Julie River is a Denver transplant originally from Warwick, Rhode...
The 47th Denver Film Festival just wrapped up in your own backyard and had some of the greatest films in the world playing at this massive festival. It kicked off on Friday, November 1 so, for the second year in a row, we sent our correspondent Julie River to watch as many movies as she could and report back on them. Last year's festival produced some really great films that went on to see wide distribution and acclaim, including American Fiction, Late Night with the Devil, and The People's Joker, so who knows what the big breakout film from this year's festival is going to be. So check out the reviews below to see what you're missing out on, and get the scoop on some films before they become the next big thing.
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Neither massive snowstorm nor the re-election of a fascist was enough to slow down the Denver Film Festival, as the movies rolled on through the rest of the week. Here's a rundown of what I caught, including to really big name movies that are rolling out very soon: Saturday Night and Emilia Pérez.
Viet and Nam
In this Vietnamese film that was banned in its own country, we meet two gay lovers, Viet and Nam, who are coal miners. When Nam finds a way to get smuggled out of the country, it causes a rift between the two lovers who can't publicly admit that they want to be together.
I don't entirely understand why this film has received such rave reviews elsewhere because I found it tediously dull. With an incredibly slow pacing and sparse dialogue, it felt like there was very little story. There wasn't a huge character arc, and much of the movie ignored the central conflict of the story to go on asides about the history of the country and the Vietnam War. I've read a lot about this having a dreamlike feel to it, and it does, but not in a fantastical way but rather in a slow, lazy, lumbering sort of way like you just ate a large meal and can't quite fight to stay awake.
59/100
Grand Theft Hamlet
In this 2024 British machinima documentary, two theater actors, Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen, bored by the pandemic lockdowns of 2021, find themselves playing Grand Theft Auto to pass the time when they manage to stumble across a huge amphitheater within the game. The discovery of the theater leads them to a hilarious brainstorm of an idea: to stage a production of William Shakespeare's Hamlet entirely within the video game. Sam's wife Pinny Grylls joins them to film the documentary and aid them as they collect a motley crew of actors to stage this unique production.
This film was a delightful romp, especially as the last film I saw before going home to watch election results. There's a certain humor that comes from the entire film being shot in the game, as a lot of the unnatural interactions that happen between video game characters are comically absurd. The whole premise is a really interesting, ambitious idea, and the film tracks them as they run into problems such as actors suddenly getting jobs in the real world and other players in the game randomly choosing to assault them during rehearsal or even during their performances.
The one downfall of having this entire film shot within the game, though, is that there are stories about the lives of these characters that get sorely missed. We get brief glimpses of the strain that the project puts on Sam and Pinny's marriage, and some outside issues going on in Mark's life, but none of them really get delved into very deeply. Instead, the film follows the A-story with little side-plot or emotional arc. It doesn't make for the most emotionally deep documentary, but it certainly makes for a lighthearted and entertaining one.
81/100
The Belle from Gaza
Years ago, French filmmaker Yolande Zauberman met a trans sex worker in Tel Aviv who said she had walked all the way from Gaza to Israel for the freedom to live her life as a woman. Zauberman sets out to find this mysterious woman by interviewing trans sex workers throughout Tel Aviv in hopes of tracking down the mysterious "Belle from Gaza." Along the way, we get to know the heavily-Arab trans sex worker community throughout the bustling Israeli metropolis, providing a stunning portrait of a community of people doing whatever they have to do to survive.
This was easily my favorite film of the entire festival, and definitely the film I needed to see the day after the trauma of Trump's re-election settled down. The film reminded me of the universality of the trans experience, as I related to a lot of what these women said about their gender identity. The difference between me and them is that they live in a much more dangerous situation with their trans identity, but the feelings of gender dysphoria are shockingly cross-cultural.
It was also the reminder I needed of what queer people do the world over, in the hardest situations, at times when everything seems bleak and hopeless: We keep fighting to be ourselves. There was a great moment where they were interviewing one Arab, Muslim, transgender sex worker in Tel Aviv, and she said "We wage war to survive." And, as tragic as it is that that has to be the case, that was the moment I decided that, if Arab trans women in Israel can put up a fight to survive, then I can keep fightng in Trump's America. We wage war to survive, always.
98/100
Saturday Night
In the newest film by Jason Reitman, we go behind the scenes for the last 90 minutes before the debut of the first episode of Saturday Night Live in 1975. Executive producer Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) is trying to earn the network's trust, but he's got a show that's running too long, a star named John Belushi (Matt Wood) who's about ready to walk out, Johnny Carson breathing down his neck, half the cast and crew are high, and network executive David Tebet (Willem Dafoe) might pull the plug on the whole thing at the last minute. Oh, and did we mention that every time Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman) asks Michaels what the show is about, Michaels can't answer, even with the clock ticking down to showtime? It seems like an impossible task to get this show to air at 11:30, but we all know he eventually did it, so how did he pull it off?
