What to Watch at IFFBoston's Fall Festival*

*plus a few upcoming events featuring yours truly.

Last things first: I'll be interviewing Romanian director Cristian Mungiu ("4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days") in an onstage conversation following a screening of the director's controversial Palme d'Or winner "Fjord" at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on Sunday, October 11, at 7:00 p.m. Mungiu will be receiving the theater's annual Impact Award. The movie opens theatrically at the Coolidge on October 23rd.

Also, the next installment of Ty Burr's Movie Club (Best Movies of All Time Edition) will be held at the West Newton Cinema next Thursday, October 8, at 6:30 p.m. (Ticket information here.) This month's movie will be "Bringing Up Baby" (1938, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐), Howard Hawks' classic screwball comedy starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant (and a dog) (and two leopards). A discussion will follow. It's a movie that I've adored for decades and that gets better – crazier, more airborne – the more I see it. Here's what I wrote in an e-book called "The 50 Movie Starter Kit: What You Need to Know if You Want to Know What You're Talking About":

Let us now contemplate the screwball comedy, classic Hollywood’s single most inspired invention. It came of age in the years immediately after the Great Depression had turned everything topsy-turvy; consequently, everything feels backward. The rich are boobs, the butlers went to Harvard, dying girls get socked on the jaw, Cary Grant’s a nerd. Screwball inverts the accepted class structure of American society and turns gender roles inside out; it rockets along with a cynicism that feels both liberating and earned. Nice guys, who are always played by Ralph Bellamy, finish last. "Bringing Up Baby" is both the most extreme example of the form and the movie that makes this writer laugh the hardest.

Be forewarned: there are people who can’t stand it. The craziness is so relentless it can turn uncomfortable, and the plot forges ahead without an ounce of sentiment. And, really, Katharine Hepburn is too much: too angular, too whimsical, too close to the chaos principal in action. She plays Susan Vance, supposedly a dizzy heiress but really a series of widening disasters that happen to David Huxley (Grant), a fuddy-duddy paleontologist who just wants to get married and locate his bone, not necessarily in that order. (The bone belongs to a dinosaur and at one point gets buried by a dog; even a child can look at the brontosaurus skeleton in the opening sequence and know it’s going to come crashing down before the end credits.)

That devil Howard Hawks directs; the film was supposed to loosen up Hepburn’s image after a series of dud costume pictures. It didn’t work— "Baby" was a critically admired flop—but college audiences in the 1960s and ’70s rediscovered and recognized it as a high-water mark of studio-era lunacy. The story line is ridiculous, with two escaped leopards, Grant in a negligee yelping “I just went gay all of a sudden!,” and Hepburn losing a heel and teetering on a midnight hillside in delight. The film is graceful enough to turn the woods of Greenwich, Connecticut, into Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden, and demonic enough to let Hepburn sink a ten-foot putt. Few films so well illustrate Hawks’s belief that men spend their lives holding dignity together while women are dedicated to blowing it all apart.

And, Lord, the dialogue. David, on the phone with Susan, realizing there’s a leopard loose on her end: “Susan, you’ve to get out of that apartment!” Susan: “But, David, I have a lease!” The characters in screwball comedies talk the way we all wish we could talk: twice as fast, thrice as sharp, each retort a perfect bullet of comic intent. Screwball is life with the disorder magnified, then gloriously ignored, and no more recklessly than here.

See you at the West Newton.

To the main order of business: The Independent Film Festival of Boston has become a two-headed beast in recent years thanks to the tireless work of Executive Director Brian Tamm and Program Director Nancy Campbell. There's the official festival in the spring, a solid week of indie gems on their way to theatrical release and, for 12 years now, the Fall Focus extravaganza of top picks from Cannes, Toronto, SXSW and elsewhere. This year's just-announced slate, held exclusively at the storied Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square, is an especially expansive one in terms of calendar – 27 features spread out over the second and fifth weekends in October – and content. I've seen nine of the offerings and am jazzed by advance word-of-mouth on at least five more – taken in sum, you won't find a better preview of the coming wave of end-of-year specialties and critical favorites.

