This time last year, Barbie and Oppenheimer were taking a lap of honour after saving cinema. We spent the summer enchanted by Céline Song’s heart-wrenching love story Past Lives, while Cannes and the autumn film festivals presented titles such as Killers of the Flower Moon, The Zone of Interest, Poor Things, Maestro, The Holdovers, Anatomy of a Fall and American Fiction.
Those 10 films made for the best group of best picture Oscar nominees we've had since the Academy expanded the category in 2009. A mix of critical favorites, crowd pleasers and the fodder for a dozen different Halloween costumes, this class was impeccable and, at least for the near future, unrepeatable.
Which brings us to 2024, where, right now, the two films that have most thrilled audiences at Cannes and the fall film festivals are Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Perez,” a musical soap opera about a Mexican cartel boss seeking to transition to womanhood, and Sean Baker’s “Anora,” the wildly generous tale 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 top prize, the Palme d’Or.
“This is not exactly a conventional film,” Baker said at Cannes, stating the obvious and setting the tone for the upcoming awards season in just half a dozen words.
Given the crowds gathered outside the theaters where “Anora” was playing in Telluride, one might have suspected that Baker was selling his film a little short. Hundreds of people turned up to miss it, a notable (and happy) contrast to the divisive reception Baker’s last film, “Red Rocket,” received at the festival two years ago.
Has the public become more open-minded and adventurous? We're about to find out, as we kick off an Oscar season that seems as unstable as any we can remember, dominated by international auteurs, independent offerings and, fingers crossed (because we could really use a maximalist miracle), Ridley Scott's “Gladiator II.”
Even the only blockbuster already assured of a best-picture nomination, Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part 2,” stands out as a bold film whose spectacle targets both the stomach and the intellect.
Villeneuve’s first film, Dune, won six Oscars two years ago. The sequel could match that tally. But as the second film in a planned trilogy (though Villeneuve doesn’t like to define the series that way), it’s unlikely to win best picture — an outcome any middle child already knows in their hearts.
While “Anora” and “Emilia Perez” 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 suicide. Enthusiasm for the Venice and Toronto festivals, aside from the Golden Lion, was respectful but not entirely enthusiastic.
The Telluride premieres of “Conclave” and “Nickel Boys” offered contrasting portraits of the ways audiences receive films at festivals. The films played back-to-back on Telluride’s opening night, with Edward Berger’s “Conclave,” a lively and occasionally clever melodrama about a group of petty cardinals who elect the next pope, astounding audiences with a series of sensational plot twists. Ralph Fiennes does most of the heavy lifting, playing a dutiful, dubious man overseeing the voting. “Conclave” feels like a movie made for the Oscars: absurd, stylish and not as clever as it thinks it is. Expect it to get better.
Ralph Fiennes stars in “Conclave,” an Oscar-nominated film.
(Highlighted Features)
“Nickel Boys,” RaMell Ross’s disconcerting adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s celebrated novel, followed “Conclave” and stunned audiences. Filmed from the point of view of its characters, two black boys navigating the horrors of a Florida reform school, “Nickel Boys” invites viewers to immerse themselves and witness. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, wonderful as the loving grandmother, said festival-goers approached her after the screening and called the film “tough.” She’s fine with that.
“I think as moviegoers, especially in this country, we’ve been conditioned to have an expectation of how we should feel when watching a movie,” Ellis-Taylor told me in Telluride. “I want to be an advocate for cinema that isn’t palliative.”
In that sense, 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, and whose rights were snapped up by the sleek indie studio A24. The story of a Hungarian Jewish architect (Adrien Brody) who survives World War II and moves to America is a sprawling, nervy and demanding film. It has an overture and an intermission and has been compared to “The Godfather” for the way it examines the American dream. Anticipation will be overwhelming when it hits theaters later this year.
By contrast, one film that has not gone unnoticed is Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia’s astonishing All We Imagine As Light, winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes and also selected at Telluride, Toronto and the upcoming New York Film Festival. The film follows the lives of two roommates who work together as nurses in a Bombay hospital, capturing their dreams and disappointments in rich, evocative detail.
Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha in “All We Can Imagine Is Light.”
(Little Chaos)
Some films failed to emerge unscathed from the festivals, such as “Joker: Folie à Deux,” Todd Phillips’ “Joker” sequel, in which Joaquin Phoenix reprises his Oscar-winning role alongside Lady Gaga. The good news: Gaga will now have more time to promote her new album instead of campaigning for an Oscar.
“Maria,” starring Angelina Jolie as legendary opera singer Maria Callas, is Pablo Larraín’s latest film about 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 little lifeless. Reviews were mixed, but never underestimate how awards voters will swoon over a biopic.
Jolie will face plenty of competition in the best lead actress category, including Mikey Madison (“Anora”) and Karla Sofia Gascon (“Emilia Perez”), along with Saoirse Ronan, who received a tribute in Telluride largely for her work as a woman trying to maintain her sobriety in “The Outrun,” a Sundance premiere.
There’s also a fiercely raw performance from Oscar winner Nicole Kidman in “Babygirl,” an erotic thriller that was the center of attention in Venice and Toronto, and more greatness from Amy Adams, who somehow hasn’t won an Oscar yet, in “Nightbitch,” which opens in Toronto, a film about the demands and joys of motherhood that also prompted a lot of conversation, much of it decidedly silly. Demi Moore was also in Toronto for the North American premiere of “The Substance,” a horror film about the value of women in show business that contains some of the best work she’s ever done.
Which brings us to movies that haven’t been seen yet. There’s James Mangold’s Bob Dylan-in-electric mode, “A Complete Unknown,” starring Timothée Chalamet. Jon M. Chu has staged a sumptuous adaptation of the Broadway musical “Wicked.” And Oscar-winning director Steve McQueen pays tribute to Londoners who lived through World War II in “Blitz,” which premieres in a few weeks at the London Film Festival and closes the New York Film Festival, making it one of the last contenders to open.
Except, of course, for Gladiator II, this year’s only appropriate answer to the question, “What’s your Roman Empire?” Unless you’re talking about Ridley Scott, who’s been churning out epic films year after year, well into the 1980s. That’s also an acceptable answer.
