Shouldn’t we?

In a way, yes, we should. But after a relatively underwhelming Cannes Film Festival back in May, the September trio of festivals was also underwhelming, and the New York lineup is light on much that could alter the race.

So let’s pick through what we’ve seen and what we expect to happen when the 10,000+ members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences get around to voting in the Best Picture category in early January. We’ll separate them into groups.  

Contenders that have already been released

The big one in this category, of course, is Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” an epic that became the de facto frontrunner when it was released on July 17 and hasn’t budged from that position since then. It did extremely well at the box office, reviews have been strong and it epitomizes a year in which lots of high-profile films tell stories about how we tell stories, with others in that camp including “The Debut,” “Elsinore,” “Digger,” “Primetime” and “Ink.”

Being a wire-to-wire favorite isn’t easy, but Nolan did it three years ago with his previous film, “Oppenheimer,” another third-week-of-July release. Lots of directors earn back-to-back Best Picture nominations – Paul Thomas Anderson did it last year, Edward Berger and Denis Villeneuve the year before – but winning the top prize with consecutive films hasn’t happened since David Lean turned the trick with “Bridge on the River Kwai” in 1957 and “Lawrence of Arabia” in 1962. The only other director to do it: William Wyler with “Mrs. Miniver” in 1942 and “The Best Years of Our Lives” in 1946.

(Francis Ford Coppola directed Best Picture winners only two years apart with the first two “Godfather” movies, as did Frank Lloyd with “Cavalcade” and “Mutiny on the Bounty” in the 1930s, but Coppola made “The Conversation” in between his two winners, and Lloyd made three other movies between his.)

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s “Project Hail Mary” came out even earlier in the year, on March 20, only five days after the Oscar ceremony. But like “Sinners” last year and “Dune: Part Two” the year before, it’s a bold spring movie that seems to be hanging on in the minds of voters.

The jury’s still out on a trio of movies that came out in the first half of the year: in order of likelihood, Olivia Wilde’s sharp and entertaining talkfest “The Invite,” YouTube creator Curry Barker’s horror-movie sensation “Obsession” (not a genre that usually finds favor with Oscar voters) and the divisive but crowd-pleasing Michael Jackson biopic (or whitewash?) “Michael.”  

Festival movies that are likely to be nominated

The fall festivals usually bring the premieres of a few best-pic nominees: Last year, for instance, there was “Bugonia” and “Frankenstein” from Venice and “Hamnet” from Telluride, the year before “The Brutalist” from Venice and “Conclave” and “Nickel Boys” from Telluride. This year, though, I count exactly one sure-fire nominee: Martin McDonagh’s twisted comedy “Wild Horse Nine.” It may not be as strong as the Irish director’s 2022 black comedy “The Banshees of Inisherin,” which received nine nominations, but it’ll likely do well, buoyed by the affection for a cast headed by John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell and Steve Buscemi.

Peter Farrelly’s “I Play Rocky” may not be quite as much of a sure thing, but his tale of the making of the 1976 Best Picture winner “Rocky” is a genuine crowd-pleaser and seems likely to become the first Toronto Film Festival world premiere to land a nomination since “American Fiction” in 2023.

Festival movies that might be nominated

This is a much bigger group than the likely nominees. It includes Jesse Eisenberg’s goofy musical “The Debut,” another crowd-pleaser; Mike Leigh’s wrenching but lovely “Tender Loving Care,” with “Widow’s Bay” Emmy winner Kate O’Flynn starring in what the iconic director says will likely be his last movie; and Australian film and theater director Simon Stone’s “Elsinore,” with a stunning performance by Andrew Scott as Ian Charleson, the “Chariots of Fire” star who played Hamlet in a London theatrical production while he was dying of AIDS in 1989. (It could follow “Hamnet” and become the second consecutive nominee to find parallels between Shakespeare’s classic tragedy and the lives of people putting it on.)

Other recent festival films in contention are Lance Oppenheim’s “Primetime,” with Robert Pattinson as “To Catch a Predator” host Chris Hansen; Sian Heder’s “CODA” follow-up, “Being Heumann,” which uses a predominantly disabled cast to tell the story of a 1977 sit-in that was pivotal in the disability-rights movement; and Danny Boyle’s “Ink,” in which Boyle’s typically propulsive filmmaking traces the rise of tabloid journalism in England in the 1980s.

Going back to the Cannes Film Festival in May, you can’t rule out James Gray’s “Paper Tiger,” in which Scarlett Johansson, Miles Teller and Adam Driver play roles based on Gray’s mother, father and uncle; and Jordan Firstman’s entertaining “Club Kid,” which takes “Three Men and a Baby,” drops two of the men and transplants the action to New York gay club scene.

Festival contenders not in English

This is an intriguing batch of films, because the increasingly international makeup of the Academy has led to four consecutive years of two non-English Best Picture nominees, and eight straight years of at least one. Two-thirds of those nominees have come from Cannes, which supplied at least six contenders this year.

The top three seem to be the Palme d’Or winner, Cristian Mungiu’s “Fjord,” austere and provocative; the Spanish drama “La Bola Negra,” an expansive epic which spans decades in the lives of three gay men and is one of Netflix’s strongest contenders; and “Fatherland,” another mid-century black-and-white reverie from Pawel Pawlikowski, who worked this territory fruitfully with his last two movies, “Ida” and “Cold War.”

The Asian auteurs Lee Chang-dong and Ryusuke Hamaguchi can’t be discounted, either, with Lee’s “Possible Love” and Hamaguchi’s “All of a Sudden” telling deep and thoughtful stories from South Korea and Japan, respectively. Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev, now living in exile in France, delivers a typically powerful look at Russian society in “Minotaur,” though Best Picture is more of a stretch for his dark drama.

Notable documentaries

No nonfiction film has ever been nominated for Best Picture, but two of them certainly stole the headlines during the festivals. One, we saw coming: Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney’s “Musk” was a look at the world’s richest man that felt monumental even as it drained viewers over its four-hour running time.

The other was a shock: Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder’s “You Can See Everything” premiered as a surprise film at Telluride and left audiences dumbfounded with its look at Elizabeth Holmes in the month before she began serving a prison term for defrauding investors in her company Theranos. If the Academy’s Documentary Branch doesn’t embrace the slippery doc/fiction hybrid beloved by Fielder fans, there’s always a chance it could hit the spot for general voters – unless those mind-boggled raves out of Telluride had something to do with the surprise unveiling and the altitude.

A post-festival possibility that some people have seen

One of the biggest contenders to skip the fall festivals was Alejandro G. Inarritu’s “Digger,” with Tom Cruise as a billionaire mogul (there seem to be a lot of them on screens these days) in a rare comedy for the ambitious Mexican director. The film premiered in London and had a few Stateside screenings recently, with more coming in the next week. So far, it’s safe to say that the film has been wildly divisive: It’s completely excessive and over-the-top in a way that seems to be exhausting to some and thrilling to others, while a big twist recasts everything you’ve seen and forces you to reconsider those scenery-chewing performances by Cruise, John Goodman and others.

A lot of people seem to be predicting that it’ll flop with voters (think: Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon”), but it’s so seriously wacky that it might also get points for guts and nerve. It won’t hurt that it gives people a reason to vote for Tom Cruise, which has been hard to find during his years in the action-star arena.

Contenders that haven’t screened yet

This Oscar-watcher’s rule of thumb is that if you come out of the fall festivals and there are three or four or six big movies that have yet to screen, you should assume that 75% of them will not be serious contenders. The problem is that at this point, you don’t know which 25% might score.

