Clockwise from top left: 'Misty Green,' 'Possible Love,' 'The Debut' and 'You Can See Everything.' Courtesy of A24 (3); Courtesy of Netflix Along with Sundance in January, Berlin in February and Cannes in May, the fall festival trifecta of Venice, Telluride and Toronto almost invariably yields many of the films destined to keep percolating in the conversation from critics’ group awards in December all the way to the Oscars mid-March. This year’s crop was way lighter than usual on major contenders, but The Hollywood Reporter’s hard-working reviews team nonetheless found plenty to love.
Five of our top 13 picks are documentaries, with subjects as varied as the resistance of independent journalism in Putin’s Russia; an iconoclast of British queer cinema; a devastating new perspective on the war in Gaza; a sui generis portrait of a convicted fraud queen; and the struggles of delivery workers in New York City.
On the narrative side, new vehicles for Julianne Moore, John Malkovich and Mahershala Ali gave those fine actors arguably their best roles in years, while the less widely known Rosalind Eleazar scored a star-making performance that should put her on every casting director’s radar; a giant of English realism crafted what will likely be the swan-song culmination of a glorious career; a debuting Lebanese director reinvigorated the heist genre; and a master of contemporary Korean cinema delivered a unique contemplation of the wealth and class divides.
-
DAU (Venice)
Image Credit: Phenomen Berlin At once immense and intimate, political, historical and personal, Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s loose biopic of Russian physicist Lev Lendau is the kind of shoot-for-the-moon feature that rarely happens anymore — and certainly not like this (the shoot relocated hundreds of actors and thousands of extras inside a giant simulacrum of the Soviet era, their daily interactions captured by a roving team of camera and sound technicians). Comparisons could be made to Oppenheimer or The Brutalist, but this is very much its own, highly original and cinematic labor of love, telling the tale of a brilliant man crushed by the weight of a totalitarian regime. — JORDAN MINTZER
