If you ask me Denis Villenueve‘s Prisoners (Warner Bros., 9.20) has been a little bit over-hyped by critics. Don’t get me wrong — it’s a moody, riveting, well-crafted thriller by a director who’s obviously a cut or two above the norm and is into complexity and adult stuff. Set in the grimmest, coldest, rainiest part of Bumblefuck, Pennsylvania you’ll ever not want to visit, the story (written by Aaron Guzikowski) is about the kidnapping of two young girls and the efforts of a lone-wolf cop (Jake Gyllenhaal) and the girls’ vigilante-minded dads (Hugh Jackman, Terrence Howard) to find them. Although not in synch, of course.

Aimed more at critics than ticket buyers, Prisoners is one of those thoughtfully murky, atmospheric, densely plotted thrillers that’s more about the journey than than the destination. Because when you get to the end it’s like “uhm…wait, what?” That was my reaction, at least.

So Stephen Frears‘ Philomena is a huge Venice wow, but Telluride audiences won’t catch it on Monday due to Toronto programmers strongly protesting this. HitFix‘s Kris Tapley reported Friday that he;d been told that Weinstein Co. “had Stephen Frears’ “Philomena” all lined up for a sneak preview on Monday, fresh off its Venice bow, [but] this didn’t sit well with programmers at the Toronto Film Festival, incensed that yet another of their big North American debuts was going to drop here.”

The fascinating ending was the first topic broached by moderator John Horn during yesterday’s post-screening discussion of All Is Lost with director-writer J.C. Chandor and Robert Redford. They don’t spoil anything so no worries. I wanted to catch it again to see if it played as strongly as it did in Cannes, and it definitely did that. Anyone who sees this film and goes “yeah, not bad, decent” needs to get his/her pipes cleaned. All Is Lost is landmark, classic, world-class stuff, and most definitely a metaphor for the struggle and the loneliness that comes with late-period aging.

After unforgivably programming Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave against Denis Villeneuve‘s Prisoners last night (everyone I spoke to was pissed about this), the Telluride guys are offering a Prisoners follow-up screening this morning at 8:30 am at the Palm. Wait…the widely-hailed pic runs 153 minutes? Okay, I’ll get out at 11:15 or thereabouts. Oh, right — they never start films on time and they always spend 10 minutes on introductions so make it a little past 11 am.

I’m especially intrigued by the opening of Kris Tapley’s HitFix review: “They simply don’t make thrillers like Denis Villeneuve‘s Prisoners at the studio level, and yet here it is. Glacially paced, bloated to a 158-minute running time, stingy with details as its mystery unfolds — it goes against most every convention for a film like this.

My 12 Years A Slave tweets, tapped out on dark streets between the Galaxy and 221 South Oak, failed to mention likely Best Supporting Actress contender Lupita N’yongo and Hans Zimmer‘s dynamic, impacting, non-period score. Cheers also to supporting players Michael Fassbender (whose performance as a plantation owner makes Simon Legree look like Shirley Temple), Brad Pitt, Sarah Paulson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Giamatti, Paul Dano (whose beating scene is ten times more satisfying than all of the posturing payback scenes in Django Unchained) and Alfre Woodard, among others. Make no mistake — Slave is Steve McQueen‘s high-water mark, his grand slam.

Following Friday night’s 12 Years A Slave debut screening at Telluride’s Galaxy (l to r.): Moderator, Brad Pitt, Cheweitl Ejiofor, Lupita N’yongo, Michael Fassbender, Steve McQueen.

There’s too much happening to file. 12 Years A Slave begins in 50 minutes. My video files of the Redford-Chandor interview are still converting to mp4 so I have to leave the computer at the inn. A possible interview with Blue Is The Warmest Color girls might happen around 10 or 10:30 tonight…maybe. I’ll just have to file stuff late.

