The Best Films of the Fall Festivals: THR Critics’ Picks

Along with Sundance in January, Berlin in February and Cannes in May, the fall festival trifecta of Venice, Telluride and Toronto almost invariably yields many of the films destined to keep percolating in the conversation from critics’ group awards in December all the way to the Oscars mid-March. This year’s crop was way lighter than usual on major contenders, but The Hollywood Reporter’s hard-working reviews team nonetheless found plenty to love.

Five of our top 13 picks are documentaries, with subjects as varied as the resistance of independent journalism in Putin’s Russia; an iconoclast of British queer cinema; a devastating new perspective on the war in Gaza; a sui generis portrait of a convicted fraud queen; and the struggles of delivery workers in New York City.

On the narrative side, new vehicles for Julianne Moore, John Malkovich and Mahershala Ali gave those fine actors arguably their best roles in years, while the less widely known Rosalind Eleazar scored a star-making performance that should put her on every casting director’s radar; a giant of English realism crafted what will likely be the swan-song culmination of a glorious career; a debuting Lebanese director reinvigorated the heist genre; and a master of contemporary Korean cinema delivered a unique contemplation of the wealth and class divides.

• DAU (Venice)

  

  At once immense and intimate, political, historical and personal, Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s loose biopic of Russian physicist Lev Lendau is the kind of shoot-for-the-moon feature that rarely happens anymore — and certainly not like this (the shoot relocated hundreds of actors and thousands of extras inside a giant simulacrum of the Soviet era, their daily interactions captured by a roving team of camera and sound technicians). Comparisons could be made to Oppenheimer or The Brutalist, but this is very much its own, highly original and cinematic labor of love, telling the tale of a brilliant man crushed by the weight of a totalitarian regime. — JORDAN MINTZER

• The Debut (Telluride, Toronto)

  

  Blessed with swing-for-the-fences brio, the latest feature by Jesse Eisenberg makes for a frequently hilarious journey into the mind of an overly committed actor. Julianne Moore is a hoot as newbie thespian Mona, who starts like one of those disaffected housewives the Oscar winner has played so often in her career but turns out to be much stranger, while Paul Giamatti makes director Jerry ferocious but not monstruous. As the balance of power between them begins to shift, their scenes together are not just entertaining but thrillingly dynamic. — ANGIE HAN

• Furies (Venice, Toronto)

  

  Propelled by a raw, heart-pounding ferocity, Rami Kodeih’s Beirut-set first feature is a sharp fusion of personal desperation and political rage, as specific to Lebanon’s corruption-fueled economic crisis as it is generally, woefully recognizable. Following two sisters determined to reclaim their savings after the bank freezes their accounts, the movie infuses a time-tested genre with the offhand wiseass humor of siblings who know and love each other deeply, brought to messy, magnificent life in a pair of spectacular performances. — SHERI LINDEN

• Misty Green (Toronto)

  

  Coming 12 years after Top Five, his terrific last feature as writer-director, Chris Rock delivers an enthralling character study and an insightful plunge into a milieu he knows intimately. In a star-making performance, Slow Horses’ Rosalind Eleazar plays the title character, a Los Angeles-based actress and singer whose talent is as indisputable as her gift for self-sabotage. While attempting to restart her career, she navigates money troubles, a family crisis and an industry that rarely makes things easy. Adam Driver, Daniel Kaluuya, Anna Kendrick and Rock also star. — DAVID ROONEY

• My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile (Venice, Telluride)

  

  If part one of director Julia Loktev’s 12-hour chronicle of journalism under fire concluded with a cliffhanger, part two covers the painful aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. By that point, we’ve come to know the handful of independent reporters — most of them women accused of being “foreign agents” by Putin’s government — whom Loktev documented during the months leading up to the war, showing how they held fast to their beliefs while their homeland crumbled around them. In this second part, we watch the courageous, resourceful journos deal with forced exile, scattering across several countries and continents as the Russian state continues to pursue them for bogus offenses. It’s a gripping and essential study of persecution and resistance. — J.M.

