October 16-25 at the Crandell Theatre in Chatham
Crandelltheatre.org/filmcolumbia
For 26 years, FilmColumbia has turned Chatham’s Crandell Theatre into a showcase for films poised to enter the wider awards conversation. Returning October 16–25, the 10-day festival brings together anticipated American and international features, documentaries, filmmaker Q&As, workshops, free children’s programming, and its unrevealed-until-showtime Saturday Sneak. The program is curated by film historian Peter Biskind and former Museum of Modern Art senior curator Laurence Kardish, with Calliope Nicholas serving as festival director. This year’s honoree is Chatham-based writer-director Jane Schoenbrun. From established auteurs to emerging voices, here are 10 especially worth circling on this year’s sprawling, unusually deep schedule.
I Saw the TV Glow
Jane Schoenbrun’s neon-drenched psychological horror follows two isolated teenagers bonded by their obsession with a supernatural television series. When the show disappears, the border between fiction and reality begins to buckle. Featuring a Phoebe Bridgers cameo, this trans coming-of-age story finds terror in a life left uninhabited for too long.
The Art of Adventure
In 1957, Canadians Robert Bateman and Bristol Foster set out in a retrofitted Land Rover, traveling 50,000 miles across four continents and 19 countries. Alison Reid pairs their remarkable footage with the now-nonagenarian friends’ recollections, creating a buoyant documentary about curiosity, conservation, companionship, and a world still open to wonder.
Fatherland
Pawel Pawlikowski returns with a beautifully composed black-and-white drama tracing Thomas Mann’s first European visit after exile. Traveling with his daughter Erika in 1949, the writer accepts honors in West and East Germany as history presses close. Hanns Zischler and Sandra Hüller anchor this compact, psychologically intricate father-daughter relationship story.
Behemoth!
Pedro Pascal plays Alex Serian, an internationally celebrated cellist returning to Los Angeles to record a film score and settle unfinished personal business. Tony Gilroy’s flashback-driven drama draws on original work by nine major film composers, turning one musician’s reckoning into an expansive valentine to movies, music, memory, and family.
Once Upon a Time in Harlem
In 1972, filmmaker William Greaves gathered surviving luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance for a reunion at Duke Ellington’s townhouse. More than five decades later, his son David and granddaughter Liani have restored and assembled the 16mm footage. Romare Bearden, Eubie Blake, Aaron Douglas, and others make the gathering extraordinary onscreen.
Wild Horse Nine
Martin McDonagh brings his scalpel wit to Chile in 1973, where mismatched operatives played by John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell arrive to conduct some unsavory CIA business. Steve Buscemi plays their bureau chief, while Parker Posey complicates matters in a darkly comic tale shot among Easter Island’s monumental moai.
The Only Living Pickpocket in New York
John Turturro stars as Harry Lehman, a 70-year-old master pickpocket whose cash-based trade has nearly vanished in the digital age. When he lifts a memory stick, trouble sends him racing through all five boroughs. Noah Sagan’s thriller doubles as a fleet-footed love letter to New York as a cinematic playground.
Bitter Christmas
Pedro Almodovar returns with a color-saturated melodrama about the slippery commerce between storytelling and life. An older gay filmmaker writes an “autobiographical” screenplay populated by women he knows, themselves writers mining their experiences. The nested narratives produce a witty, melancholy consideration of appropriation, invention, and whom any story truly belongs to.
Rehearsals for a Revolution
Winner of Cannes’s Golden Eye for Best Documentary, Pegah Ahangarani’s film surveys four decades of protest in Iran through a personal lens. The exiled actor and filmmaker assembles home movies, newsreels, and clandestine cellphone footage into an account of her dissident family and a nation’s repeatedly deferred hopes for transformation.
The Debut
Jesse Eisenberg follows A Real Pain with an uneasy comedy starring Julianne Moore as a suburban housewife who lands a role she may not deserve. Paul Giamatti is the demanding titan of the New Jersey community theater directing her. Sparks, songs, and bruised egos enliven this affectionate plunge into way-off-Broadway ambition.
