If you were at a film festival this fall, chances are you saw one of our crew on the ground, our microphone poking over the velvet rope to ask actors and filmmakers some of your most pressing questions. “I love Letterboxd,” Taylor Russell told us, not long after the one and only Cate Blanchett gave us a soundbite to end all soundbites. We even got the scoop from Aftersun daddy Paul Mescal on his four favorite films—he is a confirmed Blue Valentine fan, for the tortured romantics out there.

We snagged time for some in-depth conversations with the likes of New York Film Festival’s assistant director of marketing, Jordan Raup.

We were there for spitgate. We saw Oscar prognosticators feverishly tallying the standing ovations of every film to see how it might impact their awards predictions. But most importantly, we saw the movies themselves.

That includes having some of our lucky correspondents catching The People’s Joker at TIFF before Warner Bros swooped in and put the red tape up, potentially ensuring that no one will ever see Vera Drew’s queer coming-of-age story. (#FreeThePeoplesJoker!)

With awards season quickly pulling into port, we asked our crew who were at Venice, London, Toronto, Austin, New York and Beyond to scour the Letterboxd reviews, jog their own memories, and highlight the best the season had to offer. Open your watchlists and prepare to add selections from John Forde.

Photographer Nan Goldin has always embraced her cinematic sensibilities; documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras has already investigated the truth in injustice, inviting those in the wrong to come after her. It’s a match made in heaven: Poitras tells Goldin’s story through her eyes and more specifically through her experience as an activist fighting to take down the Sackler family. You might know them best as the billionaire architects of the opioid crisis in the US, the epidemic that lost Goldin so many of her friends and almost killed her, too.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is fascinated with what it means to live a life and hold on to it—through photos, through fighting. Jasmine Graham calls the film “an impactful documentary about the intersection of art and politics, showing that art is inherently political,” while Andrew Jupin states, “it makes you mad, it makes you cry… it makes you want to live.”

It’s pretty thrilling that a film with so much fire and ambition won over the festival masses and took home the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Film Festival, where it premiered. So much of Poitras’ narrative is focused on the power art can have to change society, to save a life, to prove that all of this really did happen. “In a way it’s healing,” Alma writes of the film’s frank portrayal of the tragedies, “but it doesn’t let you forget about how the epidemic is literally never getting better.” The fight isn’t over. Films like this make up part of our armor. EK

Bones and All

Directed by Luca Guadagnino, written by David Kajganich, from a novel by Camille DeAngelis. In theaters November 18, from United Artists. Seen at: Venice, Telluride, Fantastic Fest, BFI London Film Festival, AFI Fest.

Let’s cut to the chase: Bones and All is neither as gory nor as erotic as you’d expect from a cannibal romance. Much less one made by Luca Guadagnino, the same man who directed the sweat-soaked Call Me by Your Name and 2018’s blood-drenched Suspiria. His latest film skews much more coming-of-age drama than traditional horror, opting to mine dread from vulnerability, alienation, and the terrible fate of drifting through life unloved.

Of course, there’s still plenty of carnage: “Romantic, bloody, tragic—so full of love. Never has the sight of dried blood around the mouth felt so sensual,” raves Iana. Taylor Russell stars as Maren, an eighteen-year-old vagabond traveling through the badlands of 1980s America to find answers about her genetic disposition towards cannibalism. She meets an ensemble of eccentrics (Mark Rylance, Chloë Sevigny, Michael Stuhlbarg) along the way, but none as important as Lee (Timothée Chalamet). He’s a bisexual heart attack in pink hair-dye and ripped jeans. He wears a silly hat and dances to Kiss. And he also eats people.

Maren and Lee are the pinnacle of Midwestern emo, a power couple surging with the electricity of repressed pain and insatiable hunger. Invisible magnets pull them towards each other, apart, and back together again as they wander the country avoiding their own hang-ups. Ultimately, the young lovers’ struggle is rooted in their reticence to spill guts—both literally and figuratively. The only solution is to eat. To let each other in. Bones and all. MV

Along with some new thematic interests (“All rise for the anti-fascist Pinocchio,” writes Jay), tactile, practical craft takes precedence, as the director has ionately highlighted in the run-up to the film’s release, foregrounding the craftspeople (including Laika’s former head of puppets, Georgina Hayns), righteously preaching animation’s breadth and emotional power, and the unique pleasures of stop-motion as a medium.

