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Word is Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun and Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed will be among the late-announced sneak screenings, but without considering all the yet-to-be scheduled showtimes, here’s my tentative list of films I’m going to try to hit:

Friday, September 2:
The Méliès Mystery (Serge Bromberg; Eric Lange) [World Premiere; Q&A]

The Padilla Affair (Pavel Giroud) [World Premiere; Q&A]

Holy Spider (Ali Abassi) [North American Premiere]

Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (Alejandro González Iñárritu) [North American Premiere]

Saturday, September 3:
Women Talking (Sarah Polley) [Tribute to Sarah Polley]

Empire of Light (Sam Mendes) [World Premiere, Q&A]

TÁR (Todd Field) [Tribute to Cate Blanchett, North American Premiere]

Bones and All (Luca Guadagnino)

Sunday, September 4:
Armageddon Time (James Gray) [Q&A]

Broker (Hirokazu Kore-eda)

The Wonder (Sebastián Lelio)

A Compassionate Spy (Steve James) [Q&A]

Godland (Hlynur Pálmason)

Monday, September 5:
The Méliès American Negatives (Georges Méliès) [World Premiere, 3-D, Live Accompaniment]

The Corridors of Power (Dror Moreh)

One Fine Morning (Mia Hansen-Løve)

Good Night Oppy (Ryan White)

In addition to the two sneaks mentioned above, I’m currently missing, among others: Adam Curtis’ Russia [1985-1999] Traumazone; Lukas Dhont’s Close, the Dardennes’ Tori and Lokita, Matthew Heineman’s Retrograde, Oliver Germany’s’ Living, Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover, and Thomas von Steinaecker‘s Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer. I’d be willing to swap out most of the afternoon/evening Monday screenings for late additions of a most of these, but we’ll see how it plays out.

I wouldn’t make Dhont’s Close a top priority, despite its Grand Prix at Cannes. Many will probably be devastated by it, but I thought it went in a mostly facile direction that was too clearly calculated and thus felt occasionally cheap with regard to the audience’s emotions. But it is effective at times, that I can’t deny

I’m really interested in Squaring the Circle, Anton Corbijn’s documentary on record sleeve design firm Hipgnosis

DarkImbecile wrote: Thu Sep 01, 2022 3:20 pm Lineup for the 49th Telluride Film Festival, including world premieres for Sarah Polley, Sebastián Lelio, Sam Mendes, Anton Corbijn, Adam Curtis, Ken Burns, and more:

Has there been a new restoration of Lee's Oasis? I see there's a Korean blu, would welcome a Criterion. Uncomfortable, unforgettable. Moon So-ri's was one of those performances that felt like a legitimate phenomenon, though I guess it could be considered questionable in today's atmosphere.

It will also be shown at Lyon as part of the invitation to Lee Chang-dong, I'll try and see if it's a new resto or not.

Thanks!

Film historians and researchers Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange have together and separately created several documentaries on Chaplin, Vigo, Clouzot (the 2009 reconstruction of his unfinished Inferno), and Georges Méliès. Their latest on the latter is The Méliès Mystery, an hour-long feature originally produced for European television and focused on the pioneer’s 1923 destruction of twenty years of film negatives, and then the surprising rediscovery of dozens of negatives thought to have been burned.

I knew the broad strokes of Méliès’ story and the loss of his original negatives, but the brisk coverage of his introduction into the world of film, changing business fortunes, relationship with his brother, and attempt to reclaim his legacy held plenty that was new to me. Still, this served primarily as an tempting appetizer for one of the more intriguing shows at this festival later this weekend: a presentation of some of the restorations of those recovered negatives with live accompaniment that will be “the first ever authentic stereoscopic 3D projection of any Méliès films”, language from the program which didn’t make sense to me until seeing this doc.

This may be common knowledge to those who’ve been following the saga of these restorations, but just in case:

Spoiler

After Méliès sent his brother Gaston to distribute his films in the United States, Thomas Edison used his kinetoscope patents to block prints from the brothers’ company. As part of getting around this obstruction, Méliès began producing his films with paired side-by-side cameras to produce two original camera negatives, dozens of the American versions of which survived a century of being shuttled from basement to vault to museum. Paired with the restorations of the surviving French prints, these OCNs create a stereoscopic effect that has probably never been publicly seen before.

