‘Women Talking’ Telluride Review: Rooney Mara And Superb Female Ensemble In Sarah Polley’s Powerful Drama

Michael Moore is feeling optimistic about the midterm elections despite what many pundits are saying. The Real Time with Bill Maher guest predicts that a massive voter turnout in the Fall will help Democrats keep control of the three branches of government.

Kelly Ripa and Ryan Seacrest are celebrating their five-year work anniversary! The hosts spoke to ET’s Rachel Smith about the milestone.  “It seems like not five years,” Ripa says.

Demi Moore is in talks to join the cast of Feud: Capote’s Women, the second installment of FX’s anthology series from Ryan Murphy and Plan B, sources tell Deadline. Reps for FX and 20th Television, which is behind the Feud franchise, declined comment.

An exceptional and, one might venture, unprecedented group of politicians, diplomats, policy wonks, elected officials and veteran Washington insiders expound on the effectiveness of international military intervention—and the lack thereof—in The Corridors of Power. Israeli director Dror Moreh made one of the great political documentaries of recent times in The Gatekeepers (2012), as well as the excellent The Human Factor (2019), and this time he has assembled an all-star cast of more than 30 political heavyweights including Henry Kissinger, Hilary Clinton, George Shultz, Madeleine Albright and Condoleeza Rice, who in deep, original interviews, help to build a picture of how and why the best intentions can come unglued. The film deserves to be seen in any and all venues by audiences interested in the state of the world and clarity about how we got here.

Over a career that has taken her from child actor to the director’s chair, Canadian filmmaker Sarah Polley has spent enough time on set to have a feel for the standard rhythms of a shoot.

Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, and Rooney Mara hug it out with director Sarah Polley at the premiere of Women Talking during the 2022 Toronto Film Festival at Princess of Wales Theatre on Tuesday (September 13) in Toronto, Ontario.

Kourtney Kardashian, Kelly Ripa and Tom Brady marked the poignant occasion with heartfelt tributes on social media.SEE: Catherine Zeta-Jones reveals heartache after loss of 'a real family member'Their posts honored the 2,977 innocent people who died in 2001, including 340 firefighters and 72 police officers, and over 25,000 injured. The series of coordinated terrorist attacks against the USA saw two planes crash into the Twin Towers in Manhattan, while a third hit the Pentagon, just outside Washington DC.

Rooney Mara and Claire Foy join their co-stars for a special event at the 2022 Telluride Film Festival over the weekend in Telluride, Co.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The return of Brendan Fraser — not that he ever really went away — has been a reminder of how much affection so many of us had for him back in the ’90s, when he had his moment in movies like “School Ties” and “Encino Man” and “Gods and Monsters” and “The Mummy.” Yet let’s be honest: This is not the comeback of John Travolta or Mickey Rourke. Fraser was always, in the best way, a lightweight actor: the clear blue eyes, the pin-up sexiness, the shaggy warm boyish innocence. The fact that, at 53, he’s no longer as beautiful as he once was is part of the Brendanaissance. He can no longer hold the screen as a cutie-pie hunk; he has to do it in other ways. And in “The Whale,” directed by Darren Aronofsky (who shepherded Rourke’s return in “The Wrestler”), Fraser is a better actor — slyer, subtler, more haunting — than he has ever been.

The Wonder is Gothic without the architecture. Set in rural central Ireland in the wake of the Great Famine of the mid-1800s, director Sebastian Lelio’s adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s 2016 novel methodically moves the chess pieces around in telling the tale of an 11-year-old girl who has locals mystified as to what God is intending by letting her survive for four months without eating. Atmospheric and intriguing up to a point, it nonetheless feels like much ado about a mildly curious situation that’s been milked for rather more than it’s worth.

Clayton Davis Could Sarah Polley join the ranks of Jane Campion, Chloe Zhao and Kathryn Bigelow by becoming only the fourth female filmmaker to win an Oscar for directing? Based on the rapturous reception that “Women Talking” received at the Telluride Film Festival on Friday, it certainly seems possible. Even if that doesn’t happen, the ambitious film, a drama about a group of women in a tight-knit religious community grappling with a legacy of abuse, has put a stake in the ground as the festival’s first slam dunk best picture candidate. In fact, I think it’s going to be a contender across the board. In a Telluride lineup that is heavy on documentaries and Cannes titles, Polley’s film is one of only four World Premieres for narrative features. But what a launching pad Telluride is shaping up to be for the film and its director, a critical favorite for her work in front of the camera in “The Sweet Hereafter” and behind with the likes of “Away From Her.” The premiere for “Women Talking” kicked off with a tribute to Polley, who was presented with the Silver Medallion by Frances McDormand, who produced and stars in “Women Talking.”

Sarah Polley, at the Telluride Film Festival for the world premiere of Women Talking, her latest film as a director, acknowledged how lucky she was as an actress to have worked with so many female filmmakers. They told her to be “fierce” when they saw that she wanted to work behind the camera.

TELLURIDE – The events at a secluded Mennonite colony in Bolivia during the late ‘00s spurred headlines around the world. Men from the extremely conservative religious group had raped multiple women in their community while they slept.

TELLURIDE – The events at a Mennonite colony in Bolivia during the late ’00s spurred headlines around the world. Men from the extremely conservative religious group had raped multiple women in their community while they slept.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic With a title like “Women Talking,” audacious actor-turned-helmer Sarah Polley’s fourth feature makes clear that it will be one of those rare films capable of passing the Bechdel test. That barometer, for those who may not know, poses three seemingly easy-to-meet criteria: (1) The movie has to have at least two women in it, (2) who talk to each other, (3) about something other than a man. It’s astonishing how many movies fail. Even Polley’s film, which consists of women talking for most of its 97 minutes, is a complicated exception, since most of the conversation — an urgent meeting among the wives, mothers and daughters of an ultraconservative religious colony — concerns the men. But even then, there’s no denying that “Women Talking” is unlike any film you’ve seen before, which is exactly what you’d want from the director of 2012’s astonishingly personal, format-shattering meta-documentary “Stories We Tell.” A decade later, Polley is back with another bold thought experiment, this one inspired by a horrific conspiracy of sexual abuse discovered within a Mennonite community about a decade ago.