That said, the end to Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” trilogy, “Dune: Part Three,” seems pretty close to a sure thing. You’d think the pedigree of “The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth” would make that a reliable bet as well: screenplay by Quentin Tarantino based on the character that won Brad Pitt an Oscar for “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” directed by three-time Best Director nominee David Fincher. But only one of Fincher’s last four movies has earned a best-pic nomination, and his pulpier genre exercises – “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” “Gone Girl,” “The Killer” – are the ones that tend to miss out. So who knows?

Also a David-Fincher-adjacent semi-sequel, Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning” is a follow-up to the Sorkin-written, Fincher-directed “The Social Network,” with Jeremy Strong taking over the Mark Zuckerberg role from Jesse Eisenberg. We can expect smart, fast talking, but 2020’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7” is the only one of the three previous movies Sorkin has directed to be nominated for the top Oscar.

Other films still waiting in the wings are a trio of New York Film Festival premieres: Tony Gilroy’s “Behemoth!” with Pedro Pascal as a cellist and film composer; Luca Guadagnino’s “Artificial,” with Andrew Garfield as the CEO of OpenAI; and Tom McCarthy’s “A Statement,” with Paul Rudd and Paul Giamatti as part of an ensemble playing scientists and policymakers trying to craft a statement on climate change in 1980.  

Another film that hasn’t screened yet but holds real promise, at least to me, is “Werwulf” by Robert Eggers, who ought to have gotten more awards traction than he did for “The Lighthouse” and “Nosferatu.” No, I don’t really expect it to become a Best Picture nominee. But a werewolf movie with Willem Dafoe speaking dialogue that’s all in Middle English? Damn, sign me up.  

Best Picture predictions as of right now

Given all of this, where do we stand for now? If I had to come up with a list of what I think the Best Picture nominees would be, I’d start with these seven films, more or less in this order:

“The Odyssey”
“Wild Horse Nine”
“La Bola Negra”
“Dune: Part Three”
“I Play Rocky”
“Fjord”
“Project Hail Mary”

For the final three slots, I see at least eight films that seem to have a shot, barring any surprises surfacing between now and when voting begins in January. I’d currently go with this trio, the first two because they moved me so much and the third because it’s just so batty:
“Elsinore”
“Tender Loving Care”
“Digger”

But I wouldn’t rule out these:
“The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth”
“Primetime”
“The Debut”
“Being Heumann”

As always, all opinions are subject to change because this is awards season.

The post Where Does the Best Picture Oscar Race Stand After the Lackluster Festivals? appeared first on TheWrap.

Katie Dippold’s horror-comedy series entered the Emmy race so late that its final three episodes weren’t even eligible for this year’s awards, but it didn’t even need a full season to dominate the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards and break the record for comedy-series wins.

On paper, the Outstanding Comedy Series award looked like a real race between “Widow’s Bay,” which came into this year’s Emmys with 19 nominations, and the final season of “Hacks,” which set a new record for comedies with 24 noms. In fact, the running order of Monday night’s show suggested that the Television Academy and the show’s producers thought the Outstanding Comedy Series category had more suspense than the Emmys’ typical final award, Outstanding Drama Series, in which “The Pitt” was a prohibitive favorite to beat “Pluribus” and win its second consecutive Outstanding Drama Series Emmy.

But that’s not exactly how it worked out. Voters made their intentions clear when they gave the first award of the night to Kate O’Flynn for “Widow’s Bay” over Hannah Einbinder for “Hacks.” Then they gave the third award to “Widow’s Bay” star Matthew Rhys for his other 2025 role in the limited series “The Beast in Me.” Then they gave the sixth award to “Widow’s Bay’s” Stephen Root over Harrison Ford, and the 10th award to Rhys again, this time for “Widow’s Bay,” then the 11th one to Dippold for writing “Widow’s Bay,” a category that had probably been the best shot for the wonderful finale of “Hacks” to put up a fight.

By the halfway point, the suspense had pretty much been drained out of that final award of the night – although “Hacks” die-hards could disagree by remembering that two years ago, “The Bear” set a new record for the most comedy wins in a single year before “Hacks” stole the top comedy Emmy. But lightning didn’t strike twice for “Hacks,” with “Widow’s Bay” completing the near-sweep that had been feeling pretty inevitable for most of the night.

“The Pitt,” on the other hand, didn’t look all that dominant heading into the final drama award. Its actors lost to Allison Janney for “The Diplomat” and Tom Pelphrey for “Task” in the supporting categories, where it appeared that the frontrunner was hurt by hogging all those nominations (three out of the seven actors and four out of seven actresses nominated were from “The Pitt”), with neither Janney nor Pelphrey splitting the vote with castmates.

Going into the final awards, “The Pitt” was one of four different drama series with a single win in the night, while “Pluribus” led with two drama wins, both of them in categories where it was going head-to-head against “The Pitt.”

But last year “The Pitt” won even though “Severance” had lots more nominations. It established itself as the voters’ favorite and followed that 2025 victory with a strong second season; it wasn’t about to falter after spending the entire Emmy season as a worthy frontrunner.  

Still, the night will be remembered as belonging to the comedy series set on the creepy island. In a way, the dominance on the part of “Widow’s Bay” was a feel-good story of a show coming out of nowhere to charm and spook its way into the winner’s circle, led by a unanimously adored cast and a showrunner who must be a lot more twisted than she looks. But it was also yet another instance of Emmy voters narrowing their focus and bestowing all their love on a single show.

This is the fifth time in the last seven years that a series has set a new record for the most comedy wins in a single year. That was good news for “Schitt’s Creek” in 2020, “The Bear” twice in 2024 (once in a delayed ceremony in January and again in September), “The Studio” in 2025 and “Widow’s Bay” this year – but it’s not a great look for Emmy voters, who continually feel as if they’re rubber-stamping a small number of favorites rather than really considering the varied options available.

On the other hand, you can find some variety in voters’ choices if you look at the big picture. “Ted Lasso” is the only series to win the Outstanding Comedy Series award more than once in the last 10 years, with the last stretch bringing single-year victories for “The Bear,” “Hacks,” “The Studio” and now “Widow’s Bay.” (Other winners in the past decade are “Veep,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “Fleabag” and “Schitt’s Creek.”)

The Television Academy stirred up controversy and drew the wrath of the major Hollywood guilds with the decision to move half a dozen categories off the primetime telecast and deposit them in the non-televised Creative Arts Emmy shows on Sept. 5 and 6, which had the effect of making the limited-series categories, normally a significant part of the telecast, little more than an afterthought.

The Outstanding Limited Series award went to “DTF St. Louis,” lead acting awards to Matthew Rhys and Sally Field were dropped in between the drama and comedy categories and supporting actor and actress winners David Harbour and Linda Cardellini got a conciliatory booking as presenters, with enough time in their intro to let them toss in a few thank-yous that they would have been making had their categories been presented on the main show.

As for what the show did with the time it saved by moving those categories into the Creative Arts shows, it appeared that it made time for a few more video sketches like the Taylor Swift-meets-“Law & Order” one that took a cute idea and belabored it for longer than necessary, and for extended chat between presenters — which, while occasionally funnier than usual, is never anybody’s favorite part of an awards show.

But for those who liked the bits (or those who wanted to know who to blame), Outstanding Variety Series winner Stephen Colbert provided an answer by telling the audience that his out-of-work writers had penned the Emmy show, and that they were all looking for additional work. There are, perhaps, worse ways to get your name out there.