The best part of the screening was Bromberg’s exuberance in introducing the film and answering questions afterward, and his palpable excitement at (eventually) sharing some of Méliès’ films at both a level of quality and a format that hasn’t been seen in well over a century, if ever.

Many documentaries have been made about the struggle of artists under totalitarian state security regimes, but few have the advantage of the kind of primary source footage around which Pavel Giroud’s The Padilla Affair is built. For what appears to be the first time in the fifty years since it was filmed by the Cuban government, hours of footage of the writer Heberto Juan Padilla’s public denunciation of himself, his writings, his fellow writers and intellectuals, and his own wife have been distilled and interwoven with excerpts of his writing, Fidel Castro’s speeches, and other contemporaneous sources to create an often intense picture of a man buckling under the weight of his nation’s fist. As sweat stains Padilla’s shirt and his voice wavers in front of a roomful of his peers, Giroud uses the score and editing to make the climactic moments remarkably effective and psychologically provocative — as one of the film’s producer’s noted after the fact, our central figure here is not particularly relatable or sympathetic, but his response to his situation is illuminating.

The decision to avoid the use of talking heads and instead rely on montage to set the context for the core material is a bit of a double-edged sword: it’s effective in establishing the geopolitical atmosphere, less so in making the clear the personal motivations and stakes for the personages involved, including Padilla himself. That ambiguity isn’t totally out of line with the kind of paranoid uncertainty required to navigate this kind of state pressure, but sometimes reduces the potential impact of the escalation of the proceedings.

This could have been a mere recitation of facts and display of footage representing a historical curiosity for Latin America specialists or literary historians, but it’s to the filmmakers’ credit that they’ve constructed a film that feels extremely politically relevant and at times poetic. Worth a watch, particularly if you have a pre-existing interest in the subject matter.

Ali Abassi’s last film was Border, a darkly funny fantasy that remains one of the more unexpectedly memorable films I’ve ever caught at Telluride; its provocations were sometimes hilariously surprising but also so unsettlingly extreme that I had a hard time knowing how to respond. His latest, Holy Spider, is far more controlled in tone and intent, and he delivers a grimly scathing and extremely effective critique of misogyny that’s cuttingly specific to Iranian society and also bleakly recognizable on more universal terms.

With the droning score seemingly purposely evoking a distorted muezzin, Mehdi Bajestani’s Saeed stalks the holy Iranian city of Mashhad on a motorbike, seeking out ‘corrupt women’ and then dumping their bodies in the dirt while Zar Amir Ebrahimi’s assertive journalist Rahimi scours the city’s underbelly to find a hint of a killer many in the city don’t seem too rushed to uncover. Both actors deliver remarkable performances — Ebrahimi was awarded a well-deserved Best Actress honor in Cannes, and Bajestani is even more darkly impressive, in my opinion.

Abassi’s extreme closeups, gruesome sound design, and series of grim, dingy rooms only add to the claustrophobia primarily stemming from the limitations Ebrahimi is constantly forced to navigate in order to do her job. That her concern and compassion is met with roughly equal apathy and distaste for the victims on the part of the religious, law enforcement, and civic leaders we encounter both during and after the killing spree is as obscene as any of the brutal murders we’re shown.

There’s a lot in the way of formal choices and thematic content to get into, but I’ll just say for now that the film’s treatment of Saeed and his enablers (direct and indirect) is so pointed and acidic in its picking apart of the myriad justifications and consequences of an impulse to control, degrade, and destroy women that I have a hard time grasping some of the negative responses I saw out of Cannes, which at least in some cases appear to be an extreme and elementary confusion of depiction with endorsement. The wrenching closing shots would seem to unequivocally make Abassi’s intent clear, but I’m guessing some viewers turned off their critical faculties long before that point.

Before catching this last night, I glanced at a single tweet about Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light from a critic (Ehrlich maybe?) who implied — unfavorably — that this was Mendes’ Belfast, which is either entirely too generous to Branagh’s film or unfair to this perfectly middling adult drama.

