This time last year, “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” were taking a victory lap after saving cinema. We spent the summer swooning over Celine Song’s heartbreaking love story “Past Lives” while Cannes and the fall film festivals unveiled the likes of “Killers of the Flower Moon,” “The Zone of Interest,” “Poor Things,” “Maestro,” “The Holdovers,” “Anatomy of a Fall” and “American Fiction.”
Those 10 movies became the finest group of best picture Oscar nominees we’ve had since the motion picture academy expanded the category in 2009. A mix of critical favorites, audience crowd-pleasers and the raw material for a dozen different Halloween costumes, this class was impeccable and, at least for the near future, unrepeatable.
Which brings us to 2024, where, at the moment, the two movies that have most thrilled audiences at Cannes and the fall film festivals are Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez,” a musical soap opera about a Mexican cartel boss looking to transition to a being woman, and Sean Baker’s “Anora,” the madcap, generous story of a Brooklyn sex worker who impulsively marries the young son of a Russian oligarch. Both films premiered earlier this year at Cannes, where “Anora” won the festival’s highest prize, the Palme d’Or.
“This isn’t exactly a mainstream movie,” Baker said at Cannes, both stating the obvious and expressing the tone of the upcoming awards season in a mere half-dozen words.
From the size of the crowds standing outside theaters showing “Anora” at Telluride, you might have suspected Baker was underselling his movie a bit. Hundreds were turned away, a notable (and happy) contrast to the divisive reception that Baker’s last movie, “Red Rocket,” received at the festival two years ago.
Have audiences become more open and adventurous? We’re about to find out as we enter an Oscar season that seems as unsettled as any in recent memory, dominated by international auteurs, indie offerings and, fingers crossed (because we could really use a maximalist miracle), Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator II.”
Even the one blockbuster that’s already locked for a best picture nomination, Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Two,” stands as daring cinema, its spectacle aiming for both the gut and the intellect.
Villeneuve’s first “Dune” movie won six Oscars two years ago. The sequel might equal that count. But being the second film of a planned trilogy (even if Villeneuve doesn’t like to define the series that way), a best picture win is unlikely, an outcome any middle child already knows in their secret heart.
While “Anora” and “Emilia Pérez” established themselves at Cannes, the fall festivals offered a murkier picture of the season. “The Room Next Door,” Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language film, won the Golden Lion for best film at Venice. The drama follows a terminally ill journalist (Tilda Swinton) who asks a close friend (Julianne Moore) to stay with her as she contemplates taking her own life. Festival buzz at Venice and Toronto, aside from the Golden Lion, felt respectful but not quite rapturous.
The Telluride premieres of “Conclave” and “Nickel Boys” offered contrasting portraits of the ways audiences receive movies at festivals. The movies played back-to-back on Telluride’s opening night, with Edward Berger’s “Conclave,” a lively and occasionally clever melodrama about a bunch of petty cardinals choosing the next pope, wowing the crowd with a series of pulpy plot twists. Ralph Fiennes does most of the heavy lifting, playing a dutiful and doubting man overseeing the vote. “Conclave” feels like a movie made for the Oscars: absurd, stylish and not nearly as shrewd as it thinks it is. Expect it to clean up.
Ralph Fiennes stars in the Oscar-contending “Conclave.”
(Focus Features)
“Nickel Boys,” RaMell Ross’ disorienting adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s celebrated novel, followed “Conclave” and knocked its audience sideways. Shot from the point of view of its characters, two Black boys navigating the horrors of a Florida reform school, “Nickel Boys” invites moviegoers to immerse themselves and bear witness. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, wonderful as a loving grandmother, said festival-goers approached her after the screening, calling the movie “tough.” That’s fine with her.
“I think that we have been conditioned as moviegoers, particularly in this country, to have an expectation of how we should feel watching a film,” Ellis-Taylor told me at Telluride. “I want to be an advocate for cinema that is not palliative.”
To that end, the movie of the season might be “The Brutalist,” Brady Corbet’s three-and-a-half-hour epic that inspired a fierce bidding war after its Venice premiere, with chic indie studio A24 winning the rights. The story of a Hungarian Jewish architect (Adrien Brody) who survives World War II and relocates to America, the film is sprawling, nervy and demanding. It has an overture and an intermission and has been compared to “The Godfather” in the way it examines the American dream. The hype will be overwhelming when it arrives in theaters later this year.
By contrast, a below-the-radar standout is Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia’s astonishing “All We Imagine As Light,” winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes, and also a selection at Telluride, Toronto and the upcoming New York Film Festival. The film follows the lives of two roommates who work together as nurses at a hospital in Mumbai, capturing their dreams and disappointments in rich, evocative detail.
Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha in “All We Imagine As Light.”
(Petit Chaos)
Some films failed to make it out of the festivals unscathed, with critics roasting “Joker: Folie à Deux,” the sequel to Todd Phillips’ “Joker,” with Joaquin Phoenix reprising his Oscar-winning turn opposite Lady Gaga. The good news: Gaga will now have more time to tour behind her new record rather than campaigning for an Oscar.
“Maria,” starring Angelina Jolie as legendary opera singer Maria Callas, is Pablo Larraín’s latest look at a famous woman imprisoned by image and celebrity, following “Jackie” (about Jacqueline Kennedy) and “Spencer” (about Princess Diana). It’s a feast for the eyes and ears, but also a bit lifeless. Reviews were mixed, but never underestimate how awards voters will swoon for a biopic.
Jolie will have plenty of competition in the lead actress category, including Mikey Madison (“Anora”) and Karla Sofía Gascón (“Emilia Pérez”), along with Saoirse Ronan, who received a tribute at Telluride primarily pegged to her work playing a woman trying to maintain her sobriety in “The Outrun,” a Sundance premiere.
There’s also a ferociously raw turn from Oscar winner Nicole Kidman in “Babygirl,” an erotic thriller that was the talk of Venice and Toronto, and more greatness from Amy Adams, somehow not yet an Oscar winner, in the Toronto-premiering “Nightbitch,” a movie about the demands and joys of motherhood that also prompted a great deal of conversation, much of it decidedly dumb. Demi Moore was in Toronto too for the North American premiere of “The Substance,” a horror movie about women’s value in showbiz that contains the best work she has ever done.
Which brings us to movies not yet seen. There’s James Mangold’s look at Bob Dylan going electric, “A Complete Unknown,” starring Timothée Chalamet. Jon M. Chu has staged a lavish adaptation of the Broadway musical “Wicked.” And Oscar-winning director Steve McQueen pays tribute to Londoners living through World War II in “Blitz,” which will premiere in a few weeks at the London Film Festival and will close the New York Film Festival, making it one of the last contenders to launch.
Except, of course, for “Gladiator II,” this year’s only appropriate answer to the question: “What’s your Roman Empire?” Unless it’s Ridley Scott, cranking out epic movies year after year, well into his 80s. He’s an acceptable response as well.