This week, with Ryan Lattanzio covering the Venice International Film Festival, David Ehrlich joined “Screen Talk” co-host Anne Thompson from the mountains of Telluride, Colorado to discuss the 60-feature line-up for the Labor Day celebration of cinema.
David gives us early reviews of several films that are already breaking in Venice: He enjoyed Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Bugonia,” starring his usual suspects Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, but wants to see the director get more ambitious next time. He also enjoyed Noah Baumbach’s “Jay Kelly,” in which George Clooney plays a version of himself, but would have liked Adam Sandler to have more to do.
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At Telluride, Anne and David are excited to see two book adaptations: Chloé Zhao’s tearjerker “Hamnet” starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, and Philippa Lowthorpe’s “H is for Hawk,” starring Claire Foy, which deal with grief for a lost child and a father, respectively. There are a lot of films from the UK, to some degree filling in for a lack of American titles, and, as usual, many films that already hit at Cannes and Sundance and Berlin.
Anne adored Sundance title “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” whose star Rose Byrne is one to beat in the Best Actress Oscar race. As for Best Actor, Ethan Hawke is unaccountably moving in one of two Richard Linklater films in Telluride, “Blue Moon.” The other is Cannes title “Nouvelle Vague.” It’s the Austin director’s first time here.
Other new titles debuting in Telluride are “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere,” starring Jeremy Allen White as the New Jersey rocker during the creation of “Nebraska” and Edward Berger’s “Ballad of a Small Player,” starring Colin Farrell as a down-and-out gambler.
Anne and David agree that the spate of Cannes titles will play well at Telluride on their road to Oscar, as they did last year, including prize-winners “Sentimental Value,” from Joachim Trier; “It Was Just an Accident,” from Jafar Panahi; “The Secret Agent,” from Kleber Mendonça Filho; and “Urchin,” from rookie Harris Dickinson. Frank Dillane also deserves consideration for his performance as an unhoused man in Dickinson’s feature directorial debut.
Is it a strong lineup? David points out that Venice landed many of the juiciest new titles, including Laura Poitras’ documentary “Cover-Up,” about investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, and wonders why Neon hasn’t already acquired it. That film will come to Telluride. One we still have to wait for? Kathryn Bigelow’s “A House of Dynamite,” which travels to the New York Film Festival next month.
Listen to this week’s “Screen Talk” episode below.
