HE had an absolute blast watching Sean Baker’s Anora at 9 am this morning. My second viewing, having caught the world premiere in Cannes last May. It’s so hilarious during Act Two, and the finale is so sad and touching. Mikey Madison should take the Best Actress Oscar — no question about this.

Which is to say I’ve always felt a certain degree of distaste from all things Corbet, acting and directing.

I’m nonetheless looking very much forward to seeing Corbet’s The Brutalist, which has debuted to rave reviews at the Venice Film Festival. But 215 minutes, bruh…

During this afternoon’s post-Apprentice screening q & a, which featured director Ali Abassi, costars Sebastian Stan (Donald Trump) and Jeremy Strong (Roy Cohn) and screenwriter Gabriel Sherman, Strong explained his approach to playing the demonic Cohn by quoting the opening passage from Joaquin Miller‘s “Byron“:

If I were Special Counsel Jack Smith, roaming around Telluride like an average T-shirted beardo (and with no special pass), I would have certainly attended this afternoon’s (12:30 pm) Chuck Jones screening of Ali Abassi‘s The Apprentice. I was there, you bet. [Photo Credit: Sasha Stone.]

Succession star Kieran Culkin is now a likely Best Supporting Actor nominee for his performance as a hyper-obsessive, emotionally out-there, semi-Asperger’s dude in Jessie Eisenberg’s A Real Pain.

Culkin did a post-screening q&a with Eisenberg yesterday at the Chuck Jones theatre.

It followed Saturday’s 12:15 pm showing, and was full of confessional stream-of-consciousness blather about this and that. Great minds, great entertainers. I loved the film. A fascinating, character-driven, anxiety-propelled road movie (i.e., the “road” being a journey through Poland).

I can’t not acknowledge that Culkin, who’s just shy of 42, has serious, moussed-up rasta hair. I’ve never seen this kind of hair on a noteworthy white actor in my entire life. Some of those strands are almost a half-foot long.

And consider Culkin’s bloodshot eyes. The man is obviously smoking a lot of weed and maybe doing a little drinking. It’s hard to pinpoint but he definitely has that baked and wasted look.

Which is fine with me. It comes with the genius thing. I’m just familiar with this kind of biological signage…I know what it means.

There’s a whole big herd of rich kids who attend Telluride’s high school. Yesterday afternoon I was shopping at Clark’s market (just across the street from the school) when at least 20 or 25 teens were swamping the place, all attractive with super-toned bods and great-looking hair. So white and almost Teutonic. “Superior” genes, heh-heh, except it’s hard not to really think that. They looked like kids you’d run into in wealthy Swiss or German suburbs. A certain glow of entitlement.

My vaguely aching calves and knee joints didn’t feel as badly last night after popping a CDB (non-THC) gummie. I bought them at Telluride’s Green Dragon, and at the urging of Roger Durling, whose 90-year-old mom swears by them.

I also bought some hemp massage cream.

Early this morning I decided to blow off a 9:45 am screening of Malcolm Washington, Virgil Williams and August Wilson‘s The Piano Lesson. Being based on a venerated 1987 Wilson play, I’m certain it’ll be reasonably decent at the very least, but I’m also fairly sure it won’t blow anyone away. I’ll certainly see it before long (it screens again on Monday, 9.2 at 4 pm).

Four HE viewings today: (1) Jesse Eisenberg‘s A Real Pain at the Chuck Jones, 1:15 pm; (2) Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5, also at the Chuck Jones, 4:15 pm; (3) Jason Reitman‘s Saturday Night, Palm Theatre, 7:15 pm; and (4) a pure-pleasure option of re-watching either Anora at the Palm or The Apprentice at the Galaxy, both screening at 10 pm.

Conclave is drop-dead brilliant — a bull’s-eye master class in audience-friendly mise-en-scene, and a cinematic page-turner like very few films over the decades have managed to be. We all saw it last evening at the Herzog (6 pm), and holy effing moley!

All hail director Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front), a gifted helmer who’s made a supreme Best Picture contender, as well as the great Ralph Fiennes, whose lead performance as Cardinal Thomas Lawrence is absolutely assured of being a heavily favored Best Actor contender.

Not to mention the fabled Isabella Rossellini, whose performance as the all-knowing and unyielding Sister Agnes easily puts her into the Best Supporting Actress conversation. And there can be no bypassing Stanley Tucci‘s lucid, spot-on performance as Cardinal Bellini in the supporting actor category.

With Conclave, Berger has made a film as complex, riveting, satisfyingly adult, immaculately polished, solemnly spiritual and psychologically gripping as a film of this sort — a procedural institutional thriller — can be.

This Focus Features release (11.1) is obviously a Best Picture nominee — a knockout for intelligent audiences of all stripes and persuasions. Even the younger popcorn lowlifes will appreciate the persistent sheen of quality.

The irony is that Conclave is at heart and itself a popcorn movie, albeit a very high-end one. Why have so few 21st Century films been as good as this? As masterful and assured in the delivery of pure cinematic pleasure?

Believe it or not, a fellow journalist told me last night that a couple of fellows (possibly members of the Nickel Boys team?) were saying after the 6 pm Conclave screening that it’s a respectable but flawed half-and-halfer, possibly because it’s “too white.”

Whoa whoa whoa…too effing white?? This, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is the essence of woke derangement syndrome. On top of which Conclave features a very prominent black character (Lucian Msamati‘s Cardinal Adeyemi, plus there’s another woke-as-fuck third-act plot element that I can’t mention.

12:47 pm: RaMell Ross’s “Nickel Boys” is a truly fascinating and innovative arthouse experiment during the first 30 to 45 minutes, delivering nervy and daringly out-there chops with its avoidance of traditional boilerplate camera strategies, going for broke with a tilt-a-whirl visual scheme .

But the determination to mostly go with a vaguely Emmanuel Lubezski-ish strategy of having the camera or audience directly experience the lead protagonist’s POV wears down after a while, and what little narrative tension it has dissipates before long because Ross and Joslyn Barnes’ screenplay, based on Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel, isn’t following a linear plot line, and the film basically goes on way too long (140 minutes).

Ferociously ambitious young directors make this mistake from time to time, over-indulging their whims and darlings, etc. This doesn’t exactly constitute a felony but the film, which tells a sad and brutal tale about a notoriously corrupt Florida reform school in the ‘60s, is definitely hurt by RaMell’s over-reach.

“Nickel Boys” deserves an A for ambition, and the performances are quite good (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor is the big stand-out) but it really does tax your patience and gradually runs out of gas, and a few plot events feel a bit confusing. (Too whipped to write any further — to be continued Saturday morning.)