The Middleburg Film Festival wrapped up its 11th year over the weekend, and audiences have chosen their best of the annual event. Cord Jefferson’s literary satire American Fiction won the Audience Award for narrative film. Previously, it was awarded the same honor by the Toronto Film Festival audience. The film stars Jeffrey Wright as a frustrated Black author who creates a fake persona and writes a book full of the Black stereotypes the entertainment industry makes a profit from.
“Congratulations to our remarkable Audience Award winners,” said Susan Koch, executive director for MFF. “We couldn’t be prouder of this year’s lineup and were honored to present so many exceptional films and welcome leading filmmakers to engage in thoughtful conversations.”
The Audience Award for international feature went to J.A. Bayona’s Society of the Snow. The Netflix survival drama recounts the 1972 Uruguayan flight disaster in the Andes and the 16 survivors who endured 72 days of hardship by leaning on one another for support. Composer Michael Giacchino was on hand to receive the Distinguished Composer award and gave a Q&A to the audience following the film’s first screening.
Audiences also selected Invisible Nation, Vanessa Hope’s film about the election of the first female President of Taiwan, as its choice for Best Documentary.
A Special Presentation Audience Award went to Ben Proudfoot and Kris Bowers’ The Last Repair Shop, about a devoted group of craftspeople who repair Los Angeles public school students’ instruments, as such programs dwindle around the country. Bowers attended the festival to receive the inaugural Sheila Johnson Vanguard Award, named after the festival’s founder.
You can find all of our 2023 Middleburg Film Festival coverage here.
It’s in Anatomy of a Fall’s second scene when the titular fall happens. Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner), a visually impaired boy returns home from a walk with his guide dog when he discovers his father, Samuel (Samuel Theis) lying dead in the snow after supposedly falling off the balcony. He calls for his mother and a frazzled and frantic Sandra (Sandra Hüller) comes running down the chalet steps.
What follows in the next two and a half hours is what makes co-writer and director Justine Triet’s film so gripping. Instead of a loud and melodramatic domestic setting, we get an engaging courtroom drama that uses evidence and testimony to dissect the couple’s troubled marriage. With the help of a former flame who is also a lawyer (Swann Arlaud), Sandra navigates through the French legal system trying to prove that her husband’s murder was a suicide.
Triet decides to peel back the layers of Sandra and Samuel’s marriage by showing us the entire investigative process through the former’s eyes. We see multiple reenactments and scientific trials, like a test examining what Daniel heard that day before he left or dummies being thrown off the chalet balcony. The most damning piece of evidence is a recorded argument between Samuel and German Sandra. Both writers, though the latter is more successful, Samuel would record his life for future inspiration. When the tape is played in court, we get our only true flashback where the two argue in the mutually agreed upon English. There, Sandra’s reliability as a narrator is questioned, leading the audience to examine her culpability.
Triet’s direction brings out the naturalism in Hüller’s performance. She doesn’t condemn her leading character for her past transgressions, though everyone else does. Hüller’s depiction isn’t exactly sympathetic but the way she takes a beat to think about her answers and her at times callous delivery breathes life into her character.
Milo Machado-Graner gives a layered and moving performance as Samuel and Sandra’s son. Caught up in the trial and leaning towards his mother’s guilt, Machado-Graner works in little ways to sewn in his character’s doubts from the way he asks a question to how wide his eyes are.
Cinematographer Simon Beaufils keeps a documentary style to his shots. At multiple points, still photographs are shown of their past life as a couple. Music is used at a minimum to keep the scenes as realistic as possible. It’s details like this that capture just how methodical and cohesive Triet is as a director. Combined with Hüller’s mesmerizing performance, Anatomy of a Fall is one of the year’s best.
Anatomy of a Fall expands to more theaters, including DC, on Oct. 27. Watch the trailer below.
