Telluride Film Festival 2023: The 12 Most Anticipated Movies To Watch

It’s interesting how the Venice Film Festival has gone from one of the festivals of the fall festival season to arguably the best film festival in the world now, even overshadowing Cannes in recent years thanks to the fact that Netflix now avoids the Croisette for the most part because of France’s theatrical laws and save their Oscar contenders for the Lido. Venice has had an amazing run, arguably since 2017 when Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape Of Water” won the top prize and then went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture, which has happened one more time since with “Nomadland” and several key Oscar contenders since).

Jessica Chastain is making a statement while promoting her new movie.

UPDATED with latest: The Toronto Film Festival began September 7 in Ontario with opening-night movie The Boy and the Heron, from Oscar-winning filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki. It kicks off a lineup for the fest’s 48th edition that includes world premieres of GameStop pic Dumb Money, Netflix’s Pain Hustlers, Taika Waititi’s Next Goal Wins, Kristin Scott Thomas’ Scarlett Johansson pic North Star, Chris Pine’s Poolman, Michael Keaton-directed Knox Goes Away, Anna Kendrick’s Woman of the Hour, Atom Egoyan’s Seven Veils, Michael Winterbottom’s Shoshana, Grant Singer’s Reptile, Viggo Mortensen’s The Dead Don’t Hurt, Lee Tamahori’s The Convert and Alex Gibney’s doc In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon.

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.

Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore‘s new movie May December is set to introduce the 2023 New York Film Festival later this month!

It’s officially September. Summer is winding down, school is starting, and the Fall film festival circuit has kicked off.

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.

Tuesday is a fairy tale with some very real-world consequences.

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.

Marta Balaga Move over, Richard Donner. In “Behind the Mountains,” premiering in Venice’s Horizons section, Mohamed Ben Attia makes sure “you’ll believe a man can fly” once again. Although it might not be as graceful.

UPDATED with latest: The Telliride Film Festival began August 31 with a lineup for the Rockies event’s 50th edition that includes world premieres of 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).

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.

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. 

Colman Domingo blows through the title role like a force of nature in Rustin, an exhilarating biographical drama about the highly significant but not widely known civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, whose career and reputation in the 1960s were minimized, at least in part, by his hardly disguised homosexuality.

Thank god for Alexander Payne. The filmmaker is, and always have been, a true humanist. A writer/director more interested in human beings, something that has always been the special effect of his movies. A two-time Oscar winning writer, his latest film, The Holdovers, which had its World Premiere Thursday at the Telluride Film Festival, is one of the rare movies in which he doesn’t also have a writing credit. David Hemingson did the screenplay, but the idea, an inspired one, came from Payne, a real film buff who was always intrigued by Marcel Pagnol’s 1935 French film Merlusse about a group of boarding school students stuck over the holidays with a much-despised teacher. The director thought it had the bones for a new story and developed with Hemingson. Still, set in 1970, it is Payne’s first period film after a celebrated career for movies like Sideways, The Descendants, and many others. He has made some contemporary classics, no doubt, but the warm humanity of a trio of people left alone at Christmas in a snowy boarding school, ranks right up there with his very best. It is funny, sad, witty, poignant, filled with snark and heart and great acting. It also manages to be a film set at the holidays that offers something truly new for the genre, and also delightfully not only evokes the period in which it is set, it also purposely looks like a movie made then.

The Venice Film Festival began August 30 with opening-night movie , an Italian World War II drama, kicking off a lineup for the venerable fest’s 80th edition that includes world premieres of Michael Mann’s Ferrari, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, David Fincher’s The Killer, Ava DuVernay’s Origins, and new films from lightning-rod directors Roman Polanski, Woody Allen and Luc Besson.

Biker movies are almost a subgenre of films unto themselves, beginning with Marlon Brando’s The Wild One in the early ’50s and then through all those AIP exploitation titles of the ’60s including The Wild Angels, Hells Angels on Wheels and many more, notably Tom Laughlin’s predecessor to Billy Jack called Born Losers, all culminating with Easy Rider with Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson, which became the Citizen Kane of biker cinema.

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.

In Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel, All of Us Strangers was a ghost story of a son reconnecting with his long-dead parents while navigating romance in the current era. In adapting this weird story for the screen, writer-director Andrew Haigh made some changes, largely making the main character gay, not heterosexual, and letting the ghostly elements disappear into a feeling that this is all happening in the present day, even if son and parents are essentially the same age.