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    Oscar Contenders Emerge After Film Festival Season

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    After film festivals in Venice, Telluride and Toronto, a slate of contenders has emerged. Still, there are few front-runners.Fall foliage may still be weeks away, but the tea leaves of Oscar season are ready to be read.Now that festivals in Venice, Telluride and Toronto have concluded and all but a handful of this year’s contenders have had their first public peek-out, the story is beginning to come into focus. And unlike the last two years, which were dominated by the season-long sweepers “Oppenheimer” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” this race seems much more wide open.Still, two movies already look like significant contenders across the board. One is “Conclave,” a handsomely mounted thriller about sneaky cardinals plotting to pick a new pope. It premiered at Telluride and stars Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci. Some of my fellow journalists sniffed that “Conclave” was just a potboiler with prestige trappings, but I think that’s exactly what will appeal to Oscar voters, who love to reward a rip-roaring yarn as long as it’s well-made with a soupçon of social-issue relevance. Directed by Edward Berger, whose “All Quiet on the Western Front” won four Academy Awards, “Conclave” could be a big hit with audiences, too.If Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” felt like the biggest movie of Venice, that’s in part because of its mammoth 215-minute run time, which comes complete with a 15-minute intermission. There’s no denying the outsize ambition of this film, which was shot on the old-fashioned VistaVision format and chronicles the epic tribulations of a Jewish architect (Adrien Brody) as he emigrates to America after World War II. Expect plenty of awards recognition for Corbet and supporting performers Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones, as well as a surefire Oscar nomination for Brody, who somehow still holds the record for the youngest best-actor winner after taking that Oscar at 29 for “The Pianist.”Two buzzy performances from big stars also debuted in Venice. Daniel Craig looks likely to earn his first Oscar nomination, for Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer,” in which he plays an American expat besotted with a young man in midcentury Mexico City. And Nicole Kidman won the best actress award at Venice for the erotic “Babygirl,” which also finds her falling for a younger man. (Perhaps age-gap romances are the new Oscar bait.)The Venice trophy will help Kidman build a case for her sixth Oscar nomination (she won for “The Hours”), though she’ll face a surplus of strong lead-actress contenders who also emerged from the fall fests: Angelina Jolie as the opera diva Maria Callas in “Maria”; the Brazilian star Fernanda Torres in “I’m Still Here”; Marianne Jean-Baptiste as a mouthy malcontent in Mike Leigh’s “Hard Truths”; and the double act of Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore in Pedro Almodóvar’s empathetic “The Room Next Door,” which won the top prize in Venice, the Golden Lion.The director Jason Reitman has crafted a crowd-pleaser in “Saturday Night,” a comedy about the chaotic backstage negotiations that preceded the debut episode of “Saturday Night Live,” though its wide Oct. 11 release will have to go well if the movie hopes to sustain the momentum it earned from Telluride and Toronto. “Joker: Folie à Deux” has the opposite problem: Though this sequel to the billion-dollar hit is certain to make money when it’s released next month, it was coolly received by Venice critics and will face a much more uncertain awards future than its predecessor.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      6 Movie Trends from the Toronto International Film Festival

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      And other cultural predictions based on movies that played at the Toronto International Film Festival, including Pedro Almodóvar’s latest.After years of pandemic delays and Hollywood strikes, the Toronto International Film Festival, which concludes on Sunday, felt particularly alive this year. Unlike recent years, there was no surefire hit like “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (2022) or “Oppenheimer” (2023) that premiered in the spring or summer, which added excitement and uncertainty going into awards season. Movies both big and small come to the Canadian city to launch Oscars campaigns, build audiences, announce major debuts and, in some cases, woo buyers that’ll release films over the coming months. But it’s also a great place to see how culture at large is shifting, at least as far as Hollywood is concerned. Here’s where we’re headed.1. We’re all in the mood for love again …Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield in “We Live in Time.”Courtesy of TIFFIf the September film season (which also includes major festivals in Venice, Italy, Telluride, Colo., and the upcoming one in New York), has shown something, it’s that many writers and directors are feeling romantic. There’s Sean Baker’s “Anora,” about a sex worker who marries the son of an oligarch, and William Bridges’s “All of You,” which depicts Brett Goldstein (of “Ted Lasso” acclaim) and Imogen Poots as best friends who can’t decide whether to date. Chemistry always wins out, of course, and it’s hard to deny the frisson between Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield in John Crowley’s “We Live in Time,” an indie crowd-pleaser that’s ideal for crying your way through on a rainy Sunday afternoon.2. … Or maybe it’s just lust.Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson in “Babygirl.”Courtesy of TIFFDaniel Craig and Drew Starkey in “Queer.”Yannis DrakoulidisToronto was brimming with romantic tragedies, not comedies; perhaps because of ongoing conversations about non-monogamy and open relationships, there were a lot of affairs onscreen, too. The most successful scripts focused on intense, almost unnamable desire, often between two people who know it can’t last: In Halina Reijn’s “Babygirl,” Nicole Kidman plays a powerful executive who gets into a complicated psychosexual mess with her intern; in Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer,” based on the William S. Burroughs novel (published in 1985), Daniel Craig’s heroin-addled character deals with the hot-and-cold affections of a paramour while traveling through midcentury Mexico City and South America. Both films sizzle, and it’s no coincidence that the actors playing the young objects of these leads’ affections — Harris Dickinson and Drew Starkey, respectively — are proving themselves to be rising talents.3. Another major star? Danielle Deadwyler.Danielle Deadwyler in “The Piano Lesson.”Courtesy of TIFFWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Daniel Craig Gets Explicit in Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Queer’

