Fall Festival Breakouts: 20 Movies That Got People Talking at Venice, Telluride and Toronto

For those of us who think of Led Zeppelin as the Beatles of heavy metal, not to mention one of the four or five greatest rock ‘n’ roll bands of all time, the first documentary about them is a compelling but not fully satisfying movie. The director, Bernard MacMahon, spends an hour chronicling the group’s roots in the ’50s and ’60s. And though he interviews Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones, who prove to be charming if incredibly guarded raconteurs of their own legend, they’re the only people he talks to. The film has amazing sequences that make it a must-see for any Zep fan, but on some level it feels like a Led Zeppelin infomercial. — Owen Gleiberman
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Though the Troubles have been depicted to the point of exhaustion on-screen, director Kenneth Branagh avoids many of the clichés in favor of a more personal look back, through a child’s eyes. The cine-memoir is rendered all the more effective on account of young discovery Jude Hill and the portrayal of a family crowded under one roof. Shot mostly in black-and-white, the project will undoubtedly strike some as Branagh’s “Roma” by way of John Boorman’s WWII-set “Hope and Glory.” — Peter Debruge
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Writer-director Paul Schrader moves into the card-sharp genre with consummate ease and skill. Oscar Isaac is all svelte control as a lonely-man drifter who spends his days driving from one casino to the next, beating the house at blackjack. Here, as in “First Reformed,” Schrader embeds his tale with a topical issue that’s like an open wound, a scar on our national psyche. As it turns out, Isaac’s character participated in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. He represents our collective desire for absolution. Schrader sets up a heady thriller framework, and Tiffany Haddish brings a playfully cynical warm sparkle to the role of a poker matchmaker. But part of the beauty of poker is that it doesn’t represent anything; it’s just a game. “The Card Counter” is a good game that forgets it’s a game by working so hard to be a statement. —OG
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A small, soft-spoken yet casually profound family drama in which a subdued, post-“Joker” Joaquin Phoenix plays a middle-aged radio journalist, “C’mon C’mon” arrives on the heels of a pair of intensely personal yet easily relatable films Mike Mills wrote and directed about his relationship to his mother (“20th Century Women”) and father (“Beginners”). This one also deals with parenthood, albeit from the other side of the equation, as Mills uses the fictional dynamic between Phoenix’s character and his 9-year-old nephew (Woody Norman) to explore his own insecurities as a parent. — PD
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On those occasions when “Cyrano de Bergerac” is performed in English, it’s often stripped of its verse or played for laughter and farce, whereas Joe Wright’s splendid new adaptation presents “Cyrano” as 21st-century MGM musical. By enlisting Bryce and Aaron Dessner of the National to compose the songs, “Cyrano” restores the show’s sense of poetry, while Wright, back on form and evidently reinvigorated by the pandemic, displays the kind of radical creativity that made early-career stunners “Pride and Prejudice” and “Atonement” so electrifying in their time. — PD
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In a year with a well-above-average number of musicals popping up on the big screen, “Dear Evan Hansen” is the farthest below average in terms of merit: a curve-crashing after-school special about how people process tragedy in the age of oversharing. Your mileage may vary. Where some audiences feel seen, others are bound to take offense, and that split is what makes the Broadway hit such a fascinating phenomenon. Director Steven Chbosky and company haven’t necessarily fixed all that was wrong with the show, but they’ve been listening, at least. — PD
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Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 cult sci-fi novel is eye-bogglingly vast: a majestically somber and grand sci-fi trance-out, full of lavish hugger-mugger — clan wars, brute armies, a grotesque autocrat villain, a hero who may be the Messiah — that links it, in spirit and design, to the “Star Wars” and “Lord of the Rings” films. For an hour or so, the movie is rather mesmerizing, throwing off seductive glints of treachery as it presents the tale of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), the gifted scion of the House Atreides, whose father, Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), has been placed in charge of the spice-mining desert planet Arrakis. After a while, though, the story begins to lose its pulse. “Dune” is rich with “themes” and visual motifs (and the giant sandworms are good for a moment or two of old-fashioned creature-feature awe), but it turns into a movie about Chalamet’s Paul piloting through sandstorms and hooking up with the rebels of the desert, who in this movie are a lot more noble than interesting. — OG
