It seems Germany had to think a little before selecting their candidate for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race, as two contrasting candidates made compelling cases for submission. Earlier this year, it was widely predicted that they’d end up going with “Oh Boy,” a touching but street-smart comedy of twentysomething hipster ennui that played well on the international festival circuit, was a huge hit at home, and wound up dominating the German Academy Awards back in the spring.

Still, you probably stopped at “twentysomething hipster ennui” and thought, “Well, that’s a recipe for failure with this voting branch.” It seems the German selection committee might have felt the same way — particularly when they had another, older-skewing drama, with a WWII-related theme and a veteran Oscar-nominated star, to fall back on. I mean, this is an unpredictable business, but it’s not rocket science either. “Two Lives,” from writer-director Georg Maas, it is.

Norwegian icon Liv Ullmann — a two-time Best Actress nominee for “The Emigrants” and “Face to Face,” and among the greatest actors alive — and German actress Juliane Koehler as a mother and daughter with a war-damaged family history. Separated during the German occupation of Norway in WWII, with the young girl shipped to a children’s home in Germany, the two were reunited after the war, though the daughter has secretly maintained her German identity with certain acquaintances ever since. The bulk of the action takes place in 1990, immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, as the two are brought to testify in a case seeking reparations for similarly split families.

So far, so Academy-friendly. Reviews, while not ecstatic on the whole, are respectful of its serious-minded take on an endlessly storied stretch of history, and of the reportedly committed performances by its two stars. The film has yet to be released in Germany (though the German-Norwegian co-production was actually released in Norway last year), so we’ll find out if it ends up being as popular a choice at home as “Oh Boy” would have been, though it’s probably the most strategic one.

Germany was a fixture in the Oscar race between 2002 and 2009, cracking six nominations in those eight years, and winning for “Nowhere in Africa” and “The Lives of Others.” For the last three, however, they’ve missed the mark, despite savvy submissions: “Pina” made the nine-film shortlist, but wound up only with a documentary nomination; last year, Stasi-themed Berlinale hit “Barbara” rather surprisingly failed to crack even the shortlist. We’ll see if “Two Lives”‘ take on modern history is any more likely to please those wily foreign-branch voters.

TELLURIDE, Colo. – My immediate takeaway from Jason Reitman’s “Labor Day,” which kicks off the Telluride Film Festival this afternoon at the annual patrons screening, was that it was an unexpected mature step for the filmmaker who has offered up such self-aware films as “Thank You For Smoking,” “Juno,” “Up in the Air” and “Young Adult.” There isn’t a whiff of that tone here whatsoever. The edge that has defined Reitman’s work has been set aside while a more refined, lived-in aesthetic has taken hold.

Those other films had a very distinct voice, and they were all great movies. This one is told in a completely different voice, however, and I guess that’s what I mean when I say the results are unexpected; it’s unusual to see a filmmaker tap another perspective on narrative so confidently this early in a career. Reitman is still under a decade in features, after all.

The work I was most reminded of was Clint Eastwood’s from the early-90s. Indeed, “Labor Day,” which is based on the novel by Joyce Maynard, feels like it was baked in the same oven as “A Perfect World” or “The Bridges of Madison County.” It sits with its characters, measured, patient with them.

The drama centers on Kate Winslet as Adele, the mildly reclusive mother of 16-year-old Henry (Gattlin Griffith). The two are taken captive by escaped convict Frank (Josh Brolin) in their New Hampshire home over a Labor Day weekend in 1987 (making the film’s debut this particular weekend all the more apt). But Frank isn’t what he seems to be and as we learn his story, the reason for Adele’s emotional neurosis and the impact the weekend has on Henry, the film becomes a story of family and, more profoundly, the burden of responsibility a young person has to the emotional well-being of a parent.

The movie is a highlight for Reitman and might be his most deeply felt work yet. It’s full of texture, less interested in telling you a story than showing you one, by which I mean, this isn’t a movie — like “Up in the Air,” like “Thank You for Smoking” — that’s actively looking for a place to land. It’s more reserved than that. Rich though the film may be, it doesn’t have the swagger others have come to expect of his filmmaking, which was already assured, and it’s an incredible step in a different direction for the 35-year-old director.

That richness is felt across the work of Reitman’s crew, as well. The art department in particular deserves singling out. The decoration of these modestly period sets really establishes a sense of time and place that feels familiar and real. Eric Steelberg’s photography has never been so lush and evocative. Editor Dana Glauberman gets to play with more than usual in the film’s assemblage and Rolfe Kent’s score is delicate and appropriate.

The film could certainly figure into the awards season, particularly in the lead actress race; Winslet’s performance isn’t outwardly showy but it’s very specific, nuanced and sublime. And Brolin, who is currently set for a supporting actor push by the studio, provides a valuable spark throughout. His presence is felt even when he’s not on screen.

It will, however, be interesting to see how a release date very late in the year affects this one. It’s set for a limited bow on Christmas Day, with an expansion in January. That gives it room to breathe at the box office away from the November-December glut, but it could be a little late to grab the Academy’s attention as members scramble to catch up with everything as the January voting deadline looms. And as we’ve mentioned, Paramount has Alexander Payne’s black-and-white indie “Nebraska” (also playing Telluride) and Martin Scorsese’s high-key dissection “The Wolf of Wall Street” to work with as well.

“Labor Day” falls somewhere in between those two extremes and could resonate in the middle of the road. That is not, however, to say the film itself is “middle-of-the-road.” On the contrary; it’s a fresh step for Reitman on a separate path, and the growth won’t go unnoticed. It’ll be interesting to see how the masses take to it next week at the Toronto Film Festival.

Check back later tonight for another take on the film from Greg Ellwood.

“Labor Day” arrives in limited release on Christmas Day.

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TELLURIDE, Colo. – CBS Films helped the 40th annual Telluride Film Festival get off to a musical start by bringing in the Punch Brothers to perform at an opening night concert Wednesday night. Chris Thile and his band appear on the soundtrack to the Coen brothers’ upcoming “Inside Llewyn Davis,” and they played some bluegrass favorites to a nice crowd in the town park.

The film stars Oscar Isaac as a folk singer in 1960s New York. Isaac joined the band for a rendition of “Fare Thee Well (aka Dink’s Song).”

The film made its debut earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival. Read our review here. It also stars Carey Mulligan, John Goodman, Garrett Hedlund and Justin Timberlake.

“Inside Llewyn Davis” will have its North American premiere tonight at the Telluride Film Festival. It opens in the U.S. December 6.

TELLURIDE, Colo. – Nearly half a century ago, Marilyn Monroe confided in a young Bruce Dern an opinion of the actor passed to her by Actors Studio founder Elia Kazan, or “Gadge” as they all knew him. “He’s not going to be a leading man,” the famed director said, “because he’ll be into his 60s before anyone knows what he’s capable of.”

The reasoning went that Dern was destined to be a character actor. He didn’t subscribe to his buddy Jack Nicholson’s ribbing “it’s just acting, asshole” sentiment, but rather he preferred to inhabit a character, to be a character. He bought into Lee Strasberg’s method acting approach, and indeed, went on to have a lengthy career as a dependable fixture in any number of films. But he’s always been “third cowboy from the right,” as Dern has put it, and with Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska,” which is set for a North American premiere later today at the Telluride Film Festival, he finally had an opportunity to embrace a leading man character for all it was worth.

However, when you start talking about awards season, a performance like Dern’s begins to bump up against cynical math. There are those who will assert that with a supporting campaign, he might have a great shot at both an Oscar nomination and even a win, or at least a better shot than in the more typically competitive lead race. Christoph Waltz’s performance in “Inglourious Basterds,” which won the same Best Actor Cannes honor in 2009 that Dern won a few months ago, is often pointed to as an example of this trajectory.

But as the elderly Woody Grant in “Nebraska,” Dern gives a lead performance because “Nebraska” is, every bit of it, about Woody Grant. We start the film with Woody. We learn just about everything there is to know about Woody. And while Will Forte is great as Woody’s son, David, and has more to do on screen, we really know precious little about him. Every moment of the film is either about or informed by Dern’s presence and performance. I’m usually on the other side of this argument, but in this case, I just have a different takeaway: This is Bruce Dern’s movie.

And Paramount agrees. The studio has decided to campaign the actor as a lead, news of which I broke via Hollywood Elsewhere last week. It’s the right call, eschewing the cynical math in favor of a more significant boost for a guy who, let’s face it, deserves to have that kind of support. Others may peddle somewhat facile logic to the contrary, and it’s an arguable point. But it’s logic that fails to realize how the performance is landing with everyone from Sylvia Miles to Nicholson himself. Actors, particularly of a certain age, are eager to see Dern finally get this kind of recognition, and the well-wishers kept piling up as Dern’s daughter Laura and “Nebraska” star Stacy Keach held separate LA-area screenings and soirees in his honor over the last week.

Indeed, sit in a room with Dern and he’ll talk to you for as long as you’ll listen about his theater days, being blown away by Strasberg’s approach to immersive drama, old Hollywood and more. He’ll tell you he believes he’s worked with six geniuses in his time — Alfred Hitchcock, Elia Kazan, Douglas Trumbull, Francis Ford Coppola, Quentin Tarantino and now Alexander Payne — and he’ll freely admit that “that might piss some people off,” because, after all, he’s leaving some major talents off that list; here’s a guy who has worked with everyone from John Frankenheimer to Hal Ashby. He’ll shoot you straight and regale you, looking you in the eye and remembering every decades-old detail, right down to the weather.

No, those things aren’t about the actual performance, which does its own heavy lifting. (I heard one two-time nominee from the old days lean in to Dern at a recent New York event for the film and let him know unequivocally, “You have my nomination.”) But those things are about the charisma it takes to charm your way through the circuit, and if that charmer is a legend like Bruce Dern, you’re so much more than half-way there. So forget the punditry. When you observe industry response to the film, you quickly understand that a lead campaign is not only the right call, but in step with what people who actually have a vote are saying.

