Telluride 2024

“By sticking to his impressionistic perspective,” wrote Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice, “by fracturing his narrative, Ross achieves something genuinely poetic—a film whose very lightness is the key to its depth. Hale County traverses years, encompasses tragedy and beauty, all in just seventy-eight minutes.” A couple of years ago, news broke that Ross would be taking on what seemed to many to be a comparatively heftier project for his first fictional feature, an adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Colson Whitehead.

Would the artist—whose photographs, texts, and conceptual pieces (recently exhibited and collected as Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body: The Work of RaMell Ross) have drawn comparisons to the works of Toni Morrison and Kara Walker from Neila Orr in the Oxford American—be able to retain his vision within the stubborn confines of a budget and a schedule? Over the weekend, Ebiri sent out a welcome word of relief from Telluride: “To my fellow Hale County-heads who might have worried that adapting an acclaimed novel like Nickel Boys would force RaMell Ross to go conventional and tone down his cinematic vision: Let me assure you, that is not a thing that has happened.”

Hale County “reflected Ross’s aesthetic ambitions, how the artist comes to understand and represent the texture of a landscape,” writes Lovia Gyarkye in the Hollywood Reporter. Ross turns Whitehead’s novel, “a dexterous and moving account of two boys in a punishing Florida reform school, into his own. Here, the artist returns to and expands on some familiar themes: Black boyhood and masculinity, the anchoring force of community and, of course, the landscape and its secrets.”

In the Los Angeles Times, Joshua Rothkopf notes that “Ross has made the radical decision to commit to a first-person approach, the camera ‘seeing’ for the speaker. It takes some getting used to, but it puts you in an outward-facing mood, attuned to sounds and intimacies.” The friendship forged between Elwood—played at various stages in his life by Ethan Cole Sharp, Ethan Herisse, and Daveed Diggs—and Turner (Brandon Wilson) gives the two young men strength in the face of abuse from the corrupt administrators of the Nickel Academy.

“Elwood still believes in America’s potential,” writes IndieWire’s David Ehrlich, “while Turner is convinced that our country is already—and has always been—fulfilling the original promise of its cruelty. Ross’s formal conceit quite literally forces us to see both perspectives, but the soft poetry of his pointillistic approach—his focus on what the director refers to as ‘the epic banal’—disabuses that philosophical difference of any and all traces of didacticism. Pure sense and subjectivity in a way that evokes the same visual magic of Ross’s documentary work, Nickel Boys so viscerally and fundamentally centers the experience of its young Black characters that even the most racist brand of revisionist history could never hope to deny their truth.”

Nickel Boys, now slated to open the New York Film Festival on September 27, was one of around two dozen world premieres at Telluride, the festival that takes place each Labor Day Weekend. Several of those films—Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End, for example, and Edward Berger’s Conclave—will be screening in Toronto over the next couple of weeks. Others, as Josh Rottenberg points out in the Los Angeles Times, drew political figures such as Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, who spoke after the first screening of Maisie Crow and Abbie Perrault’s Zurawski v Texas, a documentary focusing on three women who sued the Lone Star State when they were denied abortions even though their health was at risk.

James Carville, the political consultant and breakout star of Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker’s 1993 documentary The War Room, was on hand for the premiere of Matthew Tyrnauer’s Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid! “The country is never going to be any better than the people that go into politics,” he told the crowd, “and if we just keep telling them that it’s a dirty business or they’re all crooks, they’ll hear you and and they will stay out of politics and the country will go to hell in a handbag. That’s my real passion about this. This is an honorable business.”

Telluride also screened a good handful of critical favorites and award-winners from Cannes, including Sean Baker’s Anora, the winner of the Palme d’Or, as well as Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, and Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig. And then a fair number of films arrived fresh from their premieres in Venice. Angelina Jolie and Pablo Larraín flew in to talk up Maria, the third film in Larraín’s trilogy of portraits of high-profile women at moments of crisis.

