Carrie Rickey on seven films to watch at the Philadelphia Film Festival

The Philadelphia Film Festival opens its 32nd season Oct. 19 with the literary satire American Fiction, the story of a struggling novelist portrayed by Jeffrey Wright. The event closes Oct. 29 with the documentary Sly, a profile of the onetime struggling actor Sylvester Stallone, writer and star of a certain movie franchise set in Philadelphia.

Adapted from Percival Everett’s parodic novel by first-time director Cord Jefferson and costarring Issa Rae, American Fiction was an audience favorite at the Toronto Film Festival. Thomas Zinmy’s Sly likewise is generating an anticipatory buzz.

In between, the festival will purvey 90 more features and 26 shorts both from local and international filmmakers.

My PFF picks fall into one of three categories: Films getting festival buzz, critics’ picks, and the festival’s must-see standout.

Cowritten, costarring, and directed by Philly homeboy Bradley Cooper, Maestro is a breathtaking double-portrait of conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia (Carey Mulligan), paced at vivace tempo. The flamboyant musician is queer, his beloved Felicia is not; and their conflict is that it’s the 1950s and they’re in love. The leads are near-flawless. Whether in overlapping dialogues that are like snappy duets or operatic, emotionally charged confrontations, the pair is made for each other. Together they invent an intimate partnership that demands sacrifices, as most marriages do. (Screening Oct. 21)

Green Border is set in 2021, in the verdant forest that divides Poland from Belarus. Director Agnieszka Holland (Europa, Europa) tells the story of a refugee crisis from four intersecting perspectives.

When members of a Syrian family fleeing ISIS deplane at Minsk to cross the Polish border, they don’t know that Belarus is playing a sick game. Belarus is not a member of the European Union but encourages refugees to emigrate there and cross into Poland, which is, and the refugees become hopeless human shuttlecocks swatted back and forth across the border. Holland considers their plight variously through the eyes of refugees, border guards, a psychologist, and humanitarian activists in her brave and extraordinary drama. The implicit takeaway is that nationalism is the enemy of humanism. (Screening Oct. 22 and 23)

The new film by Vietnamese-born Tran Anh Hung (The Scent of Green Papaya) also has a suggestively sensory title, The Taste of Things. It takes place in late 19th-century France and is the nation’s entry for the foreign film Oscar.

This story of culinary and romantic love stars former real-life partners Bruno Magimel as a celebrated chef and Juliette Binoche as the cook who interprets his imaginative recipes. The film opens with the harvest of ingredients for a dinner and its seemingly real-time preparation.

There is a soupçon of suspense, and full sensory overload in a synesthesia of flavors and smells and color in a bittersweet confection, like the best chocolate. (Screening Oct. 22 and 24)

George C. Wolfe’s biopic of Bayard Rustin, the West Chester, Pa.-born social activist and adviser to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., stars Philadelphia-born actor and activist Colman Domingo as the architect of the 1963 March on Washington. (Screening Oct. 23)

Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio’s account of the Mortara Affair, the case of a Jewish boy in 1858 Bologna taken from his family by Catholic priests, christened, and sent to the Vatican to be raised against his parents’ wishes. (Screening Oct. 27 and 29)

The satirical targets of director Emerald Fennell’s debut feature, Promising Young Woman, were predatory men. The targets of her sophomore feature are predatory aristocrats who take in their son’s new friend — a scholarship student from Oxford. (Screening Oct. 27)

Regrets, Sylvester Stallone has a few. “Hell, yeah!” he reflects at the start of this remarkably candid, at times confessional, account of his life and films. “Regrets inspire me to overcome my regrets,” he explains in the plainspoken eloquence that made him a star. His parents were “unpredictable,” a polite way of saying that they were volatile or absentee. He is self-aware enough to recognize both that his fame gave him the love from the fans that he did not get while growing up, and that workaholism has made him an absentee dad.

Over the course of this sympathetic documentary with interviews with his brother, Frank, his Lords of Flatbush costar Henry Winkler, his Rocky costar Talia Shire, and journalist Wesley Morris, Stallone talks about his plans to rectify that particular regret. (Screening Oct. 29).

The 32nd Philadelphia Film Festival schedule is at https://filmadelphia.org/program/