The category in which Colbert won provided another intriguing wrinkle, because this year the variety-series Emmy was reclassified as an “Area” award, which could have resulted in all five of the nominees being awarded Emmys if they’d gotten enough votes in a five-part “yes or no” vote. (Any nominee with 90% yesses gets an Emmy.) Instead, the award went only to the final season of Colbert’s show, handing “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” a rare loss and continuing a trend in the small number of Area categories: Almost every time, only a single nominee gets enough votes.

But then, his show’s cancellation gave Colbert all the momentum in the variety category this year. And as the 78th Emmys demonstrated pretty conclusively, momentum is king.  

The post How ‘Widow’s Bay’ Went From Underdog to Emmys Juggernaut appeared first on TheWrap.

So why is it that so many conversations have circled back around to Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s “You Can See Everything,” a movie that isn’t even playing here “on the shores of Lake Ontario,” as “I Play Rocky” director Peter Farrelly proudly described Toronto before his premiere?

That movie, a reportedly bonkers Elizabeth Holmes documentary (or semi-pseudo-documentary?) premiered in a secret screening at the Telluride Film Festival a week ago, but its absence in Toronto hasn’t stopped the buzz, whether in the form of enthusiasm, befuddlement, curiosity or skepticism.

So TIFF, the biggest of the fall festivals, missed out on the season’s buzziest flick and watched other festivals nab some of the top premieres: Martin McDonagh’s “Wild Horse Nine,” Lance Oppenheim’s “Primetime” and Florian Zeller’s “Bunker” to Venice, Jesse Eisenberg’s “The Debut,” Simon Stone’s “Elsinore” and Mike Leigh’s “Tender Loving Care” to Telluride, Tony Gilroy’s “Behemoth!” and Tom McCarthy’s “A Statement” to New York.

Several of those films went to TIFF after debuting elsewhere, while Toronto’s world premieres consisted of a lot of the kind of films it has specialized in in recent years: movies like “Being Heumann” and “I Play Rocky,” quintessential audience movies for the only festival whose top award is given out by the public, not by a jury.

That’s not to say that TIFF audience films can’t go on to make noise in awards circles: Recent People’s Choice winners “Hamnet,” “American Fiction,” “The Fabelmans” and “Belfast” were all Best Picture nominees, while 2019’s “Green Book” and 2020’s “Nomadland” pulled off rare TIFF People’s Choice Award/Best Picture Oscar double wins.

So far, though, the jury is out on the long-distance chances for TIFF’s top premieres. “Being Heumann,” which chronicles disability rights advocate Judith Heumann, prompted a joyous celebration both for the action on screen and for the fact that a movie like that was made with a cast of disabled actors; “I Play Rocky” found the audience bursting into applause throughout its story of the making of Sylvester Stallone’s 1976 classic “Rocky.” But both films sit in the 60s on Metacritic – and while “I Play Rocky” (score: 63) may make it into the Best Picture lineup, it’s less than a sure thing.

Eisenberg’s community-theater comedy “The Debut,” which had its international premiere at TIFF after launching at Telluride, is the closest thing to a critical and audience favorite to get a prime weekend berth in Toronto. Starring Julianne Moore as a New Jersey housewife cast in a community theater musical production which transforms her into a fierce method actor, it has a Metacritic score of 88 and went over like gangbusters at the Princess of Wales Theatre.

But it’s also one of a large number of TIFF films that may score best in the acting races. In fact, the first four days of the festival have delivered enough awards-worthy performances to fill up a couple of lead categories, with contenders including Anthony Ippolito in “I Play Rocky,” Andrew Scott in “Elsinore,” Scoot McNairy and Amanda Seyfried in “The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd,” Kate O’Flynn in “Tender Loving Care,” Rosalind Eleazar in “Misty Green,” Ruth Madeley in “Being Heumann,” Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz in “Bunker,” Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve in “Fjord,” Mahershala Ali in “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother,” Cynthia Erivo in “Prima Facie” and Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti in “The Debut,” unless Giamatti’s performance is one of those borderline roles that gets campaigned in the supporting category.

This doesn’t include films that will have their TIFF debuts on Monday or Tuesday after premiering in Venice, among them Danny Boyle’s “Ink,” with Guy Pearce and Jack O’Connell, and McDonagh’s “Wild Horse Nine,” with a performance by John Malkovich that might well be the Best Actor leader in the clubhouse at this point.

It’s not right to say that this is a weak year for movies in Toronto, but it’s weak for high-profile premieres, especially from major studios. But you could say the same thing about this year’s lineups at Cannes, Venice and Telluride, because big studios are sitting out the festival game more than ever these days.

Still, strong films have shown up in this festival by the lake. After seeing more than 50 of them (many at previous festivals or in private screenings pre-TIFF), I’m sticking with two personal favorites: Mike Leigh’s beautiful swan song, “Tender Loving Care,” and Tim Blake Nelson’s  wrenching crime story, “The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd.” That’s one person’s opinion; there are lots more movies here for lots of other opinions.

But hey, have you heard about “You Can See Everything?”

The post TIFF So Far: Why Are They Still Buzzing About That Elizabeth Holmes Doc From Telluride? appeared first on TheWrap.

The nominations were wild and, at times, contradictory, with a pair of previous winners, the medical drama “The Pitt” and the showbiz comedy “Hacks,” leading the way with 25 and 24 nominations, respectively. Both seemed to be facing serious threats from bold new shows, with the dystopian future of “Pluribus” and the creepy comedy of “Widow’s Bay” coming on strong. And in the limited series category, things were all over the map, with contenders including a controversial real-life chronicle, “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette,” the second season of the black comedy “Beef” and a twisty mystery set in the world of a kinky hookup app for would-be cheaters, “DTF St. Louis.”

We expect all of those to take home awards on Monday at the Peacock Theater. But based on what we saw at the two Creative Arts Emmys ceremonies on Sept. 5 and 6, the momentum seems to be with “The Pitt,” “Widow’s Bay” and “DTF St. Louis.”       

In recent years, the trend has been to give more Emmys to fewer programs, but we need to expect that there will be surprises. Last year, the shocks came with Jeff Hiller winning the comedy-supporting-actor award for “Somebody Somewhere” over Harrison Ford, Ike Barinholtz, Colman Domingo, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and others, and “Andor” winning the drama-writing Emmy over “The Pitt,” “Severance,” “The White Lotus” and “Slow Horses.” This year… well, if I knew, it wouldn’t be a surprise.

Here’s what we expect to happen on Emmy night.

Comedy Categories

Outstanding Comedy Series

Nominees:
“Abbott Elementary”
“The Bear”
“Hacks”
“Margo’s Got Money Troubles”
“Nobody Wants This”
“Only Murders in the Building”
“Shrinking”
“Widow’s Bay”

When the series finale of “Hacks” aired in late May, it seemed all but inevitable that the show’s standout last season and moving final episode would pave the way for an Outstanding Comedy Series win. But around that same time, people were discovering the debut season of the horror-comedy hybrid “Widow’s Bay,” which became TV’s hottest new show just as Emmy voting began.

And if you look at recent history, Television Academy voters just aren’t all that sentimental about honoring shows in their final seasons. Three-time winner “Veep” didn’t win in 2019 because voters had discovered “Fleabag”; the finales of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and the presumed finale of “Ted Lasso” lost in 2023 to the debut of “The Bear”; and overall, freshman shows have won in three of the last five years after only winning once in the previous decade.

“Hacks” went out on a high note and would be a deserving winner. But “Widow’s Bay” is another great show – and as the Creative Arts Emmys shows proved, it’s the new hot thing. And Emmy voters like new hot things over old favorites.