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      At the Venice Film Festival, the star said he embraced the scenes with sexual encounters: ‘If I wasn’t in the movie and saw this movie, I’d want to be in it.’If you know Daniel Craig only as James Bond, “Queer” is liable to throw you for a loop. In this new film from Luca Guadagnino, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, Craig, 56, plays a drug addict whose sexual escapades and heroin use are filmed with matter-of-fact candor.But if you knew Craig even before he was pressed into Her Majesty’s Secret Service — when he was still an up-and-coming young actor who appeared in risky, sexually explicit films like “Love Is the Devil” and “The Mother” — then you might guess that “Queer” is much more in line with his sensibilities than some of the big studio fare he’s made recently are. At the film’s Venice news conference, he all but confirmed that hunch.“If I wasn’t in the movie and saw this movie, I’d want to be in it,” Craig told reporters. “It’s the kind of film I want to see, I want to make, I want to be out there. They’re challenging but hopefully incredibly accessible.”Adapted from the novel of the same name by William S. Burroughs, “Queer” follows Lee (Craig), an American expat wasting away in Mexico City. Most of Lee’s waking hours are spent pursuing some sort of high, whether that means drinking to excess in dive bars, cruising any handsome man to cross his path, or shooting up heroin while all alone in his apartment.In his linen suits, Lee lurches through life like a well-attired zombie until he meets Allerton (Drew Starkey), a beguiling young drifter whose sexuality seems up for grabs. Does he like Lee or does he just like being liked? Allerton says awfully little, which only beguiles Lee even more. As the older man’s romantic obsession grows, he entices Allerton to help him search for a drug that can supposedly induce a type of telepathy; if it can be scored, maybe he’ll learn what the object of his affection is really thinking.Written in the early 1950s but not published until 1985, the Burroughs novel is slight and scuzzy. Guadagnino takes a much different approach to the source material, building lavish sets (this Mexico City was erected at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios) and imbuing the story with a sweeping romanticism.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Venice Film Festival 2024: What to Watch For

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      “Joker: Folie à Deux,” with Joaquin Phoenix, and Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature are on tap. Here are the questions we hope to answer.The 81st edition of the Venice Film Festival kicks off Wednesday with the premiere of Tim Burton’s sequel “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” and starry fare will follow, like the sexually provocative Nicole Kidman film “Babygirl” and the George Clooney-Brad Pitt team-up “Wolfs.”Here are four big questions we expect to be answered at the festival, which has long been considered the unofficial kickoff of Oscar season.Will Joaquin Phoenix face the music?A Venice debut for “Joker: Folie à Deux” has been presumed ever since the first “Joker” won the festival’s prestigious Golden Lion award five years ago. Can the sequel match that film’s success, which made more than a billion dollars at the box office and landed a best-actor Oscar for Joaquin Phoenix? The new film adds song-and-dance sequences and a potent co-star in Lady Gaga, so it’s clear that some big swings have been taken.But the “Joker: Folie à Deux” news conference at Venice may be even more keenly awaited than the movie itself now that Phoenix has made headlines for dropping out of a Todd Haynes film just as it was about to start shooting. With the actor potentially facing legal action, will he be willing to take questions about the controversy from reporters? Or will he skip the conference altogether and call to mind Florence Pugh, who famously ditched her Venice press duties for “Don’t Worry Darling” two years ago amid a rumored feud with her director, Olivia Wilde?Can ‘Queer’ and ‘Maria’ make a mark?Two of Venice’s most anticipated titles are still looking for buyers: Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer,” an adaptation of the William S. Burroughs novel starring Daniel Craig, and Pablo Larraín’s “Maria,” featuring Angelina Jolie as the opera singer Maria Callas.After the writers’ and actors’ strikes left many studios’ year-end slates looking awfully barren, you might have expected a bidding frenzy for two prestige films with major stars, but potential distributors that have screened the movies are taking a wait-and-see approach. Splashy premieres at Venice and almost-certain Oscar buzz could help make the sale.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More