That ion is prominent in Pinocchio—not just in its puppets, but also in its gorgeous painted backdrops rather than the CG environments of Laika’s works (or the hideous CG of Zemeckis’s adaptation), as it insists on hand craft at every turn, dedicated to in-camera effects work and updates of traditional techniques. Not to sell short its other, simpler pleasures too—as Alice puts it, “Every fairy tale should feature a singing and narrating Ewan McGregor.” Truer words, etc. KC

How to Blow Up a Pipeline was picked up by NEON after a few buzzy screenings at Toronto and will likely hit theaters in 2023. Goldhaber’s film possesses much verve and swagger; it’s DIY of the highest order, and a needed reminder that timely narratives can pack a punch, too. Fringe filmmaking empathizing with fringe characters, and everyone involved is about to blow up. BF

I Like Movies

Written and directed by Chandler Levack. Awaiting distribution. Seen at: TIFF.

I Like Movies is a film made by and for people who use Letterboxd. Its page on Letterboxd includes “reviews” from its writer-director and its producer, both of them personal pleas for readers to check out their micro-budget project at TIFF 2022. Thankfully, the movie more than lives up to those earnest entreaties, delivering a sweet, but not too sweet, coming-of-age dramedy that strikes a tricky balance between fuzzy nostalgia and clear-eyed realism.

Taking place in Burlington, Ontario circa 2003, the film marks the age of time mostly through the rotating titles of films on the suburban marquees and new-release walls that make up Lawrence Kweller’s (Isaiah Lehtinen) world. (Letterboxd clearly appreciate its many movie references, shouting out Lawrence’s Steel Magnolias poster and love of Todd Solondz in reviews.) Lawrence is a high school senior with no special talents, an average intellect, and nonexistent social skills. He does know a lot about movies, however, which gives him an unearned sense of superiority over his peers.

Like a loving but firm parent, writer-director Chandler Levack wants the best for Lawrence. But she doesn’t coddle him, either. This is a film about learning to be happy with what you have, a humbling lesson that nearly everyone has to learn at some point but is rarely dramatized on screen. But while Levack wisely allows her strong screenplay to carry the film, Lehtinen is what really makes it shine. It’s a self-assured, intuitive performance that’s annoying when it needs to be, and vulnerable when we least expect it. “I never wanted to punch someone in the face more! It was incredible,” Veniott writes, a succinct (and accurate) summation of this film’s vibe. KR

Brutal and visceral, I was locked into The Inspection from start to finish. Highly recommended, but a tough watch at the same time. With an A24 release soon, audiences will have the chance to determine for themselves on what side of the debate they fall. LK

Master Gardener

Written and directed by Paul Schrader. Acquired by Magnolia Pictures. Seen at: Venice, NYFF.

Paul Schrader is still working. This, in and of itself, would be no small feat for any filmmaker in their mid 70s, even without the extenuating circumstances of a global pandemic. But when Schrader was hospitalized with Covid-related pneumonia and breathing difficulties shortly after the world premiere of Master Gardener in Venice, it served as a sobering reminder of both his colossal impact on the American independent cinema and the risks required of him to continue making movies today, more than 40 years after the release of Taxi Driver.

This bears noting in light of Master Gardener, a film about steady, patient labor being rewarded with an eventual profusion of vivid, utopian beauty. Set on a Southern plantation where a head horticulturist (Joel Edgerton) privately atones for past sins by tending to the estate’s lavish gardens, the film blooms gradually, unfurling as the plantation’s imperious owner (Sigourney Weaver) and her troubled grand-niece (Quintessa Swindell) challenge and entrance him to unearth what he’s long kept buried.

More hopeful and quietly humorous than First Reformed and The Card Counter, Master Gardener is in many ways classic Schrader: a meditation on lived guilt, violent redemption, and the spiritually cleansing force of human connection. But in the decades-long work of revealing himself to audiences, through ideas and images that recur as motifs in his oeuvre, Schrader has also made it possible to catch vibrant variations on his established themes. It is this practice, and Master Gardener’s turn toward the light—in which facing the past might not require annihilative violence and could instead offer absolution, a second chance—that most clarifies the film’s tender beauty and cumulative power.