The movie itself? It surprised me a bit. I thought it was fantastic. Like most Payne films, it rings a lot of genuine notes while never losing its sense of humor. It’s about a man who’s lived a modest life and wants for something bigger in his autumn. It’s a little obtuse to start but it finds its stride and tells a meaningful story without a lot of fuss. And it struck me as less a Payne film than some amalgamation of the Coens and Payne, with a touch of something more empathetic. Because this is one of the only movies from Payne, whose work I tend to appreciate, that doesn’t appear to be sitting in judgment of its central characters. It’s not sending them up, really. It’s more careful than that.

It also features a brilliant supporting performance from June Squibb that could just as easily be in the hunt for awards consideration. She’s fiery in the right measure and lights up the screen. And frankly, the film could even figure into the Best Picture race. But, like the rest of Paramount’s slate, it will depend on how things shake out for the studio, which sports three very different films from very different filmmakers who have all been embraced by the Academy in the past. It’s a pretty exciting trio, but I really wouldn’t underestimate “Nebraska” in the grand scheme of things; it may be a small film but it has a big heart and people will want to stick up for it, as they will Mr. Dern, who has traveled a long and legendary road to this moment in the spotlight.

“Nebraska” opens in limited release on Nov. 22.

VENICE -Some films are born midnight movies, some achieve midnight-movie status, and others have midnight-movie status thrust upon them. It”s the third route that is by far the least reliable or enduring: there”s nothing so antithetical to notion of cult cinema as the idea that it can be calculated and declared (or worse still, self-declared) out loud. From its ungainly, eccentric title downwards, Sion Sono”s manic postmodern bloodbath “Why Don”t You Play in Hell?” falls squarely in that category, weird and woolly and sporadically amusing as it may be.

Part ultra-violent yakuza actioner, part dorky wish-fulfilment comedy in the “Kick-Ass” vein, both parts cranked extremely loud and incredibly close, “Hell” ends up playing its contrasting genre trappings against one another. Using the semblance of one to deny considered engagement with the other – it”s not really a grisly body-count thriller if it makes you laugh, apparently – Sono covers all his ideological bases by positioning the film as a love letter to cinema.

That”s a hackneyed but unimpeachable claim, intended to give it the high ground even when it”s splashing gleefully in the gutter. As such, “Hell” is populated with eager Sono-surrogate youths brandishing cameras, making knowingly shoddy B-movies-within-B-movies, and bathing in analogue nostalgia. When a standard-issue scene in the film features a young woman filling an antagonist”s mouth with broken glass, then aggressively Frenching him until the shards puncture his cheeks, you have to take your comforts where you can find them. And even at its most effortfully haphazard – freely bisecting stray bodies with swords and strewing their remains across the frame, doing its best and most directly appropriated Tarantino snarl while an approximation of Santa Esmerelda disco pulses on the soundtrack – there”s a preening quality to its provocations, a constant wink at the audience reminding them that”s it right to be wrong.

The narrative is at once furiously complicated and inessential, a skeleton on which to hang extravagant, hit-and-miss set pieces. Still, an opening scene that at first seems a jokey non-sequitur – a pop-brite toothpaste commercial in which a button-cute Japanese tyke sings a cheery but aggressive jingle that implores listeners to “gnash your teeth, let”s fly!” – proves eventually to be one of the more identifiable plots points here. The kid, Mitsuko, is the daughter of yakuza boss Muto (Jun Kunimara), whose wife is sent to prison for massacring a rival gang during a home raid.

The scandalous incident nips Mitsuko”s acting career in the bud; a decade later, with her mother on the verge of parole, the now-grown Mitsuko (Fumi Nikaido) is starring in a film bankrolled by her father that she impulsively abandons halfway through production. (Think Lindsay Lohan with less dilated pupils and a mean right hook.) Muto”s attempt to continue the production on his own eventually collide with the hitherto isolated antics of misleadingly named troupe The Fuck Bombers, a group of awkward young movie geeks making their own on-the-fly kung fu flicks. The lengthy, tangled finale sees both crews” shoots merge with a grisly, climactic real-life yakuza battle: history”s most high-octane snuff movie is there for the making, if only any of the crew can, quite literally, keep their heads about them.

That very rough synopsis makes the fallout seem tidier than it is. In practice, it”s hard to keep track of sides amid the wall-to-wall waterslides of blood, the cast”s unrelentingly high-key performance style and the shrieking spaghetti-western samples that pervade the soundtrack. I have no doubt that those who give themselves over to the racket will find it genuinely, thrillingly subversive, and maybe it is: Toronto”s Midnight Madness programmers think so, as do Drafthouse Films, which has boldly picked up this spiky novelty for US distribution.

But even allowing for a certain degree of Not My Thing, it felt to me like a put-on from Sono, whose creative high-water mark remains his four-hour epic of deranged teenage lust, “Love Exposure” – a film whose eccentricities are no less wild or chaotic than those of his latest, but feel born of genuine, agonized feeling. Even within the film”s gonzo universe, none of the characters has much in the way of inner life; Sono”s ardent movie-love does comes through loud and clear in the film”s litany of cinematic references – both Eastern and Western, high and low – but this is the kind of self-reflexive movie that congratulates itself just for being a movie at all. “Make a damn good movie, even if it”s only one!” the characters cry at various intervals in the carnage, which is rather a low-aiming manifesto for a director who has already made at least one damn good movie. “Why Don”t You Play In Hell?,” for all its spirited schlock, isn”t pushing that number upwards.

VENICE – Packing films, as one would sardines, into the snug, air-locked space of even the biggest festival always uncovers unforeseen parallels and commonalities, making happy bedfellows of works that otherwise wouldn”t have much to say to each other. With John Curran”s wonderful Australian adventure “Tracks” having just christened the Competition 24 hours after Alfonso Cuaron”s mindboggling space thriller “Gravity” opened the fest, it seems we have this year”s first pair of Lido buddies: two days in, Venice 2013 is the festival of women fighting the elements.

That”s a glib reading, of course, and one that does a disservice to both films” subtleties, some of them also shared. With the Outback desert a pretty indomitable (not to mention indomitably pretty) presence from the outset, “Tracks” seems a woman-versus-land story only until it emerges that the land is a reflection of the woman herself.

In 1975, Robyn Davidson, a hard-headed, 25-year-old Queensland native, set out for Alice Springs to pursue her dream of walking the 2000-mile expanse of desert between that particular middle of nowhere and the Indian Ocean. She almost certainly didn”t imagine (or wish) her story would become mainstream film fodder; unassumingly severe and openly self-oriented, she”s a figure who wouldn”t appear to have much time at all for other versions of other lives. Yet her expansive, plainspoken memoir “Tracks,” with its satisfyingly challenging central quest and self-evidently cinematic backdrop, has been an obvious siren call to film producers for decades now. Julia Roberts was attached to the project in the mid-1990s, a possibility both intriguing and hazardous: it”s hard to imagine the naturally plucky star marrying herself to the environment in quite the way that Davidson”s personal narrative requires, that mile-wide smile filling up with windblown sand.

Good things come to those who wait, and the (very) good thing in this case is Mia Wasikowska, the tranquil-faced Australian actress who, at 23, is even younger than Davidson was when she embarked on her impossibly possible journey. Pale and birch-like, possessed of an unusual beauty that doesn”t come separate from an innate intelligence, she has successfully built her career so far on a kind of cool but relatably reticent quality: through starring roles in the likes of “Jane Eyre” and “Stoker”, she”s become a go-to girl for characters who are nobody”s go-to girls. As such, she”s ideal for the role of Robyn, a woman who doesn”t mean to be antisocial, but has strictly rationed practical use for the company – social, professional or even sexual – of others. “How can you tell a nice person to just crawl into a hole and die?” she asks a sympathetic benefactor at one point. In Wasikowska”s quiet phrasing, it”s not a facetious question.

That nice person who initially takes the brunt of Davidson”s people problem – well, that”s what he chooses to call it, at least – is Rick Smolan (the winningly strange Adam Driver), the gauche but eager American photographer assigned by National Geographic to document her journey at various points along the way. For her, his presence is a necessary but invasive imposition: the magazine may be bankrolling her endeavor, but she has no idea how to publicly present a trial she”s undergoing for reasons that aren”t just private, but hard to articulate even to herself.

“I just want to be by myself,” is the explanation she offers near the beginning to anyone who asks, as the film in a straightforward backstory that gives some context to the high-security aura surrounding this barefoot Garbo. And initially, solitude is just what the parched beauty of the Outback – never more gleamingly filmed, by ace cinematographer Mandy Walker, than right at the beginning – offers her and her hard-won entourage of surly, belching camels, shepherded by a bright-eyed black labrador.

But finding your bliss is harder than keeping it, and as the cumulative stresses of hard earth and harder sun take their inevitable toll on her mind and person, Robyn comes to realize that the desert isn”t her opponent so much as a manifestation of her own spartan independence: her trek is precisely as difficult as she”s making it for herself. Her gradual acquiescence to the kindness of strangers – notably Eddy, a wizened but uncuddly Aboriginal guide (played with grace and occasional hilarity by Rolley Mintuma) she hires to lead her through otherwise forbidden sacred country – is as rewarding a narrative arc as her steady progress toward the Indian Ocean, yet the film steers happily clear of banal help-me-help-you sentiment. She may thaw toward Rick (as well she might, given that the role seems reformatted for Driver”s quizzical charms), but an early, impulsive kiss between the two doesn”t go quite where you fear it will. Marion Nelson”s spare but full-bodied script goes lighter than Davidson”s book on the late-1970s feminism, but “Tracks””s heroine leaves the film, as she enters it, wholly her own woman.

It”s become critical cliché to describe environment as character in cinema, but that”s not to say many films pull off the metaphor particularly well – and given the personal and spiritual mirroring function served by the desert in Davidson”s story, it”s a vital that this film does so. The best decision made by director Curran, who manages proceedings with all the unobtrusively classical elegance he did his underrated adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham”s “The Painted Veil,” was to get Mandy Walker behind the camera. The Aussie DP is best known for her lacquered Outback vistas in Baz Luhrmann”s “Australia,” but this more intimate epic requires the tonal and textural detailing of her work in small-scale character dramas “Lantana” and “Shattered Glass.” The delicate modulations of her clay-and-fire palette here are particularly extraordinary, as the sun bakes the earth and Wasikowska”s freckled complexion alike to a similarly mottled terracotta hue. Toward the end, as the camera lingered on a closeup of Robyn”s worn, wounded back, I took a second to realize it wasn”t an establishing landscape shot. (Points, too, to the makeup team”s vivid but unshowy work.)