You can buy tickets at the festival website. My picks would include:

"Possible Love" (Thursday, October 8, 7:00 pm) – From my TIFF report: Any new film from the Korean master Lee Chang-dong (“Poetry,” “Burning”) is an occasion, and this one plays as a subtler, more haunting variation on the class-war games of Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite,” with which it shares actress Cho Yeo-jeong. She’s cast as an upper middle class documentary filmmaker, married to a wealthy VC bro (Zo In-Sung), who focuses her camera on a working-class couple traumatized by a labor strike in which the husband (Lee regular Sul Kyung-gu) was beaten into a coma by police. If the theme of political media exploitation in the guise of personal friendship is somewhat more concrete than this director’s usual concerns, he dramatizes it with an empathy and insight that can take your breath away; one scene late in the film drew audible gasps from the audience at my screening. Chief laurels go to Jeon Do-yeon as the working-class wife, who grows before our eyes from an insecure chatterbox to a woman of immense strength and dignity. (In theaters October 23, on Netflix November 6.)

"Once Upon a Time in Harlem" (Friday, October 9, 6:00 pm) – When he died in 2014, the genre-defying filmmaker William Greaves (“Symbiopsychotaxiplasm”) had never completed what he considered the most important event he ever captured on film: a 1972 party he engineered with the living luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance. A passion project taken over the finish line by the filmmaker’s son, David Greaves, it's a once-in-a-lifetime chance to hang out at Duke Ellington’s house with a bunch of then-living legends: artists Aaron Douglas, Richard Bruce Nugent and Romare Bearden, composers Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, actor Leigh Whipper, poet Arna Bontemps, historian John Henrik Clarke, and Ida Mae Cullen, widow of poet Countee Cullen.

"All of a Sudden" (Saturday, October 10, 12:00 pm) – From my TIFF report: It's perhaps Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s most conventionally ambitious film – notice I didn’t say conventional – in that it folds so much into its running time: Proper care of the elderly and our Babel of languages; terminal illness and the sustaining joys of female friendship; theatrical performance and group foot massage; talk and thought and action. On top of all this, there’s a big honking TED talk smack in the middle, whiteboard and all, about the systemic entropy built into Capitalism. Set mostly in Paris, with a few side trips to Kyoto, “All of a Sudden” pivots around the twin suns of Marie-Louise (Virginie Efira), the director of an experimental Paris program for Alzheimer’s patients, and a young playwright named Mari (Tao Okamoto, who shared a Cannes Best Actress prize with her co-star). Hamaguchi is one of those filmmakers, like Eric Rohmer, who’s able to make reams of dialogue bristle and flow with purpose and drama, and the midsection of "All of a Sudden" flowers into an all-nighter of walk, talk, ideas and profound connection. It's glorious.

"Minotaur" (Sunday, October 11, 2:00 pm) – From my TIFF report: A Grand Prix winner at Cannes and a remake of Claude Chabrol’s 1969 film “La Femme Infidele” (which had already been remade in 2002 as “Unfaithful” with Diane Lane and Richard Gere). A complacent businessman (Dmitry Mazurov) uncovers evidence of the affair his wife (Iris Lebedeva) is having with a younger man (Yuriy Zavalnyouk), which leads to a procedurally terse ride into Hitchcockian suspense and bad behavior. But “Minotaur” is set during the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when orders are going out to local civic leaders to provide conscripts for the front, willing or not, and the hero’s slow, certain descent into moral depravity is as blisteringly political as it is domestic. The movie's as subtle as a whack on the head (or two), which is both its strength as a broadside against a country that has forced director Andrey Zvyagintsev into exile and a loss for anyone seeking the deeper, more mysteriously mythic waters of his earlier masterpieces “The Return” and “Leviathan.” But I think Zvyagintsev would argue that the time for ambiguity is long past.

