I’m just going to cough this up and let the chips fall…

The four finest films of the 2023 Telluride Film Festival — the ones that boasted the highest levels of craftsmanship, and which will really get through to Average Joes and Janes and cause their hearts and minds to snap to attention — are Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers (a ’70s film, yes, but a first-rate specimen of this type), Tran Anh Hung‘s The Taste of Things (i.e., The Pot-au-Feu), Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things and lastly Ilker Çatak’s The Teacher’s Lounge, the official German submission for Best Int’l feature.

Okay, I’ll make it five — Errol Morris‘s The Pigeon Tunnel, a richly visual, beautifully scored doc about John le Carre…enveloping and rather dazzling.

Actually there’s a sixth that got me — Aki Kaurismäki‘s Fallen Leaves, a Chaplinesque, slightly glum relationship comedy-drama. Costars Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen deliver quietly touching performances.

On my last day (i.e., yesterday) I saw and rather liked Pawo Choyning Dorji‘s The Monk and the Gun. I wasn’t floored but enjoyed it for the most part. Set in Bhutan in 2006, it’s an ensemble comedy about the citizens of that land-locked Asian country having their first encounter with democracy. I’ll write about it later this week.

There’s also Justine Triet‘s Anatomy of a Fall — a smart (if somewhat muted) mixture of an investigative procedural and courtroom drama. Fully respectable and recommended, but rather long.

So I saw four big winners, one striking documentary destined to endure, an adult-angled investigative whodunit, and two films that are entirely decent and winning in unusual ways. Eight in all.

None of the other films shown at Telluride really stuck to the wall, and will almost certainly not stir much excitement when they open commercially.

Yes, Poor Things was the biggest conversation flick, but the gymnastic “furious jumping” scenes and the generally bawdy “Bride of Frankenstein” sexuality will probably diminish enthusiasm among older industry audiences. SAG members will nominate Emma Stone for Best Actress, of course, but overall the Poor Things carnality has a vibe that comes close to what used to be called hard-R exploitation, except in this instance it’s very Terry Gilliam-esque. Several noms in various categories are likely, but I suspect that over-40 voters will withdraw a bit.

I felt mildly diverted by George C. Wolfe’s Rustin, but never gripped. The movie is just okay; it certainly never winds you up. If Colman Domingo’s spirited performance as civil rights leader Bayard Rustin lands a Best Actor Oscar nomination, fine. But it’ll be a gimmee…a political gesture that everyone will feel obliged to ratify and approve. If the Obamas were truly enthusiastic about this film they would have attended Telluride, or so my gut tells me. Their absence spoke volumes.

I didn’t see Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s Nyad (Netflix), but the general reaction seemed to be that Annette Bening‘s performance is highly respectable but her Diana Nyad is a real bitch. People never just vote for the craft aspect — they also vote the character. If the character is seriously unlikable…

The Telluride foo-foos can enthuse all they want about Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers. It’s a very soulful film, gently haunting and certainly well-crafted in many respects, but I know what older straight guys tend to feel and respond to, and a lot of them are going to quietly clear their throats during the sex scenes, which happen between the talented and genuine Andrew Scott and the hugely annoying Paul Mescal. If Mescal’s boyfriend character had been played by a Brad Pitt-level hottie in his late 20s or early 30s, fine, but Mescal is impossible. You can’t expect older straight guys to feel charged about watching a couple of British guys with heavy beard stubble (and one with a dorky moustache)…enough said.

Forget Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders — it didn’t work at the festival and it won’t happen when it opens. Ditto Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, which is basically shallow, glossy trash. Watching Barry Keoghan play a creep is a chore. I really hated it, and so did a lot of other Telluride viewers.

I didn’t see Ethan Hawke‘s Wildcat, a narrative drama about Flannery O’Connor, but everyone told me it wasn’t very good. I’m sorry but no one spoke up for it.

I also couldn’t fit in Daddio, the dialogue-driven two-hander with Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn.

I watched the slow-moving Janet Planet for about an hour on my final day…not my cup.