British writer Sophia McDougall recently wrote a superb essay in which she railed against the stony, supposedly commendable Hollywood archetype of the Strong Female Character: “Agency is far more important than ‘strength”,” she writes, before yearning for more female protagonists “who can be either strong or weak or both or neither, because they are more than strength or weakness.” I thought of those words again and again as I watched “Tracks,” which honors its subject”s stoic reserve, but allows a strain of warm calico romanticism into her remarkable story. It”s a contrast that feels apt for a heroine whose physical endurance is beyond reproach, but whose personal limitations, more interestingly, fluctuate being propelling and impeding her journey.

TELLURIDE, Colo. – It’s fair to say filmmaker Jason Reitman has a bit of a history with the Telluride and Toronto film festivals. In 2005 his feature debut, “Thank You for Smoking,” sold at the latter. Since then, three of his last four films, including this year’s “Labor Day,” have debuted at Telluride (2007’s “Juno” and 2009’s “Up in the Air” in the form of “sneak previews” secret screenings) before heading north to Toronto. It’s become a notable tradition, so we asked Reitman about his thoughts on the two environments and whether he’s superstitious enough to consider them a good luck charm at the start of the fall.

How did that first Telluride-Toronto experience with “Juno” in 2007 affect you?

I had heard about Telluride but not experienced it. People always talked about it like it was a fairytale. We came in as a secret screening, which was exciting; everyone sees you around town and they start to realize your film is there. We played so well at Telluride that year that by the time we arrived in Toronto, there was this kind of word already coming. Before we even screened, it was a must-see film at the festival. It just brought up the wattage of the screening in Toronto. It became a harder ticket, and you could just feel it as the movie began, there was this excitement, this understanding that they were about to experience something cool that carried off of the juice that it got at Telluride.

How do these two very different environments compare and how do they reflect on your work when you bring movies to each?

The Telluride environment is as lovely as everyone says. It’s this quaint little Rocky Mountain town that is preserved in all its charm and it’s a very easy place to talk to fellow filmmakers and film fans. You spend three days in this little tree-lined valley going to a barbecue and trying to keep up with the altitude and it’s so quiet. And then less than a week later you land in Toronto, this metropolis, and it’s a whole other deal. All of a sudden it’s loud, it’s exciting, you’ve gone from jeans and flannels to suits and dresses, tons of press conferences, red carpets, and a similarly excitable but different fan base of movie-goers who are just as thrilled to see movies. But their passion is just a little bit different. Frankly it’s a wonderful combination because obviously there’s something lovely about how quiet and respectful the Telluride crowd is, but then there’s something so exciting about how loud and passionate the Toronto crowd is. You get to see two different versions of your film, like see your film play to two different audiences, in two different rooms.

Are you able to take time to see films while attending these festivals?

Yeah. Since the time I started going to film festivals I spend a lot of time seeing movies. This year my schedule’s really tight. Telluride I’ll probably get a chance to see a lot more films, because I’m doing a lot of press at Toronto. There’s something nice about going to Telluride and not having to worry about doing interviews on a regular basis and just hanging out, eating barbecue and having drinks with your friends.

Do you ever feel like there’s a danger of peaking early with buzz for a fall film by hitting these early festivals? It’s been argued that “Up in the Air” ran out of steam because it hit such a high point with Telluride/Toronto in 2009.

I’ve heard so many arguments, honestly, both ways. “Don’t play Cannes, it’ll be too early.” “Don’t play Toronto, it’ll be too early.” “Wait for New York.” “Don’t play New York, play AFI.” “Don’t show anything. Wait for December, pull the Eastwood and don’t show a single soul.” I don’t think there is a certain system that works. I think the best thing to do is play for the audiences you think will love your film. For whatever reason, the audiences at Telluride and Toronto seem to be the kind of people who dig my movies, and I presume I’ll just keep bringing my films back to those festivals. It seems to be a nice match. We’ll get a bit of a bump coming out of the festival, then some other film will get a little juice. In the weeks leading to our release, we’ll get a little more juice and it’ll just go back and forth.

With the last film, “Young Adult,” you skipped this strategy.

Frankly, “Young Adult” was a movie that, I don’t know, it just felt like a different movie. We wanted to try something different. Looking back, I don’t even know if it was the right decision. It would have been nice to have seen it play at some film festivals. It certainly is a film festival type of movie. But I’m not a superstitious guy so it really doesn’t play into anything like that. We tried something. We did this little tour from city to city at these cool little art house theaters and we did posters in each town. It was something fun. But am I excited to go back to Telluride and Toronto with “Labor Day?” Very much so. And frankly I think Telluride will be a lovely place to show “Labor Day” because it strangely feels like the setting of the movie.

The three times you’ve done Telluride and Toronto you’ve had distribution on board, but with “Thank You for Smoking” in 2005, you came to Toronto looking for a buyer in the marketplace. That must have been a completely different experience.

It was phenomenal. It was the dream. It’s what everyone talks about. Saturday night in the Ryerson Theatre, had a killer screening and then that night there was a bidding war that went until three in the morning. I went out and smoked cigars with all of my buddies. The next morning Paramount and Fox Searchlight both announced that they had bought the film and it started a week-long battle with them in the press, each stating that they had bought the film. Searchlight in the end had it. It was an exciting week.

Alright so let’s just ask the question: Is going to the quaint mountain setting of Telluride and then to the busy metropolitan marathon of Toronto at the beginning of the fall festival circuit your good luck charm?

I wouldn’t consider it a “good luck charm.” It seems like a natural way to introduce my films to the people I think most about when I’m making them. Telluride you get a slightly more highbrow curation, a small selection of very thoughtful, smart, highbrow films. It’s a nice combination of international films you might never have seen and the most promising American films of that moment. What’s fun about Toronto is you get a broad spectrum of what’s interesting happening in cinema. You get huge movies, tiny foreign films, interesting American indies and badass midnight films. I can spend a day in Toronto at the Ryerson, see five movies in a row and see everything from a great little American indie to a badass film like “Drive” or “Spring Breakers” and then close the night out on some insane movie like “Stuck.” The Telluride and Toronto audiences are not elitist. They just love movies. All kinds of movies.

“Labor Day” screens for the public in Telluride on Friday at the Galaxy Theater. It arrives in theaters on Christmas Day.

It’s become as mandatory a part of the film festival experience as queueing, champagne hangovers and the swinging lanyard affixed to one’s neck: if a new James Franco joint isn’t to be found in the program, you’re probably not looking hard enough.

Out in the real world, the Oscar-nominated actor still functions primarily — if not exclusively — as, well, an Oscar-nominated actor. Among the paying public, awareness of his extramural activities may be limited chiefly to his being the guy who bombed hard at the Oscars that one time; some may have heard of an artsy endeavor via an interview, but would be hard pressed to specify what it was. I’m certain most would be surprised to hear that he’s directed 11 feature films, in addition to any number of shorts and hard-to-classify experiments; those whose tastes run expressly toward multiplex fare would be more surprised still to find out what the mildly eccentric-seeming star of “Oz the Great and Powerful” thinks about in his spare time.  

In the bubble-like realm of festival cinema, however, it’s Franco’s mainstream acting gigs that increasingly seem like the sideshow. In the face of general critical reticence — outright skepticism, in some cases — his restlessly pursued status as a self-styled auteur seems to be taking root, if only through sheer force of will. When someone makes films as persistently and insistently as Franco does, it becomes churlish, even snobbish, not to call him a filmmaker, whether you think he’s a particularly good one or not.

But if critics are largely agnostic on Franco as an off-camera artist, top festival programmers have been fully converted. Scarcely a major festival has passed in 2013 without a film in which he’s involved in some capacity. First came Sundance, which premiered “Interior. Leather Bar.,” the meta-fictional homage to William Friedkin’s “Cruising” that he directed with Travis Mathews. The festival also unveiled “Kink,” the explicit S&M-themed documentary on which he acted as a producer. (As if to drive home the sleaze theme, he also hit the Sundance red carpet for porn biopic “Lovelace,” in which he has a supporting role.)

Bolstered by reviews that, at worst, highlighted the film’s curiosity value, “Interior. Leather Bar.” has since done the rounds at several other festivals — including Berlin, a fest that has been kind to his short work in the past. Berlin also hosted the premiere of another effort from Franco’s production company Rabbit Bandini: writer/director Carter’s “Maladies,” a maddeningly precious comedy of sorts about a socially dysfunctional artist played by… you guessed it… Franco.

We move on to Cannes, where Franco’s directorial brand got its highest endorsement to that point from the festival world: his sweat-stained William Faulkner adaptation “As I Lay Dying” was selected for the Un Certain Regard section, placing him in the company of such big-name auteurs as Sofia Coppola and Claire Denis.

And now, Franco’s all over the fall festival circuit, too. His latest solo directorial effort “Child of God,” a Cormac McCarthy adaptation this time, is having its world premiere at Venice. The Italian fest has previously looked kindly on Franco’s output — his Van Sant-aping Sal Mineo biopic “Sal” premiered in a sidebar there two years ago — but they’re being especially generous hosts this time, becoming the first of the A-list fests to include Franco in their Competition lineup, where he’ll compete against the likes of Hayao Miyazaki and Errol Morris.  

Obviously, “Child of God” is moving on to the vast, all-inclusive marketplace of Toronto. Less expected, however, is that it’s also cracked the more selectively curated lineup for this year’s New York Film Festival, whose reputation as something of an auteurist members’ club may not be borne out in all their selections (Richard Curtis’ “About Time,” for example), but it does prove how seriously Franco is now being taken across the festival circuit.

And that, as they say in the ads, is not all. “Palo Alto,” another new film from the Rabbit Bandini stable, is also playing Venice. And while this debut feature from Gia Coppola (yes, another one from the clan) isn’t directed, written or directly produced by Franco, it has his mark on it in another significant way: it’s adapted from his book of short stories. Oh, and Franco stars in it, of course. (The film was also included in today’s Telluride lineup announcement, so in case you were worried that Franco had missed a big stop on his 2013 festival tour: nope, he’s got it covered.)