Olivia Colman, who can basically do no wrong of late, leads a solid cast as Hilary, a middle-aged woman working in an early 1980s coastal British cinema and struggling to overcome a mental health crisis. Her world expands a bit, for better and for worse, when Micheal Ward’s Steven takes a job tearing tickets and forms a bond with her.

Less the overearnest love letter to the power of cinema — though there are elements of that — and more a mature dual character study that covers a medley of the cultural and political forces of that specific time and place, Mendes’ film is relatively subdued in terms of his direction, Roger Deakins’ cinematography, a script that mostly refrains from any grand statement on the issues at hand, and even the Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score.

Even with only a handful of truly notable moments of performance or writing (though also only a handful that fall flat), Empire of Light largely meets its modest ambitions. Maybe because I was steeled for something as wrongheaded and derivative as Belfast, I ended up mildly positive on Mendes’ latest, though I’m sure based on some other reactions I’ve heard that it will fully enrapture some viewers with its earnestness and aggravate others with its restrained ambitions and sometimes maudlin execution.

DarkImbecile wrote: Thu Sep 01, 2022 9:00 pm …here’s my tentative list of films I’m going to try to hit…

This plan got shot entirely to shit by a scheduling snafu yesterday, by the way, so we’ll see what I’m able to get to over the next two days.

I’ve made clear my love for directors who take big daring swings and lean into their stylistic flourishes, but it’s also rewarding to see a filmmaker sublimate those impulses and focus their efforts into effective, earnest, heartfelt storytelling. James Gray’s Armageddon Time, a depiction of a pivotal period of his childhood in the autumn of 1980, is unapologetically generous to its actors, characters, and the audience in a way I really appreciated, even if it isn’t necessarily pushing the form or its thematic concerns anywhere particularly groundbreaking.

As much as the film is deeply personal and biographical, it perhaps functions best as an exploration of the idea of social mobility, the moral and practical sacrifices required to achieve it, and what it represents for this family and those at the top and bottom of the ladder they’re trying to climb.

The film is built around a pair of very good child performances, and if Michael Banks Repeta and Jaylin Webb weren’t as successful as they are the whole production would be a failure. I feel like every review has to mention how good Anthony Hopkins is in a small supporting part, so I’ll quickly acknowledge that while spending more time on how good Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway are in higher degree-of-difficulty roles as Gray’s parents.

And we’re back! As usual, the intensity of the schedule and my declining brain function as the festival went on meant that I had to pause the responses to the second half of my experiences at Telluride, but my first full night’s sleep in a week should allow me to get the rest of these out:

My biggest disappointment of the festival was the Steve James documentary A Compassionate Spy, a mostly perfunctory presentation of information that’s largely been public knowledge for two decades, and misplaced faith in a cute love story told by a charming widow to replace insights into the real-world consequences of a notorious act of espionage.

The film’s protagonist is Ted Hall, who at 19 was the youngest physicist working on the Manhattan Project, and who became convinced that if the plans for nuclear weapons weren’t shared with the USSR, the world was doomed to devolve into another horrific bout of total warfare — one likely to end in a one-sided nuclear holocaust. The information he and others provided may have resulted in accelerating the Soviet nuclear program by as many as five years, and may have stalemated the bipolar order and kept the Cold War cold — or so the film asserts, with not a ton of expert testimony to back up those claims.

This story first came out publicly shortly before Hall’s death in 1999; he was briefly notorious, particularly because other Americans had been executed for providing intelligence of substantially lesser importance. James’ film tries to distinguish itself from previous accounts by telling the story through the eyes of Ted’s wife, Joan, a fireball of a woman who supported his espionage after the fact and helped him escape persecution during the Red Scare. The problem is that in refocusing the story through Joan’s eyes and foregrounding their romance, James sidelines the more interesting moral and historical results of Hall’s actions. The film is very clear about Hall’s stated motives to stop the next world war, but much less clear on what impact he may have actually had on the shape of the Cold War and its eventual outcomes.

