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TELLURIDE, Colo. — Complete with a secret screening that had everyone guessing for days, a seismic revelation (which became a bona fide viral moment) and an unusually strong lineup of world premieres and smart replays, the 53rd Telluride Film Festival turned out to be one of the strongest in years. Leaving aside the many great movies that debuted at Cannes (“Club Kid,” “Minotaur,” “Fjord”) and Sundance (“Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York”), we selected our favorites from an eventful Labor Day weekend — laborious but fun.
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‘The Debut’ (opens Dec. 11)
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Maybe you’ve heard the premise of “The Debut”: Meek suburban wife auditions for a community theater musical despite having no experience or, quite frankly, apparent talent. Sounds like Christopher Guest’s “Waiting for Guffman,” right? It is — for about five minutes. But Jesse Eisenberg’s delightful comedy takes so many odd, interesting and occasionally surreal turns in its hero’s journey that you’re never quite sure where it’s going next. Eisenberg is aided by the incomparable Julianne Moore playing the woman who, after falling into the role of Miss Danielle, the show’s tough-talking, toolbelt-wearing building super, finds herself transformed in ways that she could never anticipate. “The part’s amazing,” Paul Giamatti, brilliant as the theater troupe’s director, told me in Telluride. “She’s giving four performances in one performance.” Always up for an adventure, Moore has never been better or more thrilling. I can’t remember enjoying a movie more at a film festival. — Glenn Whipp
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‘Elsinore’ (opens Nov. 20)
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Andrew Scott was a genial presence around Telluride, bringing hot-priest energy to brunches and getting hugs from Oprah. But when it came time for the world premiere of his latest film, “Elsinore,” the mood was stunned, saddened and wowed. The movie is the definition of an actor making the most out of a showcase that’s perfect for him: a biopic that blends the verbal trickiness of “Hamlet” with the domestic anxieties of Scott’s devastating “All of Us Strangers.” There’s some fun in knowing that he’s playing Ian Charleson, the real-life Scottish actor best known for his turn in “Chariots of Fire” (taxi drivers sing the theme music at him) but whose career was cut short by AIDS and, even before then, a lack of luck. What “Elsinore” does is reclaim a piece of personal reinvention that should be more widely known. Lunging at the chance to take a stage role vacated by a furious Daniel Day-Lewis, Charleson created a Hamlet for the ages, all while racing against his own health. Shakespeare’s play is described in the movie as a text about “being alive” and also “becoming dead.” Spanning the two, Scott arrives at a performance of pure transcendence. — Joshua Rothkopf
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‘The Liberation’ (opens November TBD)
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It took me a while to realize this was a stealth horror film — even though it derives from the real-life history of director Guy Nattiv’s grandmother — and once you come to that understanding, it casts an insidious spell. A Holocaust survivor, New Jersey assistant bank manager Rita (Carrie Coon), like many frustrated middle-aged women of the early 1980s, found solace in different company, joining a women’s group and getting in touch with a deeper sense of self. It was not her fault that this group happened to be a cult, one that exploited her financially, sexually and spiritually, alienating Rita from her husband and two daughters. Nattiv clearly has a lot of anger, turning the structure of a story that usually has an inspiring ending (see “The Debut”) into something dark and cautionary. But I couldn’t shake it for days. Coon, on a staggering recent run that includes “His Three Daughters” and “The White Lotus,” is endlessly fascinating, toggling between desperation and euphoria, while also bringing the best out of co-stars Tracy Letts and Bella Ramsey. — J. Rothkopf
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‘Tender Loving Care’ (opens Dec. 4)
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Before the festival began, Telluride director Julie Huntsinger told me that if there was an overarching emotional through line to this year’s program, it was “tenderness.” Few films embodied that idea more completely than the latest from the great Mike Leigh. Over a career spanning more than half a century, the 83-year-old British filmmaker behind “Naked,” “Secrets & Lies” and “Vera Drake” has found endless comedy and pathos in ordinary people doing their imperfect best to get along. Kate O’Flynn, who recently broke out in the Apple TV series “Widow’s Bay,” plays Amy, a London child protective worker, alongside Alice Bailey Johnson as her relentlessly upbeat best friend and fellow social worker and Marion Bailey and Paul Jesson as her aging parents. There’s not much plot but there doesn’t need to be. Leigh simply spends time with these characters as they care for others while confronting the complications of their own lives and the limits of how much they can actually help anyone. Health issues prevented Leigh from making the trip to Telluride, but he sent a warm video message to introduce the screening, saying the film “speaks for itself.” If this proves to be his final feature, it would be hard to imagine one more unmistakably his own. — Josh Rottenberg
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‘Wild Horse Nine’ (opens Nov. 6)
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After more than four decades onscreen, John Malkovich has become so thoroughly Malkovichian that it can sometimes be hard to see the actor beneath all that Malkovichness. Martin McDonagh, the writer-director behind “In Bruges,” “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” and “The Banshees of Inisherin,” draws something new out of him. Set largely on Easter Island against the backdrop of the 1973 Chilean coup, his death-haunted comedy casts Malkovich as an aging CIA operative whose health is failing and whose memory is beginning to go, with Sam Rockwell as his longtime partner and friend. The banter between the two gives McDonagh’s script its usual comic crackle. In the quieter moments, Malkovich lets us see Chris reckoning with a life spent doing his country’s dirty work. When I spoke with Malkovich before Telluride, he waved away the idea that he was overdue for more awards: “I’ve been awarded a billion times over.” The academy has nominated him twice, for 1984’s “Places in the Heart” and 1993’s “In the Line of Fire.” Thirty-three years after that last nomination, he seems all but guaranteed to earn a third. — J. Rottenberg
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‘You Can See Everything’ (opens October TBA)
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Telluride attendees spent days obsessing over what movie would screen as the Sunday surprise premiere, and the unceasing speculation felt like it could only result in a letdown. That didn’t happen. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s 174-minute all-access documentary about Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes is, as you’d expect, wild and surprising and wholly original, less an inquiry into the guilt or innocence of its delusional subject and more an examination of how truth has become so slippery in the 21st century. Holmes tells Fielder she has never lied, a contention that clearly troubles him. But it becomes clear that she believes that her version of reality is the only authentic truth, facts be damned. Once she goes to prison, Holmes’ controlling partner Billy Evans takes center stage, along with the real star of the film, a celebrated actress that Fielder recruits to help him in his inquiry. Moderating a Q&A after the film, Emma Stone called this section of the movie a “rom-com caper” and she’s not far off. (She and Fielder also asked to keep the actress’ identity a secret. Fair enough — for now.) No documentary has ever been nominated for a best picture Oscar, but “You Can See Everything” is so fascinating and rewatchable that it deserves to break the seal. — G.W.
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