We’ll know shortly whether “Palo Alto” and, in particular, “Child of God” are worthy of the esteemed company into which Franco has pole-vaulted himself this year. It’d be nice to say that the latter, an ambitious adaptation of a very challenging novel, is more than just a commendable effort from a hard worker, and rather represents the arrival of a genuinely vital directorial voice on the American independent scene.

Because up to this point — and I say this with no malice or prejudice — I haven’t quite seen it myself, and I’m far from the only one. Back at Cannes, “As I Lay Dying” marked a personal best for Franco. Impassioned and not without some formal chutzpah, it was an almost inevitably problematic adaptation of a dauntingly difficult text, but it wasn’t the creative faceplant for which many critics seemed to be sharpening their claws in advance.

Perhaps even more of a victory is that, on Sept. 27, it’ll become Franco’s first directorial effort to receive a detectable theatrical release in the US, a breakthrough that’ll be consolidated when “Sal,” distributed by Tribeca Film, follows suit in November, more than two years after its festival premiere. Perhaps the days of Franco’s directorial identity being limited to the cosseted festival sphere are coming to a close.

Still, I’m not convinced “better than expected” — or even “releasable” — is good enough for the second-highest tier of competition at the world’s most prestigious film festival. “As I Lay Dying” succeeded in raising expectations for “Child of God,” which arguably still needs to exceed expectations to justify the festival laurels it already wears by virtue of mere selection.

Considering that none of his directorial efforts has met with outright acclaim, Franco has had an accelerated ride to the top of the festival tree. It’s not hard to see why festival programmers have been seduced. Even A-list auteurs, for the most part, aren’t terribly sexy red-carpet fodder. So when a young, charismatic, good-looking Hollywood star goes behind the camera and obliges with a steady stream of serious-minded, reasonably festival-friendly creations, it’s hardly surprising that they form an orderly queue behind him. Even the most cinephilic festival directors have publicity to consider, too. 

But the sudden, meme-like ubiquity of his name on the festival circuit seems both patronizing to Franco and unfair on the equally hard-working, up-and-coming talents on the art house scene who would kill for, say, a Competition slot at Venice. Which is not to pre-judge “Child of God,” but to note that it arrives on the Lido without the groundwork that’s been laid by other filmmakers also making their debut in the Euro-fest premier league this year. Xavier Dolan, for example, is a filmmaker less prolific and even more precocious than Franco. His rise through the festival ranks certainly hasn’t been hurt by his more photogenic qualities, but it’s been driven principally by palpable critical chatter around even his most uneven films.

Until Franco’s films start similarly walking the talk, his blanket inclusion at every major film festival going — hey, perhaps we’re not far from the reality of a dedicated James Franco Film Festival — will always be regarded with a certain amount of cynicism. Here’s hoping the tide turns this fall. 

The lineup for the 40th annual Telluride Film Festival has been unveiled, and with it, the announcement of this year’s tributees: T Bone Burnett and the Coen brothers, Mohammad Rasoulof, Robert Redford and Alejandro Ramirez. Here’s a look back at the history of the honor.

The Silver Medallions have been awarded since the first annual Telluride Film Festival in 1974. They are made of pure silver and the design has never changed, featuring the emblematic “SHOW” logo. The presentation of the medallion is preceded by a clip reel, full feature and/or on-stage interview.

Traditionally, three Silver Medallions are given out each year, with a few exceptions where numerous people from a specific category were paid the honor. Often a special medallion has been awarded to a hero of cinema, usually a non-filmmaker who has had a major impact on American or international film culture — a historian, a critic, an organization dedicated to the celebration and preservation of film as an art, etc.

This year’s quintet of honorees joins a long and illustrious legacy. Here is the full list of medallion tributes Telluride has presented over the last four decades:

1974 – Francis Ford Coppola, Leni Riefensthal, Gloria Swanson
1975 – Werner Herzog, Henry King, Jack Nicholson
1976 – Chuck Jones, King Kong, King Vidor
1977 – Benjamin Carré, Michael Powell, Agnes Varda
1978 – The Czech New Wave (Jaromil Jireš, Pavel Jurácek, Jan Nemec, Ivan Passer), Sterling Hayden, Hal Roach
1979 – Abel Gance, Klaus Kinski, Robert Wise
1980 – Robert Altman, Maurice Pialat, Karl Strauss
1981 – The Character Actor (John Carrdine, Elisha Cook, Carlos Diegues, Margaret Hamilton, Dusan Makavejev, Woody Strode); Stan Brakhage (Special Medallion), Kevin Brownlow (Special Medallion)
1982 – Pierre Braunberger, Athol Fugard, Joel McCrea
1983 – Andrei Tarkovsky, Luis Trenker, Richard Widmark; Irwin Young (Special Medallion)
1984 – Henry Hathaway, Janet Leigh, Andrzej Wajda; Joseph Losey (Special Medallion)
1985 – Emilio Fernandez, Hanna Schygulla, Alexander Trauner; Paul Kohner (Special Medallion)
1986 – Isabelle Huppert, Alexander Mackendrick, Jirí Menzel
1987 – Tenghiz Abuladze, Stephen Frears, Don Siegel
1988 – Pedro Almodóvar, Cab Calloway, The Xi”an Studio
1989 – Peter Greenaway, Shohei Imamura, Dennis Potter; William K. Everson (Special Medallion)
1990 – John Berry, Gerard Depardieu, Clint Eastwood; Manny Farber (Special Medallion)
1991 – Jodie Foster, Nature”s Filmmakers (Paul Atkins, Peter Jones, Marion Zunz), Sven Nykvist
1992 – Elmer Bernstein, Cy Endfield, Harvey Keitel; Pierre Rissient (Special Medallion)
1993 – John Alton, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Ken Loach; Stefan Jarl (Special Medallion), Arne Sucksdorff (Special Medallion)
1994 – Harriet Andersson, Ken Burns, Judy Davis; Ninon Sevilla (Special Medallion)
1995 – John Schlesinger, The Surrealists (Guy Maddin, The Brothers Quay, Jan Svankmajer), Zhang Yimou; Andrew Sarris (Special Medallion)
1996 – Alain Cavalier, Mike Leigh, Shirley MacLaine; Roger Mayer (Special Medallion)
1997 – Horton Foote, Neil Jordan, Alexander Sokurov; Milos Stehlik (Special Medallion)
1998 – Susumu Hani, Vittorio Storaro, Meryl Streep; Stanley Kauffman (Special Medallion), Chris Reyna (Special Medallion)
1999 – Catherine Deneuve, Philip Glass, David Lynch; BBC’s “Arena” (Special Medallion)
2000 – Im Kwon-taek, Ang Lee, Stellan Skarsgard; Elmore Leonard (Special Medallion), Serge Silberman (Special Medallion)
2001 – Catherine Breillat, Om Puri, Ken Russell; HBO (Special Medallion)
2002 – Peter O”Toole, D.A. Pennebaker, Paul Schrader; Positif (Special Medallion)
2003 – Peter Brook, Toni Collette, Krzysztof Zanussi; Ted Turner (Special Medallion)
2004 – Theo Angelopplous, Jean-Claude Carriere, Laura Linney; Fred Roos (Special Medallion)
2005 – The Dardenne Brothers, Charlotte Rampling, Mickey Rooney; Criterion Collection (Special Medallion), Janus Films (Special Medallion)
2006 – Penélope Cruz, Rolf De Heer, Walter Murch; David Thomson (Special Medallion)
2007 – Shyam Benegal, Daniel Day-Lewis, Michel Legrand; Leonard Maltin (Special Medallion)
2008 – David Fincher, Jean Simmons, Jan Troell; Richard Schickel (Special Medallion)
2009 – Anouk Aimee, Viggo Mortensen, Margarethe Von Trotta; Serge Bromberg (Special Medallion)
2010 – Claudia Cardinale, Colin Firth, Peter Weir; Television Archive (Special Medallion), UCLA Film (Special Medallion)
2011 – George Clooney, Pierre Etaix, Tilda Swinton; Sight & Sound (Special Medallion)
2012 – Roger Corman, Marion Cotillard, Mads Mikkelsen; Boston Light & Sound (Special Medallion), Chapin Cutler Jr. (Special Medallion)
2013 – T Bone Burnett and the Coen Brothers, Mohammad Rasoulof, Robert Redford; Alejandro Ramirez (Special Medallion)

The Coen brothers, T Bone Burnett and Robert Redford are among those to be feted at the 40th annual Telluride Film Festival, which will feature the world premieres of Jason Reitman’s “Labor Day” and Ralph Fiennes’ “The Invisible Woman.” Prestige titles from the 2013 festival circuit so far have been curated for the weekend as well, including Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska,” J.C. Chandor’s “All is Lost” and the Coens’ “Inside Llewyn Davis.”

Following a very well-received opening day premiere today at the Venice Film Festival, Alfonso Cuarón’s “Gravity” will make a stop in the Colorado mountains before moving on to the Toronto Film Festival next week, as will Jonathan Glazer’s “Under the Skin,” Gia Coppola’s “Palo Alto” and John Curran’s “Tracks.” Other films looking for an early splash at Telluride before moving to the Toronto fest include Ritesh Batra’s “The Lunchbox” and “Tim’s Vermeer,” from magician Raymond Teller of Penn and Teller fame, as well as the Reitman and Fiennes premieres.

The 40th annual fest is dedicated to the memory of filmmaker Les Blank, film critic Roger Ebert, producer and sports entrepreneur George Gund and author and filmmaker Donald Richie, all of whom passed away in 2013.

With “Inside Llewyn Davis,” the Coen brothers are making their first-ever trip to Telluride, believe it or not. Festival programmers are taking advantage of the occasion by staging one of the festival’s three Silver Medallion tributes for the sibling filmmakers alongside their music collaborator on the film, T Bone Burnett. Meanwhile, with “All is Lost” set to land Robert Redford in the awards race and potentially garner him his first Oscar nomination for acting in 40 years, the Sundance Institute founder and all around Hollywood legend will be toasted with a tribute as well.

Though rumors swirled around other potential high profile fetes for the likes of Sandra Bullock, Bruce Dern or Kate Winslet, the festival stuck with its identity of shining a proud light on lesser-known work from vital voices on the world cinema stage. The third tribute, therefore, will go to filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof (“Iron Island,” “The White Meadows”), a brave critic of the systematic oppression of individuals in Iran. Rasoulof’s latest film, “Manuscripts Don’t Burn,” will also play at the festival.