I have my mixed feelings on Jason Reitman. On the one hand, he's made Thank You for Smoking, which was heavy handed and confused, and Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which I thought was an unworthy successor to his father's Ghostbusters films. On the other hand, he also directed Juno, which is an absolutely perfect movie (although it wasn't his script), but he also directed and wrote one of my true all-time favorite movies that I think is wildly under-appreciated: Up in the Air.
Oh, and he did Young Adult, which was a dud, but he had every reason to believe that teaming up with Diablo Cody a second time would pay off after Juno and I think her script is really the problem with Young Adult, not Reitman's direction. But hell, even his father, Ivan Reitman, pumped out a few duds every now and then amidst making classics like Ghostbusters and Meatballs and Twins. Remember Ivan Reitman's 1997 film Fathers' Day? No you don't, and there's a reason for that. You kind of have to weight the good against the bad and, well, Saturday Night is another one in the good column for the younger Reitman.
The casting of Saturday Night is absolutely perfect. Gabriel LaBelle plays an earnest Lorne Michaels that feels more relatable than the stiff older man in a suit you now see making occasional guest appearances on SNL episodes. LaBelle really sells you on a Michaels as a brilliant young mind and genius at finding talented people and bringing out the best in them, and that this show was really the product of a romantic young wunderkind who knew that he had something good on his hands even before he understood what it was.
Cory Michael Smith is the absolute spitting image of a young Chevy Chase and pulls off the actor's ego perfectly. Dylan O'Brien looks like a perfect clone of a young Dan Akroyd. Matt Wood captures the haunted and troubled spirit of John Belushi, elevating the character above a surly drug addict to someone who was clearly very broken and didn't know how to fix it. Nicholas Braun pulls off two characters in this film who just happen to not have any scenes together, playing both Andy Kaufman and Jim Hanson, and with just a change of wardrobe and hair, he captures the mannerisms of these two very different men.
One of the other standout performances comes from Rachel Sennott, whom I already loved for her performance in Bottoms, playing the role of Rosie Shuster, or Rosie Shuster Michaels at the time, a writer for Saturday Night Live in the show's early years who was also married to Michaels at the time this movie takes place. Shuster's troubled marriage with Michaels, whom she had known since junior high school, is a fascinating subplot of the story while Shuster tries to figure out if, eight years into the marriage, her own husband thinks of her as a wife or just a writing partner. Easily the most prominent female role in the film, Sennott brings life to an often-overlooked figure that was so important to the show's early days.
In the Q&A after the film, Jason Reitman explained that they interviewed everyone that they could who was involved with that first episode of Saturday Night Live and tried to get the story of that night, but none of the stories matched up. So, while some of this is certainly based on those very conflicting stories, there's obviously some liberties taken with this script. Everything hits the perfect dramatic beats and comes to a perfect conclusion right in the moments before the show goes live, which certainly has to have been a little bit of rose-colored exaggeration. But that's why it's a biopic and not a documentary: It's about adding a little more romance to an already romantic story. Frankly, I found this to be really satisfying, and I would have been disappointed if they didn't exaggerate for dramatic effect a little bit. Overall, it's a triumph of a movie, and it's a beautiful portrait of one of America's great late-night institutions.
96/100
The Hyperboreans
In this abstract an experimental Chilean film, Chilean actress and clinical psychiatrist Antonia Giesen plays herself as she seeks to turn a script from one of her patients into her next movie. The bizarre, stream-of-consciousness style of the film is fantastical and weird as Giesen spends most of the film alone, acting against puppets and animation, and at times switching between characters herself. Somewhere in the background, the true history of Chilean writer and neo-Nazi Miguel Serrano sort of haunt the film, making him an almost sinister figure that lurks in the film's background and is woven throughout.
This whole movie was wildly creative, with a unique style that plays with the fourth wall, often using sets and props and puppetry that we can see aren't real, just tools to tell the story with. Giesen is not a known actress to Americans, but she proves why she's a rising star in the Spanish-speaking world, as she carries this movie entirely on her own shoulders. I walked away from this movie just flabbergasted by the imagination it took and, moreover, how much better it held my attention than some other experimental films I've seen. While weird and abstract, there's never a dull moment in this film, and it's a fascinating journey.
94/100
I'm Still Here
This Brazilian historical drama film is set in 1971 in Brazil when the country was under the leadership of a military dictatorship. Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) had been a Congressman for the Labor Party before the military took over and, now, in 1971, he's living in Rio de Janeiro with his wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres) and their five children when, one day, men they presume to be from the military government show up and escort Paiva away for questioning, never to return. The film follows the Eunice Paiva as she soldiers on as a single mother fighting to get the government to admit their hand in her husband's disappearance and presumed murder.
This was an absolutely fascinating dramatization of a historical event that, I must admit, I knew nothing about. Fernanda Torres truly carries this film with a perfect depiction of Eunice Paiva's strength and perseverance in opposition to a powerful enemy. It's the story of the whole family, too, and the children in the story have heartbreaking character arcs as well as they slowly come to realize their father is never coming home, but the defiant spirit of Eunice Paiva is what truly takes center stage in this emotional drama.