Natalie Portman starred as Jacqueline Kennedy in the immediate wake of her husband’s assassination in Jackie (2016), and Kristen Stewart played Princess Diana on the verge of divorcing her husband in Spencer (2021). As the renowned opera singer Maria Callas living out her final days in Paris with her housemaid (Alba Rohrwacher) and butler (Pierfrancesco Favino), “Jolie looks incredible,” writes Vulture’s Alison Willmore, “all angular cheekbones and brocade housecoats, divine in a cat flick eye and beehive in black-and-white flashbacks to her romance with Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer). Maria looks incredible, too, with cinematographer Edward Lachman giving ’70s Paris the exact look of a vintage postcard, and Larraín staging flights of fantasy that involve choirs turning up out of the crowds on the Place du Trocadero and orchestras sitting on the steps in the rain. But despite the obvious effort that went into the making of Maria, there’s so little life.”

“Larraín has his loyal fans,” writes Time’s Stephanie Zacharek, “and lovers of Jackie and Spencer may adore Maria. But to me, Larraín’s allegedly sympathetic psychoportraits are the movie equivalent of Madame Alexander dolls lined up on a dresser: extremely pretty, but not made for touching.” Maria “captures nothing of the spirit of Callas.”

While he’s kept busy as a producer, Alfonso Cuarón hadn’t directed a shot since he wrapped his masterful Roma (2018) until he buckled down and wrote, directed, and produced his first full-length miniseries. Disclaimer is a seven-episode adaptation of Renée Knight’s 2015 novel about an acclaimed documentarian (Cate Blanchett) with a secret that a retired professor (Kevin Kline) threatens to uncover.

Disclaimer “may mark a new creative format for the Mexican director,” writes Rafa Sales Ross at Little White Lies, but it “sees him revisit some of the themes explored in depth throughout his career, from carnal desire as a treacherous motivator and the very particular kind of grief that burdens parents sentenced to live longer than their children.” Cuarón “trusts in his story—and his team’s storytelling prowess—to sweep you up,” writes IndieWire’s Ben Travers. “Which it does, and they do. Disclaimer is a cunning psychological thriller with twists and turns enough to thrive as pure entertainment. But never does it drift from its initial portent, so that when the truth comes crashing down, it levels everyone involved, onscreen and off.”

The Hollywood Reporter’s Jordan Mintzer is clearly impressed with Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5, “which depicts how a dedicated crew at ABC Sports managed to broadcast the 1972 Munich Olympics terrorist attacks live to an entire nation.” The film details “all the logistical hurdles the team needed to scale so they could capture the crisis as it happened, relying on massive TV cameras, smuggled 16 mm film stock, a slew of walkie talkies and plenty of ingenuity.” With “intense, lived-in performances” from Peter Sarsgaard, Ben Chaplin, Leonie Benesch, and John Magaro, September 5 is “more than just a time capsule about how the news was handled in the pre-digital age; it’s an account that speaks to our time as well.”

Petra Costa’s Apocalypse in the Tropics follows up on her Oscar-nominated The Edge of Democracy (2019), a documentary essay on Brazil’s path in the 2010s from the Lula to the Bolsonaro administrations. Writing for Screen, Jonathan Romney recommends Costa’s new film as “a sobering account of the rise of evangelical populism in recent Brazilian politics—the ‘Apocalypse’ in question being that of the biblical Book of Revelations, which Costa sees as a dangerous blueprint for a new breed of politically influential preachers.” It’s a “phenomenon that is very specifically rooted in Brazil’s history, but that has unmistakable parallels with contemporary North American turmoil.”

With Separated, Errol Morris takes on the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy of separating migrant children from their parents. At RogerEbert.com, Glenn Kenny calls Separated “a solid, infuriating piece of work. There are laughs to be had, but they’re of an extremely mordant variety: in limning portraits of Trump apparatchiks like Scott Lloyd and Kirstjen Nielsen, [Morris] shows a bureaucracy delighting in their toughness at executing a ‘tough’ policy but then blanches and ultimately backs down when public reaction paints them as, you know, sadists.”

Kenny finds that Kevin MacDonald’s One to One: John & Yoko “frequently feels like several films at once. A tense archival chronicle of American in turmoil over the Vietnam War and the possible criminality of then-President Richard Nixon, a portrait of post-flower-power Greenwich Village, and an account of two prodigious and prolific artists trying to foster change and keep from being kicked out of their adopted home.” One to One is “compelling because [John Lennon and Yoko Ono] are compelling, and because the time really was a fraught and frightening one. We could use a guy like John, warts and all, nowadays, to be sure. I think Errol Morris might agree.”