The film’s recreations are executed no more than adequately, and the historical context regarding the use and threat from nuclear weapons and the anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s are sometimes compelling but often feel incidental to the way the film is constructed. It feels somewhat overcritical to say the film fails in its inoffensive and modest aims, but there ultimately just doesn’t seem to be a reason for this to be a feature instead of a short or an hour-long TV special, and the mismatch between the stakes involved in this story and the way James tells it feels like a fundamental miscalculation.

The Chilean director Sebastián Lelio has maintained a remarkably high standard of quality for his last decade of humanist features, combining visual style with a deep respect for a range of characters whose perspectives are not often prioritized in cinema or contemporary society more generally, and who have a tendency to strain against the judgement and boundaries of moralistic communities: a transgender woman in catholic Latin America; a middle-aged divorcée in an world that fetishizes youth and marriage; Jewish lesbians in a highly rigid Orthodox enclave in London.

His latest film (which he co-wrote with the source novelist Emma Donoghue), The Wonder is Lelio's first period piece, a spiritual mystery set in post-Hunger Ireland and starring Florence Pugh, the latest actress to do some of her best work under his direction. Despite the very different time and place, Lelio noted in introducing the film that the story spoke deeply to him as someone who was born into both mandatory Catholicism and a nation under dictatorship. Oppression, imposed both internally and externally, is one of his primary concerns here, as well as the cage of belief that so often constrains and contains us — the remarkable (and to some seemingly superfluous) bookends explicitly highlighting the artificiality of this mode of storytelling are very much necessary, and elevate this as an intellectual exercise in addition to an often painfully emotional one.

Pugh plays Elizabeth Wright, an English nurse summoned to an Irish village in the mid-19th century to witness and confirm what the locals believe to be the miraculous survival of a girl who has gone four months without eating. Paired with a nun to provide around-the-clock care and observation, Wright finds herself caught between her own commitment to observable reality, the ecstatic beliefs of the girl and her family, and the community leaders (including Ciarán Hinds and Toby Jones) who have their own reasons to want to believe in the divine intervention she seems to represent. As the narrative progresses, both the stakes involved and the sacrifices necessary for Wright to protect this girl and herself escalate to delirious heights; the resolution of this conflict and what it implies about what might be necessary on an individual and societal level to free ourselves from our cages elevates the film to another level.

In addition to the satisfying slow burn of the plot, the grainy filmic cinematography by Ari Wegner, and Pugh's seething but deeply human performance, one of my favorite elements is Matthew Herbert's remarkable score, an unsettling and mysterious mix of whistles and drones that complements the discordant proceedings quite well. In a festival with two great Hildur Guðnadóttir scores for Women Talking and TÁR, it's definitely worth noting that Herbert's might be my favorite on its own, and the one most intricately woven into the fabric of its film.

Matthew Heineman has made a name for himself as the creator of documentaries that are uncomfortably immersive in their proximity to their subjects — whether Mexican cartel warriors, activists in ISIS-controlled Syria, or health care workers in COVID-ravaged hospitals — and his latest, Retrograde, is a stunning achievement of vivid journalism and a testimony to institutional failure, remarkably bravery, and immense human distress. With mind-boggling access and seemingly impossible (or at the very least wildly unsafe) acts of cinematography, Heineman and his team document the shocking collapse of the Afghan government and the total Taliban victory in Afghanistan in three stages.

Starting in January 2021, the focus of the film is on a team of American green berets collaborating with a charismatic Afghan general, Sami Sadat, to maintain control of pivotal Helmand province — until their hasty, shockingly wasteful and destructive withdrawal after Biden's decision to honor an agreement made by the Trump administration to pull out American forces. Then the film crew stays in Afghanistan with Sadat through the summer as his command struggles with corruption and incompetence in the Afghan military and government, increasingly under escalating military pressure from Taliban fighters even as Sadat's forces use modern technologies and training and to bomb and closely monitor their adversaries. Finally, as the noose tightens around Sadat in the pivotal city of Lashkar Gah, the film's perspective shifts to the Kabul airport, where scenes of chaos and terror underscore the total collapse of the $2 trillion American project in Afghanistan.

