Best of the Fall Fests: THR’s Critics Picks

Best of the Fall Fests: THR’s Critics Picks

VENICE, TORONTO Documaker Gianfranco Rosi returns to his native Italy for this stunningly shot look at life at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, then and now. The film surveys Pompeii’s prized ruins; ventures into the tunnels beneath them, dug by tomb robbers selling antiquities on the black market; hovers over the Gulf of Naples to…

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‘This Is Not a Drill’ Review: Climate Activism Doc Feels Stuck in a More Hopeful Past

‘This Is Not a Drill’ Review: Climate Activism Doc Feels Stuck in a More Hopeful Past

Had This Is Not a Drill, the new documentary from Oren Jacoby (Sister Rose’s Passion), premiered at the Telluride Film Festival last fall, it would have played as an inspiring story of three grassroots environmentalists taking on Big Oil, offering optimistic examples of individual courage and collective determination in the face of endlessly funded and…

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Telluride Awards Analysis: ‘Hamnet,’ Chloé Zhao’s Pic About the Shakespeares’ Love and Loss, Is Talk of Fest

Telluride Awards Analysis: ‘Hamnet,’ Chloé Zhao’s Pic About the Shakespeares’ Love and Loss, Is Talk of Fest

Hamnet, the latest work of the wonderful Chinese filmmaker Chloé Zhao, who won best picture and director Oscars for 2020’s Nomadland, is an adaptation, written by Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell, of O’Farrell’s bestselling 2020 novel of the same name about the Shakespeare family. A tearjerker of the first order, it has become — in the wake…

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‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’ Review: Jeremy Allen White Gives Raw, Internalized Performance as The Boss in Contemplative Bio-Drama

‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’ Review: Jeremy Allen White Gives Raw, Internalized Performance as The Boss in Contemplative Bio-Drama

Just as A Complete Unknown escaped the dreary conventionality of cradle-to-grave music biopics by surveying the nascent period in the stardom of its unknowable subject, Bob Dylan, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere makes affecting gains by focusing on the Artist as a Depressed Young Man. Which is not to say Scott Cooper’s Bruce Springsteen portrait…

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