The New York Times' A.O. Scott reports from the Telluride Film Festival (with a wordiness that brings out the copy editor in me). In addition to the bigger titles he digs deeper for four more obscure films to keep an eye out for:
David Mackenzie’s “Starred Up” is a British prison drama anchored by
superb performances from Jack O’Connell and Ben Mendelsohn as a son and
father confined in the same penitentiary. Tough, violent and profane,
the movie is also sensitive to the nuances of emotion underneath the
macho belligerence, and honest about what its characters must do to
survive.
“Ida” is the first Polish-language feature directed by Pawel Pawlikowski, whose previous movies (notably “The Last Resort” and “My Summer of Love”)
have made him one of the bright lights of British cinema. This movie is
dark, both visually and thematically, as Mr. Pawlikowski uses a
monochrome palette and a boxy, old-fashioned aspect ratio to capture the
gloom of 20th-century Polish history and the glimmers of hope that
managed to persist. The story of a young woman preparing to take her
vows and become a Catholic nun, “Ida” touches on both the legacy of the
Holocaust and the realities of postwar Communism with apt sorrow and an
equally apt touch of fatalistic humor.
“Gloria,”
from the Chilean director Sebastián Lelio, is the sad and funny
portrait of a 58-year-old woman. It is hard to do justice either to
Gloria (played by the amazing Paulina García) or to the story Mr. Lelio
tells, which is about the way she contends with loneliness, sex,
alcohol, pop music, her grown children and her neighbor’s cat.
Modern urban loneliness is also among the themes of “The Lunchbox,” the deft and charming first feature by Ritesh Batra. He uses Mumbai’s lunch-delivery system — which transports thousands of
meals every day from kitchens to offices — as the background for a
quasi-romantic fable that might be thought of as an Indian variation on
“You’ve Got Mail.”
Click on through for the full report.
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