94/100
Escape from the 21st Century
In a bizarre Chinese sci-fi film set on an alternate world that's similar to Earth but somehow has 12-hour days, three teenage friends -- Wang Zha (Yichen Chen/Ruoyun Zhang), Chengyong (Zhuozhao Li/Yang Song), and Paopau (Quixan Kang/Leon Lee) -- accidentally ingest chemicals that allow them to travel back and forth between their bodies in 1999 and their bodies 20 years in the future in 2019. But when they find what their lives are like in the 21st century, some of the friends like what they see while others don't.
This film had some clever ideas and enduring characters, but it threw way too many ingredients into the stew. The whole conceit of the film taking place on another planet was unnecessary and confusing, as there are some aspects from our world that seem to exist on this planet, while some other things are wildly different. For example, there's a major plot point that revolves around Wang Zha suddenly remembering whom he loaned his copy of Street Fighter II to in 1999. So it's a different planet but they have the Street Fighter games? It also felt like a film that was confused about what its own ultimate point was, and so it tacked on a really trite moral at the end and just called it a day. There was the potential to create a really fun movie somewhere in the creation process of this film, but it got lost in an overcomplicated script.
62/100
Emelia Pérez
I intentionally skipped the closing night film at the Denver Film Festival this year because I heard there was something much queerer going on. In the musical crime film Emilia Pérez by French filmmaker Jacques Audiard, which starts streaming on Netflix today, Mexican cartel leader Juan "Manitas" Del Monte (Karla Sofîa Gascón) recruits lawyer Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña) and hires her for one simple task: arranging for Manitas to undergo gender confirmation surgery and become a woman. Unfortunately, the cartel leader chooses to do this in the most toxic and destructive way possible, scheduling all the necessary surgeries on the same day and faking the death of her "male" self to be reborn as Emilia Pérez. She sends her wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and their two children off to Switzerland and embarks on her new life. Then, four years later, she Emilia decides she wants to have her children back in her life and invites them back to Mexico under the ruse of Emilia being Manitas' distant cousin who was now stepping in to adopt the family. But, with Jessi still left in the dark, she grows to resent her new benefactor.
This movie was absolutely explosive drama that was only further enhanced by the fact that the whole thing was a musical, most of it performed in Spanish, which just sounds beautiful when sung. Gascón pulls off the gradual transition from terrifying male cartel leader to an equally powerful figure of Emilia Pérez, making a character with a lot of baggage and a lot of blood on her hands remarkably relatable. Zoe Saldaña powerfully portrays her character's conflicted morality throughout the story as she slowly learns that she's waded too deep into very dangerous waters. Selena Gomez is not an actor I've ever had a strong opinion on either way, and I frankly didn't recognize her in this role when I watched it, and I was absolutely blown away by her outstanding performance as the deeply wronged wife desperately trying to figure out how to survive and keep her children safe.
The film doesn't end with any sort of feeling that Emilia made a mistake in transitioning. It was clearly the right decision for her life, but she went about her transition in a really terrible way, tearing apart her family in the process instead of being honest with her own wife. But she also had gotten herself into a life where transitioning publicly would be difficult, and leaving that whole life behind must have seemed like an easy solution. But, in the end, the character's tragic flaw ends up being that she doesn't offer her own wife the opportunity to come along on this journey with her. Whether or not Jessi would have gone on that journey is up for debate, but she deserved to be given the choice to accept her own spouse's new identity instead of having it swept under the rug, and that's as close to a moral as you get at the end of this story. It's a lesson in moral ambiguity at times, but it's also a beautiful story about what one person will do to find happiness.
96/100
Chainsaws Were Singing
Finishing out the film on a truly bizarre note with an off-the-wall horror musical comedy from Estonia, Chainsaws Were Singing follows the story of Tom (Karl-Joosep Ilves) and Maria (Laura Niils) who meet and fall in love in the same day, but are then separated when a chainsaw-wielding maniac (Martin Ruus) kidnaps Maria to take her back to his cannibalistic family for dinner. Tom enlists the assistance of the first driver he finds, Jaan (Janno Puusepp), and together Tom and Jaan must find and rescue Tom's new love before she gets eaten.
With loads of gore and a very silly premise, this was a fun way to finish off the festival. Parts of the story got really predictable, and it's about 30 minutes longer than it needs to be, but some parts were true comedic genius. The discovery of the bizarre bukkake tribe in the middle of the forest is a truly outlandishly hilarious moment that speaks to a true comedic talent. It feels a little bit like Estonia's answer to Troma Entertainment, but, with a touch of trimming, it could be a good Troma-esque romp.
73/100
The festival is over, but there's still plenty going on at Denver Film year round that you should check out. Emilia Pérez starts streaming today on Netflix. Saturday Night is playing in select theaters across the country, but not in Colorado. Still, you can buy or rent it on sites like Amazon Video and Apple TV.