by Meredith Brody

(October 1, 2024)

You HAVE to Go to the Mill Valley Film Festival— if You Want the Vanishing Pleasures of the Communal Movie Experience.

On my recent brief tour of fall film festivals – taking the train (!) to Telluride, then flying directly (well, changing in Denver!) to Toronto – I had two recurring and opposite experiences: the thrilling one of seeing a new movie in a full room of people who were paying rapt attention to the screen, and the dispiriting one of discussing the current state of exhibition in the world. My trum

p card: the fact that there is only one movie theater left in Berkeley, a fairly sophisticated college (university!) town that not that long ago boasted dozens of screens along its downtown corridor. Tell me that movie-going as a communal experience is vanishing…

My movie going life has changed, obviously, and not for the better. I will now travel long distances, thousands of miles, to get the beautiful projection on large screens that I took for granted for many years. (I also enjoyed seeing movies in dives. Remember New York’s Theater 80 St. Marks? Rear projection! 16mm!)

But since the SF Bay Area is home to a number of film festivals – before the pandemic, there were so many as to occur over one a week – there are times when I can enjoy the peak viewing experiences available in Telluride and Toronto in my own back yard. October is packed with bay area film festivals.

And one is fast approaching: the excellent Mill Valley Film Festival, its 47^th iteration, which takes place in three cute small towns – San Rafael and Larkspur as well as Mill Valley – as well as the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. Each of the towns has a panoply of eateries and shops to beguile the festivalgoer in between screenings. I enjoy the sensation of a staycation during the days between Opening Night on Thursday October 3^rd and Closing Night on Sunday October 13^th, eleven days later, driving the 20 miles between home and the festival back and forth every day.

I won’t be in attendance on this year’s opening night, however, because I saw the crowd-pleasing Conclave (playing Thursday October 3^rd,  7 PM, Sequoia and Rafael),  in Toronto after receiving positive reviews of it from friends in Telluride. I envy those who will be there, because just now I’m remembering two peak viewing experiences from the Mill Valley Film Festival two years ago: Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, whose opening night audience improved the film almost out of all recognition – comedies do so much better with a full audience than “sitting at home in your room, “ apologies to Fred Ebb – as well as the effervescent appearance of the she-knows-how-to-do-it Kate Hudson, as well as Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom Jr., and Rian Johnson. The other was seeing Martin McDonough’s The Banshees of Inisherin in a similarly packed audience. I was sitting on the right aisle towards the front and remember looking back at the rapt, transfixed audience, so quiet you could, yes, hear a pin drop – but also frequently responsive with laughs and yelps of surprise. Two unforgettable evenings. 

In the grand tradition of such religious epics as The Two Popes (2019, directed by Fernando Meirelles and starring Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce), The Cardinal (1963, directed by Otto Preminger, starring Tom Tryon and Romy Schneider), and Dark Habits (1983, directed by Pedro Almodovar, starring Cristina Sanchez Pascual), Conclave purports to invite you into the dirty politics behind the election of a new Pope. It’s fun to see Ralph Fiennes, John Lithgow, Stanley Tucci, and Isabella Rossellini at their melodramatic best – there are a couple of twists, but I bet you’ll see them coming. It’s a movie that will certainly benefit from a theater packed with an audience.

The day after, Friday October 4^th, I would encourage anybody and everybody to see Anora (6 PM and 7:30 PM, Sequoia), directed by the miraculous Sean Baker, who’s never directed a movie I didn’t like. It’s part of the “Spotlight on Mikey Madison,” whom I watched for five years on the Pamela Adlon series Better Things without realizing that she was a genius. Anora, which won the Palme d’Or in Cannes back in May, was my favorite movie out of all the 50 or so I saw in Telluride and Toronto. It’s an amazingly energetic, funny, propulsive — and finally touching — story of the romance between a sassy stripper and a spoiled enfant terrible of a pair of Russian mafia oligarchs. Baker said at Telluride that he was especially proud of the casting, which he did by himself — and rightly so. Full of fresh faces, and not a foot put wrong. You can purchase a ticket for just the movie, or both the movie and a reception afterwards. Go see it at MVFF if you possibly can. She’ll BE THERE!