Receiving a Special Medallion this year will be Alejandro Ramirez, CEO of Mexico’s Cinépolis movie theater chain — the fourth-largest theater chain in the world, run with an eye to how the movies can address poverty in both his country and his home state of Michoacán. The Special Medallion is an honor reserved annually for a hero of cinema, be it an organization or an individual, that preserves, honors and presents great movies. Past recipients include the Criterion Collection, HBO, Ted Turner and Leonard Maltin.

For each of the past 25 years, the film festival directors have selected a Guest Director to serve as a key collaborator in TFF programming decisions, bringing new ideas and overlooked films to light. To celebrate the 40th anniversary, six past participants return with new programs. They are authors Don DeLillo, Phillip Lopate, Michael Ondaatje and Salman Rushdie, screenwriter Buck Henry and film scholar B. Ruby Rich. Their programs will feature the 50th anniversary of the Zapruder film, Mike Hodges’ Michael Crichton adaptation “The Terminal Man” and Chris Marker’s “La Jetée,” among other treats.

Another key figure of Telluride’s past, Francis Ford Coppola (one of the first annual fest’s tributees), will also be on hand this year. With Alberto Fuguet’s “Rumble Fish” appreciation “Locations: Looking for Rusty James” set to play in the Backlot section, Coppola will be on hand with the director to introduce a tandem screening at the outdoor Abel Gance cinema on Thursday night.

Also set to attend and participate in the festival’s “Conversations” series are author Joyce Maynard, whose book “Labor Day” was adapted by director Jason Reitman and is set to premiere at the fest; “Nebraska” star Bruce Dern, poised to make a lead actor play on the awards season (more on that soon); and the Palme d’Or winning trio of “Blue is the Warmest Color” director Abdellatif Kechiche, Lea Seydoux and Adele Exarchopoulos.

As previously reported, Telluride will be unveiling a new venue for its anniversary celebration: The Werner Herzog Theater. While the Chuck Jones represents cinema’s joie de vivre, the Abel Gance its vision and ingenuity and the Le Pierre its unparalleled ability to connect, the Werner Herzog will demonstrate fearlessness and commitment, according to the festival. Herzog will have a classic film at the fest this year, 1972’s “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” (which won’t be the recent BFI restoration but will be a new HD scan from the original negative done by Werner Herzog Film GmbH), as well as a new work, “Death Row,” following on the heels of “Into the Abyss” two years ago.

Additionally, there will be other special presentations programmed by various figures in the Telluride community. Sony Pictures Classics co-president Michael Barker will pay tribute to his love of Italian westerns with a screening of Giulo Petroni’s “Death Rides a Horse.” Film critic David Thomson, meanwhile, will present a “true harbinger,” he says, to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” with William Dieterle’s “Portrait of Jennie” starring Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten. Critic and curator Pierre Rissient (after whom Telluride’s Le Pierre theater is named) will also present a small program that will include Bernard Girard’s “Alfred Hitchcock Hour” episode “A Piece of the Action,” starring a young Robert Redford.

As usual, the fest will pepper a number of short films — this year from the likes of Bill Plympton, Jonaás Cuarón and Lynne Ramsay — throughout the schedule preceding a number of screenings, as well as through the Barry Jenkins-curated Calling Cards program. One of these will be Disney’s well-hyped Mickey Mouse short “Get a Horse!,” which premiered at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in June and will screen in 3D prior to “Gravity.”

Finally, the Student Prints and Great Expectations programs, among other things, will fill out a packed holiday weekend with various other nuggets to be discovered by film lovers descending on the fest.

Still to be revealed are any number of “Sneak Previews” screenings of films officially set for premieres elsewhere (typically Toronto), reserved on the Telluride schedule with the usual hair-raising “TBA” notations. Rumors abound on what they could be, from Denis Villeneuve’s “Prisoners” to Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave.”

We’ll find out what they are and how a number of these films land with audiences soon enough as the 40th anniversary celebration of the ultimate cinephile film festival kicks off later today.

Check out the full Telluride line-up on the next page.

The 2013 Telluride Film Festival runs Aug. 29 – Sept. 2.

The 2013 Telluride Film Festival Line-up

SHOW
Telluride’s 40th annual line-up

“All is Lost” (J.C. Chandor)
“Before the Winter Chill” (Philippe Claudel)
“Bethlehem” (Yuval Adler)
“Blue is the Warmest Color” (Abdellatif Kechiche)
“Burning Bush” (Agnieszka Holland)
“Death Row: Blaine Milam + Robert Fratta” (Werner Herzog)
“Fifi Howls from Happiness” (Mitra Farahani)
“The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden” (Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine)
“Gloria” (Sebastián Lelio)
“Gravity” (Alfonso Cuarón)
“Ida” (Pawel Pawlikowski)
“Inside Llewyn Davis” (Joel and Ethan Coen)
“The Invisible Woman” (Ralph Fiennes)
“La Maison de la Radio” (Nicolas Philibert)
“Labor Day” (Jason Reitman)
“The Lunchbox” (Ritesh Batra)
“Manuscripts Don’t Burn” (Mohammad Rasoulof)
“The Missing Picture” (Rithy Panh)
“Nebraska” (Alexander Payne)
“Palo Alto” (Gia Coppola)
“The Past” (Asghar Farhadi)
“Starred Up” (Sarah-Violet Bliss)
“Tim’s Vermeer” (Teller)
“Tracks” (John Curran)
“Under the Skin” (Jonathan Glazer)
“The Unknown Known” (Errol Morris)

BACKLOT
Behind-the-scenes movies and portraits of artists, musicians and filmmakers

“Here Be Dragons” (Mark Cousins)
“Jodorowsky’s Dune” (Frank Pavich)
“Locations: Looking for Rusty James” (Alberto Fuguet)
“Milius” (Zak Knutson and Joey Figueroa)
“Multiple Visions, the Crazy Machine” (Emilio Maille)
“Musidora, the Tenth Muse” (Patrick Cazals)
“My Dior” (Frédéric Tcheng)
“Natan” (David Cairns and Paul Duane)
“Particle Fever” (Mark Levinson)
“Remembrance: A Small Movie About Ouul in the 1950s” (Peter Von Bagh)
“Road Movie: A Portrait of John Adams” (Mark Kidel)
“A Story of Children and Film” (Mark Cousins)

SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS
Cinephile feasts programmed by Guest Directors and members of the Telluride community

“Aguirre, the Wrath of God” (Werner Herzog, 1972) – With Silver Medallion Tribute to Alejandro Ramirez
“Le Morte Rouge” (Victor Erice, 2006) + “The Zapruder Film” (Abraham Zapruder, 1963) – Presented by Don DeLillo
“The Terminal Man” (Mike Hodges, 1972) – Presented by Buck Henry
“Naked Childhood” (Maurice Pialat, 1960) – Presented by Phillip Lopate
“La Jetée” (Chris Marker, 1962) + “Elephant” (Alan Clarke, 1989) – Presented by Michael Ondaatje
“One Way or Another” (Sara Gómez, 1974) – Presented by B. Ruby Rich
“Mahanagar” (Satyajit Ray, 1963) – Presented by Salman Rushdie

“Death Rides a Horse” (Giulo Petroni, 1967) – Presented by Michael Barker
“Le Joli Mai” (Chris Marker, 1963) – Presented by Colin McCabe
“La Poison” (Sacha Guitry, 1951) – Presented by Monique Montgomery
“Muscle Beach” (Irving Lerner and Joseph Strick, 1948) + “A Piece of the Action” (Bernard Girard, 1962) – Presented by Pierre Rissient
“He Who Gets Slapped” (Victor Sjo?stro?m, 1924) – Presented by the Pordenone Silent Film Festival
“A Simple Case” (Vsevolod Pudovkin, 1930) – Presented by the Pordenone Silent Film Festival
“Portrait of Jennie” (William Dieterle, 1948) – Presented by David Thomson
“Slow Food Story” (Stefano Sardo, 2013) – Presented by Alice Waters

TRIBUTES
Silver Medallion fetes for filmmakers and cineastes

T Bone Burnett and the Coen Brothers
Mohammad Rasoulof
Robert Redford
Alejandro Ramirez (Special Medallion)

VENICE – “Gravity” opens, in coy denial of the mammoth imagery soon to follow, with modest white letters on a black screen, spelling out facts about outer space that sound more than a little like threats. “Life in space is impossible,” the titles conclude, after warning us off with daunting details of distance, physics and unimaginable cold. It”s a simple and – at least from a terrestrial perspective – pretty inarguable thesis that Alfonso Cuarón”s astonishing new film nonetheless goes to great, gruelling and frequently gasp-inducing pains to illustrate, before opening up less certain possibilities with a sudden surge in its own emotional temperature. Life in space is a no-go, sure. But what about life after?

It”s been seven long years since Cuarón, the serenely versatile Mexican stylist capable of finding grace notes in raunchy south-of-the-border road trips and Harry Potter alike, last visited our screens with a chilling fantasy that now sits as an unwittingly perfect bookend to his latest: in “Children of Men,” life scarcely seems possible on Earth.

Both films are visions of otherworldly worlds that look and sound nothing like their many previous cinematic realisations: industrial dystopia has never seemed less future-chic and more irreversibly barren than in “Men,” and space has never seemed bigger, more unknown, more outer than it does in “Gravity.” Both films navigate their unchartered territories with a hopefulness that could only be described paradoxically as despairing: for Sandra Bullock”s numbly bereaved medical engineer Ryan, as for the freakish newborn who emerges at the close of “Men,” survival is a short-term instinct with few known long-term rewards.

