2024 Telluride Film Festival Capsule Reviews: ‘Anora,’ ‘September 5,’ ‘The Piano Lesson’

ANORA (dir. Sean Baker, NEON)

Mikey Madison is truly an iconic star. As the spunky Ani, an exotic dancer from Brooklyn, Madison owns the screen every second she’s on it. She’s tough, good at her job and suffers no fools. Sean Baker, now on his fourth film featuring sex workers (is there something going on there?) manages at every turn to trap Madison in any of the hallmarks of sex worker debasement for the sake of entertainment. It’s not even a ‘you go, girl’ attitude or mock feminist nature, it’s creating a completely three-dimensional person and letting Madison run free with it. On a whim, Ani is whisked away to Las Vegas by Ivan the ne’er do well son of a Russian oligarch. Mark Eidelshtein is a riot as Ivan, all video games and fuck boy energy, spending his parents’ money like there’s a ticking clock (there is). But a sudden marriage between the two early 20-somethings triggers the fail safe and a trio of lunkheaded goons kidnap Ani when Ivan up and disappears. Yura Borisov, Karren Karagulian and Vache Tovmasyan are all absolutely hilarious as the goons in question when the second act morphs into a truly madcap romp, a constant screwball comedy of errors but one that’s never dumb and never subjects Ani to the common tropes of abuse that we’ve seen dozens of times, to the extent that she makes a comment on it herself. Anora is on the year’s best, the funniest film of the year and with a beautiful ending that will have you in tears.

Grade: A-

SEPTEMBER 5 (dir. Tim Fehlbaum, distributor TBA)

There have been several narrative and non-fiction features about the events of the 1972 Munich Olympics, where 12 people (11 Israeli Olympians and coaches and a West German police officer) were killed in the Olympic village by the Palestinian group Black September. Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film Munich looked at it from the point of view of the Olympians, 1999’s One Day in September won the Oscar for Documentary Feature and two television movies, 1976’s 21 Hours at Munich and 1986’s Sword of Gideon have told the story. But none have come at it from the very unique perspective of the ABC network, specifically the sports section, who aired much of that day live to over 900 million people across the world. The first Olympics ever to have a live international broadcast, and the first in Germany since Hitler’s in 1936, the pressure for the networks to provide 24-hour coverage was unprecedented and Tim Fehlbaum takes us behind the scenes of ABC sports with Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro and Leonie Benesch (The Teachers’ Lounge) making every second count. It’s a riveting and thrilling look at everything from internal politics (ABC fighting with CBS for live slots) to what language can be used on air, not profanity, but everything from ‘terrorists’ to ‘we have reason to believe,’ showing the stark reality of what news television is now where you can actively lie and spout intentional misinformation, versus journalistic integrity to a story. The use of archival news footage and film narrative is seamless and the moment by moment decisions are truly suspenseful. Even as we know the harrowing end, we, along with the news crew in these moments, feel hope. This is a smart, very timely take on an event that changed world history and while it can seem that there is a lack of political side-taking in a 2024 film of a 1972 event, it’s exactly the right choice.

Grade: A-

September 5 is currently without U.S. distribution.

THE PIANO LESSON (dir. Malcolm Washington, Netflix)

I think The Piano Lesson works best when it leans into the ghostly, supernatural and religious elements, less so in the more rigid monologues. The titular piano, with carved faces of generations past, working as the trauma that holds us back but also the only thing that can set us free, is beautifully realized in the work of production designer David J. Bomba (Mudbound) and cinematographer Mike Gioulakis (Us). The work song sequence (“Berta”) is masterful and hints that a musical version of the play feels like a natural progression. Ray Fisher stands as the best performance for me; gentle and simple of mind but not cartoony or imbecilic. It’s a delicate performance, where his hulking size (although a part where his shoe size is said to be a 9 did make me laugh in disbelief) is met with enormous empathy. Danielle Deadwyler tends to lay too heavy into the staginess of the speechy monologues in the beginning but loosens up and absolutely soars in the second half, physically and emotionally immersing herself as a conduit to the stories both horrible and beautiful that the instrument holds. Less impressed with John David Washington, who largely yells his performance and Samuel L. Jackson, who received a Tony nomination for this role last year, doesn’t do much more than hold a cup of coffee and give a low energy version of most of his previous work.

Grade: B

Netflix will release The Piano Lesson in select theaters on November 8 and on Netflix November 22.