IF YOU WERE THE LAST- Not enough people saw this little diamond of a film when it streamed on Peacock, and that’s a shame. It’s not an exaggeration that I fell in love with this DIY-styled rom-com starring Anthony Mackie and Zoe Chao within the first minute. Their chemistry as stranded astronauts and best friends navigating the “should we or should we not bang?” question, is stratospheric and unlike any pairing you will see this year.
For all of his blockbuster bonafides, Anthony Mackie’s magnetism has always been best deployed in smaller films, particularly of the rom-com genre. For Zoe Chao, her transition from surly best friend roles to undeniable queen of the rom-com has been an enjoyable ride, and it hits an atmospheric high with If You Were the Last. This low-fi screwball charmer burns hot with Mackie and Chao’s instant chemistry, making this one film that shouldn’t be missed on Peacock.
The premise is so simple, and so delightfully free from big-budget excess. Chao and Mackie play Adam and Jane, astronauts on a NASA shuttle lost in deep space with little hope of rescue. It’s been this way for three years, and the two have managed to make the best of it. She keeps trying to fix the comms and navigation system in hopes of saving themselves; while he is okay trusting in fate. They dance, watch movies (he keeps avoiding Die Hard, she hates Casablanca), listen to music, tend the chickens and pet goat, occasionally chat with the corpse of their dead colleague (that’s a long story); but in general they seem happy going out on their own terms.
There’s just one problem. Three years into this mission and…well, how in the Hell can two people this unbelievably attractive keep their hands off of one another? We all know that men and women can’t just be friends, right? Adam addresses the elephant in the room, saying that sex for him is a stress reliever, but for her it’s more meaningful than that. The bulk of the film is a cute sparring match as Adam and Jane debate taking their relationship to a physical level. There are obvious problems with it, like the prospect of getting pregnant, but also…well, they have spouses (played by Natalie Morales and Geoff Stults) on Earth. But after more than 1000 days, are their spouses still waiting for them? Does marriage mean anything given their predicament?
Refreshingly, If You Were the Last isn’t about Jane and Adam bangin’ their way up and down the spaceship. It is an exploration of heterosexual male and female relationships in times of crisis. And what we see is that when things get tough, both do the little things to help the other get through it. And it’s through those not-so-little gestures that the question about meangingless, stress-relieving sex answers itself. These two are obviously meant to be more than just each other’s fuck buddies. But that doesn’t become an option until they are faced with the reality of returning home, back to their normal lives and away from one another. Is that what they truly want?
Crisp, snappy banter keeps this little 90-minute gem moving along nicely, with Mackie and Chao looking so comfortable you’d think they’d done a dozen movies together already. We see them dancing, singing, cuddling, and being the emotional support the other needs. In one roller coaster emotional scene, Jane’s beloved tape deck breaks. Faced with the prospect of never hearing her favorite music again, she utterly breaks down. Enter Adam, who recognizes the gravity of the moment instantly, and regales her with a rendition of her favorite song, Lionel Ritchie’s “All Night Long”.
Throughout, the film has a lovely, cleverly DIY production design ala Michel Gondry, using handcrafted, playful effects to capture the planets as they soar by. Credit to director Kristian Mercado for leaning into the whimiscal aesthetic. Technical jargon is met by displays that look like they were built out of Fisher-Price toy sets, and it’s absolutely perfect in setting a surreal tone. Because a story like this should feel like a dream, it does hit a drag when back on Earth and real life intercedes. But even then, it all serves to make us want to see Jane and Adam return to the happiness they had while in the stars. Mackie and Chao are lightyears ahead of everyone else at this, and together they make If You Were the Last an out-of-this-world rom-com experience.
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE-DEAD RECKONING PART ONE- As summer blockbusters go, they don’t get much bigger than Mission: Impossible-Dead Reckoning part 1. The audacious title matches the audacious runtime and audacious plotline, involving the global threat of AI which somehow necessitates Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt riding a motorcycle off of a mountainside. Hey, whatever works! The visual spectacle somehow gets more incredible with each film cooked up by Cruise and his partner-in-crime, Christopher McQuarrie. This film, the first chapter of a two-part epic, continues to make us feel something for Hunt and his little IMF team of rogues. No matter how ludicrous the threat, the personal stakes are never in doubt.