Predicted winner: “Widow’s Bay”

Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series

Nominees:
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, “Wonder Man”
Steve Carell, “Rooster”
Matthew Rhys, “Widow’s Bay”
Jason Segel, “Shrinking”
Martin Short, “Only Murders in the Building”

Over the last decade at the Emmys, the show that has won Outstanding Comedy Series has also won at least two of the seven other televised comedy awards – and in every single case, its lead actor or actress has won. It’s been 12 years since a comedy-series winner failed to also take a lead acting award, and it only happened in 2014 because “Modern Family” entered all of its actors in the supporting categories.

Given the way he keeps the horror humorous, there is absolutely no reason to think that “Widow’s Bay” star Matthew Rhys won’t keep the streak going

Predicted winner: Matthew Rhys

Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series

Nominees:
Quinta Brunson, “Abbott Elementary”
Ayo Edebiri, “The Bear”
Elle Fanning, “Margo’s Got Money Troubles”
Lisa Kudrow, “The Comeback”
Jean Smart, “Hacks” 

Jean Smart is a legend who has won for “Hacks” the last four years in a row, to go with her three additional Emmys in other categories. It’s not completely out of the question that Lisa Kudrow could pull off a huge upset for her comeback in “The Comeback,” but Smart’s performance in the “Hacks” finale helped take that show out on a stunning high note. She seems all but guaranteed to win her fifth consecutive comedy-actress Emmy, which would tie her with Candice Bergen and Mary Tyler Moore for the second most wins ever in the category, behind only Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ six.

Predicted winner: Jean Smart

Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series

Nominees:
Colman Domingo, “The Four Seasons”
Paul W. Downs, “Hacks”
Harrison Ford, “Shrinking”
Nick Offerman, “Margo’s Got Money Troubles”
Stephen Root, “Widow’s Bay”
Michael Urie, “Shrinking”
Tyler James Williams, “Abbott Elementary”

He’s been doing fine work for decades, he’s enormously respected, he’s gotten grizzled and he’s never won an Emmy … and by the way, he isn’t Harrison Ford.  Sure, Ford falls into the overdue category and could well win for “Shrinking,” but Stephen Root is a scene-stealing wonder in “Widow’s Bay.” Last year, Ford was the favorite but was upset by Jeff Hiller for “Somebody Somewhere”; this year, it may be Root’s turn.

Predicted winner: Stephen Root

Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series

Nominees:
Dale Dickey, “Widow’s Bay”
Hannah Einbinder, “Hacks”
Janelle James, “Abbott Elementary”
Kate O’Flynn, “Widow’s Bay” 
Michelle Pfeiffer, “Margo’s Got Money Troubles”
Megan Stalter, “Hacks”
Jessica Williams, “Shrinking”

This is another category where “Hacks” once seemed unstoppable, given Hannah Einbinder’s deeply moving (and very funny) performance in the series finale. And this is another category that was upended when “Widow’s Bay” came along, because Kate O’Flynn became one of the season’s breakout stars. You could argue that some of O’Flynn’s best work came in the final three episodes, which aired after the Emmys cutoff date and aren’t eligible to be considered, but she had a terrific showcase in the “Beach Reads” episode, which should be enough to get her the Emmy.

Predicted winner: Kate O’Flynn

Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series

Nominees:
“Abbott Elementary” (Randall Einhorn for “Ballgame”)
“The Bear” (Christopher Storer for “Bears”)
“The Chair Company” (Andrew DeYoung for “Life goes by too f**king fast, it really does”)
“Hacks” (Lucia Aniello for “Hacks”)   
“The Ms. Pat Show” (Mary Lou Belli for “Give It Arrest”)
“Widow’s Bay” (Hiro Murai for “Welcome to Widow’s Bay”)

Over the last decade, this category has matched the comedy-series winner a little more than half the time, which should be good news for Hiro Murai and the “Widow’s Bay” pilot. But it’s risky to underestimate the final episode of “Hacks,” which went to Paris and back and captured all of what people loved about that series. In a close race, we’re going with the world-building that went into the “Widow’s Bay” pilot.

Predicted winner: “Widow’s Bay”

Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series

Nominees:
“Abbott Elementary” (Quinta Brunson for “Team Building”)
“The Chair Company” (Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin for “Life goes by too f**king fast, it really does”)
“The Comeback” (Michael Patrick King and Lisa Kudrow for “Valerie Does It All”)
“Hacks” (Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky for “Hacks”)
“Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat” (Anthony King for “Mergers and Acquisitions”)
“Widow’s Bay” (Katie Dippold for “Welcome to Widow’s Bay”) 

Like the directing category, comedy writing has a 60% correlation with the comedy-series winner. But “Hacks” has won twice, once when it also won the series award and once when it didn’t. It may be hard for voters in the writers’ peer group to resist the comedy about comedy writers.

Predicted winner: “Hacks”

Drama Categories

Outstanding Drama Series

Nominees:
“The Diplomat”
“The Gilded Age”
“A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms”
“Paradise”
“The Pitt”
“Pluribus”
“Slow Horses”
“Your Friends & Neighbors”

Last year, “Severance” went into the Emmys ceremony with 27 nominations, the most of any show; “The Pitt” had less than half of that, 13, tying it for eighth place among all programs. And yet, “The Pitt” won the Outstanding Drama Series award, and this year it reinforced its status as voters’ favorite by leading all shows with 25 nominations. Last year, the medical show was something of an underdog; this year, it’s a clear favorite.

Vince Gilligan’s smart and twisted “Pluribus” is likely its main competitor, though it also feels a little like “Severance” did last year, maybe too quirky for mainstream voters. There’s a lot of affection for “The Diplomat” that might manifest itself more in the acting categories, but “The Pitt” seems destined to repeat last year’s win, though without nearly as much suspense.

Predicted winner: “The Pitt”

Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series

Nominees:
Sterling K. Brown, “Paradise”
Gary Oldman, “Slow Horses”
Mark Ruffalo, “Task”
Rufus Sewell, “The Diplomat”
Noah Wyle, “The Pitt”

It’s been a very long time since an actor scored back-to-back wins in this category, with only three men doing it in this century: James Gandolfini for “The Sopranos” in 2000 and 2001, James Spader for “The Practice” in 2004 and “Boston Legal” in 2005 (playing the same role) and Bryan Cranston for “Breaking Bad” in 2008, 2009 and 2010. However rare the feat might be, it’s hard to see how Noah Wyle isn’t going to accomplish it for a season in which his Dr. Robby was in a very bad state.

Predicted winner: Noah Wyle

Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series

Nominees:
Carrie Coon, “The Gilded Age”
Chase Infiniti, “The Testaments”
Keri Russell, “The Diplomat”
Rhea Seehorn, “Pluribus”
Zendaya, “Euphoria”

Zendaya has been nominated two previous times for “Euphoria,” and she’s won both times. Keri Russell has a real chance to join husband Matthew Rhys in the winners’ circle for “The Diplomat.” But Rhea Seehorn is a tour de force in “Pluribus,” and she seems likely to follow last year’s winner, Britt Lower for “Severance,” as a comedy-actress winner from an edgy sci-fi series. Plus, it’ll help Emmy voters make up for bypassing her for “Better Call Saul,” the show with the most nominations without a win in Emmy history.

Predicted winner: Rhea Seehorn

Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series

Nominees:
Patrick Ball, “The Pitt”
Billy Crudup, “The Morning Show”
Shawn Hatosy, “The Pitt”
Gerran Howell, “The Pitt”
Jack Lowden, “Slow Horses”
Tom Pelphrey, “Task”
Carlos-Manuel Vesga, “Pluribus”

Now we face a big question: Will “The Pitt” split the vote in the supporting categories? The show has three of the seven nominees in this category, and if voters can’t decide between Patrick Ball, Shawn Hatosy and Gerran Howell, that might well open the door for Tom Pelphrey from “Task” or two-time winner Billy Crudup from “The Morning Show.”

