Telluride Turns Fifty in Style, New York Hits Sixty-One

The Telluride Film Festival opened its fiftieth-anniversary celebration with a noncinematic spectacle: a blue sturgeon moon rising big and bright, cresting over the tree line just as my gondola rose over the mountain ridge. Gondolas (aka ski lifts) are the transportation system that moves folks between Telluride’s main drag and one of its prime theaters (and up to bike trails and ski runs too). That night, on the eve of the festivities, my fellow gondola passengers and I were transported in more ways than one, sprung from Earth for a few magical minutes that felt like a Méliès movie come to life, the simple carriage carrying its passengers straight into the moonbeam, a glimpse of other realms for a film festival known for delivering them on its screens. And so it all began.“Fifty years is a long time to do anything. And while we might be a little biased, we feel the work that TFF does is pretty important,” said Telluride Film Festival director Julie Huntsinger at the outset. The festival opened just as the press was predicting overall festival downturns due to the SAG-AFTRA and Writers Guild strikes that were forcing the fall events to forgo their red-carpet attractions, presumably causing diminished attendance and ticket sales. But Telluride was never that kind of festival. Sequestered in the Colorado mountains, it’s always been more safe house than carnival, offering an easy mix of the famous, not famous, and infamous. It has always been more of a directors’ festival than one obsessed with actors on red carpets (though it has saluted its share and welcomed many more).Any festival is always more than the sum of its parts: there is a stupid joyousness that comes from attending a film festival. It’s an exhilaration that makes some films shine brighter than their natural lumens would suggest and makes those in attendance feel unreasonably touched by grace. Down off the mountain (a phrase always applied to Sundance too, its match in cinematic altitude), some of the magic persists and some evaporates. But within the framework of the festival, there’s a sort of unspoken truce: to enjoy, to clap, to accept what’s on offer. And the festival’s curatorial team this year delivered an edition worthy of praise in this, the first outing since their mentor and former boss, festival cofounder Tom Luddy, passed on. He was constantly evoked, his presence missed, but I think his ghost would have been pleased.As for the films: some came from Cannes, some were shared with Venice, others jumped the gun on Toronto or New York. My favorite of the Cannes harvest was Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winner, Anatomie d’une chute (Anatomy of a Fall), her thrilling examination of marriage, writing, passion, and lies, starring this year’s breakout star, a phenomenal Sandra Hüller. And Hüller soars past her performance in Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade, 2016) to step into the front ranks of actresses able to convey complex emotions with a minimum of gloss and an absence of artifice.Hüller’s character, Sandra, a well-known writer, lives in a chalet in the mountains outside Grenoble with her husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis), their half-blind young son, and a photogenic border collie. Its opening scene has Sandra’s interview with a visiting fan disrupted by Samuel’s aggressively loud music booming from upstairs, louder and louder, making it clear that the marriage is in trouble. How much trouble? Enough so that Samuel’s sudden death, in a fall from the top of the chalet into the snow below, immediately raises suspicions. Soon Sandra is charged with murder, whereupon the film becomes a tense courtroom drama in which the very idea of a woman writer’s autonomy and the inherent nature of fiction drawn from life are both thrown into question—with their son forced to take sides.While a besotted defense attorney and misogynist prosecutor duel in court, Hüller carries the film through a range of facial expressions, line deliveries, and physicality that define her character for her dual juries: the one in the courtroom and the one in the cinema. With its narrative precision and realist style, Anatomy is a feminist provocation disguised as mainstream entertainment; thanks to Triet, it succeeds superbly at both. (Someday, it will make a great double bill with Tár.)Writing and death also haunted Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers. Haigh, known for Weekend (2011) and 45 Years (2015), is adept at plumbing emotions that bubble to the surface of his narratives, placing his characters and audiences alike on a knife-edge of revelation. In Strangers, Haigh maintains his customary tension between what is revealed and what is hidden, how the characters are fooling themselves and how Haigh is fooling his audience.Strangers centers on the tormented figure of Adam (Andrew Scott), a gay screenwriter haunted by a half-buried past, who lives in a seemingly empty building where his only neighbor is Harry (the ever-wonderful Paul Mescal), a seductive guy whom he rejects when he shows up drunk at his door in search of company. All very odd? Even odder is how Adam spends his time: in repeat visits to his childhood home, where he finds his still-young parents, Jamie Bell and Claire Foy, miraculously intact and happy to see him, despite their having died in a car crash when he was young and stuggling to come out.Between these time-travel visits in which he seeks to reconcile his gayness and childhood, Adam is back in the weirdly empty high-rise, falling in love with Harry. These strange, haunted scenes are reminiscent of Tilda Swinton’s time with her mother in the empty hotel of Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter (2022). Half gothic, half ghost story, Strangers is never about plot. Rather, Haigh is concerned, as