Meanwhile, life in space – impossible and urgently temporary as it may be – is pretty unbeatable, relieving its inhabitants of all accepted rules and limitations of physicality, movement and sound travel; it”s 45 years since Kubrick”s “2001: A Space Odyssey” effectively patented the description “the ultimate trip,” but that doesn”t mean Cuarón and his team can”t further serve and substantiate it. Certainly, the unfeasibly mobile camera of Cuarón”s loyal, invaluable cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki seems drugged – or perhaps purely entranced – by its possibilities, gliding and weaving across seemingly impracticable distances with a deliberate fluidity that no previous screen depiction of weightlessness (whether in outer space or the subconscious hotel suites of Christopher Nolan”s mind) has come close to approximating. (You”d also have to go back to Wim Wenders” “Pina” to find a film that demands this compellingly to be made and seen in 3D, and even that”s in a different ballpark.) When I stood up as the final credit rolled, I don”t mind admitting that I immediately had to sit down again, a Bambi-like wobble coursing through my limbs, as if I’d just re-encountered gravity myself. For sheer transference of experience upon the audience, I can think of no film quite like it.

Cuarón and Lubezki open the film straight away with a series of long, silky takes that luxuriate in gravity-free sensation, as three astronauts float with uncanny, disorientating ease through a routine spacewalk that only an astronaut could conceivably describe as “routine”. Ryan, on her first mission, at least has the good grace to look bewildered as they orbit their own spacecraft, bobbing and treading through the infinite blackness as through water; the more experienced Matt (George Clooney at his most glibly Clooney-esque, an atonal distraction that the film only gradually reveals as a virtue) banters with flirtatious geniality as she tetchily sets about her task, though it”s clear even he hasn”t become immune to awe in his privileged profession.

If the film ever explains exactly what the nature of their mission is, the details went right by me: Cuarón is concerned only with the stunning physical reality – or, to apply an abused term that here feels wholly apt, sur-reality – of their being there. Cinema is rife with space operas – this can only be described as space ballet, its human figures dancing even as they”re dying.

And die they do, in at least one of three cases, as disaster obviously strikes and the dance tumbles and speeds up into a far more perilous, but equally exquisite, freefall. “I have a bad feeling about this mission,” Matt jokes near the start – the first of several stock action-film lines the film reclaims with disquieting sincerity, as flying debris from a destroyed neighboring satellite lays waste to their craft. Cue a series of catastrophic collisions and attritions that are unsettlingly muffled by the unearthly silence of Chris Munro and Glenn Freemantle”s remarkable sound design: screaming is one thing, but in this film”s space, no one can hear you crash.

I”m loath to explain the circumstances that ultimately require Ryan to navigate her own path back to Earth: partly because the film”s sharp, unexpectedly sentiment-soaked emotional switchbacks deserve protection, but also because story feels secondary to “Gravity” in the best possible way. Feeling is narrative here – physical feeling, psychological feeling, bruised and agitated either way – as the film ceases star-gazing (without dialling back on the gobsmacking pyrotechnics and deep-focus space vistas) to concentrate on the in-the-moment specifics of Ryan”s survival. Effortlessly sympathetic and resolute even when cocooned to the point of invisibility in a spacesuit, Sandra Bullock puts her impressively restrained performance to the fore just when the film needs her to, without straying from the character”s slightly dour vulnerability or succumbing to focus-pulling bravado; it”s a role that at once requires a movie star, and requires her not to be one.

Some may feel disconcerted or even disappointed that “Gravity” shifts from a mode of cool (even avant-garde) observational spectacle to a more human-focused survival story – you might choose to see it as a bloodless final-girl horror movie. The gear change comes with unceremonious abruptness, yet I couldn”t tell you if it”s later or earlier than halfway through. It may not sound like high praise that I had no sense of timing throughout this thrillingly brief 91-minute film, but I imagine you can”t feel the minutes ticking by in space either. The immersive rhythmic continuity of Lubezki”s camerawork and Cuarón and Mark Sanger”s deceptively tight editing is such that it”s hard to mentally organize the film into scenes and sequences after the fact.

I do know, though, that “Gravity” ends in a wholly different register – tonally, visually, emotionally – to the one it begins in, as Cuarón embraces both the Hollywood trappings and, more riskily, the amorphous spirituality of his script with an emphatic lack of apology. (I felt my own conviction waver in a tricky late scene with Clooney that edges on patriarchal Old Hollywood syrup, but the emotional payoff is rousing enough to justify the means.) There”s a note of bombast to the finale that feels hard-earned after the staggering physical trials of what has gone before, and I do mean staggering: “Gravity” is a film both short and vast, muscular and quivery, as certain about one Great Beyond as it is curious about another.

Four festivals that play out over just seven weeks. Hundreds of films.  Some with distribution, some without. Some that are highly anticipated, others that will become surprise gems. It’s fall festival time and that just doesn’t mean the beginning of awards season. It means new films that will be fought over by competing distributors for acquisition and other movies that may end up going direct to VOD (if they are lucky). 

This year, HitFix’s Kristopher Tapley, Gregory Ellwood, Guy Lodge and Drew McWeeny will be attending the Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York Film Festivals in one form or another.  With that in mind, we’ve compiled and ranked our 25 most anticipated films of the fall festival season. You can see who made the cut in the embedded gallery in this post.

Afterwards, vote in our poll and tell us which three films you’re most looking forward to hearing about.

It all begins with Guy Lodge’s “Gravity” review from the Venice Film Festival in just a few hours.

http://players.brightcove.net/4838167533001/BkZprOmV_default/index.html?videoId=4912102315001

We’ve had our eyes on this one for over a year now. With Matthew McConaughey in full swing of a career revival — the McConaissance, as he calls it — the actor seemed poised to leap to the front of the Best Actor race with Jean-Marc Vallée’s “Dallas Buyers Club” on paper. The new trailer for the film only adds fuel to the assumption.

The film is based on the life of Ron Woodruff, who in 1986 was diagnosed with HIV and began smuggling FDA-unapproved alternative medicine from Mexico into order to prolong his life. The very synopsis sounds zeitgeist-y enough vis a vis the on-going health care and insurance debate, but mostly it looks like a stellar vehicle for McConaughey. I’ve also been curious about Jared Leto in the film and have been told the relationship that develops between his transsexual Rayon and Woodroof ends up being a sweet and meaningful one, and who knows? Maybe Leto gets his first nomination, too.

Check out the first trailer for the film at Apple (we’ll have an embed when one’s available) and check out the poster below. Tell us what you think. Is this going to be McConaughey’s Best Actor Oscar win? Can’t wait to find out.

“Dallas Buyers Club” will play the Toronto Film Festival next week. It hits theaters on Nov. 1.

As awards season finally drags itself kicking and screaming back to Hollywood after a long well deserved vacation, there are two momentous events that officially signify its return.  First, this pundit begins speaking in third person once again (oh, you know you love it) and, second, we present 10 predictions for the upcoming season. In August. In very early, er, late August.

Over the years this writer has been very right (calling “Precious” and “Inception” Best Picture nods) and he’s been so, so wrong (yikes, I guess that nomination for Steve Martin’s “Shopgirl” screenplay didn’t happen did it?). Of course, putting yourself out there this early is part of the game and the equivalent of Miley Cyrus showing up at a Parents Television Council meeting anytime soon. But, we’d expect nothing less.  If awards season is anything it’s the most political, back-biting and euphoric yearly campaign west of our nation’s capital.  Whether you’re trying to convince someone the Hollywood Film Awards has more legitimacy than the presiding regime in Syria or a member of the media dealing with feedback from your beloved fanbase.

That being said, we’ll know a lot more after many of this year’s contenders begin screening at the Venice and Telluride Film Festivals this week and the Toronto Film Festival the week following. In the meantime, are you ready to take a step into the future? This prognosticator is sure your knives are sharpening as you get ready to scroll down the page…

Sundance may go without a Best Picture nod this year
The Park City institution had something of an Oscar comeback this past season with the Best Picture and Best Director nods for “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” This after festival films were shut out of the Best Picture race in 2011 following nominations four out of the five previous years. After this year’s festival it looked like both “Before Midnight” and “Fruitvale Station” could crack the roll call for Oscar’s top honor. Obviously, you need a passionate following to earn a Best Picture nod, but will the love for either film still be that strong in December and early-January? “Fruitval” has a shot, but at this point we’re not feeling it (at least in the top category).
Prediction: Neither “Fruitvale Station” nor “Before Midnight” will be nominated for Best Picture, but both films will earn screenplay or acting nods.

You can’t stop Meryl
It looks like America’s greatest actress earned just one year off the awards circuit train. The buzz is Streep is back to her fantastic self in John Wells’ “August: Osage County” (shocker). And, even in what may be the most competitive Best Actress field in recent memory, the three-time winner is pretty damn close to a lock — unless she goes supporting after all.
Prediction: Meryl Streep will earn her 18th nomination for “August: Osage County.”

Don’t call it a comeback, Ron Howard’s been here for years
Howard earned a Best Director nomination for “Frost/Nixon” and the film found five nominations overall, but doesn’t it seem like he’s been out of the game since “A Beautiful Mind” or at least “Cinderella Man?” Perhaps it’s because the 81st Academy Awards were pretty much “Slumdog Millionaire’s” to lose after its festival premiere in September, or maybe it was Howard making sure “Frost” stars Michael Sheen and Frank Langella got most of the time in the spotlight. In any event, after the huge misfire “The Dilemma” (which certainly no one remembers) he’s back with the independently financed “Rush” (a film no studio wanted to make). Happily, the picture may be the best directing effort of Howard’s career and it will be shocking if the Academy doesn’t bestow some love on the amazing true story. Of course, whether that includes a Best Picture nod or not remains to be seen.
Prediction: “Rush” will earn at least five Academy Award nominations.

The age of the 3D Oscar picture
“Avatar,” “Hugo,” “Life of Pi” and, now, “Gravity.” 3D may be the mechanism studios are using to jack up ticket prices and keep the Hollywood machine going, but it’s also increasingly becoming a tool of artistic significance. “Avatar” and “Pi” are clearly not the same cinematic experiences without the immersive technique and we’ve seen enough of “Gravity” to know that’s also the case with Alfonso Cuarón’s passion project as well. We’re not willing to bet on the Best Picture nomination…yet, but direction? Let me pull out my wallet…
Prediction: Cuarón will earn his first Best Director nomination for “Gravity.”

Battle of five former winners
We’ve already predicted Ms. Streep to earn another Best Actress nomination, but what about the other four nominees? The field is impressive and sight-unseen you could argue two to three actresses may be robbed of a deserved honor. More intriguing, however, is the fact that so many former winners are in play. Streep, Judi Dench, Emma Thompson, Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Kate Winslet, Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts and Marion Cotillard Cotillard have all taken home an Oscar at one point or another. We’re calling it…
Prediction: Every Best Actress nominee will be a previous Academy Award winner. Something that has never happened in the history of the category.