But here’s an odd statistic: The last four winners in this category – Tramell Tillman from “Severance,” Crudup and Matthew Macfadyen from “Succession,” twice – all came from shows that had three or four nominees in the category. And at the Creative Arts Emmys last week, “The Pitt” had two nominees in the guest-actor category, but the show’s Ernest Harden Jr. won. So we’re going to assume that vote-splitting won’t be a problem, and give this to Patrick Ball over Pelphrey.

Predicted winner: Patrick Ball

Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series

Nominees:
Taylor Dearden, “The Pitt”
Fiona Dourif, “The Pitt”
Allison Janney, “The Diplomat”
Katherine LaNasa, “The Pitt”
Sepideh Moafi, “The Pitt”      
Julianne Nicholson, “Paradise”
Karolina Wydra, “Pluribus”

Once again, vote-splitting is a potential problem for “The Pitt,” which has four of the seven nominees. It’s hard to decide which of the four would stand out to voters, with Katherine LaNasa being the defending champ in the category, Sepideh Moafi having a powerful storyline and Taylor Dearden and Fiona Dourif being slight dark horses. And that confusion could easily work to the advantage of Allison Janney, Julianne Nicholson or Karolina Wydra.

Really, this one feels like a tossup, but we think the Emmys will make another “Pitt” stop.

Predicted winner: Sepideh Moafi

Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series

Nominees:
“The Gilded Age” (Salli Richardson-Whitfield for “My Mind Is Made Up”)
“Paradise” (Hanelle M. Culpepper for “Exodus”)
“The Pitt” (Noah Wyle for “12:00 PM”)  
“Pluribus” (Vince Gilligan for “We Is Us”)
“Slow Horses” (Saul Metzstein for “Scars”)
“Task” (Salli Richardson-Whitfield for “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a river”)

As it does in the comedy field, this award goes to the overall series winner most but not all of the time. (Last year, “The Pitt” won for series but “Slow Horses” won for directing.) Unless viewers want to reward Salli Richardson-Whitfield, the first woman ever to receive two nominations in the category in a single year, it’ll probably come down to “The Pitt” vs. “Pluribus” again, with the former show perhaps having an edge for the distinctive, propulsive way in which it is filmed.

Predicted winner: “The Pitt”

Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series

Nominees:
“The Diplomat” (Peter Ackerman and Debora Cahn for “Amagansett”)
“The Pitt” (Kirsten Pierre-Geyfman & R. Scott Gemmill for “1:00 PM”)
“The Pitt” (Valerie Chu for “12:00 PM”)
“Pluribus” (Vince Gilligan for “We Is Us”)
“Slow Horses” (Will Smith for “Scars”)
“Task” (Brad Ingelsby for “A Still Small Voice”)

The last couple of years have brought surprises in this category: “Andor” last year, “Slow Horses” the year before. That could be a good sign for “Task” or “The Diplomat,” but the novelty of Vince Gilligan’s creation of “Pluribus” might well be hard to ignore.

Predicted winner: “Pluribus”

Limited Series Categories

Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series

Nominees:
“All Her Fault”
“The Beast in Me”
“Beef” 
“DTF St. Louis”                                                           
“Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette”

Until about halfway through the Creative Arts Emmys show on Sept. 6, “Beef” seemed to be the favorite to win in this category, just as the first season of that anthology series did in 2023. But then “DTF St. Louis” won for supporting performers David Harbour and Linda Cardellini, for writing and for directing.  “Love Story” got an important casting win at the beginning of that ceremony – but when one limited series wins for acting, for writing and for directing, you’ve got to figure that it’s the voters’ top choice.

Predicted winner: “DTF St. Louis”

Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie

Nominees:
Riz Ahmed, “Bait”
Jason Bateman, “Black Rabbit”
Charlie Hunnam, “Monster: The Ed Gein Story”
Oscar Isaac, “Beef”     
Matthew Rhys, “The Beast in Me”  

“Beef” is favored in both of the lead acting categories, but its nominees in the two supporting categories were beaten by “DTF St. Louis” last weekend. That doesn’t mean Oscar Isaac is going to lose here, but an upset is certainly possible. The other four nominees are conceivable, with Jason Bateman a backhanded way to give “DTF” (which he’s also in) a little more love, Matthew Rhys a way to thank him for “Widow’s Bay” and Riz Ahmed a surprise nominee who might have more support than we realize.

Predicted winner: Oscar Isaac

Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie

Nominees:
Claire Danes, “The Beast in Me”
Sally Field, “Remarkably Bright Creatures”
Carey Mulligan, “Beef”  
Sarah Pidgeon, “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette” 
Sarah Snook, “All Her Fault”

Again, Carey Mulligan is the favorite for “Beef.” But who doesn’t love Sally Field? And the casting Emmy that went to “Love Story” last week suggests that voters are impressed by the actors playing real people, foremost among them Sarah Pidgeon.

Predicted winner: Sarah Pidgeon

Reality and Variety Categories

Outstanding Reality Competition Program

Nominees:
“Dancing With the Stars”
“RuPaul’s Drag Race”
“Survivor”
“Top Chef”
“The Traitors”

This category is full of streaks. “The Voice” won for three straight years. “RuPaul’s Drag Race” won for five straight years. “The Amazing Race” won for seven straight years. And you have to think that “The Traitors” is about to add to its own streak, which currently sits at a paltry two years. The only thing that could stop it is admiration for the fact that “Survivor” just had its 50th season and has never won.

Predicted winner: “The Traitors”

Outstanding Variety Series

Nominees:
“The Daily Show”
“Jimmy Kimmel Live”
“Last Week Tonight With John Oliver”
“The Late Show With Stephen Colbert”
“Saturday Night Live”

This is one of the easiest categories to predict, and one of the hardest. It’s easy because “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” is going to win an Emmy for its final season, just as it did last year when voting happened after CBS canceled the show that so annoyed President Trump. But it’s hard because the variety-series Emmy has been reclassified as an “Area” award, which changes how people vote.

Instead of being asked to choose one of the five nominees, voters will be asked a question separately for each of the five nominees: Does this program deserve an Emmy? Any show that receives 90% yes answers gets an Emmy; any show that falls below that figure doesn’t. So there could be one winner, there could be five winners or there could be any number in between.

One thing to keep in mind: In recent years, other Area categories have almost invariably produced a single winner. So the smart choice might be to say Stephen Colbert will win and leave it at that. But history says that the Academy really loves John Oliver, too, so we’ll throw him in, too.

Predicted winners: “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,” “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert”

The post Final Emmy Predictions: Something Old, Something New, Something Blue appeared first on TheWrap.

Actually, it feels wrong to call “Hombre al Agua” a black comedy – or, for that matter, to give it any one specific label. It’s a fantasia of sorts that whips up melodrama, satire and social commentary and is full of deception, masks, lies and personal reinventions. There are two different movies within the movie plus a Mexican TV melodrama, and the key line might well be one that Garcia Bernal’s character delivers late in the film: “You are what you make others believe before they catch on.”

Labyrinthine in ways that are both fascinating and frustrating, the film is full of tonal shifts that can sometimes be clunky in ways that are forgivable because they’re deliberate. Garcia Bernal’s last directorial effort, 2019’s “Chicuarotes,” was a genre mashup that didn’t really work; “Hombre al Agua” is a genre mashup that’s a kick.

