'In Review' by David Ehrlich: Greetings from Telluride!

View on web New reader? Subscribe August 29, 2025 Ahoy, mateys! And greetings from the Telluride Film Festival, where the air is thin, the critics are tired, and the movies are hopefully neither of those things.  The festivals have started, awards season is officially underway, and IndieWire will be publishing roughly 12 million reviews from the canals of Venice, the mountains of Colorado, and the totally normal city streets of Toronto over the next 10 days. In lieu of my usual ramblings, this week's newsletter will offer a taste of the biggest films that have kicked things off. This Week… Reviews of: "La Grazia" "Jay Kelly" "Bugonia" "Cover-Up" "Megadoc" *** REVIEW: "La Grazia" GRADE: C Critic: David Ehrlich Venice Film Festival  Paolo Sorrentino's Pivots from Horny to Boring “Bureaucracy is meant to be slow,” the President of Italy (Tony Servillo) explains to a member of his inner circle. “That’s the point: to give people time to reflect.” But how much time is too much, and what good is reflection for a lame duck politician with six months left in his final term and a seemingly clinical inability to make any difficult choices before he leaves office? So far as we can tell at the start of Paolo Sorrentino’s uncharacteristically sedate and sexless “La Grazia,” which feels like forced Catholic penance for the Neapolitan flesh parade of last year’s poorly received “Parthenope,” reflection is just about the only thing the unnamed President has done for most of the last seven years. A widowed jurist whose even-keeled — or completely dormant — personality convinced the people of Italy that he was the right man to rescue them from an economic crisis of some kind, the President bored the problem into submission pretty fast, and has spent the rest of his residency at the Quirinale staring into the middle distance and thinking about his dead wife. Now he's going to bore us with it too. Read the full review on IndieWire   REVIEW: "Jay Kelly" GRADE: B- Critic: David Ehrlich Venice Film Festival George Clooney Is Somehow Miscast As Himself A major star for the majority of his adult life, Jay Kelly has so thoroughly subsumed himself into his classic screen persona — smirking, debonair, heroic — that he no longer seems to know who he is off set. More troublingly, the world-famous actor has come to like it that way. As Sylvia Plath once wrote: “It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It’s much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.” That quote serves as an almost oppressively fitting epigraph for the misty-eyed Netflix movie that Noah Baumbach has made about one of the last true Hollywood stars — or two of them, I should say, as Jay Kelly is so transparent a stand-in for the actor who plays him that he and George Clooney share the same body of work. (No complaint here: “Funny People” is one of my favorite genres). Plath’s words help to frame “Jay Kelly” as the story of a dashing sexagenerian who’s known by everyone and no one in equal measure, but Baumbach’s uncharacteristically precious screenplay, co-written with thee Emily Mortimer, has little trouble articulating that dilemma on its own terms. Read the full review on IndieWire REVIEW: "bugonia" GRADE: B Critic: Ryan Lattanzio Venice Film Festival Can Anyone Save the Green Planet!? Imagine if Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games” were instead about a pair of lone-wolf, conservationist vigilantes trying to save the world instead of two sociopathic twinks wanting to tear it down, and you’ll have some idea of the hyper-contained, rigorously controlled torture chamber that is Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Bugonia.” Jesse Plemons stars as a galaxy-brained conspiracist beekeeper who’s either severely mentally ill or the only prophet among us, hijacking his cousin (Aidan Delbis) into a scheme to kidnap a big pharma executive (Emma Stone) whom he believes to be a body-snatched alien sent to end the planet. Lanthimos works from an on-the-nose-for-the-now feature screenplay by “Succession” and “The Menu” writer Will Tracy, diverting from the droll theater of cruelty present in scripts by Efthimis Filippou (“Kinds of Kindness”) or the florid repartee of Tony McNamara (“The Favourite,” “Poor Things”). “Bugonia” has all the streak of Tracy’s kill-the-rich brand of satire, but with the Greek Oscar-nominated filmmaker interrogating the potential performativity of such capitalist-fighting crusades. Read the full review on IndieWire REVIEW: "Megadoc" GRADE: B Critic: David Ehrlich Venice Film Festival Is Working with Shia LaBeouf Harder than Directing Apocalypse Now? A fly-on-the-wall documentary about the making of an $120 million movie that nobody saw and even fewer people liked, Mike Figgis’ “Megadoc” — shot on the Fayetteville, Georgia set of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” — boasts all the fineries of a DVD bonus feature, and makes little effort to contextualize its footage for anyone who isn’t already on a first-name basis with immortal characters like Clodio Pulcher and Wow Platinum. (Both of whom were only immortal in the figurative sense, of course, as the former was hanged upside down like Benito Mussolini, while the latter was killed by a crossbow that Jon Voight disguised as his dick.) But don’t let that stop you from watching it. Read the full review on IndieWire All my memories are movies This email was sent to chamirsohail707.amir@blogger.com by IndieWire. Please add email@email.indiewire.com to your address book to ensure delivery to your inbox. 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