Two film critics give us their Philadelphia Film Festival recommendations

This year’s Philadelphia Film Festival brings to the city a program of 98 films. To help us plan our time at the festival, we asked two film critics for some recommendations. Here’s what former Inquirer film critic Carrie Rickey and frequent Inquirer writer Stephen Silver are most excited to see in this year’s (in Rickey’s words) “exceptionally rich” festival.

Director Sean Baker’s last several films, including The Florida Project and Red Rocket, have played PFF, and the Film Society recently ran a retrospective of his work. This is all leading up to his new film, Anora, for which the buzz is immense. Mikey Madison plays a sex worker who has a whirlwind romance with the son of a Russian oligarch (Mark Eydelshteyn), leading to widespread complications. — SS

It’s been a while since we’ve had a great baseball movie, but Carson Lund’s Eephus comes highly recommended from the Cannes and the New York film festivals. It depicts the final game of a baseball beer league in 1990s Massachusetts, with supporting performances from legendary documentarian Frederick Wiseman and eccentric 1970s ballplayer Bill “Spaceman” Lee. — SS

Sophomore feature of filmmaker Payal Kapadia is the standout of the festival’s focus on films from India. Centered on the labors of a head nurse, a receptionist, and a hospital cook, Kapadia’s panoramic film is set against the backdrop of the alternately dreamy and distracting Mumbai. The subtext of this deeply humanist film is whether this place where the women find good jobs is a place where they can also find good lives. — CR

For those enthralled by the hypnotic “iconic women” biopics of Pablo Larraín, Chilean filmmaker of Jackie (as in Kennedy) and Spencer (as in Princess Diana), the festival boasts Larraín’s Maria, with Angelina Jolie as legendary diva Maria Callas. The film tells the story of the last week of the soprano’s life with flashbacks to her performances and her relationship with Aristotle Onassis. European critics have hailed Jolie’s performance and Ed Lachman’s cinematography as the high point of both of their careers. — CR

Brady Corbet’s epic drama is three-and-a-half hours long and covers 40 years of the life of fictional László Tóth (Adrien Brody), an architect who survived the Holocaust and settled in Philadelphia. Though it was shot entirely in Europe, The Brutalist features vintage Pennsylvania tourism commercials and a central plot element of Tóth building a massive community center in Doylestown for businessman Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce.) — SS

RaMell Ross’s poetic and daring adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel is based on the shameful events at a real-life Florida reform school during the 1960s. There is Elwood (Ethan Herisse), an idealistic youth inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. And there is Turner (Brandon Wilson), a jaded realist serving his second sentence. Telling the story both visually and philosophically from each of their perspectives, Ross asks if idealism can armor these young men from a racist institution. His answer is as nuanced as the splendid performances of his actors. — CR

A beloved pope is dead. Conclave, adapted from the thriller by Robert Harris, centers on the election of his successor. Conducting the process is a cardinal (Ralph Fiennes) struggling with his own crisis of faith when he discovers a disturbing secret that links the late pontiff with candidates for his replacement. This movie equivalent of a page-turner co-stars John Lithgow, Stanley Tucci, and Isabella Rossellini and is directed by German filmmaker Edward Berger. — CR

The films of the great Spanish director Pedro Almodovar have played stateside for decades, but this represents his first-ever English-language feature. The film stars Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton as reunited friends, reconciling with the past. — SS

From Iranian German filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof comes an intense family drama set against the backdrop of the Iran protests in 2022. Shot in secret, the film follows a father (Misagh Zare) after he is appointed to a high government position, and his daughters' rebellion against him. — SS

At the heart of Blitz, from Britain’s Steve McQueen, is the inhumanity of bombing civilians during battle, as the Germans did to Londoners in World War II. In McQueen’s film, when a mother (Saiorse Ronan) evacuates her biracial son from the bomb-scarred capital, he escapes from the home-bound train, putting him at even greater risk of becoming collateral damage. For the director of the unsentimental Shame and 12 Years a Slave, the film about parallel separation trials of mother and son is Dickensian, and effective. — CR

P.S: Among the locally-connected documentaries there are Citizen George, Glenn Holsten’s portrait of the social activist and professor George Lakey; Bill Nicoletti’s The Philly Sound...Heard ‘Round the World, about Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, poet-architects of Philly Soul; and Frank Petka and Pat Taggart’s No One Died: The Wing Bowl Story, the saga of a singular local ritual.

More information on tickets, showtimes, and the program can be found at filmadelphia.org/festival.