Telluride has commonly centered documentaries that celebrate artists, and three of their most high-profile non-fiction films of this unusual year detailed the lives of incredibly influential musicians. I went into these three films expressing my general dislike of bio-docs to my wife. They’re typically structurally flat (“This happened, then this happened, then that happened…”) and…

Riz Ahmed stars in Bassam Tariq’s “Mogul Mowgli” as a Pakistani-British rapper named Zed, who is just about to make it big. He’s been working at this career for decades, starting with recording raps on tapes at his parent’s home back in London. But right when he’s about to embark on a tour, he becomes…

Even when you’re at one of the most prestigious and venerated film festivals in the world, there’s no guarantee that you won’t see a bad movie. And yet as my time at the Mostra Internazionale D’arte Cinematografica, La Biennale di Venizia—the Venice Film Festival to you—draws to a close, it’s looking like I did very…

Because of COVID restrictions—and boy, sentences starting with that phrase never get old, do they—the Venice Film Festival is only seating at 50 percent capacity in its venues. The seats are occupied in staggered, social-distancing fashion. Because of this, the festival has to schedule more screenings of their competition films in order to meet demand.…

A stylistically diverse trio of perceptive films, all charged by searching male leads, made for an unusual thematic group in this year’s Telluride Film Festival. The first of them is “Red Rocket,” Sean Baker’s shrewd, gritty and unfailingly hilarious follow-up to 2017’s “The Florida Project,” that made a splash in Telluride following its Cannes debut…

Pablo Larraín’s “Spencer” is a haunting reimagining of a tense Christmas holiday in the life of Princess Diana. Knowing this will not fully prepare you for what you’re about to watch. Larraín’s vision is full of dream sequences, internal and externalized pain, metaphor-heavy dialogue and Kristen Stewart brooding sensationally under various hats and Diana’s signature…