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Andrew Garfield and Jessica Chastain play Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker in a ticklishly fascinating rise-and-fall biopic. You’d expect director Michael Showalter (“The Big Sick”) to treat televangelism as kitsch, but instead he gives Jim and Tammy Faye the full dignity and scandal of their humanity. He uses their greedhead soap opera to tell the larger American story of how Christianity got turned into showbiz. Garfield plays Jim as a velvet-voiced sociopath, and Chastain, tapping a flamboyance she has never displayed before, makes Tammy Faye a mesmerizing diva-victim who went along for the ride. — OG
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Audrey Diwan’s quietly devastating sophomore feature is the latest in an ongoing run of tough, emotionally intelligent art films dealing frankly with the subject of abortion access: It earns its place in the company of “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” and “Lingui.” Adapted from a semi-autobiographical novel by Annie Ernaux, the story isn’t new, but bears repeating at a time when no ground gained in the longterm battle for women’s reproductive rights can be taken for granted. Without didactic rhetoric or politicking, “Happening” powerfully essays the risks of refusing women control over their bodies. — Guy Lodge
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The vast majority of sports movies are about exceptional talent. Featuring a grizzled and nearly unrecognizable Will Smith in the title role, “Monsters and Men” director Reinaldo Marcus Green’s “King Richard” is about exceptional belief: the conviction of one man, Richard Williams, that he could turn his daughters Venus and Serena into the world’s greatest tennis players. Hindsight makes this a story worth telling. At the time, everyone thought he was crazy. “It’s like asking someone to believe you have the next two Mozarts living in your house,” says one coach, passing up the opportunity of a lifetime. — PD
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Edgar Wright’s murky, middling blend of horror and time-traveling fantasy is a surprising misfire, all the more disappointing for being made with such palpable care and conviction. Wright’s particular affections for B-movies, British Invasion pop and a fast-fading pocket of urban London may be written all over the film, but they aren’t compellingly written into it, ultimately swamping the thin supernatural sleuth story at its heart. Juvenile characterizations and plotting lean into YA territory, while a few grisly spurts of sex and gore suggest otherwise. At a certain point, even the period music cues prove uninspired. — GL
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First a little girl goes missing, then her doll, in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Lost Daughter,” a daring psychological drama in which what should have been an idyllic summer vacation instead becomes a kind of overdue emotional workout for Olivia Colman’s character. “I’m an unnatural mother,” she confesses at one point, saying aloud what women aren’t typically allowed to admit about motherhood — that not everyone is cut out for the job — in a film that gives any who may have felt this way a rare sense of being recognized. — PD
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Adapting Balzac is no small feat for any filmmaker, and in whittling down the three volumes that comprise “Lost Illusions,” director Xavier Giannoli has a million choices to make. Casting was crucial — he shrewdly taps “Summer of 85” discovery Benjamin Voisin to play Lucien, surrounding the gifted newcomer with top talents (including Gérard Depardieu and Xavier Dolan) — but more important was the filmmaker’s decision to emphasize the character’s shady career as a journalist. Turns out, there’s nothing new about fake news, and it may shock today’s audiences to learn just how powerful — and how corrupt — the media was two centuries ago this year. — PD
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A Romanian crime drama of bracing authenticity and dread. Written and directed by Bogan George Apetri, it’s framed as the story of Cristina (Ioana Bugarin), a novice nun who takes a taxi into the city, heading for an Ob/Gyn clinic. That surprises us, but what happens on the ride back is even more shocking. The film gets taken over by a police inspector, and since the actor who plays him, Emanual Pârvu, looks like a handsome literature prof, we assume he’s going to be the civilized face of the law. But Pârvu is a wily actor who throws curveballs. He’s not just solving a crime — he’s trying to restore order to a place that has gone to the dogs. “Miracle,” as it closes in on its heart of darkness, creates a slow-burn suspense that won’t quit. — OG
