‘Rustin’ Review: Colman Domingo A Force In Biopic That Gives Civil Rights Leader His Due – Telluride Film Festival

“Wicked Little Letters” narrates the bizarre tale of several foul-mouthed anonymous letters that began terrorizing the small British town of Littlehampton in the 1920s. Against all odds, what might seem like a contrived, ridiculous story is almost entirely true.

J. Kim Murphy A24 has acquired theatrical distribution rights to “Sing Sing,” five days after the Colman Domingo-starring drama made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.

EXCLUSIVE: In competitive bidding, A24 has acquired U.S. theatrical rights to Sing Sing, the Greg Kwedar-directed drama that stars Colman Domingo. The film premiered at Toronto to rapturous reviews and A24 is plotting a 2024 theatrical release. Deal is 7-figures.

The Gotham Awards said today that Rustin, director George C. Wolfe’s snapshot of the life of civil rights icon Bayard Rustin that stars Colman Domingo, will receive its Icon & Creator Tribute for Social Justice. The Netflix pic will be honored at the 33rd annual Gotham Awards on November 27 at Cipriani Wall Street in Manhattan.

McKinley Franklin editor New York-based LGBTQ+ film festival NewFest has debuted the lineup for its 35th festival, which is set to run from Oct. 12 to Oct. 24.

Stephen Saito Cages can’t contain the sheer amount of imagination on offer in “Sing Sing” — not just in the way director Greg Kwedar and his writing and producing partner Clint Bentley conceived of the prison-set drama, but also as an animating force among its characters. Apart from Colman Domingo and a few others, most of the cast are formerly incarcerated alumni of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program, which stages theatrical productions at New York’s Sing Sing Correctional Facility.

Colman Domingo shows off his award following the TIFF Tribute Gala during the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival over the weekend.

Sophia Scorziello editor Virginia’s Middleburg Film Festival, now in its 11th year, is set to open this October with Netflix’s Bayard Rustin biopic “Rustin” starring Colman Domingo. Director George C.

With no film industry to speak of, and limited funds to make a movie in one of the most remote places on earth, young Bhutanese director/writer Pawo Choyning Dorji pulled off a miracle with his first feature, Lunana: A Yak In The Classroom which came out of nowhere to get an Oscar nomination for Best International Feature (formerly Best Foreign Language Film) in 2019. It was a charmer of a movie set in a village in Bhutan with no connection to the outside world and where a young teacher must decide whether he wants to stay and teach the kids or follow his dreams to Australia.

was not the strangest thing to happen to cult fashion footwear this weekend. The internet spent a significant amount of time arguing about the —that is, a man who robbed his Hinge date of her cloven-toed Mary-Janes and gifted them to his actual girlfriend—which inspired fear in Ssense shoppers and confusion in fair-weather fashion fans who still think of Margiela’s most famous creation as “.”Less concerned with the moral implications of theft, conversations online centered on whether —which have gone from an art school niche to a —are “” or not.

Daddio is a knockout, the sort of breakthrough by a virtual unknown that many might dream about but only rarely takes place. Entirely set in a taxi stuck for a long time at night on a jammed highway heading from New York City’s JFK airport to Manhattan, debuting writer-director Christy Hall has created a marvelous two-hander between a veteran New York cabbie who’s seen it all and a young woman trying to figure things out.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic It’s not easy to upstage Martin Luther King Jr., but that’s exactly what leading man Colman Domingo does in “Rustin,” a movie named for the civil rights pioneer who gave King the platform to speak his most famous four words: “I have a dream.” That day, Aug. 28, 1963, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the man standing just over King’s right shoulder — quite literally, his right-hand man — was one Bayard Rustin.

Diana Nyad was a swimming legend, a stellar athlete in the 1970s who achieved the heights of her sport, and then went on to a successful decades-long career in the broadcast booth for ABC Sports, ESPN, and elsewhere.

TELLURIDE – Every year, almost without fail, there is an American hero, somehow lost to history, who finally gets their moment on the big screen. This year’s honoree is Bayard Rustin, a key figure in the Civil Rights Movement who was a primary organizer for the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963.

Ethan Hawke has directed, written and/or acted in quite a few notably esoteric projects throughout his multi-faceted career, and he’s now come up with another in Wildcat. This one makes use of four Flannery O’Connor stories that tie in to aspects of the writer’s difficult life and truly do illuminate aspects of it in clever and plausible ways. The general public would have no clue as to what’s going on in this often perceptively made film that connects with her work, but the episodes are frequently weird, abruptly amusing and almost always cleverly pertinent in some way. 

The haves and have-nots of Great Britain have always served as ripe subject matter for writers of every stripe and the tradition continues in Saltburn, a vibrant if rather familiar take on the class system circa 2006. Emerald Fennell, following up on her Oscar-winning script for Promising Young Woman, reveals a strong hand behind the camera, even if the trajectory of the story feels rather overwrought and familiar. Nonetheless, the writing is alive and often amusing, giving the fine cast a lot to play with.

Clayton Davis Senior Awards Editor If the summer belonged to Cillian Murphy from “Oppenheimer,” then the upcoming fall season will belong to Colman Domingo in “Rustin.” The Emmy-winning actor of HBO’s “Euphoria” throws down the gauntlet with his portrayal of the gay civil rights leader Bayard Rustin in George C. Wolfe’s biopic, which just premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, where Barack Obama pre-recorded a message for attendees. “This past week marked the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington and that March would not have happened without Bayard Rustin,” Obama said in his message.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Did the Algonquin round table somehow spiritually relocate itself in the early 1970s to Key West, Florida? The idea that the small, remote island city was a hotbed for one of the last great counterculture arts scenes — particularly for prose writers, but also with some music mixed in — is the focus of a new short film about the Key West scene of 50 years ago, “All That Is Sacred.” The 34-minute movie, which stars the famous novelist Tom McGuane and writer-musician Jimmy Buffett, has its premiere at the Telluride Film Festival this weekend. Variety has an exclusive premiere for a trailer for the film, which does not yet have distribution; check it out below.

Not only a beautiful destination, the Telluride Film Festival is a cinephile’s paradise; a secluded city in the Colorado mountains that’s hard to get to and then rather exclusive, which is probably partly the draw and the reason so many filmmakers and actors adore Telluride. But it’s also a cinephile’s haven in terms of community, there’s a knowing togetherness, lack of hierarchy and you can easily be in line for a film with a random science teacher from Albuquerque who is also a massive film nerd as you could be next to legendary director Werner Herzog.

The Telluride Film Festival, a key part of the fall festival circuit launching awards season and perhaps some major Academy Award contenders, announced the wide-ranging lineup of films for its landmark 50th edition. The fest kicks off Thursday and runs through Labor Day and will feature world premieres of Oscar winners Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers (Focus Features), Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn (Amazon) and Free Solo filmmakers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s narrative feature Nyad (Netflix).