Much of Retrograde could have come straight out of a Kathryn Bigelow film: laser sights and tracer rounds cut through the night, drones drift over military compounds and mountain cities, explosions reverberate through humvees and MRAPs, machine gun fire and RPGs flash green in night vision, dark blood runs onto field hospital floors. There is little non-diagetic sound, no talking heads — the prime feature of the film is its relentless immediacy and harrowing tension. Sadat is a compelling protagonist, optimistic and forceful, but sometimes struggling to maintain his composure in the face of betrayal by his colleagues and casualties among his men. The camera catches him under fire from the enemy and his own officers, pushing him to face reality as things fall apart.

The bookending scenes at the Kabul airport are some of the most visceral and heartrending, the sheer scale and intensity of the human tragedy on display so moving that my audience was very emotional as the film concluded, giving Heineman a standing ovation that brought him to tears as well. He, his producers, and one of the former military officers in the film spoke eloquently about America's responsibility to the 130,000 Afghan refugees brought to the country over the last 15 months, and to those who supported and protected Americans for years and are still trapped in Afghanistan, trying to avoid imprisonment or execution by the Taliban.

Highly recommended both for the filmmaking on display and the power of seeing closeup what we all read about or caught glimpses of last year; I believe it's being distributed by National Geographic, so it should be accessible both in theaters and online later this year.

DarkImbecile wrote: Fri Sep 02, 2022 6:19 pm Film historians and researchers Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange have together and separately created several documentaries on Chaplin, Vigo, Clouzot (the 2009 reconstruction of his unfinished Inferno), and Georges Méliès. Their latest on the latter is The Méliès Mystery, an hour-long feature originally produced for European television and focused on the pioneer’s 1923 destruction of twenty years of film negatives, and then the surprising rediscovery of dozens of negatives thought to have been burned.

I knew the broad strokes of Méliès’ story and the loss of his original negatives, but the brisk coverage of his introduction into the world of film, changing business fortunes, relationship with his brother, and attempt to reclaim his legacy held plenty that was new to me. Still, this served primarily as an tempting appetizer for one of the more intriguing shows at this festival later this weekend: a presentation of some of the restorations of those recovered negatives with live accompaniment that will be “the first ever authentic stereoscopic 3D projection of any Méliès films”, language from the program which didn’t make sense to me until seeing this doc.

This may be common knowledge to those who’ve been following the saga of these restorations, but just in case:

Spoiler

After Méliès sent his brother Gaston to distribute his films in the United States, Thomas Edison used his kinetoscope patents to block prints from the brothers’ company. As part of getting around this obstruction, Méliès began producing his films with paired side-by-side cameras to produce two original camera negatives, dozens of the American versions of which survived a century of being shuttled from basement to vault to museum. Paired with the restorations of the surviving French prints, these OCNs create a stereoscopic effect that has probably never been publicly seen before.

The best part of the screening was Bromberg’s exuberance in introducing the film and answering questions afterward, and his palpable excitement at (eventually) sharing some of Méliès’ films at both a level of quality and a format that hasn’t been seen in well over a century, if ever.

The promise of this documentary was paid off on the last day of my festival with an absolutely delightful presentation of restored shorts that included the world premiere of five Méliès films in authentic stereoscopic 3-D, along with piano accompaniment and narration from Lobster Films' Serge Bromberg, whose infectious enthusiasm and excitement for the work on display turned the screening into a buoyant celebration of these works and the efforts to restore the rest of of the American Méliès OCNs.

The presentation included the following program of films (most of which I'd only seen in low-quality partial clips, if at all):

Those Awful Hats (D.W. Griffith, 1909) — A fun amuse-bouche Bromberg included to illustrate how most audiences were seeing films around the turn of the century, pre-stadium seating and in the midst of the big-hat fad; the giant claw would still be useful in modern theaters.

Après le bal (le tub) / After the Ball, the Bath (Georges Méliès, 1897) — A minute-long film included because it was one of the few dozen or so earliest surviving Méliès films, because it was one of the first we know of to feature nudity (or pretty closets it), and because of the amusing solution Méliès used to correct for the transparency of the water used for the bath.