“The Hobbit” ain’t no “Lord of the Rings”
Remember when everyone felt they had to consider “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” as a serious awards season contender? That’s what happens when you’re the de facto sequel (yes, it’s a prequel, we know) to the Oscar winning “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. “An Unexpected Journey” earned just three nominations in 2013 and we expect this year’s “The Desolation of Smaug” to find just one or two (make-up and visual effects most likely). “Smaug” may end up a very good movie, but the age of Middle Earth’s Oscar reign is quickly coming to an end.
Prediction: “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” will earn even less nominations than its predecessor.

Kiddie animated films can’t take home the big one
Uh-oh, it’s one of those years in animation. DreamWorks’ entry for Oscar glory? “The Croods.” Universal Pictures? “Despicable Me 2.” Sony Pictures Animation? “Cloud With A Chance of Meatballs 2.” Fox? “Epic.” Walt Disney Animation Studios? “Frozen” (which looks very, very kiddie). Pixar? “Monster’s University.” And the latter is the current frontrunner. Now, let’s stop to consider this. Is the Academy really going to honor a sequel that earned less critical and audience acclaim than its predecessor? The predecessor that lost in the same category 11 years ago? No, we think not. Instead, an independent animated film such as “The Wind Rises” by the legendary Hayao Miyazaki (a previous winner for “Spirited Away” in 2003) will rise to the top. I mean, John Lasseter doesn’t think Pixar has to win every year does he? Wait, don’t answer that question…
Prediction: Hollywood studios miss out on the Best Animated Feature Film Oscar in 2014.

The fight for the Documentary Oscar will be hardcore
The Academy changed the rules somewhat late in the game last season allowing all members to vote for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar. This time around the distributors with players in the doc category have much more time to strategize how to win what is now a wide open vote. Expect more documentary screeners to be sent to members than ever before, even before the nominations are announced. Granted, the nominating committee could surprise and leave out some popular choices, but no one is going to be allowed to ignore this category any longer.
Prediction: Early campaigning will make the year’s documentary Oscar race the tightest ever.

Woody Allen continues his domination of the Original Screenplay category
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s an easy one, I know. But hey! It’s not like “To Rome With Love” got a nod!  
Prediction: Allen earns his 16th original screenplay nomination and 24th overall for “Blue Jasmine.”

Tom Hanks back in the Oscar circle but…
After some questionable choices and time spent producing Emmy-winning mini-series, Tom Hanks has started to get back into an awards season rhythm. It actually started with “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” and then last year’s “Cloud Atlas” (don’t laugh). This season he has a potential supporting actor nomination as none other than Walt Disney in “Saving Mr. Banks” and an almost surefire nod as “Captain Phillips” in the Best Actor category. Even if both occur we’re still not convinced the Academy is ready to elect him into the three-time winner club. Remember, it took Streep forever to gain entry and even the supposed greatest actor of our time, Daniel Day-Lewis, had to wait 18 years for his second statue. Hanks’ best chance is in the Best Supporting Actor category, but we just don’t buy it. Not yet anyway. He may be a beloved member of the Academy, but…
Prediction: Tom Hanks won’t join the three-timers club for his work in “Saving Mr. Banks” or “Captain Phillips,” but he’ll be nominated for both.

Agree? Disagree? Have your own prediction? Share your thoughts below.

Is “The Monuments Men” an awards movie? That’s still the question on everyone’s lips after the film started to appear more commercial than the subject matter might have had us believe — not that that’s a bad thing. “Argo” was pretty darn commercial.

George Clooney is playing things cool on the movie. Maybe he doesn’t want to deal with the awards press whirlwind. Maybe he’s being smart by not showing too much of his hand. Who knows? It’s true there isn’t an awards consultant (yes, those are a thing) on board, though reports that Sony won’t be aiming for Oscars with the film are probably a bit of a stretch. Whatever the case, I loved the trailer and can’t wait to see the movie. That’s all I know for now as we gear up for the big fall festival push later this week.

A poster for the film has finally been released. It’s handsome enough. All the dudes are present (sorry, Cate Blanchett). It’s interesting that Matt Damon is featured out front. Does that mean he’s the lead of the film? I’ve been wondering how his and Clooney’s roles would shake out on that score. Anyway, check out the poster below and tell us what you think.

“The Monuments Men” arrives in theaters on December 18.

Well, it won’t be France’s “Blue is the Warmest Color” (for eligibility reasons discussed here), but at least one lesbian-focused drama stands a chance at winning this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. And it’s from rather an unexpected country: Nepal. Subarna Thapa’s film “Soongava: Dance of the Orchids,” a story of a young dancer who defies her wealthy Hindu family’s plans for an arranged marriage to move in with her working-class female lover, was announced as the landlocked South Asian state’s official submission yesterday.

Nepal currently has some of the most progressive gay-rights legislation in Asia, but this is the first overtly gay-themed film to emerge from the country’s tiny film industry. Indeed, it’s only the fifth film they’ve ever entered in the Oscar race, and the first since 2006. Nepal got lucky with their very first submission, as French director Eric Valli’s picturesque epic “Caravan” scored a nomination in the 1999 race, but none of their subsequent submissions has made the grade.

“Soongava” is a French-Nepalese co-production; Thapa, though Kathmandu-born, has since relocated to France and taken on French citizenship. That’s not a problem for the Academy, though apparently the selection of his film has met with some disapproval in the Nepalese industry. 

The film beat three other shortlisted Nepalese productions: “Badhsara,” “Sanguro” and “Sirish Ko Phool.” Released at home in January, “Soongava” did minimal business, but has had more success on the international festival circuit, playing Palm Springs and winning a Jury Award at the Toronto Lesbian & Gay Film Festival. Reviewing it for Variety out of Palm Springs, Boyd van Hoeij dismissed it as a “by-the-numbers coming-out narrative”; it doesn’t sound like much of a threat for the gold, but good on Nepal for making and submitting it.

Also picking adventurously is Greece: after scoring that improbably Oscar nomination for audacious critical favorite “Dogtooth” three years, the country seems to have been emboldened to enter more dark, challenging works from their current wave of cool-blooded auteur cinema. This year’s submission is the catchily titled “Boy Eating the Bird’s Food,” a debut feature from well-regarded local theater director Ektoras Lygizos that made an impact at last year’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival (where I unfortunately missed it). It then travelled the fest circuit extensively, with stops in Toronto and Rotterdam, among others.

The film is reportedly an allegory of sorts for the country’s recent economic woes, starring young first-time actor Yannis Papadopoulos (whose performance received honors at Karlovy Vary and Thessaloniki) as an unemployed singer driven onto the street by his financial predicament, with a pet canary as his only ally. The film has garnered a degree of notoriety on the fest circuit for a scene in which the desperately hungry protagonist eats his own sperm.

Not up the Academy’s alley, one suspects. But hey, that’s what we said about “Dogtooth.” 

Concluding our preview of the 20 titles in the running for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, which kicks off on Wednesday. Today’s selection includes new films from Terry Gilliam, David Gordon Green, John Curran, Emma Dante and Gianfranco Rosi.

“The Zero Theorem,” directed by Terry Gilliam: It’s been nearly 20 years since the last Terry Gilliam film that was widely embraced by either critics or audiences, but when it comes to festival programmers and industry peers, goodwill from the honorary Brit’s “Monty Python”-to-“12 Monkeys” glory days is a seemingly limitless resource. The Venice Film Festival has backed Gilliam in times both thick and thin. “The Fisher King” premiered there in 1991, winning him the Silver Lion; 14 years later, he received a frostier welcome on the Lido with the roundly (and rightly) panned “The Brothers Grimm.” Which way will “The Zero Theorem” go? We can hope that the presence of “Grimm” star Matt Damon in the cast isn’t a sign pointing to the latter route.

Gilliam continues to draw A-list talent to his wonky visions — or in this case, the vision of first-time screenwriter Pat Rushin. Two-time Oscar winner Christoph Waltz takes the lead as Qohen Leth, a brilliant, reclusive computer hacker in an Orwellian (though perhaps by this point we can say Gilliamesque?) corporate world who devotes his days to cracking the eponymous theorem — a formula that will reveal the meaning of life. Damon is his mysterious employer, known only as Management; Ben Whishaw is also on board, while Tilda Swinton plays an unspecified character called Dr. Shrink-Rom. Which, well, of course she does.

If you’re sensing parallels to one of Gilliam’s most famous screen fantasies, you’re not alone. “When I made ‘Brazil’ in 1984, I was trying to paint a picture of the world I thought we were living in then,” says Gilliam in his director’s statement. “‘The Zero Theorem’ is a glimpse of the world I think we are living in now.” He seems sincerely proud of the film, adding that it’s his lowest-budget production in several decades — though the skeptical might detect in a hint of defensiveness in his words. The film isn’t going to Toronto, so perhaps he knows it’s a niche item.

“Joe,” directed by David Gordon Green: 2013 is a year of quiet recovery for Green, the onetime indie darling whose unexpected career digression into mainstream slacker comedy hit a wall in 2011 with the universally loathed “The Sitter.” The director regrouped, returned to his indie roots but retained the offbeat humor for “Prince Avalanche,” a sweet, shuffling buddy comedy that was warmly received at Sundance earlier this year, and also won him Best Director at the Berlinale. Evidently reinvigorated, he’s back only a few months later with “Joe,” which appears to be a fully-fledged return to the woozy Southern Gothic romanticism of early works like “All the Real Girls” and “Undertow.”

Others may be tempted to draw on-paper comparisons to “Mud,” the recent indie hit from Green’s fellow North Carolina grad Jeff Nichols — and not just because both films star talented teen Tye Sheridan. Sheridan plays a down-on-his-luck kid who joins the lumber-clearing crew managed by kindly ex-con Joe (Nicolas Cage), whom he comes to see as a father figure. When the boy finally flees his unhappy home, it’s Joe with whom he seeks sanctuary. Micah Cyrus, Gary Hawkins and Meltem Oznalci adapted the screenplay from the acclaimed novel by the late Mississippi author Larry Brown.

