2024 Telluride Film Festival Capsule Reviews: ‘The End,’ ‘Emilia Peréz,’ ‘Saturday Night’

In this Telluride Film Festival capsule review edition we’ve got Joshua Oppenheimer’s golden age musical The End, Jacques Audiard’s Cannes-winning musical Emilia Peréz and Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, the 90-minutes before the first ever airing of Saturday Night Live.

THE END (Joshua Oppenheimer, NEON)

Breaks my heart to say that The End is quite a mess. Billed as Oppenheimer’s ode to the golden age of musicals, it certainly starts off well with George Mackay (having a wonderfully diverse year with this, Femme and The Beast) charming us with two numbers that evoke everything from the new Wonka to the classic West Side Story. Playing a stunted man child who was raised in a bunker of his wealthy parents, he ranges from innocent kindness to an autistic lack of social awareness, understandable for someone who’s never had sex or met anyone outside of the five other people he lives with. But it quickly becomes irritating with so many songs hitting the exact same note, both in musical style and theme. George Mackay and Moses Ingram have the vocals. Tilda Swinton (who one great song) and Michael Shannon as MacKay’s delusional parents seem to have been cast because they’re intentionally bad singers but it’s truly hard to tell. Moses Ingram shows up as the first visitor of the private enclave of wealthy losers and, like MacKay, really has the pipes for a musical. At 2h20m, The End long overstays its welcome and I was clamoring for the exit to the real world far too early.

Grade: D+

NEON will release The End theatrically in the U.S.

EMILIA PERÉZ (dir. Jacques Audiard, Netflix)

Emilia Peréz is such a wild musical melange of Andrew Lloyd Weber meets Almodóvar. It really goes for broke in its first half, exploring so many influences and styles (the “Vagioplasty” song is really next level camp excellence) and, unlike some other musicals at Telluride, has a diversity and variety of songs that speak to character individuality and motivation. Extraordinary, career best work from Zoe Saldaña (her numbers are flawless), Karla Sofía Gascón is the film’s heart as a Mexican drug lord who undergoes sexual and gender reassignment surgery bot to protect their family and to live life truthfully, Selena Gomez breaks out of her comfort zone with a rockstar Lady Gaga-esque song and Adriana Paz is wonderful, coming in late to the film with a motivation that changes the course for everything we see next. The quartet of actresses collectively won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this summer (as well as the Jury Prize for Audiard) and in a year of many musicals and music-driven films you’re not likely to see anything as vibrantly new as this.

Grade: B+

Netflix will release Emilia Pérez in select theaters in the U.S. and Canada on November 1 and on Netflix November 13.

SATURDAY NIGHT (dir. Jason Reitman, Sony Pictures)

Saturday Night, which details the 90 minutes before the first ever airing of Saturday Night Live in October 1975, doesn’t have the kinetic energy it should have and the male cast members get the best jokes and performances. Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase and Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroyd give top tier comedic performances both in character for their SNL rehearsals and their asides as themselves with remarkable agility. Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris doesn’t look or sound like him at all but is quite funny even if more than once he’s written evoking Don Cheadle in Boogie Nights (a movie this wants to be in several ways but never comes close to), Cooper Hoffman as Dick Ebersol is inspired casting and he continues to prove to be a natural talent and one that isn’t simply a branch of his Oscar-winning father. So good as Steven Spielberg’s proxy in The Fabelmans, Gabriel LaBelle, here as SNL creator Lorne Michaels, not so much. Really miscast and passionless and looking the ten years younger than the rest of the cast that he is. Despite its slim runtime, it manages to come to a screeching halt when it leaves 30 Rockefeller or aims for character development outside of sketches. Not that that kind of character shading isn’t needed, it just speaks to the script’s flimsy construction and momentum.

Grade: C+

Sony Pictures will release Saturday Night in theaters on October 11.