“Let me know when the Discourse starts on this one so I can throw my phone into the Adriatic,” snarks Bilge Ebiri from the film’s Venice world premiere, awarding it four stars. New York Film Festival responses were largely enthusiastic about this “film of collapsing contrasts: white and Black, young and old, chaos and order, love and hate,” as Brian writes. “In a lesser artist’s hands, such juxtapositions would seem banal, but Schrader makes them almost sublime.” IF

Aided by Diop’s inclination to let the camera linger, inviting the viewer into a harrowing state of ive pondering, Saint Omer builds a searing examination of the hypocritical nature of morality. Under the heavy weight of the judge’s gavel stands not only a woman, but unyielding societal constructs built to force women into conformity, a bleak box that favors little but desperation. And desperation, here, is an eerily silent state of utter displacement—cultural, familial, personal. Embodying this labyrinthine notion, Malanga finds brilliance in stillness, crafting a bone-chilling performance that anchors the film in gripping tangibility.

“It challenges all notions of understanding—both subjective and objective, and of the difference between judgment and justice and leaves you with no answers but your own feelings,” Mikey Brzezinksi neatly encapsulates. The sentiment is echoed by Chaim Kindergelt, who labels Saint Omer a “stirring experimentation in the machinations of subjectivity, a rigorous orchestration of colonial affects entwined with matriarchal relations.” RSR

TÁR

Written and directed by Todd Field. In theaters now, from Focus Features. Seen at: Venice, Telluride, NYFF.

It’s been a long time since I have needed to spend a solid 72 hours unpacking a film in great detail, but after a second screening of TÁR I did just that with several friends over the course of a weekend. Just when we thought we’d exhausted all possible angles, someone would pipe up: “Hey what do you think it meant when she…” and off we’d go again, filling in knowledge gaps with Leonard Bernstein’s ‘Art of Conducting’, Simon Rattle’s thoughts on the “great fake profession”, Michael Tilson Thomas’s documentary on Gustav Mahler, photos of MTT and Bernstein together over the years.

Todd Field places the unraveling of fictional composer and conductor Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) in both the elite symphonic landscape and the present cultural context (TÁR takes place in late 2022; New Yorker Festival season). Not that you need to know it’s the real Adam Gopnik interviewing her at the start, or who the initials “MTT” refer to when Tár sneers at her alarm clock radio as it wakes her with one of Tilson’s recordings. But it’s an extremely satisfying state to be left in as an audience member, wanting to know more about everything both made-up and real in Todd Field’s twisty new version of a well-worn tale, the public fall from grace.

There are no diminishing returns here. Once you emerge, blinking, overwhelmed by Cate Blanchett’s tour-de-force performance as the title character, and begin to piece together finer details—an email, a casual line of dialogue, a handbag, a lunch order, a prime number—it’s like belatedly hearing the other instruments in a symphony in which Lydia Tár has played all the solos. They were there the whole time, we just had to listen for them.

And Letterboxd are certainly listening, as TÁR has recently cracked our Official Top 250 of All Time. And then there’s this, from Madeline Burg, which I can only hear in Tár’s voice: “Bradley Cooper you better pack up your little Bernstein biopic baby.” GG

With its desaturated color palette and Andrew Wyeth visuals, it could be the nineteenth century or the Great Depression—until an unexpected music cue pulls us, disturbingly, closer to our own times. Polley describes the film as a “fable”, though in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned, it’s as terrifyingly prescient as The Handmaid’s Tale. “This movie snuck [up] on me and slowly destroyed me in the best emotional way,” CitizenDeKrane writes. Despite the grim subject matter, the film also offers humor and hope, as Rooney Mara’s Ona quietly steers the women towards the dream of a better world. “Hope for the unknown is good,” she counsels. “It’s better than hatred of the familiar.”

Polley follows Ona’s lead, taking her audience into thrillingly unfamiliar territory. If Maria Schrader’s She Said gives the #MeToo movement its creation story, Women Talking sures it in imaginative scope, creating what Zoë Rose Bryant calls “a radical act of female reinvention.” The future is female, people. JF