Southern charms aside, the chief point of interest here is Cage potentially playing it straight — he’s been doing his gonzo schtick in unworthy films for so long that people may have forgotten what he’s like as an actual human being, That’s a narrative that could be conducive to Best Actor consideration at the festival, even if the performance isn’t revelatory. Factoring in Green’s resurgence, “Joe” is shaping up as a two-pronged comeback vehicle.

“Tracks,” directed by John Curran: I was surprised to find out just how long “Tracks” has been loitering in Hollywood’s pre-production purgatory: Julia Roberts was attached to make it in the mid-1990s — before, it seems, “Mary Reilly” clipped her creative wings. Her loss (and that of anyone curious to hear Roberts’ attempt at a Down Under accent) is Mia Wasikowska’s gain. The prodigiously talented 23-year-old has already proven her unconventional leading-lady chops in “Jane Eyre” and “Stoker,” but this may be her most challenging showcase yet: as Robyn Davidson, the young Australian explorer who trekked 1,700 miles across the Outback desert in 1977, she’ll be sharing large stretches of screen time with only a dog and four camels. An extra red-carpet draw, meanwhile, is the presence of Adam Driver — best-known for his compellingly strange, Emmy-nominated work in “Girls” — as a National Geographic photographer following her progress.

Davidson’s mad quest is one made for big-screen treatment, and it’s exciting to see Curran attached to it. The American filmmaker stumbled with his starry 2010 thriller “Stone,” but deserved far more credit than he received for 2006’s lyrical, watercolor-textured adaptation of “The Painted Veil” — if he can match that film’s combination of prettiness and character-based intimacy to this material, he could be onto a winner. He’s got a helpful ally in cinematographer Mandy Walker, who previously gave the Outback desert the sweeping travelogue treatment for Baz Luhrmann’s “Australia.” Iain Canning and Emile Sherman, the Oscar-winning producing team behind “The King’s Speech” and “Shame,” are steering the project.

The film is currently without US distribution, though Venice buzz will help in that department as it heads to the meat market of Toronto. As could an award, of course. Venice has a history of choosing young Best Actress winners — could Wasikowska be the latest?

“Via Castellana Bandiera,” directed by Emma Dante: For whatever reason, Italy’s biggest international festival successes rarely seem to emerge from Venice, which often seems to house less accessible local fare. Certainly, this debut feature from well-regarded Palermo-based theater director Emma Dante, an adaptation of her own novel, sounds fascinatingly eccentric: billed as a “Sicilian western,” the film is set entirely in a single Palermo street, one too narrow to allow two cars to pass each other. As the female drivers of said cars (Elena Cotta and Alba Rohrwacher, whom you may recognize from “I Am Love”) mutually refuse to back up, they remain in a deadlocked duel at the wheel, staring at each other for days on end. It would appear to be an allegorical conceit, though how the first-time director sustains it for 90 minutes is one of the more intriguing mysteries of the festival.

“Sacro GRA,” directed by Gianfranco Rosi: The lesser-hyped of two documentaries in this year’s Competition (the other being Errol Morris’s “The Unknown Known”), “Sacro GRA” is the fourth feature doc from Italian filmmaker Rosi — the previous two both won awards in lower-profile strands at Venice, so fest director Alberto Barbera clearly felt he was due a promotion. Perhaps the fact that it’s Rosi’s first film on an Italian subject made the difference: a study of Rome’s gigantic GRA ring road, and the individuals living around it, it’s the product of over two years’ filming on a minivan around the vicinity. I suspect it’s a tad too specialized to be a threat for the Lion, but you can’t accuse Barbera of not throwing curveballs into Competition.

Catch up with the first three parts of our Venice preview here, here and here. Our Venice Film Festival coverage kicks off on Wednesday, with the world premiere of Alfonso Cuaron’s “Gravity.” What films are you most looking forward to?

Continuing our preview of the 20 titles in the running for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, which kicks off next week. Today’s selection includes new films from Jonathan Glazer, Kelly Reichardt, Xavier Dolan, Amos Gitai and Philip Gröning. 

“Under the Skin,” directed by Jonathan Glazer: Regular readers may well have worked out that this is my most anticipated title of the Venice Film Festival — if not the entire remainder of 2013. Impatiently, I held out a sliver of hope that Glazer’s long-awaited third feature would show up in Cannes, but it was always likeliest to premiere on the Lido — where the British director’s last feature, “Birth,” was unveiled a full nine years ago. The eerie reincarnation drama was an immediately polarizing title. Some denounced it as overreaching twaddle; I’m in the camp that deems it one of the films of the new century. Nothing about “Under the Skin” suggests that Glazer, in his long absence, has grown any more inclined to play it safe.

You may well have heard the premise by now. Adapted from a critically acclaimed, unremittingly dark sci-fi novel by Dutch-born, Scotland-based author Michel Faber, the film stars Scarlett Johansson as an alien in human form, sent to Earth by her employers at a rich extra-terrestrial corporation; there, she prowls the backroads of rural Britain, preying on hitchhikers for decidedly sinister purposes. If you haven’t read the novel, it’s best to curb your knowledge going in; suffice to say it has a wickedly satirical streak that I hope is delicately handled in the adaptation by Glazer and Walter Campbell.

The supporting cast includes Scottish actor Paul Brannigan, who made an auspicious debut last year in Ken Loach’s “The Angel’s Share.” Below the line, it’s interesting to see Glazer, who worked with the late Harris Savides on his last film, reteaming with cinematographer Dan Landin, who shot many of the visually arresting ads and music videos that were Glazer’s calling card in the 90s. The frosty, pristine aesthetic sensibility that is Glazer’s trademark is perfectly suited to this material — as, for that matter, is Scarlett Johansson’s cool allure.

The film has been tightly guarded by its British producers, despite it having been ready for some time. Now, buzz is building that it could be something special: an auteur genre piece with good reason to keep its secrets secret. Early festival reactions will determine whether it’s strictly an art house venture, or has the makings of a classy crossover item in the “Black Swan” vein. 

“Night Moves,” directed by Kelly Reichardt: Another of my most anticipated. Reichardt’s last film, the remarkable trail western “Meek’s Cutoff,” played in Competition at Venice three years ago (after being turned down by Cannes, say some sources). So it’s not a surprise to see the defiantly independent American — one of two women vying for the Golden Bear this year — return to the Lido with her latest. What may be a surprise to those who haven’t checked in with Reichardt lately are the new film’s baby steps toward the mainstream. That could work in its favor with the jury: Reichardt has never wanted for passionate advocates, but there are those who find her previous work a little sparse for their taste. 

After easing into the practice of name actor collaborations with Michelle Williams, Reichardt has picked her starriest ensemble to date for “Night Moves”: Dakota Fanning, Peter Sarsgaard and Oscar nominee Jesse Eisenberg star as a trio of eco-terrorists whose plot to blow up a dam has severe, unexpected consequences for all three. It’s a premise that reportedly grazes thriller territory while accommodating Reichardt’s regular thematic preoccupations of environmental and human integrity.

Though it’s her largest-scale project to date, the director’s regular below-the-line team, as well as usual co-writer Jon Raymond, is still intact. That’s particularly good news in the case of cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, who did something approximating magic on “Meek’s Cutoff” (and also distinguished himself this year on “The Bling Ring”).

“Tom at the Farm,” directed by Xavier Dolan: Dolan is probably tired of hearing the word “wunderkind,” but with four features under his belt at the age of 24, the lavishly coiffed French-Canadian actor-director won’t stop hearing it for a good few years yet. Patience is not one of his strengths: he was said to be greatly peeved last year when his third feature, the near three-hour transgender drama “Laurence Anyways,” failed to make the Cannes Competition lineup. The festival’s decision was justified by the intermittently brilliant but precociously overblown film, but Dolan has packed his bags regardless: “Tom at the Farm” will be his first film to premiere outside Cannes, and Venice has duly obliged with a Competition slot.

Still, perhaps he noted some of the “Laurence” criticism: “Tom” finds him taming his vision to a compact 91 minutes, though I rather wish he’d followed his last film’s lead by not casting himself in it. Swings and roundabouts, I guess. Dolan plays the title character, a young urbanite who travels to the countryside for the funeral of his male lover, only to find himself physically and psychologically cornered by the dead man’s violently homophobic brother. Described as a psychological thriller — fresh territory for Dolan indeed — this has the potential to be his simplest, most piercing work since his first (and, I say, still his best) film, “I Killed My Mother.” An unexpected name in the credits is that of Oscar-winning composer Gabriel Yared (“The English Patient”), which proves Dolan’s sway these days. Will the jury think he’s ripe for a major award, or deem him still a bit unseasoned?  

“Ana Arabia,” directed by Amos Gitai: Prolific Israeli auteur Gitai is a veteran dramatic chronicler of ongoing political and cultural conflict in his native land, and has been in Competition three times before at Venice. His latest continues both traditions, following a young female journalist as she observes and interviews a community of Jewish and Arab outcasts living a deserted rural territory. Perhaps more intriguing than the vague synopsis is the way it’s filmed: Gitai set himself a challenge to tell the entire story in a single unbroken shot lasting over 80 minutes: “It”s also somewhat of a political statement,” he explains in his director’s statement, “commenting that the destinies of Jews and Arabs on this land will not be cut.” Formal ambition plus political relevance — it’s a combination that has impressed other juries, and Venice has been good to Israeli cinema in recent years, with prominent wins for “Lebanon” and last year’s “Fill the Void.”

The Police Officer’s Wife,” directed by Philip Gröning: Eight years after wowing critics and various festival juries with his three-hour monastery documentary “Into Great Silence,” German director Gröning is back, this time with a return to fiction filmmaking. “The Police Officer’s Wife,” however, promises to be as detailed and observational as one of his docs: coming in at 175 minutes, the film tells the story of a young family descending into abuse, following the titular wife as she fights for her child’s soul. Gröning’s cryptic director’s statement says “I shoot better films without a script,” again reminding us of his documentary ties, and he describes the film’s simplicity as “precious.”

Join me tomorrow for another roundup of five Venice Competition titles, as we count down to our festival coverage — which kicks off on Wednesday. What films are you most looking forward to?