Emilia Perez (Saturday October 5^th, Rafael, and Monday October 7^th, Sequoia), which won the Best Actress Award at Cannes for the ensemble of Adriana Paz, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, and Zoe Saldana, as well as the prize for Best Director for Jacques Audiard, is a hot-colored, hot-tempered, musical/opera about lawyers, drugs, and money (apologies, Warren Zevon). Oh, and there’s a sex change thrown in. Audiard, a fastidious, correct, upright and well-spoken Frenchman, makes messy loud fever dream enjoyable movies. At MVFF 47, Emilia Perez will receive the MVFF Ensemble Award. There is an additional fee for a reception after the Saturday October 5^thscreening.

The marvelous English director Andrea Arnold, OBE, makes austere elegant movies that are also occasionally messy and loud. She won an Oscar in 2005 for her short film, Wasp, and three of her subsequent films, Red Road, Fish Tank, and American Honey, won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Her latest, Bird (Friday, October 4^th, BAM/PFA 7 PM, Sunday October 6^th, 3 PM, Lark), is alternately tender and violent, urban and countrified. An adolescent girl (Nykiya Adams) is caught between her loving but feckless father (Barry Keoghan) and loving but even more feckless mother, who’s living with a dangerous and abusive man. Is the charismatic boy-man she meets also dangerous – or even real? I love Arnold’s work, which stays with you. Nobody makes movies like she does.

Nobody makes movies like Pedro Almodovar does, either. His latest, The Room Next Door (Sunday October 5^th at 4:15 PM, Sequoia, Monday October 6^th at 4 PM, Rafael), and is a return to form after his curious half-hour English language short for Yves Saint Laurent, starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, Strange Way of Life. Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore star as two old friends, a war correspondent and a best-selling author, who reconnect after falling out of touch. You can relax while you’re watching this, because you’re in the hands of a master. Almodovar knows what he’s doing in terms of composition, color, design, pacing, tone. There’s a plot point I don’t want to mention, in case you don’t already know it. I read a trade review after I saw the film that enraged me: after a few brief paragraphs of actual criticism, deadline and word count pressures set in and the last 2/3rds of the “review” were a bald retelling of the plot, which was considerably more than I would have wanted to know before I saw the movie. So instead I’ll mention a Fun Fact to Know and Tell: the building that Tilda lives in is Two Fifth Avenue, home to both Larry Kramer, author of “Faggots and The Normal Heart” and co-founder of Act Up, and the deeply closeted Ed Koch, Mayor of NY, whom Kramer detested.  (And across the street and glimpsed in the movie is One Fifth Avenue, which has been home to Paul Mazursky and Brian de Palma, among others. From l’internet: “Past and present residents include Jessica Lange, Patti Smith (Robert Mapplethorpe shot her “Horses” album cover in art curator Sam Wagstaff’s penthouse in the building), actress (and mother of Gwyneth Paltrow) Blythe Danner, and the late Sam Shepard.”)

Deadline pressures are the main plot point of Jason Reitman’s funny and charming Saturday Night (Saturday Oct 5^th at 9 PM, Sequoia; Sunday Oct 6^th at 11 AM, Rafael), as it plays in pretty much real time the events of the hour-and-a-half just before the taping of the first-ever Saturday Night Live in 1975 in New York City. I was charmed by the clever casting – actors I knew, actors I didn’t – especially the gifted Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris (no relation), and the towering Nicholas (Succession) Braun in a double role – one of which I recognized, one of which I didn’t (tell you later). Willem Dafoe is especially striking as the legendary Dave Tebet, a charismatic old-school NBC exec. It’s a welcome return to form for Reitman, and is yet another movie that needs a good audience to play at its best.