When the Devil Drives (Walter R. Booth, 1907) — A five-minute trick film included to illustrate how other directors around the world were learning from and adding their own twists to the innovations of Méliès and others; this is a zany delight that escalates the insanity sequence by sequence to delirious heights.

L'Homme-Mouche / The Human Fly (Georges Méliès, 1897) — A two-minute colorized print featuring Méliès as a Cossack dancer who takes his performance up and across the wall; used to illustrate that most surviving French prints of Méliès' work are low-quality, partially damaged prints that exist only in their hand-painted form.

Le Bourreau turc / The Terrible Turkish Executioner, or It Served Him Right (Georges Méliès, 1904) — Similarly, this very funny bit of macabre Orientalism survives only in the form of a paper print that was filed for copyright purposes; while the process of digitizing and restoring films like these last two is remarkable, the contrast between the clarity and detail as opposed to the films that follow is striking.

Le Rêve d'un fumeur d'opium / The Dream of an Opium Fiend (Georges Méliès, 1908) — The first film in the program to be presented from a recovered American camera negative, this depiction of an addict's hallucinations plays like a greatest hits reel of Méliès special effects, with substitution splices, floating objects, and a particularly funny cut replacing a beautiful woman our high-as-akite hero tries to grope with a costumed ape. Truly miraculous image quality compared to the surviving French prints.

Le Chaudron infernal / The Infernal Caldron and the Phantasmal Vapors (Georges Méliès, 1903) — The first of the main attractions of the program: by overlaying the 2D restored French hand-colored print and the 2D black and white restored camera negative, the slightly misaligned images can be filtered with stereoscopic glasses to create a colorized 3D image of this two-minute short featuring a demon shoveling human victims into a burning cauldron that results in gouts of flame and ghostly spirits of the sacrificed, who eventually drive the demon itself into the fires. Similarly stunning restoration work creates an unprecedentedly crisp image made only more exhilarating by the (entirely unintended by Méliès, of course) 3D effect.

L'Oracle de Delphes / The Oracle of Delphi (Georges Méliès, 1903) — Another two-minute film — this one entirely in monochrome as the best surviving French print was not hand-painted — depicting a tomb raiding Egyptian punished by a disturbed god and his morphing sphinxes by replacing his head with that of a donkey.

L'Alchimiste Parafaragaramus ou la Cornue infernale / The Mysterious Retort (Georges Méliès, 1906) — This depiction of an alchemist being tortured by a demonic jester he accidentally conjures features the single best 3D effect in the entire program, as the jester first appears a green snake crawling toward the audience and expanding and contracting, almost as if the film was designed to be seen this way.

Les Quat'Cents Farces du diable / The Merry Frolics of Satan (Georges Méliès, 1906) — The first of the longer 3D films, this diabolical ~20-minute Faustian farce features an Englishman and his assistant visiting an alchemist, who sells them some wish-granting pills and only asks that he sign a contract for them — before revealing that he is the Devil and our hero has carelessly signed his soul away! The cursed man and his family proceed to be tortured by Satan and his minions — primarily by refusing to allow them to eat lunch — which climaxes in their being transported across the heavens by a skeletal horse. The grimly hilarious ending of the Englishman being trussed and roasted on a spit over the infernal fires of hell is just as perfectly demented as the rest, vaulting this to the top of the list of Méliès films I've seen (including Le Voyage dans la Lune / A Trip to the Moon). I'd not seen any of this film before, but I have to imagine the 3D effect and the sharpness of the OCN make this the most enjoyable version anyone's seen in years.

Le Voyage à travers l'impossible / The Impossible Voyage (Georges Méliès, 1904) — Similarly, the wonderful derangement of this roughly twenty minute film is greatly enhanced by the intermittent 3D (the two versions don't always share all the same portions), particularly in the sequences on the sun — the freezer gag, which I'd seen before, is so much more effective in this restoration. These two longer films are near-perfect advertisements for the imaginative hilarity of Méliès' work, and even though his oeuvre can be repetitive, culturally insensitive, and narratively incoherent, the creative joy built into them makes clear why Méliès enjoys such a legendary status in the cinephile world.