…to rave about Errol Morris‘s The Pigeon Tunnel, which I saw yesterday at 4:30 pm. Within ten seconds I knew this polite but persistent interrogation of the late “John le Carre” (a.k.a. David Cornwell) was first-rate. By which I mean fascinating, riveting, even haunting at times.

Perhaps it’s not quite on the level of Morris’s The Fog of War (‘05), but it operates in the same general region in terms of examining notions of moral relativity within the British “circus” and particularly as they existed within Ronnie Cornwell, his con-artist dad.

I adored the Phillip Glass score.

It’s 10 am and time to leave my riverside cabin in Dolores, Colorado, and head for the Alberquerque, New Mexico airport, which is roughly a four-and-a-half-hour drive. The National car rental desk closes at 5:30 pm. My La Guardia flight leaves tonight around 11 pm or so. I’ll probably stop in Cuba, New Mexico for a breather and a little filing.

In a THR post-Telluride assessment piece, Scott Feinberg discusses Tran Anh Hung‘s The Taste of Things (aka The Pot-au-Feu), and mentions that :France seems to have a very tough call on their hands, as far as whether to submit Anatomy of a Fall or The Taste of Things as its Oscar entry.”

Variety‘s Clayton Davis said the same thing….gee, tough one.

Well, it’s not. Davis and Feinberg are obliged to equivocate (no favorites, officially neutral), but they know that Anatomy of a Fall, which I saw and admired in Telluride, is primarily an intellectual head-trip courtroom thing, and that The Pot-Au-Feu is a heart-and-soul movie, a truly sublime love-and-food flick that exudes classic French culture start to finish.

And don’t call it “foodie porn” in my presence — it goes much deeper than that.

There’s really no contest, if you ask me. France has no choice but to officially submit the film that resulted in a Cannes Film Festival Best Director win for Tran Anh Hung.

Tony Manero (’08), Post-Mortem (’10) and especially No (’12) made me an ardent Pablo Larrain fan. But Jackie (’16) left me frustrated and dismayed (I much referred Noah D.Oppenheim‘s original 2010 script) and I hated Spencer (’21).

Pablo’s Diana movie left such a bad taste in my mouth, in fact, that I immediately and instinctually decided to avoid his latest, a comedic vampire flick about Augusto Pinochet, at Telluride.

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Variety‘s Elsa Keslassy has never made a secret about seeing the world (and reporting about it) through woke-colored glasses.

At the start of the May ’22 Cannes Film Festival, for example, she was one of a trio of Variety reporters (along with Elizabeth Wagmeister and Matt Donnelly) who were shocked to discover that Woody Allen, Gerard Depardieu and Johnny Depp are featured in a celebrity mural on the 2nd floor of La Pizza, a popular eatery adjacent to the Cannes marina.

Keslassy’s co-bylined story, by the way, stated that Allen “was accused of rape by his then 7-year-old adoptive daughter, Dylan [Farrow], in 1992″ — dead wrong.

Keslassy has now posted a Venice Film Festival interview with Allen, ostensibly about Coup de Chance (which screened for press this morning) but more importantly, or at least from Keslassy’s perspective, an opportunity to try and persuade Allen to fall upon the church steps and finally admit that he’s guilty of being the unregenerate monster that wokesters have accused him of being for several years.

Alas, Keslassy was only successful in changing Allen’s mood during their chat.

When she brought up the Farrow molestation charge, “Allen’s tone and demeanor [shifted] noticeably,” she notes. “He was jovial and talkative when discussing his film and his love for French cinema classics, looking enraptured. [But] his mood suddenly turned gloomy, however, [when] I asked him to comment on Farrow, as well as the impact that her claims has had on his reputation in the U.S.

“By the end of our interview, Allen [had] became pensive, gazing off into space.”

Get him, Elsa! Or at least, you know, make him emotionally suffer. Woody haters worldwide are counting upon you to wield a terrible swift sword. What are facts compared to this historic responsibility?