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In this stylishly ironic fish-out-of-water movie, director Ana Lily Amirpour proves she’s got it: the ability not to just to tell a story but to hold an audience in the palm of her hand. Mona Lisa (Jeon Jong-seo) is a catatonic waif who uses telekinetic powers to escape an insane asylum; she then heads into the New Orleans night. You may ask: Do we really need a fairy tale for adults, dunked in the squalor of the streets, about a victim-rebel-avenger who possesses a power that would make her right at home with the X-Men? Maybe not, but Amirpour grounds the fantasy, telling it in images of darkly burnished color and light (the film looks like “Taxi Driver on the Bayou”). As Bonnie Belle, a stripper who carries her own vibe of alienated toughness, Kate Hudson acts with a no-fuss authenticity, and Ed Skrein works diabolical wonders with the role of Fuzz, a white hip-hop drug dealer in Lou-Reed-in-1971 bangs. — OG
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Pedro Almodóvar’s movie tells the story of two women (Penélope Cruz and Milena Smit), both single mothers, who give birth to their daughters at virtually the same moment. It’s a film of cascading twists and turns, of thickening complication, of high family drama. Yet it’s not an over-the-top Pedro party. It’s a straightforwardly sculpted and emotionally down-to-earth drama that ties the inexorable pull of family to an excavation of Spain’s tragic past. Cruz acts with a mood-shifting immediacy that leaves you breathless. — OG
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Jane Campion’s stately modernist Western is made with an austere poker-faced classicism, and roiling undercurrents, that sometimes bring “The Piano” to mind. Set in Montana in 1925, it centers on two rancher brothers: Jesse Plemons as the proper, officious George and Benedict Cumberbatch as Phil, a drawling cowboy monomaniac with desires he hides even from himself. The tensions between the two are already simmering when George marries a distraught widow (Kirsten Dunst) and takes her and her lisping, delicate son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) to live on the ranch. Campion works with a painterly precision and control yet treats her characters like puzzle pieces, fitting them into a grand scheme that connects with the audience in an overly programmatic way. The film’s dramatic upshot is to denounce homophobia — an unassailable message. But maybe, at this point, not a revelatory one. — OG
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No risk that “Free Solo” directors E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin have depicted thus far has been more significant or more unreservedly worth taking than the one they chart in this stunning documentary, which takes us to the summer of 2018, when the Wild Boar soccer team got trapped in Tham Luang, an extensive and labyrinthine cave in Northern Thailand. Joined by thousands of concerned citizens and multifarious experts, an epic and terrifying battle of constantly changing unknowns had to be won to save them. — Tomris Laffly
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Pablo Larraín has made an intimate speculative drama about Princess Diana and how she freed herself from the life she chose, and the life that was killing her. As Di, Kristen Stewart speaks in a voice that’s soft and satiny, the words tumbling out in a whispery rush. Stewart changes her aspect, her rhythm, her karma; she becomes Diana. The movie is set at the Sandringham Estate over the Christmas holiday, and it takes the form of a you-are-there voyeuristic diary. Larraín places Di in this lush getaway palace as if he were making a royal version of “The Shining.” The real-world dilemma is there — Diana is trapped in a loveless marriage to a diffident stick who openly betrays her — yet the film also creates a dream projection of who she was inside. — OG
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Barry Levinson’s Holocaust drama feels like a late-career reckoning. It tells the true story of Harry Haft (Ben Foster), a Polish Jew who gets sent to Auschwitz in 1943, where he witnesses the lowest circle of the inferno of the death camps. But he also becomes a boxer, sparring with other prisoners for the entertainment of the Nazis, and this allows him not to perish. “The Survivor” is a Holocaust drama, a boxing movie, a character study, and a meditation on guilt. The pieces don’t always mesh, but this is still Levinson’s strongest movie in a long time. You feel the fervor of his commitment. Foster’s performance, at once athletic and anguished, turns Harry into something more ambiguous than a plaster Jewish saint who knows how to use his fists. He’s a pensive bruiser trying to fight his way out of purgatory. — OG
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