It begins with lovely vistas as the camera glides through a lavish villa and pans across the beach outside, then settles in a darkened room as Camilo (Garcia Bernal) and his wife Juana (Esmeralda Pimentel) try to have sex, until Juana gets fed up with Camilo’s lack of enthusiasm for her idea to role-play as strangers. A baby in the next room start crying, Camilo and Juana argue about who should get up (doing so with more passion than they’d showed during the sex) and Camilo ends up preparing a bottle, switching on a black-and-white melodrama and falling asleep on the couch with his baby daughter sitting on his chest.  

All of this is shot in deep, lustrous shadow – but after the TV drama takes over the screen for a couple of minutes, the cinematic palette shifts from dramatic darkness to a bright, light glare. Plus we get a narrator who fills us in on the backstory. Camilo was a very attentive Cuban lifeguard; he saved Abel (Jorge Salinas)  a millionaire who was having cramps while swimming; Abel gave Camilo a job in his seal-manufacturing plant and also introduced him to his daughter, Juana. And we already know what happened there.

Naturally, things get complicated. Abel is hit by a car, and asks Camilo to look after his pregnant mistress, Silvina (Natalia Oreiro), which pleases neither Silvina nor Juana nor the creepy guy who hangs around outside their estate and claims to be Silvina’s husband but really isn’t.

Meanwhile, there’s a director hanging around the house who wants to make a movie about Juana, her career as a pole vaulter, her status as an heiress and “the prejudices people have against the rich.” Juana starts writing the screenplay but won’t show it to Camilo, and eventually Ricky Martin shows up to play the role based on Camilo, though Juana seems pretty desperate to keep the two men apart.

Then, because there’s not enough going on, Abel decides to sell the company to the Dutch (who would like him to lay off a third of the workers first) and run for governor of Yucatan. He enlists Camilo as his chief of staff and holds their first meeting while he’s sitting on the toilet, a tactic apparently borrowed from U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, who famously used it to keep people off-balance.  

So you’ve got class struggles, the cares of the idle rich, show business, politics and who knows what else, all swirled into a grand party where everybody is playing a role, adopting a persona or trying to figure out who they can trust. (Short answer, especially for Camilo: nobody.) The movie’s reality is surrounded by fictional representations of that reality: the movie about Juana, a fake documentary cooked up to distract the factory workers from impending layoffs, the TV melodrama that pops up regularly.

“Hombre al Agua” starts out playful and grows more overtly comic, particularly once politics is thrown into the mix. At one point, a character compares the film’s milieu, the world of the rich, to old sci-fi movies where astronauts land on a planet that looks a lot like earth but turns out to be completely different.

It’s Garcia Bernal’s most assured film, which is not to say that the shenanigans are seamless or that the satire always lands. But it doesn’t need to be that sharp or pointed; it’s enough that he has taken the craziness and danger of modern life and whipped up some messy good fun.

The post ‘Hombre al Agua’ Review: Gael Garcia Bernal Whips Up Some Messy Good Fun appeared first on TheWrap.

Then came Lee Chang-dong’s “Burning” in 2018. The quiet, patient love triangle and murder mystery wasn’t nominated, but it became the first South Korean film to make the shortlist – and it kicked off an eight-year stretch in which movies from the country made the shortlist four times, most memorably in 2019 when Bong’s “Parasite” upended the Academy’s old habits and won not only the Best International Feature Film Award, but also Best Original Screenplay, Best Director and Best Picture.

Given the timing, you have to credit Lee Chang-dong and “Burning,” with an assist for the “Parasite” wins. At the time, it was director Lee’s first film after an eight-year hiatus – but paving the way for “Parasite” didn’t inspire him to capitalize on the Academy’s newfound affection for Korean cinema; instead, it took him another eight years to make his next film, “Possible Love.”

That long-awaited followup had its world premiere on Sunday at the Venice Film Festival. An intricate story of class conflict, journalistic ethics and the difficulty of healing, the upcoming Netflix release is another slow-burn story from Lee, circling issues of deep trauma and loss for almost three hours in a measured tempo that simply refuses to rush.    

Its central characters, Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu) and Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon), are a husband and wife who’ve been devastated by the aftermath of a factory labor dispute that turned into a violent confrontation with state militia. While many of the laid-off workers have joined support groups in the aftermath of a co-worker’s suicide, Ho-seok remains closed-off and uncommunicative; he drinks, but he barely talks.

Mi-ok, on the other hand, tries her best to find strength in community. When they arrive at a memorial service for the dead friend, Ho-seok initially refuses to even enter the building, while his wife goes in and agrees to talk to a documentary filmmaker Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong, the matriarch of the rich family in “Parasite”) who is making a movie about the aftermath of the strike. “He told me that if he talked about everything inside him, there’s no telling what might happen,” Mi-ok says of her husband. “He might flip out, start killing people.”

Ho-seok agrees to talk to the filmmaker, then finds himself unable to do so. But he goes out to dinner with Ye-ji and her rich husband, Sang-woo (Zo In-sung). Although Mi-ok is intimidated by the director, who is widely considered something of a fashionista, the two couples gradually fall into a state that might pass for friendship.

But Lee Chang-dong is too savvy and too austere a filmmaker to tip his hand; instead, he lets questions linger in the air. Is the documentary filmmaker really supporting the workers, or is she using them? Is this friendship, or exploitation? There are curious layers here: Ye-ji’s documentary uses a Steadicam to shoot footage of the workers, while the “Possible Love” cinematographer, Kim Ji-yong, uses a hand-held camera to shoot the guy with the Steadicam. (Does that make the film more trustworthy than the film within the film?)  

“Possible Love” uses lengthy flashbacks and digressions, and the backstory emerges slowly: Ho-seok was beaten so badly when the labor dispute was broken up that he was unconscious for three days, and then he was taken out of the hospital and thrown in jail for a month and a half. He finally goes to group therapy, where he finds himself unable to speak, but then he consents to a family vacation at Ye-ji and Sang-woo’s secluded beach house, and even agrees to do an interview for the documentary film while he’s there.

When the working-class couple get to the vacation house, Mi-ok is stunned. “This looks like a place from a novel I haven’t read,” she says. But when the rich couple are alone, even Sang-woo questions his wife’s intentions. “You’re different from these people, trying to pretend you’re the same,” he says.

“I’m trying to love these people,” she insists.

The connection between the couples is tested, celebrated, shattered and perhaps restored over the course of scenes that take place in brightly lit, sterile rooms and in overgrown swaths of wilderness. When emotions are finally unleashed, “Possible Love” can be devastating, though Lee is not afraid to follow the storms with a coda that can be downright leisurely.

The pacing requires patience, to be sure, but it’s also a strength in a movie that has a lot of issues to explore. For an audience that can settle into its rhythms, the film never feels as if it’s shortchanging a storyline or a character. “Possible Love” accumulates power as it goes – and the fact that it keeps going for two hours and 46 minutes means there’s a lot of power here to accumulate.    

“Possible Love” will be released in theaters on Oct. 23 and on Netflix on Nov. 6.

The post ‘Possible Love’ Review: Korean Drama Accumulates Power for Almost Three Hours appeared first on TheWrap.

Yes, that was the scene at the Telluride Film Festival last year for the world premiere of Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet.” But it was also the scene this year for the premiere of Simon Stone’s “Elsinore,” another convincing piece of evidence to suggest that Shakespeare, and “Hamlet,” aren’t done with us yet.