I sat through this entire program with a big stupid grin on my face, and it was one of the delights of the year for me; hopefully some sort of tour takes place soon so more people can experience it.

DarkImbecile wrote: Thu Sep 08, 2022 8:32 pmThe promise of this documentary was paid off on the last day of my festival with an absolutely delightful presentation of restored shorts that included the world premiere of five Méliès films in authentic stereoscopic 3-D, along with piano accompaniment and narration from Lobster Films' Serge Bromberg, whose infectious enthusiasm and excitement for the work on display turned the screening into a buoyant celebration of these works and the efforts to restore the rest of of the American Méliès OCNs.

...

I sat through this entire program with a big stupid grin on my face, and it was one of the delights of the year for me; hopefully some sort of tour takes place soon so more people can experience it.

This sounds wonderful and feels like a safe bet for a 3D Blu-ray release from Flicker Alley, but have we heard anything about this, or was anything hinted at during the screening?

No, there was no indication one way or the other regarding a physical release or a theatrical plan, and though I briefly spoke to Bromberg before the show, it didn't occur to me to ask. He spoke a bit about the need for an additional ~$1 million in funding to complete the restorations of the 80 or so American Méliès negatives, and seemed to be getting some interest on that front from some of the more well-heeled attendees.

One of the more surprising partial letdowns of a very good Telluride was Hirokazu Kore-eda's Broker, which took me a couple of tries to even get a seat for — much like the superior and too-similar Shoplifters, which I missed at the festival in 2018 despite twice trying to get in to screenings. Though very much in line with some of Kore-eda's preoccupations — makeshift families, a deep empathy for decent people struggling on the fringes of society — Broker distinguishes itself as his first Korean-language film and with its far more comedic tone, but while it's ultimately a (merely) good film with a handful of lovely moments, it definitely suffers in comparison to that Palme D'or winner.

Built around an illegal adoption scheme making use of babies discarded at a "baby box" attached to a church, the film follows Song Kang-ho and Gang Dong-won as conmen who scoop up a baby abandoned by Lee Ji-eun's prostitute and try to dodge the attentions of the police and gangsters even as they accumulate accomplices and search for prospective parents who will pay to circumnavigate the traditional adoption route. While the premise seems ripe for emotional and narrative payoffs, only a few tender moments land with the intended effect as Kore-eda transparently struggles to resolve the arcs of nearly a dozen characters in a satisfying fashion. The actors are largely very effective — particularly Song, Lee, and Bae Doona as the police detective tracking them down — though Kore-eda isn't entirely able to find the right balance required to fully flesh out their characters.

Still, there are poetic moments and compositions that belong alongside his best, particularly a scene between Gang and Lee on a Ferris wheel; Kore-eda's knack for aching sadness doesn't culminate with anything close to the kind of power it has in some of his previous features, but there's enough tenderness and charm in this cast to make the film worth seeing despite the weaker script. The one element I can't excuse is Jung Jae-il's overly sentimental score and the intrusive way Kore-eda deploys it to step on some of the key moments of the film; going without a score would have notably improved the effectiveness of Broker, and a better one might have done even more to prop it up.

A minor Kore-eda is still worth watching, but knowing what he's capable of can't help but leave one feeling disappointed by leaving his latest only able to mildly recommend it.

I didn't like Broker either, it was strangely aimless in repeatedly failing to deliver any substance to the themes it was trying to actualize with sloppy semi-didacticism. Agree on the ferris wheel scene, and there were a few other poignant moments that were striking and promising for emotional payoff, but went nowhere as the film continually switched tracks for no apparent reason. A shame, considering the high concept was ripe for Kore-eda to play with