“Allen [has] returned to the Venice Film Festival for the world premiere of Coup de Chance, a romantic thriller that marks his 50th, and he suggests, quite possibly his last feature film,” Keslassy writes. “Coup de Chance represents the continued mutual embrace between the director and the [European] continent, after controversies have limited his funding stateside.

“This accounts for his pondering retirement: Allen says that producing a new movie means hustling to secure backing and at 87, he’s not sure he still wants to do that kind of work.”

“I have so many ideas for films that I would be tempted to do it, if it was easy to finance,” Allen told Keslassy. “But beyond that, I don’t know if I have the same verve to go out and spend a lot of time raising money.”

“I feel if you’re going to be canceled, this is the culture to be canceled by.”

—Woody Allen, talking to a reporter who’s marginally interested in his new film, mostly interested in his personal history. https://t.co/FtS48rYbrE

— Janet Maslin (@JanetMaslin) September 4, 2023

I forgot to mention a few days ago that IndieWire‘s influential film critic and editor Eric Kohn has flown the coop. He’s now working as a film strategy and development exec for Harmony Korine‘s EDGLRD, and HE wishes him all the best. A job with serious creative potential, a better salary, slicker threads, more security for his family, etc. Good for him.

That said, EDGLRD is a completely nonsensical compression of EDGELORD that no one will ever be able to spell without double-checking, or perhaps even remember. You look at it and nothing kicks in. You can hear Korine saying “I need a company name that sounds extra cool or at least can be spelled in a cooler way than EDGELORD but at the same time can’t be cooler because it’s pronounced edd-glurrd.”

That’s Korine for you — in the name of edgeness and hipster chops he simultaneously attracts and repels.

In the context of journalism, it’s now necessary to speak of Kohn in the past tense.

Eric was always a nice guy (as in congenial, nebbishy, mild-mannered, smoothly spoken). He was always a reliably smart critic and an engaging writer who (a semblance of honesty is allowable) frequently soft-pedalled his opinions or praised films so obliquely or described them so blandly that sometimes a reader couldn’t be entirely sure if he liked a film or not.

But I was always grateful to Eric for his all-around warmth and graciousness, and for having gotten me into the Key West Film Festival for three or four years. A fine fellow in many respects.

Eric’s nice-guy credentials aside, I have to add that I found his refusal to admit to even the existence of wokesterism since the woke plague kicked in five or six years ago….that was infuriating.

And in his capacity as an influential New York Film Critics Circle member and chairman of that group during 2018 and ’19, it has to be acknowledged that Kohn and fellow IndieWire critic David Ehrlich (whom Kohn hired) did a lot to change the image of the NYFCC from that of a gold-standard critics org to one strongly associated with woke eccentricity.

From “Not Necessarily The Bad Guys,” posted on 1.9.23:

“In addition to their sometimes well-grounded, highly perceptive praising of stellar filmmaking and performances, the New York Film Critics Circle has (be honest) been in the grip of woke theology over the last four or five years. Most of us understand this, and the NYFCC honchos and spokespersons will deny it to their dying day.

“For decades a NYFCC award was a gold-standard honor — a classy, triple-A stamp of irrefutable big-city approval. But since ’18 or thereabouts the NYFCC members have sought to integrate notions of quality with “the sacralization of racial, gender and sexual [identity],” as Matthew Goodwin put it in February 2021.

“In short, they’ve become known as a contender for the most reliably eccentric, woke-flakey critics group, neck and neck with the occasionally wokejobby Los Angeles Film Critics Association. (Note: HE has agreed on certain occasions with LAFCA award calls, hence the term “occasionally woke-jobby.”)

“For me the syndrome seemed to begin in 2018 when the NYFCC handed their Best Actress award to Support The Girls‘ Regina Hall. For me there was no contest among the Best Actress contenders that year — Melissa McCarthy‘s performance in Can you Ever Forgive Me? was heads and shoulders above Hall’s, and yet the NYFCC allowed themselves to be guided by identity politics. They disputed this, of course.

I’m sorry but I watch this seven-minute, 45-second clip at least once a year.

Uncensored version: