Here’s a heads up for San Francisco Bay Area (and especially Marin) movie fans. The Mill Valley Film Festival usually offers an early peek at some prestige fall releases, and that is definitely the case this October.
I think the three most promising films are:
- The Past: The Artist’s Berenice Bejo won Best Actress at Cannes as a Parisian woman divorcing her Iranian husband in Paris amid an increasingly messy family life. By the director of Oscar-winning A Separation.
- All Is Lost with Robert Redford as a man battling impossible odds when something goes horribly wrong on his trans-ocean solo voyage.
- the historical slavery epic 12 Years a Slave (but the only screening, with director and star, is already sold out).
Other films with lots of buzz include:
- Nebraska: Director Alexander Payne follows his Sideways and The Descendants with a black and white indie. Bruce Dern won Best Actor at Cannes for portraying an addled Montana grump who thinks he’s won a junk mail sweepstakes. His son drives him to Omaha to claim the nonexistent prize, stopping to see some relatives and have some road trip adventures along the way. There’s also some buzz about the performance of June Squibb (who acted in Payne’s About Schmidt) as the old man’s wife.
- Philomena: Judi Dench stars as an Irish woman seeking the son she was forced to give up for adoption. Co-stars Steve Coogan in a non-ironic role.
- Blue is the Warmest Color: This film, which many critics thought was way too long, nevertheless won the top prize at Cannes. Actresses Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux (Farewell My Queen, Midnight in Paris) are reportedly spectacular in this three-hour love story. One of the explicit sex scenes takes over twenty minutes (TWENTY MINUTES!).
- The Rocket: A boy takes his family across war-scarred Laos to enter a rocket contest. It looks like the kind of movie that I usually don’t like, but it won major awards at the Berlin and Tribeca film fests.
Eventually, I’ll have descriptions and trailers for all these films on my Movies I’m Looking Forward To. Scroll down to “Later Fall – Prestige Season”. The Mill Valley Film Festival will run October 3-13 at the Rafael in San Rafael, the Sequoia in Mill Valley and three other Marin venues.