always, with plumbing the power of emotions—desires, regrets—to shape a life. His films’ twists and turns play with expectation. This one eventually delivered a sucker punch of an ending that left Adam bereft and audiences filing out in a daze, buzzing into the night.Equally suckered and punched is Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch), the central figure in Ilker Çatak’s school exposé, Das Lehrerzimmer (The Teacher’s Lounge), in which the teacher herself ends up framed. Partly a look at how wokeism can be twisted, targeting immigrant students and highlighting how outsiders still can be scapegoated, the film takes up a case of petty theft that twists and turns until only the one who tries to do right ends up wronged. It’s a story of misunderstanding and isolation, but one that confounds the audience as its targets change and motives slip and slide. To be sure, it’s a very German film in its preoccupation with social status and insider/outsider dynamics; it’s no surprise that it premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, where it was lauded. Çatak’s choice to center questions of justice within an unremarkable school makes it especially chilling.In Pablo Larraín’s latest, El Conde (The Count), Jaime Vadell is cast as a 250-year-old vampire by the name of Pinochet. Yes, for the fiftieth anniversary of the Chilean coup, Larraín audaciously cast the despotic general as a vampire who has faked his own death and hides out on a remote island, plotting his return to the domains of the living. Sequestered with his wife and loyal butler, he prepares for a visit by the adult children who have grown impatient waiting for their inheritance.But where is it? The children, like the Chilean state, want to know where Pinochet has hidden the assets and riches stolen throughout his dictatorship. To answer that question, a young and beautiful nun (Paula Luchsinger) arrives, carrying both her accounting books and her exorcism kit, determined to set things right. (Inevitably, the populist exorcist will become a vampire too, and her giddy scene of learning to fly through the skies is a treat that rivals Hong Kong cinema’s beloved high-wire acts.)That’s the plot, sort of, but the brilliance of the film is in Larraín’s decision to engage Ed Lachman to shoot it. Long known as Todd Haynes’s cinematographer, Lachman employed a new Arriflex camera and vintage glass lenses to deliver a deeply rich, velvet, digital black and white with a chiaroscuro lighting that could bring even a vampire to life—a satisfying aesthetic experience that felt very appropriate for Telluride. Larraín has become as chamelionlike as he is prolific, switching between films unearthing Chile’s past (No!, Neruda) and international productions focused on political women (Jackie, Spencer). This time, he merges the two, infusing this most notorious political figure with an even more capacious backstory that leaves a shockingly bitter political aftertaste.Like all film festivals, Telluride is awash in options impossible to parse with certainty or to take in with any sense of completion. I decided to participate in a festival tradition: the carefully curated testimonial tributes, which this year all necessarily featured directors. There were testimonies to three directors on offer: Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, with Poor Things; Italian writer-director Alice Rohrwacher, with La Chimera; and German filmmaker Wim Wenders, with both Anselm and Perfect Days.I chose a Wim Wenders–hosted screening of Anselm, his 3D dive into Anselm Kiefer’s work and history, followed by a Q&A with MoMA film curator Rajendra Roy and the presentation of the testimonial medallion by Werner Herzog himself. It’s remarkable that Wenders has not been previously so honored: onstage, he paid tribute to Tom Luddy, crediting him as the first person to bring him to California and then Colorado, someone who was always his champion. It was a somber moment. Anselm provided an immersion in the artist’s universe, plunging the audience into enormous studios where the art often looked like a construction site with machinery, but without any olive branch extended to the audience in the form of narration, explanation, or even identification: it was purely experiential.I also attended a tribute to Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher, whose portrayals of life in the Italian countryside have long charmed audiences. Her new film, La Chimera, deployed its narrative within the real-life milieu of the tomberoni, the tomb raiders who wantonly excavate Etruscan tombs that have lain untouched for centuries, bent on digging up precious artifacts to sell to the highest bidder. With a love story wrapped inside these excavations and the beguiling presence of Isabella Rossellini as a dotty matriarch, it charmed the house.Rohrwacher also introduced a screening of Georgian filmmaker Kote Mikaberidze’s silent slapstick comedy My Grandmother (1929), a madcap journey through an impossible Soviet bureaucracy that was banned for fifty years. There, she paid tribute to the acclaimed Finnish band the Cleaning Women, who provided the live musical accompaniment (as well as the soundtrack for La Chimera).And, yes, I skipped the tribute to current bad-boy star Yorgos Lanthimos with Poor Things. I’ll leave it to others to sing his praises, as so many will. For me, Poor Things was unbearable. Yes, I know: Emma Stone! No doubt the nominations will roll in. Whenever I see an actress in such a fervent display of masochistic exposure, I think to myself: Oh, honey, you trusted your director. That this performance is already considered Oscar gold is tremendously depressing: ticks and oddities, plunder and idiocy, lots of sex and nudity—and she prevails in the end, so no blame game! Bludgeoned by its lavish sets, exoticized period trimmings, clearly massive budget, and of course, the blaring “originality” of it all, I simply could not forgive the abjection that dominated the screen and my eyes, nor could I overlook the calculation of its final scene. Oh, if only I could unsee it.I licked my wounds and retreated, looking for an antidote, and found it in George C. Wolfe’s Rustin. At first glance it seems a traditional biopic tracing the importance of Bayard Rustin, whose life as a leading civil rights figure was shadowed by the homophobia of his era. Wolfe takes up Rustin’s life within those times, brilliantly casting Colman Domingo as the man who willed the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom into being and even convinced his reluctant pal Martin Luther King Jr. to deliver his landmark address. Wolfe is a brilliant director of actors, and Domingo is fierce in the role, managing to convey the passion and passions of a man whose homosexuality cost him his leadership role in the movement at a pivotal time. (It’s a subject that was explored at length twenty years ago in Nancy Kates and Bennett Singer’s documentary Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin.)Wolfe shows both Rustin’s hurt at being denied his rightful role by homophobic leaders unwilling to align with him as well as his elation at shepherding a new generation into the fight. And Wolfe shows that fight! The young activists flock to Rustin and believe in his bottom-up strategies, working the phones and churches and their own connections to deliver half a million people who would make history on that day, just a few months before John F. Kennedy’s Rustin is an movie political on the fiftieth anniversary of that it be and new young in these such a was the festival’s to the a by in his Yes, there was not only Wolfe and his team but also the festival on its own fiftieth It’s not festival Julie by a former who has of his The is a on the film, so the was too, an with her own film in the I to the many films by women that the festival has to a the form of a documentary It was the most film I at Telluride. In its some with Paul great My which I about from and which is by the Film the anniversary of her by an of her life. her to from the that out their a of and left by her an to bring back to she actress to the and with her a and in a of that of the of and and of the and will never the It is to that the film is more than the sum of its parts: a of a and history that in through the aesthetic she to her history of and in Telluride with The her most to her she the on the This is a of and young who out of and accept a of a in the in a even by we see we would be a more the the is the are out of are and a to is more or at this that it’s time to with with in the satisfying role of she has into off into the with a at her has a that is as satisfying as it is the on is the in first outing as a is a examination of the life of mother and her who is about to and The is herself when she would have been that a film of and the kind that the shape of life without or just a sense of drama a with a seems to the of their the is the at to within the of still a The time are a to time so that the film becomes a in how drama can in the absence of narrative well as the the and of of was never considered much of a festival for from documentary Werner and or for women from international like Claire or of from a at thanks to But that has and Telluride has become a where with an can and where films are of the Telluride are a in their audience with mainstream in new while still on to its the current generation of and seems to be these a the New Film Festival would be but on this is the of Telluride at the of clearly the of the a festival, it’s a an festival that folks from and it’s a for the film in the for which has no such In his first year as and with a on delivered a great edition even with the by the SAG-AFTRA And attendance was a on opening day, the was Film at to but her by at its directors and even the that make films Todd and the team the festival’s when the and even the off the Writers Guild an loud when introduced so well in New that I it than I in more to its audience more in on the was a very New in a where can be found in and where are on the outside Alice I outside like any and with then I the of for the Cannes from the but at the just as often I still in New I even of the festival as a of the back from into a of the film in its the first due to its on the but New audiences were able to at and see many of the films at Telluride or Venice, even Cannes or all at for their (The New its films at the time as the other fall festivals, even And I was able to of my by of his and The films that at Cannes and of Life is a of a and star as a and a who years an in This time, are in a for son, to him to him for up in but all does not of Life seems to have an to it’s no was to some twenty years but for him, he it this is his a that as as the would with and a sex scene more than It’s a his in to a for from to share his a of the John through a interview one year before his death and in that the life of clearly the to into a of the life takes its name from the which in from a in the past, when he with his to a hotel with a a of that becomes the central a the audience by his film on the subject of in than on It’s a of a who so his that he a and in At that up with a for the of his life, bent on from his son him for even at him, as he at one audience at too, who to a it’s his of it all the an for I in one and were there to was Berlin Film Festival director that over the the it would not the festival, a decision with and a by the It’s if the Berlin will with its that his final edition will and the and film in their own on this film, were also in is known for his great by and about to The revealed that their the he film that to for his of The as a match between or to the and and the It for a and beguiling

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.