The ongoing feud between SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP has claimed another blockbuster victim. Paramount has announced that the next Mission: Impossible sequel all the way to May 23rd 2025, almost a full year from its original release date next June.
With such a lengthy gap, the decision has also been made to retitle the film, so it will no longer be Mission: Impossible-Dead Reckoning Part II. That also means there will have been a Dead Reckoning Part I and that’s it, which is kinda weird. I assume that will be retitled officially, too.
Anyway, Variety says the sequel will still follow events from Part I, which finds Ethan Hunt and the IMF team battling a rogue AI with global conquest in mind. So far, the consequences of this mission have been pretty steep, but the team gained a new member in Hayley Atwell’s thief, Grace.
The 11th Annual Middleburg Film Festival was held over the weekend, bringing cinematic talent and magic to this gorgeous Virginia countryside resort. DC-based movie fans were treated to major upcoming award contenders including Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, and George C. Wolfe’s Rustin.
MFF’s Director Spotlight Award went to Alexander Payne. He was at the festival for his film The Holdovers starring Paul Giamatti as a disgruntled boarding school teacher who is stuck watching the kids with nowhere to go over the Christmas holiday. Director Todd Haynes won the Visionary Director Award for his latest work in May December, a psychological drama about the fallout of an inappropriate relationship through the eyes of the actress set to play one-half of the couple in a movie. Celine Song was honored for her moving take on life’s “what ifs” in Past Lives.
I saw thirteen films over the course of the four-day festival. While I liked most of what I saw, I noticed that biopics and toxic relationships ruled this year’s lineup. Some films fell into both of those categories like Maestro and Priscilla. I tended to favorite some of the more unconventional narratives like the grounded and tender coming-of-age story Frybread Face and Meby Indigenous filmmaker Billy Luther or German director Ilker Çatak’s The Teachers’ Lounge, a tale that twists school politics with everyday injustice. Both gentlemen were at Middleburg.
Thirty-nine films were shown this year. Of course, I didn’t get to see every single one, and l left with some future must-sees. Fellow critics raved about Cord Jefferson’s satiric take on representation and Blackness in American Fiction, which our Travis Hopson reviewed. Someone told me that the animated Robot Dreams was a film they could have watched over and over. The documentary short The Last Repair Shop comes from Middleburg favorite Kris Bowers who you may know from his composing work in Bridgerton, King Richard, and Green Book. The one-hour film was shown on Sunday, with Bowers getting an award after the screening.
Here are my three favorite films that I saw at the Middleburg Film Festival:
Anatomy of A Fall
Sandra Hüller gives a riveting and calculated performance as a woman put on trial for possibly killing her husband in Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall. Even though the film is two and a half hours, the realistic and precise dialogue makes the time in the theater fly by. Triet smartly uses the courtroom drama format to not only cut through what happened but to shine a light on a troubled and long-dead marriage. Newcomer Milo Machado-Graner gives a nuanced performance as the blind son struggling with his mother’s possible innocence.
Saltburn
Barry Keoghan could get his second Oscar nomination for his twisted and dazzling performance in Emerald Fennell’s brilliantly deviant Saltburn. The Irish actor stars as Oliver Quick, an Oxford student of low social and financial standing who spends the summer at his rich friend’s home (Jacob Elordi) to disastrous consequences. Rosamund Pike and Richard E. Grant stand out in killer supporting roles. You may remember Fennell for her first feature Promising Young Woman. If you thought that film was biting, Saltburn will take your head clean off. Debaucherous, shocking, and just plain fun, itwon’t be for everybody but those who’ll love it, are lucky.
