Directors’ Fortnight comes to L.A. plus the week’s best movies

Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.

This has somehow become a blockbuster week for new releases, with a number of films that likely will wind up on many year-end best-of lists all landing in theaters. While some of them also will be launching on streaming platforms soon, seeing any of these in a theater with an audience would make for an ideal experience.

Written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg, the tender dramedy “A Real Pain” follows a pair of cousins (played by Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin) who go on a tour of Holocaust-related sites in Poland.

When I spoke to Eisenberg and Culkin for our fall preview, they both mentioned the connection they felt while shooting together.

“When we started working, there was an immediate rapport — something worked right away,” said Culkin. “We really got to know each other by being these characters and by wanting this thing to work.”

For me, among the year’s biggest surprises has been Alonso Ruizpalacios’ “La Cocina,” starring Raúl Briones and Rooney Mara as staffers at a tourist restaurant in Manhattan. The film is a dazzling allegory on work, life and the world at large, and it announces Ruizpalacios as a filmmaker fully in command of his voice. As I said in my review of the film, “Even while what is depicted onscreen veers wildly out-of-control, there is a sense of surety to the filmmaking that makes this one of the freshest movies of the year.”

This is only Mara’s third screen role in the past six years. She responded to a letter from Ruizpalacios, the two having never met, and, as she said in an interview with Carlos Aguilar, “My time is very precious now that I have kids. To me now, the experience is so important. I’m like: Is this going to be a worthwhile experience? Is it something I can grow from? And everything about the way Alonso wanted to make the film to me was like, ‘Yes, this is an experience I’d like to have.’ It seemed different than anything I had done thus far.”

Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez” has been one of the most buzzed-about films of the year since it premiered at Cannes. A Mexico-set narco-themed melodrama about a drug lord who transitions in secret, the movie is also a musical.

In a rare move, all four lead actresses in the film — Karla Sofía Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz — shared the actress prize at Cannes. In an interview with Manuel Betancourt, Saldaña said of working on the film, “It was a mixture of an experiment and an experience. I liked the experimental side of it. And we only achieved that because Jacques was not possessive over his words, his lines. That was incredibly collaborative. But also very freeing.”

Mati Diop‘s stirringly enigmatic documentary “Dahomey” won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year and is Senegal’s entry for the international feature Oscar. The film explores the return of artifacts from France to the country of Benin, formerly known as Dahomey, from the point of view of the objects themselves.

Also in theaters this week is “Blitz,” Steve McQueen’s look at the German air raids of London during World War II, starring Saoirse Ronan and Elliott Heffernan. As McQueen said to Emily Zemler, “Often people think war is what happens in far distant places. I wanted to bring it home: This is what happened here. This movie has a real sense of urgency, unfortunately. I wanted it to be a roller-coaster ride through London during the war.”

Robert Abele reviewed Clint Eastwood’s “Juror #2,” a courtroom thriller starring Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, Zoey Deutch, Chris Messina and Kiefer Sutherland that is getting a curiously cursory limited release.

As Abele wrote, “If ‘Juror #2’ is this all-time-great filmmaker’s last effort, it may come across like a quiet goodbye: measured conversations replacing his oeuvre’s well-known violence and death. But in its relaxed professionalism, it’s still a worthy closing argument for what Eastwood has always cared about most — how we live as much as how we die, and in the final count, what condemns us all.”

A part of Cannes comes to L.A.

Starting tonight and running through Sunday, Acropolis Cinema will be presenting “Directors’ Fortnight Extended,” spotlighting a selection of films from the Cannes sidebar Director’s Fortnight, also known as Quinzaine des cinéastes. Playing at the Culver Theater, this is the first time a program from the Fortnight has come to Los Angeles.

The series opens with Ryan J. Sloan’s neo-noir thriller “Gazer,” starring Ariella Mastroianni. Other highlights of the program include Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel’s French thriller “Eat the Night,” set amid the world of online gaming; Chantal Akerman’s restored 1989 exploration of Jewish American identity, “Histoires d’Amérique: Food, Family and Philosophy”; and the closing selection of Jonas Trueba’s Spanish-language relationship comedy “The Other Way Around.”

The Fortnight began in 1969 as a response to the cultural and political upheaval at Cannes in 1968, and it has retained that rebellious spirit ever since, as a parallel event to the main selection of the festival.

“The Fortnite is this Cannes sidebar that was designed to be a new space capable of welcoming filmmakers from all over the world, regardless of their mode of production,” said Julien Rejl, artistic director of Directors’ Fortnight since 2023. “The idea was to give the priority to new cinematic language. Any kind of cinema could be from very radical and edgy filmmakers, like genre cinema, great masters. The idea was to have equality in the treatment of these films and to give the filmmakers a possibility, an opportunity, to take time and meet an audience, talk about their film, talk about cinema and also to meet between themselves.”

On Saturday afternoon there will be a conversation with Rejl and filmmakers India Donaldson, who made “Good One,” and Tyler Taormina, the director of “Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point.”

Acropolis had previously been involved in bringing selections from the Locarno Film Festival to Los Angeles, and this new partnership with the Directors’ Fortnight continues the mission of screening little-seen art-house films for Los Angeles audiences.

