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<\/p>\n\n\tOn my last morning in Telluride, halfway through breakfast at Butcher & Baker, Kenneth Branagh stopped at the table on his way to a Q&A for \u201cInto the Breach,\u201d the National Theatre documentary he produced. He had a story. A night earlier, he\u2019d ridden the gondola up in pitch darkness with Willem Dafoe, Tom Hiddleston and Andrew Scott \u2014 four of the best actors alive, each with a film at the festival, sealed in one cable car with nothing to look at and nothing to do but talk. All anyone could hear was Dafoe. Branagh, laughing, called it \u201cthe wisdom of Willem.\u201d A voice in the dark, no face attached.<\/p>\n
\n\tI half-believed it until a few hours later, waiting out my flight at Montrose, when I ran into Hiddleston on his way back to the U.K. He told the same story, unprompted.<\/p>\n
\n\tThat\u2019s the festival. The Telluriders have gone home, Venice wraps in a few days and we came down the mountain knowing more about this Oscar race than we did going up. Christopher Nolan\u2019s mythological epic \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d is still the one to beat. It won\u2019t be a cakewalk. Here\u2019s what else I carried down.<\/p>\n
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\n\t\u201cThe Debut<\/a>\u201d handed Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti their moment.<\/p>\n \n\tJesse Eisenberg\u2019s third feature behind the camera premiered Saturday night. By the next day, it was the hottest ticket in town. \u201cThe Debut\u201d drops Moore\u2019s Mona, a meek suburban homemaker who lands a bit part in a community theater musical, into the front of the best actress race. It\u2019s the funniest, warmest thing she\u2019s done in years. Giamatti, whom Eisenberg calls his \u201cfavorite actor,\u201d plays the tyrant director shaping her. During one rehearsal scene between them \u2014 a master-class, no other word for it \u2014 the Telluride crowd applauded in the middle of the movie<\/a>. You rarely see that happen once at a festival. It happened again before the credits.<\/p>\n \n\tMoore already has an Oscar for \u201cStill Alice,\u201d and she\u2019s the one to beat. Giamatti is the sentimental story coming up underneath: twice nominated for \u201cCinderella Man\u201d and \u201cThe Holdovers,\u201d never a winner and here he is doing the loosest work of his late career in a supporting turn built to be embraced. Eisenberg wrote seven songs for the fictional show. The one they\u2019ll push is \u201cThis City May Have Chewed Me Up (But It Hasn\u2019t Spit Me Out),\u201d which Moore performs, and it\u2019s headed for a best original song campaign.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tNathan Fielder in \u201cYou Can See Everything<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tA24<\/p>\n \n\tNathan Fielder attempts the impossible.<\/p>\n \n\tThe festival\u2019s best-kept secret came Sunday night, when ticket holders filed into the Werner Herzog Theatre with their phones locked away for \u201cYou Can See Everything,\u201d the Elizabeth Holmes documentary Fielder co-directed with Lance Oppenheim, whose narrative feature \u201cPrimetime\u201d premiered in Venice a day earlier. Holmes invites Fielder and his skeptical crew to film her in the 34 days before she reports to prison. The shoot spirals into a three-year descent. Portions are recreated with an A-list actor who is eligible for Oscar attention, though not SAG<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n\tNow comes the hard part, which is the documentary branch, which has never embraced this kind of nonfiction filmmaking. Voters who prize the observational and the sincere tend to bristle at a movie where the filmmaker is this present and this implicated. The circus around Fielder guarantees the kind of coverage most nonfiction contenders would trade a lung for. Whether the branch rewards it is the whole question. Nobody has made a movie quite like this. Almost nobody has won an Oscar for one.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tJordan Firstman in \u201cClub Kid\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tA24<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cClub Kid\u201d has a real play for the old guard.<\/p>\n \n\tJordan Firstman\u2019s directorial debut had its North American premiere Friday, and its trajectory keeps getting more serious than anyone bet on<\/a>. Firstman writes, directs and stars as Peter, a washed-up New York party promoter whose life on the dance floor stops cold when the 10-year-old son he never knew about (British newcomer Reggie Absolom) turns up at his door.<\/p>\n \n\tStrip away the club scene and the online-comedian brand, and you have a classically built story about a man-child being handed a kid. I expected that this would struggle to appeal to the older industry demographic. I was wrong. In fact, it seems to register incredibly well with older Academy voters, at least the ones I chatted with on the mountain.<\/p>\n \n\tVeteran actor Colleen Camp, who first came to the festival in 1977, made the case for the film\u2019s tonal control better than any campaign deck could. \u201cI always say, always hire somebody funny to do something dramatic, because you\u2019ll get so many interesting things,\u201d she said at the post-screening Q&A. \u201cAnd what [Firstman] did in this movie is even in the most dramatic moments, they\u2019re brilliantly ironic and they\u2019re funny.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tFirstman described how his script reversed course on him over two years of writing. \u201cI started the script from kind of a cynical place of looking around at the scene and just not feeling good about it \u2014 looking at the excessive drug use and the sex, and being a part of it and feeling bad about myself and feeling bad about my community,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat happened was that making this film in the community \u2014 we shot at real parties, in the queer spaces in New York \u2014 my empathy really opened up in the production of the film.\u201d That shift is on the screen, and it\u2019s what voters will feel without necessarily being able to name it.<\/p>\n \n\tBy the end of the panel, it came down to one word, spoken loudly by Firstman: \u201clove.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tL.A. BOLA NEGRA. Guitarricadelafuente as Sebasti\u00e1n in La Bola Negra. Cr. Carla Oset\/Netflix \u00a9 2026.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\u2018La Bola Negra\u2019 Carla Oset\/Netflix<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cLa Bola Negra\u201d commands the room.<\/p>\n \n\tRespect is the currency at that altitude, and Los Javis have it. Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi arrived off a Cannes run that ended with the directing prize, and the Telluride word-of-mouth only got louder<\/a>. Chris Pine, Sofia Coppola, Rian Johnson and their Netflix stablemate Danny Boyle (\u201cInk\u201d) all turned up for the screening.<\/p>\n \n\tShot on 35 mm and inspired by the unfinished Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca work of the same name, \u201cLa Bola Negra\u201d moves across 1932, 1937 and 2017, tracing three generations of gay men through nearly a century of Spanish history.<\/p>\n \n\tA subtitled Netflix title the festival can\u2019t stop buzzing about is exactly where you want to be heading into the international feature race, and the streamer is hunting well beyond that category. And even though stars Guitarricadelafuente and Pen\u00e9lope Cruz weren\u2019t on the mountain, the film played so well that it shows it can exist in the awards echo chamber without them (which says a lot).<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t\u201cWild Horse Nine\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSearchlight Pictures<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cWild Horse Nine\u201d made the two-stop drop look easy.<\/p>\n \n\tOf the titles that ran the Venice-to-Telluride relay this year, Martin McDonagh\u2019s landed with the most confidence. Searchlight Pictures\u2019 \u201cWild Horse Nine\u201d bowed in Venice competition on Sept. 3 to a 13-minute standing ovation, the Lido\u2019s first real roar of the fall. Two days later, it turned up as Telluride\u2019s surprise patron screening, timed to John Malkovich\u2019s Silver Medallion tribute.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n