All of Us Strangers
No easy answers are given in director Andrew Haigh’s romantic and heartbreaking fantastical drama. The always brilliant Andrew Scott plays a lonely gay man living in an almost empty London high-rise. When he starts getting close to a neighbor (a mesmerizing Paul Mescal), he starts seeing his dead parents played by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell. It’s the small everyday conversations that Scott has that devastate you as a viewer and Haigh’s dialogue knows just what buttons to push to move his audience. All of Us Strangersis a harrowing meditation on grief.
Our long wait for a new Paddington movie is…well, still a couple of years away from being over. Sony Pictures confirmed today that Paddington in Peru, the third film in the series, would hit U.S. theaters on January 17th 2025. It’ll open a couple of months earlier in the U.K, which isn’t a surprise.
There was also confirmation of a rumor that has been spreading for weeks, and it’s that Rachel Zegler has dropped out of the film due to the SAG-AFTRA strike. She has been replaced by newcomer Carlo Tous in the role of Gina Cabot.
Ben Whishaw returns as the voice of the marmalade sandwich-loving bear, with Hugh Bonneville, Julie Walters, Madeleine Harris, Samuel Joslin, Jim Broadbent, Olivia Colman, and Antonio Banderas, and Imelda Staunton also coming back. It was previously reported that Emily Mortimer replaced Sally Hawkins as Mrs. Brown.
Dougal Wilson will make his feature directing debut, replacing Paul King who left to direct the Wonka film with Timothee Chalamet.
Here is the Paddington in Peru synopsis: The highly anticipated third Paddington film brings Paddington’s story to Peru as he returns to visit his beloved Aunt Lucy, who now resides at the Home for Retired Bears. With the Brown Family in tow, a thrilling adventure ensues when a mystery plunges them into an unexpected journey through the Amazon rainforest and to the mountain peaks of Peru.
Synopsis: Six campers go on a camping trip in southern California where they are promptly stalked and killed by a ghoulish man who ultimately is just looking for a little love.
Three young couples head to the wilderness of the California hills for a weekend away camping and enjoying nature. Little did they know that 20 years earlier a group of Gypsies had perished in a fire at the same location leaving a badly burned child to wander the woods. One couple gets killed by an unseen assailant during the night. Thinking that they headed home, the rest of the group continues on as they are stalked from a distance. Their only hope is a park ranger tracking them down in an attempt to warn them.
You know this trope, any horror fan should. Young attractive people are systematically killed by a disfigured entity seeking revenge for a wrong they experienced long ago. It was used again and again throughout the 70’s and 80’s. The Prey takes that trope and attempts to create something unique but really ends up making an 80-minute nature documentary interspersed with some violence, gore and nudity. I was almost waiting for David Attenborough’s voice to start narrating.
Aside from a first-person camera perspective leering at the people from a distance coupled with heavy breathing, the killer isn’t seen on screen until the 68-minute mark. The best horror in this movie is the last 15 minutes or so where the killer chases the final 2 girls with the ranger fast approaching to rescue them. The rest of the film is filled with inane dialogue and shots of nature worthy of National Geographic.
This is Edwin Brown’s first and last attempt at anything other than X-rated fare which is common for a lot of low-budget directors of the time. It does have a few names you might recognize though like Jackson Bostwick who was the first Captain Marvel from the short-lived Shazaam television series back in the 70’s. There’s also a brief appearance from Carel Struycken who played Lurch in the Addams Family films of the 90’s among other various creatures of TV and film throughout the years.
With the short runtime, I wasn’t expecting much but still found myself completely bored. From what I understand there is also a 97-minute cut of this flick that digs deeper into the backstory of the killer, eliminating most of the nature footage and adding more nudity. A stunt that the director confirmed was all Essex Productions and none of his doing so I’m kind of curious what that looks like. Guess I’ll have to track down the Arrow DVD release. As for this theatrical cut? As a nature documentary, it gets an “A”, as a horror movie it gets a “D” teetering on an “F”.