I’m enraged…okay, irked to hear that people at yesterday’s screening of J.C. Chandor‘s incontestably brilliant All is Lost were giving it three stars out of five. Or were going “yeah, pretty good but not amazing” or words to that effect. “I think some people just weren’t prepared for it,” a cinematographer friend told me last night. She means they were a bit thrown by the almost total lack of dialogue and the fact that it’s all Redford, all the time — i.e., no other characters. There hasn’t been a more or less dialogue-free film that has delivered this effectively in I don’t how long. (The Artist doesn’t count — different animal.). Trust me, All Is Lost is not falling short at the Telluride Film Festival — it’s the audiences. But what can you do? You can’t get out the stick and order people to be more perceptive. Their aesthetic dispositions are their own affair. They either get what they’re seeing or they don’t.

Film buffs who go to festivals like Telluride have been more or less trained like poodles to sit up on their hind legs and go “yap! yap!” whenever a new Coppola comes along and makes a film. Gia Coppola, director-writer of the occasionally irksome but mostly decent Palo Alto, is the latest recipient of this largesse. My attitude is that talented filmmakers deserve respect and allegiance, even if their paths have been paved by family connections. And it has to be acknowledged that The Latest Coppola has delivered a pretty good film here. Or at least one that I felt more or less okay with when it ended.

I talked things over with three or four colleagues after it ended, and we were mostly agreed with Gia Coppola shouldn’t be penalized for being the granddaughter of Francis because her work is certainly above-average.

Based on producer and costar James Franco’s same-titled short story collection, it’s basically about a demimonde of Northern California teens revelling in vacant nihilism and coping with the tug of nascent adulthood. In that sense it sometimes feels boring as shit because most teenagers — hello? — are boring as shit to hang with. I knew that when I was 17 even and I really know that now. Teenage males, in particular. All but worthless, not into anything, hormonal dogs, booze-swilling, to some extent self-destructive…go away and come back when you’re 29 or 30.

Everyone hates the Telluride Film Festival slotting of Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave, which screens today at the Galaxy at 7:30 pm. That’s because this 134-minute must-see film (i.e., journos can’t skip) is interfering with so many other screenings. It kills attending the 6:30 pm T-Bone Burnett and Coen Bros. tribute. It kills seeing Jonathan Glazer‘s Under The Skin at 7:15 or whatever. It kills seeing Prisoners at 6 pm at “the Zog.” It kills seeing The Past at 9 pm. If I was a Telluride programmer I would fix it so that the films that everyone really wants to see (as opposed to those films that people kinda want to see) don’t fight with each other so much.

Perhaps I need to see Errol Morris‘s The Unknown Known: The Life and Times of Donald Rumsfeld once or twice more, but my initial impression was one of muted fascination and at the same time vague disappointment. I feel I know Rumsfeld pretty well from his innumerable interviews and press conferences during the Bush years so I went in wanting to know him a little better. I’m not sure that I got that from Morris’s film, although I was certainly engaged start to finish.

The doc is an examination of who and what Rumsfeld is by way of his “snowflakes” — i.e., thousands of memos he dictated over the decades. But when one of the flakes exposes some chink in the armor, Rumsfeld shrugs and grins and throws up his hands and spins it around in his usual way.

For me the most interesting aspect was the straight biographical stuff.

Here’s what I texted to a friend last night: “Efficient, engaging, chilly, a bit frustrating. The obvious similarity to The Fog of War makes it feel deja vu-ish, but that 2004 Oscar winner was a haunting cautionary fable that stayed with you. And it was more emotional than the Rumsfeld doc, or for me it was. The Unknown Known boils down to being an exercise in the study of denial and spin and revelation and doublespeak. Perhaps the man is impenetrable. I know there’s no catharsis in the film. It’s a good intelligent work that didn’t knock my boots off.”

It’s 8 am in Telluride — less than an hour to get to the 9 am Palo Alto screening at “the Zog.” The upside is that it won’t be too crowded and I can “get it out of the way,” as I’ve been saying from time to time since I arrived here two days ago. 11:05 am update: I saw it this morning, tapping out a response now. I really hate watching teenage nihilism. There’s no aesthetic beneath it. I guess I’m really saying that teenagers are deathly boring as dramatic protagonists. They’re anxious, uncertain, confused, withdrawn…later. Give me protagonists who are fighters, schemers, lovers, poets, politicians — anything but teenagers.