The end of the Telluride film festival comes suddenly when you've been seeing films nonstop for four straight days on very little sleep, and you're very much at the mercy of the schedulemakers given that most of the big theaters close down early Monday evening. This year, given the time Broker let out, there were only three options available: Good Night Oppy, a Mars rover documentary that had great word of mouth; another documentary on the cyclist Greg LeMond and his miraculous win in the 1986 Tour de France; and the new Netflix adaptation of Lady Chatterly's Lover, directed by Laure de Clermont-Tonnere and starring Emma Corrin and Jack O'Connell, and about which there was some low-key buzz on the street for the chemistry between its leads and the sheer volume of sex scenes. Just as Bones and All was perhaps more appealing on the last day of an otherwise not particularly bloody festival, the promise of a particularly horny period piece sounded like a nice change of pace, and so the last of the 16 films (counting the Méliès program as a single film) I was able to catch at Telluride this year was one I hadn't expected to appear at the festival at all and wasn't aware of before reading the program.

Let me start off by confirming that there are probably a solid 40 minutes of fairly steamy sex scenes in variety of places and positions, and that in and of itself is a welcome development in an increasingly neutered cinematic landscape; in fact, if the film had been willing to go a little farther and longer on these scenes, it might have tipped it over into positive territory for me. Instead, the film spends slightly too long on establishing the circumstances of Lady Chatterly's passionless marriage and the reasons behind her interest in the gamekeeper at her husband's family estate. Much of the editing of these early scenes is unnecessarily jumbled and busy, as if the film itself has become a little messy in its impatience to get to the good stuff, while too many of the period drama elements feel like Downton Abbey outtakes, only at the film's very end matching the vitality of the more erotic sections.

Thankfully, like the other Netflix features I saw at the festival (Bardo and The Wonder), this adaptation of the D.H. Lawrence novel avoids the blandly overlit house look of many Netflix films, with cinematographer Benoît Delhomme instead favoring natural lighting and Kaminski-esque soft glows; the costume design is similarly above-average, with Corrin's outfits notably evolving as her affair progresses (and sometimes mid-fling). Corrin and O'Connell are good both clothed and otherwise, and Corrin — in their first lead feature role — particular convincingly delivers both Lady Chatterly's idiosyncratically romantic view of life and society and her smoldering passion for the working class Oliver. I also very much appreciated the slight changes to the novel's conclusion, which avoid the standard trope of punishing a woman for acknowledging her sexuality and denying her a happy ending, so to speak. While its shortcomings are substantial enough that I can't unequivocally recommend it, this adaptation will have real appeal to the millions who eat up Netflix's Bridgerton — the success of which is what I assume greenlit this project, and the mild eroticism of which this film leaves handily in the dust.

Venice Film Festival awards

Really happy that Bones and All got plenty of recognition, bummed that I wasn’t able to catch the one screening of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed in Telluride, a little concerned that TÁR might end up being seen only as a Blanchett awards vehicle

Pleasantly surprised to see St Omer come away with two prizes. Looking forward to this at the London Film Festival.

hearthesilence wrote: Thu Jul 28, 2022 5:12 pm

The Narrator Returns wrote: Tue Jul 26, 2022 4:25 pm The Sally Potter short seems to be the deleted Chris Rock subplot from her last movie The Roads Not Taken. I hated most of what actually made it into Roads Not Taken so I can't say I'm optimistic about what she cut out.

I haven't followed Potter's most recent work, but Chris Rock the comedian? Given his remake of an Eric Rohmer film and an earlier attempt to join an aborted remake of Kurosawa's High and Low, surely he must be a cinephile at heart. (When is he going to visit Criterion's closet?)

They actually paired this with the Orlando restoration at Metrograph. I actually liked it quite a bit - it doesn't really sink in until the end, when you realize what the film's final lines (spoken by Rock) imply and how it has indeed been reflected in the horrendous course taken by the American right this past year.

alacal2 wrote: Mon Sep 12, 2022 10:50 am Pleasantly surprised to see St Omer come away with two prizes. Looking forward to this at the London Film Festival.

St Omer was very good.

For the New York contingent, I'd recommend checking out Unrest, Dry Ground Burning and the Currents Shorts programs has some good stuff in it too. I enjoyed the new Joanna Hogg, The Eternal Daughter, very much, Panahi's Two Bears wasn't easy but, also good. Overall the best one for me this year may be Albert Serra's Pacifiction.