• NAZA (Venice)

  

  It’s hard to describe all the feelings provoked by watching a film like the new documentary from No Other Land directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. Outrage, of course. Most certainly contempt, on a profound level, for the current Israeli regime and its prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu. Yet this sober and thoroughly reported bombshell of an exposé, in which two dozen IDF intelligence officers detail the systematic targeting of civilians in Gaza since October 7th — how it was carried out deliberately and with state-of-the-art precision — is above all a brave and indispensable act of bearing witness. — J.M.

• Possible Love (Venice, Toronto)

  

  Following the haunting 2018 masterwork that was Burning, Lee Chang-dong reaffirms his status as one of the greats of contemporary Korean — and world — cinema with this transfixing chamber drama about economic and emotional unease, throwing together two couples on opposite sides of the wealth divide. All four leads in the quiet powerhouse are superb, with especially memorable work from the wonderful Jeon Do-yeon, who won the Cannes best actress honors in 2007 for Lee’s Secret Sunshine. — D.R.

• Queer Edward II (Venice)

  

  This wondrous documentary is comprised of footage from the set of Derek Jarman’s 1991 screen adaptation of the Christopher Marlowe play Edward II. Filled with vintage archival material that supplements the portrait of the irrepressibly charming Jarman and his talented collaborators, the film is guaranteed to induce swooning nostalgia in those who remember queer life, London and the filmmaking scene thereof in the early 1990s. But the doc also offers sadly timely history lessons about the necessity of resisting despotic, homophobic authoritarians — especially if you can do it with men dressed as nuns. — LESLIE FELPERIN

• Tender Loving Care (Telluride, Toronto)

  

  Revolving around a London woman (Widow’s Bay Emmy winner Kate O’Flynn), her BFF and fellow social worker (Alice Bailey Johnson) and her aging parents (Marion Bailey and Paul Jessup), Mike Leigh’s new, and possibly last, film is warm and inviting, filled with giggles and gossip and gentle gallows humor. It’s also wrenching, with a topical urgency simmering just beneath the jovial surface: Leigh is tough-minded about what it means to look out for one another at this point in history — specifically in a country whose public services have been eroded by an ethos of self-reliance codified by Thatcher and further cemented, or perverted, by Brexit. — JON FROSCH

• Union Town (Venice, Toronto)

  

  Barbara Kopple, the documentarian laureate of the American organized labor movement, follows 1976’s Harlan County, USA and 1990’s American Dream with another complex and galvanizing film taking the temperature of the national workplace. Unsurprisingly, what Kopple witnesses in the gig economy is disheartening: a decentralized employee base at the mercy of nearly faceless ownership and mired in a struggle to get UPS, Amazon and various food delivery apps to do the right thing. It’s powerful and powerfully bleak, but Kopple always finds hope in solidarity. — DANIEL FIENBERG

• Wild Horse Nine (Venice, Telluride, Toronto)

  

  John Malkovich does his best work in years in Martin McDonagh’s poignant, blood-dipped buddy comedy. He stars as a terminally ill CIA operative dispatched in 1973 to Santiago with the younger partner he mentored (played by a wired Sam Rockwell) to lay the groundwork for a coup to overthrow Salvador Allende’s Chilean democracy. On what seems like a whim but ends up being far more complicated, the two agents visit Easter Island, where the famous sentinel-like stone heads bear witness to violence and sorrow, summoning the CIA’s irascible head of South American operations (a plum role for Steve Buscemi). — D.R.

• You Can See Everything (Telluride)

  

  In the first half of this fascinatingly intimate documentary portrait, filmmakers Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim essentially embed with Elizabeth Holmes in the last weeks before her prison sentence — but it’s the second half that really kicks into gear, getting excitingly meta and almost surreal. What begins as a fascinatingly intimate peek at a deluded or disingenuous scammer reveals itself as something much more ambitious and less predictable, until we’re left to ponder what value a personal truth has at all. — A.H.

• Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother (Toronto)

  

  A perfectly cast Mahershala Ali finally gets a leading role suitable for an Oscar-winning actor of his stature, playing a devout Muslim and contract killer who finds himself forced to care for his three kids after his wife dies in Bassam Tariq’s achingly human Texas-set thriller. It’s a crime story with a large, beating heart, a loving portrayal of Islam, and — rarest of all — a movie that explores the possibility of a form of masculinity that allows for the full range of human emotion. — JOURDAIN SEARLES