On the heels of “Hamnet,” and the adrenalized version of “Hamlet” from Riz Ahmed and Aneil Karia, “Elsinore” is both a sign of the enduring power of Shakespeare’s drama and a film about that power. And while it may have a more limited life than Zhao’s critical favorite, with its eight Oscar nominations and $100-million-plus grosses, it packs an emotional punch and showcases one of Andrew Scott’s most shattering performances.

The film takes place in 1989, when the National Theater was presenting a production of “Hamlet” starring Daniel Day-Lewis, in his early 30s and fresh off his Oscar-winning performance in “My Left Foot.” The famously intense actor had a breakdown in the middle of a performance and left the stage, never to return. (We glimpse this on monitors and from the wings, but no real footage of Day-Lewis is used.)

The film then flashes back to the previous month, when actor Ian Charleson, famous for starring in the Best Picture winner “Chariots of Fire” eight years earlier, slips some lines from Shakespeare into an audition for a nondescript action flick. “Why are you even auditioning for this stuff?” a friend asks. “You were in one of the most celebrated movies of all time!”

“Yes,” says Charleson with a sigh. “And all anyone can remember is the theme music.”

But as he tries to keep his career going, Charleson also carries a secret: He is gay and he has AIDS at a time when the disease is ravaging the gay community. “I used to look at middle-aged queens and think, ‘Please never let me get that old,’” a friend says. “Now I think, ‘Let me get to Friday lunchtime.’”

“Time’s running out,” Charleson tells another friend with an air of resignation. “I’ve wasted time. Now time’s wasting me.”

Charleson is aware of the National Theater’s production of “Hamlet”: “It’s the greatest part you can play, and in the greatest theater,” he tells a friend. “I’m f—ing jealous.”  But he’s sure he’s “not posh enough” for the National, until director Richard Eyre (Johnny Flynn) offers him the role in the wake of Day-Lewis’ departure. Charleson tells Eyre of his condition, swears the director to secrecy and vows that he can handle the enormous physical and emotional demands of the role.

Except that he can’t. His doctor, Margaret Johnson (Olivia Colman in peak cranky mode) insists that he must concentrate on regaining his strength and can’t even consider it. But Charleson is obsessed, persisting through a bout of pneumonia that sends him into the hospital on the night of the show’s first preview. (In real life, the production ran its original course with understudy Jeremy Northam taking over from Day-Lewis, then restarted with new cast members that included Charleson.)

As “Hamnet” did, “Elsinore” focuses on the mortality in Shakespeare’s tragedy: the father’s ghost bidding his son adieu, the “Alas, poor Yorick” soliloquy as Hamlet holds a skull, the sword fight that leaves him poisoned and dying.

Even in the early stages, Charleson’s Hamlet – or Scott’s Hamlet, since no footage exists of the earlier actor’s 1989 performance – is casual, conversational and riveting. In the hands of Scott, who played the role on the West End in 2017, the words sing without ever sounding the slightest bit actory or declamatory. Stefan Gregory’s score gives scenes momentum and depth, often with nothing more than solo piano, while Stone manages to make ’80s songs like Dire Straits’ “Romeo and Juliet” and Fine Young Cannibals’ “Don’t Look Back” fit in this Shakespearean tapestry.

The film is named for named for the Danish castle where Prince Hamlet lives, but the title is deliberately evocative of the forbidding National Theater building in London. Stone and cinematographer Mike Eley shoot the Brutalist structure in a manner befitting a monument, often as not with its stark columns looming above the characters’ heads.

But this is Scott’s movie. He’s amusing one moment, tortured the next, navigating a film that has import without ever becoming pompous. As a man who knows he’s in his final days, he summons up deep wells of regret, spiked with rage at his circumstances but also at himself.

“I wanted to be in the movies, I wanted to scale heights,” he says quietly, chiding himself for his ambition. “I didn’t scale heights, though, did I?”   

Does Charleson scale heights on stage at the National? It’s hardly a spoiler to say yes, since there wouldn’t be a movie if he didn’t. Does “Elsinore” get melodramatic along the way? Sure, but only in the sense that Shakespeare gets melodramatic – which is to say, gloriously so.

“Elsinore” will be released by Focus Features, which is also the company that released “Hamnet.”

The post ‘Elsinore’ Review: Andrew Scott Shines in Yet Another Sign That Shakespeare Isn’t Done With Us Yet appeared first on TheWrap.

The film, which had its world premiere on Friday at the Telluride Film Festival, is quietly virtuosic, though perhaps not as immediately arresting as “All of Us Strangers” or “45 Years,” the films that have garnered the most awards attention for Haigh in the past.

It’s also a film that subverts the beauty of its surroundings. “A Long Weekend” recasts the ritual of farm life in the mountains as something grim and foreboding; it takes one of the most gorgeous settings imaginable – the Canadian Rockies, standing in for Colorado – and makes it feel like a constant threat. It’s not quite “The Shining,” but there are similarities: The setting isn’t an escape, it’s a trap.

It certainly feels that way to Louise (Caitriona Balfe), who lives in a mountain cabin with her husband, Lester (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), and their two sons, Mike (Fred Hechinger) and Tommy (Kit Connor). It’s the early 1950s, and the cabin where they raise chickens and rabbits is a 15-mile trek over mountain roads to the nearest town – a situation that pleases Lester but bothers Louise, who comes from a livelier part of these mountains and yearns to be closer to civilization.

“It takes a certain type of person to live this close to heaven, I’ll tell you that,” one character tells Mike late in the film; it hardly needs to be spelled out that Lester is that type of person and Louise most assuredly is not.

As the story begins, Mike is back from a year working on a farm in Iowa; his younger brother will soon be leaving to fight in Korea. Like their parents, the boys are a study in contrasts: Tommy can’t wait to get out of the mountains and experience a different world (“I don’t want to spend my life in this dump”), while Mike wants to stay put (“Some people want change, I know, but I like things the way they are”).

They enjoy rhapsodic moments at home – not just the glories of the setting, but the more exuberant pleasures of dancing in the living room to Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right” years before Elvis hijacked the tune. But Andre Turpin’s moody camerawork and Paul Haslinger’s taut music, astringent and pinched on top and rumbling down below, is anything but bucolic; it suggests darker, grimmer turns to come.

It doesn’t take long for those turns to arrive. On a trip to town for supplies, Mike spots his mother downing a shot in the back of a hardware store that she later claims was closed. It turns out that Louise’s shopping trips have another purpose: to buy the liquor that she consumes every day on the sly (though her alcoholism seems to be a “secret” known to everybody except Mike).

The drinking gets worse until the day Mike finds his mother crying at the kitchen table, a broken glass in the sink and a mixture of sorrow and rage in her eyes. Lester finally explains to Mike what has been going on: His wife has had problems with the bottle for years, including a particularly bad stretch when the doctor said that the only way for her to survive would be to stop drinking altogether. So he’s thrown away her secret stash, sending her into hysterics that shake Mike, who can’t understand why they can’t just give her what she wants.

But rather than curing her, the cold turkey treatment drives her away: Mike comes in the house after doing his chores and finds that his mother has left on foot on an early winter day when an impending storm will make it virtually impossible for her to cover the 15 miles to town safely.

Her disappearance resets the film, but Haigh (and Tóibín before him) isn’t interested in a snowbound adventure story. “A Long Winter” develops that narrative while also slipping in and out of a dream state, exploring Mike’s growing awareness that he’s gay and testing the family bonds that kept them on the slopes of a mountain that might just be cursed.