"Wild Horse Nine" (Tuesday, October 13, 8:00 pm) – From my TIFF report: The latest dark comedic provocation from playwright-turned-filmmaker Martin McDonagh, who was last seen torturing Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrow in “The Banshees of Inisherin.” This one feels in spirit like a throwback to McDonagh’s much-loved 2008 feature debut “In Bruges,” in that it’s a two-hander about a pair of argumentative fellows, both supposedly on the side of law and order, as they wander way out of their element. In this case, it’s two CIA spooks, Lee (Sam Rockwell) and Chris (John Malkovich), who are up to their armpits in dirty deeds in 1973 Chile, with a side trip to Easter Island. The abiding pleasure of the movie is Malkovich: Few movies, have given one of our most eccentric great actors – he vies with Christopher Walken for the title – such freedom to play.

"Bitter Christmas" (Sunday, November 1, 8:00 pm) – From my TIFF report: At 75, Pedro Almodóvar continues his run of quiet late-life treasures with this Pirandellian sigh of a movie. It’s about Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), a filmmaker in 2004 working on a new screenplay while juggling friends, a lover and unresolved grief over the death of her mother. It’s also about a gay filmmaker (Leonardo Sbaraglia) in 2026 writing the screenplay of the film we’re watching while juggling friends, a lover and unresolved grief over the death of his mother. It’s about the artistic necessity and unforgivable sin of using one’s friends and lovers as grist for creativity, borrowing their traumas to bring fictional characters to life. It’s about a movie that’s writing itself as we watch it. This being Almodóvar, it’s also about ravishing colors and swooning music and beautiful women of melodrama who used to be the heroines of his movies and are now, with all frankness, variations on himself. Some folks are dismissing this as Minor Pedro, and it seems to be, if entertainingly so, until it folds beautifully together in the final act. I see a master at dusk, spinning the expanding, empathetic tales he knows will be his last.

"Elsinore (Monday, November 2, 8:00 pm) – From my TIFF report: Andrew Scott ("Fleabag," "Ripley," "All of Us Strangers") finally tackles the big, gnarly, passionate role he’s to date steered clear of: Ian Charleson, the Scottish actor who was best known for 1981’s “Chariots of Fire” but who in 1989 performed a critically acclaimed “Hamlet” at London’s National Theatre before dying seven weeks later of AIDS-related causes. The close focus on the progression of Charleson's symptoms and his tenacious determination to finish the run gives Scott a huge range of emotions to work with, and he responds with an extraordinarily powerful performance. Oscar talk is assured, and deservedly so. With Olivia Colman.

"I Play Rocky" (Tuesday, November 3, 7:00 pm) – From my TIFF report: Anthony Ippolito's performance as the young Sylvester Stallone is the highlight of this unexpected charmer about the rocky road to the making of "Rocky." Director Peter Farrelly ("Green Book") knows how to push an audience's buttons but the movie's such great fun, you don't mind. The star disappears so completely into the skin of a person and a persona we think we know from fifty years of cultural exposure that within minutes you accept him as the real marble-mouthed deal. A crowd-pleaser for sure – so see it with a crowd.

Festival offerings I haven't seen but that have good advance buzz (links to traulers where possible): "The Only Living Pickpocket in New York," a winsome urban fable starring John Turturro (Oct.9, 8:15 pm); "Fatherland," with Sandra Hüller, from "Cold War" director Paweł Pawlikoski; "Club Kid," a favorite with critics and audiences at Cannes and TIFF (Oct. 10, 8:30 pm); Mike Leigh's latest, "Tender Loving Care" (Oct. 11, 7:30 pm); and "The Debut," writer-director Jesse Eisenberg's follow-up to "A Real Pain," starring Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti (Oct. 29, 7:00 pm).

Which one of these gets you most excited to see? Do tell.

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