Seed of the Sacred Fig (Saturday October 5^th BAMPFA at 7 PM, Sunday October 6^th Sequoia at 12:30 PM) takes us into Iran just a couple of years ago – when the life of a newly appointed judge, his wife, and two daughters, is upended during the Women, Life, Freedom protests swirling outside his door, and he realizes his new position is just to award death penalties to activists. They escape to their ancient country house where the family dynamic explodes in unexpected and threatening ways.

Mike Leigh has his own unique and distinctive method of filmmaking, involving a long improvisation period during which he and his actors devise the screenplay for their movie together. In his newest, Hard Truths (Monday October 7^th, Rafael, at 7:30 PM), the wonderful Marianne Jean-Baptiste (nominated for an Oscar when she starred in Leigh’s Secrets and Lies in 1996) plays a remarkably thin-skinned, hostile, and aggressive woman who spews constant bile in every human encounter, including the cowed and unhappy members of her family. It’s a difficult but rewarding watch. Leigh, famously crochety himself, maintains a relentless and exhausting pace in this film. Having spent some time in his presence in three different cities over the years, I suspect Mr. Leigh has a running monologue in his head not unlike Jean-Baptiste’s. 

Luca Guadagnino’s followup to the sexy and stylish Challengers is an adaptation of William Burrough’s Queer ((Wednesday October 9, Sequoia, at 5 PM), in which the Burroughs  character is incarnated by the rather more attractive Daniel Craig, who stumbles alcoholically around ‘40s expat Mexico, looking for drugs and cruising for pickups, interacting with an Allen Ginsberg type (Jason Schwartzman, who apparently gained weight for the part), and falling for a mysterious bi-sexual young American student (played by the boyish Drew Starkey). A suitably dreamy way to spend a mid-week late afternoon.

There are a variety of special focuses at the Festival including Active Cinema, ¡Viva el Cine!, and a variety of special interest Strands. 

The Festival balances these adult films with lots of family programming.

Mind the Gap annually celebrates and empowers female and nonbinary filmmakers with a full day of seminars and screenings on Saturday, October 5.  Rachel Morrison, the director of The Fire Inside, and cinematographer for Fruitvale Station, Mudbound, and Black Panther will offer a Keynote Conversation and receive the Mind the Gap Award.  Additional programs occur throughout the festival.

All We Imagine as Light also receives a Mind the Gap award on Friday October 11^th at the Rafael at 7 PM (and repeats as a regular screening on Saturday October 12^th, BAMPFA, 7 PM).  With a very little extra effort, we could see this poetic yet engrossing tale of three fellow nurses in Mumbai dealing with love and death and finances inflated into an 8 or 9 episode streaming series – which would detract from its lyricism and surprising effects. First-time fiction feature director Payal Kapadia previously made an acclaimed documentary, A Night of Knowing Nothing, seen at festivals worldwide. Mumbai is abandoned for a visit to the coastal village home where one of the friends is forced to return. There a kind of connection is unexpectedly forged. All We Imagine is Light deserves to be seen at a film festival, in a film festival audience. And Mill Valley is the festival to do it at.

X (formerly Twitter): @MVFilmFestival
Facebook: @MillValleyFilmFestival 
Instagram: @millvalleyfilmfest
YouTube: @CaliforniaFilmInstitute
Letterboxd: @CAFILM

Trailers for the films above in the order they were written about.

Meredith Brody, a graduate of both the Paris Cordon Bleu cooking school and USC film school, has been the restaurant critic for, among others, the Village Voice, LA Weekly, and SF Weekly, and has written for countless film magazines and websites including Cahiers du Cinema, Film Comment, and Indiewire. Her writings on books, theater, television, and travel have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Interview. She also contributes to EatDrinkFilms including her“Meals with Meredith,” where she talks about food and film with filmmakers at restaurants in northern California, writes about vintage cocktails and where she eats during film festivals at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco. A selection of her EDF pieces are found here.

One could describe Meredith as “hooked on cinema” as she attends four-five films a day at many bay area and international festivals each year.  Somebody has to do it. Read about her journey back to festivals after two years in pandemic mode.