The different storylines jockey for space; at times it feels as if the film is trying to juggle too much, but Haigh proves adept at this tricky balancing act as the plotlines coalesce to serve a spooky and gently moving tale of loss, acceptance and the limitations of home. “That’s the thing about this world: Loving somebody’s not enough,” Lester says at one point.

Still, “A Long Winter” suggests that Haigh’s own point of view is closer to a line from Mike: “Ma said, folk always find a way to cope.”

“A Long Winter” will be released by Mubi.

The post ‘A Long Winter’ Review: Andrew Haigh Finds Love and Dread High in the Mountains appeared first on TheWrap.

And if you’re making a rock ’n’ roll documentary and Pete Townshend is your subject, you let him talk.

That’s what Frank Marshall and Nigel Sinclair do in “Pete Townshend: Behind Blue Eyes,” which had its world premiere on the opening day of the 2026 Telluride Film Festival on Friday. Townshend, after all, has been known since the 1960s not just as the windmilling guitar maniac and mastermind behind The Who, but as perhaps the best talker, philosopher and pontificator in rock. Sometimes he’s wise and sometimes he talks nonsense, as he would be the first to admit if you catch him in the right mood, but he’s always gloriously entertaining.

And when you’ve also got Who singer Roger Daltrey on hand to gleefully undercut his on-again, off-again musical partner’s pomposity, you can move well beyond the typical “behind the music” rock-doc tropes to capture one of the most combustible and fascinating groups of the last 60-odd years.

In some ways, “Behind Blue Eyes” is a straightforward mixture of talking heads and archival footage, providing The Who’s origin story and trodding chronologically from the early hits (“I Can’t Explain,” “My Generation”) to the “rock opera” breakthrough  (“Tommy”) to the ’70s albums (“Who’s Next,” “Quadrophenia”) to the 1978 death of wild-man drummer Keith Moon and the stormy dissolutions and reformations of the ’80s and beyond.

There’s not a lot here that fans won’t already know, but the performance footage from their earliest club gigs to their arena-rock heyday is invigorating, and the devil-may-care zeal with which Townshend and Daltrey discuss their triumphs, failures, arguments and flights of ego is refreshing in this era of closely-guarded public images.

While the film covers almost the entirety of the band’s career and of Townshend’s artistic life, it digs deepest into the period in the late ’60s and early ’70s when Townshend was trying to follow the success of “Tommy” with an even more outlandish project: “Lifehouse,” a multi-disc album and film that would tell a sci-fi story about a future world where rock music didn’t exist, but where it was possible that the individual music emanating from every member of an audience could be combined into a grand cacophony that would create the ultimate healing note. Some of this was going to take place live on stage at the Young Vic theater in London, but none of it made much sense to anybody except Townshend.

“We were completely lost when he started talking about the narrative,” Daltrey says. “The one thing I got was that if we ever do discover the meaning of life, it would be a musical note.” To the surprise of few, they never found that note. “Of course it didn’t happen,” Daltrey adds. “We didn’t know what we were doing.”

In the end, “Lifehouse” fell apart but many of its songs were repurposed for the less ambitious but wildly successful “Who’s Next” album, which is widely considered The Who’s best work. “Ironically,” Townshend says in the film, “the more successful the album became, the more devastated I felt about it. That was the beginning of the end of it all.”

The film’s materials bill this as “one of the greatest untold stories in rock and roll,” but in many ways that’s a significant overstatement: Over the last 30 years, versions of the “Who’s Next” album have been released that include almost 100 extra tracks destined for or associated with “Lifehouse,” along with copious discussion and documentation. It’s probably accurate to call the aborted work rock’s second most famous lost album after the Beach Boys’ “Smile,” but it’s not a mystery by any means.

It is, however, a meaty section of “Behind Blue Eyes,” and one that draws some of the craziest, the funniest and the saddest stories out of Townshend. Then again, the movie is filled with great stories from every period, going back to when the former art student had a hit and became a spokesperson for disaffected teens with his first song, “I Can’t Explain.”

That song began with the line, “Got a feeling inside/Can’t explain,” and in retrospect the irony is thick – because as “Behind Blue Eyes” demonstrates, Pete Townshend has spent the last 61 years doing a whole lot of explaining.

The post ‘Pete Townshend: Behind Blue Eyes’ Review: Rock Doc Is Long on Talk appeared first on TheWrap.

His 2024 film was hard and his 2026 one is tender, and they’re both brilliant. At the age of 83, the director responsible for “Secrets & Lies,” “Topsy-Turvy,” “Vera Drake,” “Another Year” and “Mr. Turner,” among others, still makes films that are richly humanistic marvels. Starting with a singular process in which he and his actors build their characters from the ground up and then figure out where the story might take them, he makes movies in which it seems wrong to use the word characters; these are just people who happen to be living in front of Leigh’s unobtrusive camera.

The superpower of this essential filmmaker has always been the empathy that is built into the way he makes movies, and “Tender Loving Care,” which had its world premiere on Friday at the Telluride Film Festival, makes full use of that power. It’s a gentle little gem, in no hurry to get anywhere – and if it does turn out to be Leigh’s final film, as he has suggested, it will stand as a touching and apt sendoff to a movie-business unicorn. 

The film begins with a typically trying day in the life of Amy Spooner, played by the newly-minted Emmy nominee Kate O’Flynn from “Widow’s Bay.” She’s a social worker trying to arrange matters for a stubbornly uncooperative old man who’s about to be released from the hospital after suffering a heart attack, but who doesn’t appear to have any place to go.

For Amy and her colleagues, dealing with difficult patients in trying circumstances is part of the daily routine in an era of cuts in health care and social services. After work, she hangs out with a few friends, notably Alice Bailey Johnson’s Rosie, and trade stories about their disappointing love lives: Amy has just split up with a longtime boyfriend, while Rosie has what she thinks is a promising relationship until her beau-to-be doesn’t show up for their first serious date.

But even in private, the women appear determined not to let the frustration and sadness show; instead, they pour another glass of wine and pretend to have a good time while Gary Yershon’s sparse but sprightly music plays along, insisting in its own way that things are just fine.

Their conversations are a case study in forced gaiety, but the film drops hints that they know what they’re doing and what they’re covering up. When Amy and Rosie dance around the kitchen singing, they choose East 17’s “House of Love,” a 1992 hit based on a Brit boy band’s insistence that a world in crisis could be cured by a night on the dance floor.

And when Amy meets up with her elderly parents, Birdie and Geoff (Marion Bailey and Paul Jessup, both scene-stealers), she leads a singalong of the Platters’ doo-wop classic “The Great Pretender,” a song that pretty much sums up these lives: “Oh yes, I’m the great pretender / Pretending that I’m doing well.”

But that pretending reveals something true, too; it is a conscious choice to embrace the light, a choice that tells us plenty about Amy and Rosie and Birdie and Geoff, as do the occasional bits of memory that emerge along the way. Where “Hard Truths” was dominated by the darkness and rage in which Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s character chose to dwell, “Tender Loving Care” is animated by a refusal to let anger or despair become overwhelming, no matter that the circumstances of their lives might well justify that choice.     

Because this is a Mike Leigh film, those circumstances are less important than the texture. In the hands of a remarkable cast that fashioned their characters in collaboration with their director before a plot even existed, these people reach for their wine glasses and shrug off their disappointments and do their best.

As the title suggests, they care for one another. But more than that, Mike Leigh and his actors care for them, and that means we do, too.  

Bleecker Street will open “Tender Loving Care” in the U.S. in early December.

The post ‘Tender Loving Care’ Review: Mike Leigh Delivers Another Gentle Gem appeared first on TheWrap.