The Oxford stretch of the film is nervous and sad, but once Oliver arrives at the ludicrous Saltburn estate, Fennell turns up the comedy. Oliver’s early days at Saltburn are a wry, increasingly sinister delight, made all the more so by Rosamund Pike’s sharply amusing turn as Felix’s ice-queen gorgon of a mother, who states—as if it is psychiatric fact—that she has an innate revulsion to ugliness.

    She’s glad, then, to see that Oliver, slouched and blandly dressed as he is, has some sort of dark beauty in his eyes. Keoghan, a rising Irish actor who here puts his magnetic oddness to good use, makes us believe that these haughty sophisticates could indeed see something worth ferreting out of Oliver. Sure enough, he proves, rather quickly, to the manner born. He falls in with Felix and his sister Venetia (an appropriately purring and unstable Alison Oliver) as they read Harry Potter books and lounge by the water—they also play drunken tennis in formalwear, naturally—while keeping Felix’s sneering gay American cousin, Farleigh (Archie Madekewe), at a safe enough distance.

    Some kind of game is being played here, but Fennell is coy about exactly what that is. Are Felix and his cohort (which also includes the lord of the manor, played as a rich dullard by Richard E. Grant) ensnaring Oliver in some kind of trap? He’s a toy to be played with for sure, but to what end? Gradually, though, it seems that Oliver might have the upper hand, that he is a much more capable calculator than anyone, including us in the audience, have given him credit for.

    Fennell has fun with these wicked possibilities, letting her actors flounce and skulk around in between jags of crackling, clever dialogue. It’s a pleasure to be in the company of these noxious people, all looking resplendent in the film’s shadowy lighting and artfully composed tableaux. (The film is, somewhat unnecessarily, presented in a square aspect ratio, as has become a tiresome trend in the last ten years.) The period setting made me nervous at first—I dreaded how many knowing, “rememberthis cultural object from the aughts?” winks we would be made to endure—but Fennell makes references sparingly.

    A few old tunes come wafting out of Millennial post-adolescence (MGMT’s “Time to Pretend” is one of them, duh) and we see the family watching The Ring and Superbad. Otherwise, though, Fennell does not force us to consider the film’s time. It’s place that she’s more concerned with, this ominous Eden where Oliver is stepping into the full bloom of his being—whether that is a newly self-assured, benevolent observer or a shrewd machinator.

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    Richard Lawson

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  • All of Us Strangers Is a Raggedly Emotional Spectre of a Ghost Story

    All of Us Strangers Is a Raggedly Emotional Spectre of a Ghost Story

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    In 2011, the British filmmaker Andrew Haigh told the story of a young gay man living in an anonymous high rise and seeking some kind of human connection. That film, Weekend, is a modern gay classic, discursive and melancholy and sexy. Twelve years later, Haigh is back to a high rise, this one an eerily empty luxury condo-plex in London, for his new film All of Us Strangers, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival on Thursday.

    In that building lives a gay man, Adam (a muted but effective Andrew Scott), bored and shiftless in middle-age. He’s a screenwriter struggling to get started on a project about his family but mostly spending his time watching television and snacking into the wee hours. One day, as also happened in Weekend, a chance encounter puts Adam in close proximity to a handsome stranger, Harry (a scruffily appealing Paul Mescal), who seems to be the only other tenant in this gleaming new building. While their flirtation journeys toward sex and romance, Adam also ventures back into his past. Quite literally, in a way: when he visits his childhood home, perhaps in search of inspiration, Adam finds his parents there, young as they were when they died in a car accident—maybe the first and most significant confirmation that Adam’s was meant to be a solitary life.

    All of Us Strangers is a ghost story, occasionally frightening but otherwise pitched in the tender, searching language of mourning. Adam’s parents, sensitively played by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell, seem to have been waiting for their son to come home; they know nothing of his life and are eager to see and hear how he’s grown. Just as Harry, back in the quiet of Adam’s apartment, prods Adam with questions whose answers help fill in a portrait of a man adrift in solitude, an orphan who seems to have, somewhere in adulthood, once again lost purchase.

    Which is a common feeling among middle-agers, but perhaps especially so—at least, in Haigh’s argument—for gay people whose very existence can isolate them from the comfortably accepted patterns and rhythms of the regular world. Being gay is not a lonely life anymore, Adam insists to his mother when she suggests as much. Not like it used to be, anyway. We don’t really believe him when he says it, though; nor does he seem to. All of Us Strangers, with that evocatively damning title, is about alienation, particular perhaps to gay men of Haigh’s age who grew up on a fault line of identity, as a new progressivism, a tolerance and openness, attempted to wrench free of the horrors of the past.

    Has Adam fallen through that crack? Not quite. But he dangles over it, and is glad to have Harry’s hand, pulling him, however briefly or not, toward the light of contentment, of self-acceptance. And yet he can’t shake his grief, for his parents and for, in some senses, the life they had hoped for him. The ease of heterosexual marriage and children and houses with yards. Adam has lost friends to that inevitability, perhaps partially explaining his rather empty existence in the city.

    As it considers these losses—both Adam’s discrete tragedy and a more ineffable desolation—All of Us Strangers wanders into abstraction. Haigh’s film whispers with mystery; the fact of Adam’s parents, suddenly returned, is not the only unsettling unknown of the movie. Dream bleeds into reality as Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s jarring score pings and murmurs and drones. The film’s lush visuals are discordantly offset by that eerie soundscape, and by the harshness of Haigh’s ideas. (The film is loosely adapted from Taichi Yamada’s novel Strangers; the gay text is all Haigh’s.)

    The impact of All of Us Strangers will likely vary wildly depending on the beholder. With such a despairing thesis, the film may seem awfully foreign to some younger queer people who, while no doubt still suffering the batterings of an often hostile world, can’t quite identify with Adam’s internal wrestling: his fear, his coded shame, his hermetic longing. Older viewers may run headlong toward the film’s despondency, finding solace, even catharsis, in its haunting ache.

    It’s a difficult work, raggedly emotional but chilly. Which was also the case with Haigh’s 2015 film 45 Years, in which a long and mostly happy marriage must be reassessed when something like a ghost comes lilting out of the past. That film is going for deep feeling but is, instead, a rather clinical study of human thought and behavior. All of Us Strangers has a similarly antiseptic quality. For all of its piercing insight and arresting performances, its steamy sex, its devastating conclusions, the film operates at a remove, from behind a pane of glass. Perhaps because Haigh gives Adam so little tether to the realm of the real; so much of the film is lost in plaintive reverie. All of Us Strangers is itself a kind of specter, looming and dreadfully insistent and yet incorporeal, impossible to truly embrace and hold tight to for dear life.

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    Richard Lawson

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