This one is currently streaming on Tubi if you’re interested. If you do decide to subject yourself to this flick, my advice is to watch the opening and skip to the final 15 minutes. You won’t miss anything important other than a banjo solo and an improvised joke by Bostwick among what looks like scenes shot specifically to fill time.
Join me again tomorrow as we continue this strange journey down the horror rabbit hole. Please let me find something good…
IF YOU WERE THE LAST- Not enough people saw this little diamond of a film when it streamed on Peacock, and that’s a shame. It’s not an exaggeration that I fell in love with this DIY-styled rom-com starring Anthony Mackie and Zoe Chao within the first minute. Their chemistry as stranded astronauts and best friends navigating the “should we or should we not bang?” question, is stratospheric and unlike any pairing you will see this year.
This is a pretty weird situation and I don’t know what to make of it. Sci-fi rom-com If You Were the Last, starring Anthony Mackie and Zoe Chao, premiered at SXSW earlier this year to pretty good reviews. There’s been no advance press for it, until now with the release of the first trailer, ahead of the film’s Peacock debut…today. What happened there?
Is it a sign that maybe Peacock aren’t that high on the film? Or that they forgot it existed? With so many streaming projects out there I’m surprised this doesn’t happen more often.
Anyway, the film is directed by Kristian Mercado with Natalie Morales and Geoff Stults as co-stars.
Here’s the synopsis: Adam and Jane are three years into a NASA mission that has gone very wrong. Their ship is broken, and now they drift between Jupiter and Saturn, finding ways to pass the time as they become more certain that no one is coming to save them. Adam paints, and Jane attempts to repair the ship. They argue over what movies to watch. And every day, they dance. One day, Adam poses that maybe they should sleep together. Jane laughs the idea off — why mess up their great dynamic just to add one more (admittedly very fun) activity to their list of time-passing options? Thus begins a friendly, flirty debate about whether they’re better off spending their remaining days as friends or something more.
Um, enjoy the trailer. And if it catches your fancy, flip on over to Peacock and watch it now.
The Junge Cruise reunion keeps getting bigger. A couple of years ago we learned that Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson would reteam for Kate Warne, an action film acquired by Amazon. With Blunt and Johnson aboard to produce, Deadline reports that Jungle Cruise director Jaume Collet-Serra has now joined them.
Collet-Serra will direct the film on real-life director Kate Warne, based on a script by Melissa Stack with a first draft by Gustin Nash. While she hasn’t officially signed on to lead it, Blunt is expected to star as the legendary gumshoe, recognized as the first female detective and part of the Pinkertons beginning in the 1850s. She helped uncover the Baltimore assassination plot against Abraham Lincoln in 1861.
Emily Blunt as a kick-ass detective in a field dominated by men? Yes, please. Of course, we can expect to see her with Johnson and Collet-Serra again for the Jungle Cruise sequel. The two A-list actors also have the Netflix superhero film Ball & Chain, which I assume is still happening.
We’re happy to offer our DC readers the chance to attend a free early screening of Five Nights at Freddy’s, starring Josh Hutcherson and produced by Blumhouse!
SYNOPSIS: Can you survive five nights? The terrifying horror game phenomenon becomes a blood-chilling cinematic event, as Blumhouse— the producer of M3GAN, The Black Phone and The Invisible Man— brings Five Nights at Freddy’s to the big screen. The film follows a troubled security guard as he begins working at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. While spending his first night on the job, he realizes the night shift at Freddy’s won’t be so easy to make it through.
The screening takes place on Wednesday, October 25th at 7:00pm at Regal Majestic. If you’d like to attend, RSVP at the Gofobo site here. Please remember all screenings are first come first served and you’ll need to arrive early to ensure seating. Enjoy the show!
Five Nights at Freddy’s – In Theaters and streaming on Peacock October 27