“The idea behind Acropolis in general is to bring films that wouldn’t otherwise show here,” said Jordan Cronk, founder of Acropolis Cinema. “So that is a perfect marriage as far as just the idea behind it. A lot of these films, some of them are small enough that they would be hard for Acropolis to show even for just one night, but when you can put them in the context of something like the Quinzaine, we’re hoping it could generate enough interest so people can check out the smaller films.

“When you put the films in the context of a larger program from Cannes, I’m hoping people will discover the films that we’re showing during the day, artisanal cinema,” added Cronk. “That is definitely a goal, and it’s just a pleasure to try and introduce audiences out here to new and exciting cinema.”

GuadaLAjara Film Festival

This weekend also will see this year’s edition of the GuadaLAjara Film Festival at a variety of venues around the city, with events at the United Theater on Broadway, Vidiots, Gloria Molina Grand Park, the Million Dollar Theater, Alamo Drafthouse and Milagros Cinema Norwalk.

The fest opens with Mexico’s submission for the international feature Oscar, “Sujo,” directed by Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez. Acclaimed cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto’s feature directing debut, “Pedro Páramo,” will screen ahead of its release on Netflix later this month. The festival closes with the first two episodes of the upcoming Prime Video series “La Liberacion,” created by Alejandra Marquez Abella.

Among the short films in the festival are “All the Words but the One,” directed by and starring “Baby Reindeer” star Nava Mau, and “Dovecote,” produced by and starring Zoe Saldaña. “La Cocina” will screen as part of the festival as well.

Points of interest

30 years of Giant Robot

In honor of the magazine Giant Robot, founded by UCLA alumnus Eric Nakamura to celebrate alternative Asian and Asian American culture, the UCLA Film and Television Archive is launching “A Film Series for You: Celebrating Giant Robot’s 30th Anniversary.” The series launches Friday night with a 2022 episode of PBS SoCal’s series “Artbound” that interviewed key players from the magazine’s history, along with a screening of Wong Kar-Wai’s 1994 “Chungking Express,” which was reviewed in the magazine’s third issue. A Q&A will include Nakamura, magazine co-editor Martin Wong, filmmaker Dylan Robertson, actor Tamlyn Tomita and actor-filmmaker Daniel Wu.

Saturday night will see a double bill of Jon Moritsugu’s 1993 “Terminal USA” and a 35mm screening of Gregg Araki’s 2004 “Mysterious Skin.” Other films in the series include Shunji Iwai’s 2001 “All About Lily Chou-Chou,” Michael Arias’ 2006 “Tekkonkinkrett,” Shusuke Kaneko’s 1995 “Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe” and Derek Yee Tung-Sing’s 2004 “One Nite in Mongkok.”

‘Blonde Venus’ in nitrate 35mm

Screening at the Academy Museum on Saturday in a rare 35mm nitrate print is Josef von Sternberg’s 1932 “Blonde Venus.” Starring Marlene Dietrich and a then-little-known Cary Grant, the film is about a chanteuse turned housewife who returns to the stage to earn money to save her ailing husband. The film features the notorious “Hot Voodoo” musical number that opens with Dietrich in a gorilla suit.

In other news

Teri Garr remembered

Actor Teri Garr died this week at age 79. She skillfully blended comedy and dramatic pathos in films such as “Tootsie,” for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for supporting actress, as well as “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Mr. Mom,” “Young Frankenstein” and “After Hours.” Her appearances on both “The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson” and “Late Night With David Letterman” remain iconic for their warmth, charm and disarming candor.

Reviewing “Tootsie,” critic Pauline Kael called Garr “the funniest neurotic dizzy dame on the screen.” Times critic Sheila Benson referred to Garr’s performance in “After Hours” as “touchingly bizarre.”

Garr publicly revealed her multiple sclerosis diagnosis in 2002, and the illness was her cause of death.

She continued working after opening up about her health, saying, “Actually, I thought, ‘What’s the difference — being handicapped in Hollywood or being a woman over 50?’”

Malkovich on ‘Malkovich’

As part of The Times’ ongoing 1999 Project celebrating the popular culture of that pivotal year, I spoke to actor John Malkovich about his experiences making the movie “Being John Malkovich.” The feature debut of director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (both future Oscar winners), the film is about a down-on-his-luck puppeteer (John Cusack) who finds a portal to the inside of the head of Malkovich. The cast also includes Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener, Charlie Sheen and, in a brief uncredited cameo as the national arts editor of the Los Angeles Times, filmmaker David Fincher.

As to how he prepared for the role of John Malkovich and whether it was different from any other part, Malkovich responded, “That’s an interesting question. The thing is, there wasn’t that much to search for, because the world is so specific that Charlie created. I remember one day when I did something and Spike Jonze said to me, ‘John Malkovich wouldn’t do it that way.’ And I kind of chuckled, but I said, ‘Oh, OK. How would he do it?’ And I really didn’t think that much of it because anything I do isn’t me. But John Malkovich isn’t me either, any more or less than anything else isn’t me. So if somebody says, ‘That’s not the way John Malkovich would do it,’ maybe they know better than I do.”