In Telluride, 'Conclave' is a hit, even if other Oscar contenders aren't ready for prime time

The camera tilts skyward in several early scenes of RaMell Ross’s exquisite, elliptical “Nickel Boys.” It’s counterintuitive for a filmmaker to do this: Let’s gather all those beautiful actors and sets, all the production design of a movie, but turn our attention instead to the clouds, an exploding sunbeam, the swaying trees, a ripe orange to be picked. A filmmaker who is a seeker, spiritual or otherwise—and Ross certainly is one—will sometimes just look up, much as Terrence Malick did in “The Thin Red Line,” even while shooting a war movie.

It’s also how we often receive a movie (especially if you’re like me and prefer to be in the front row), lulled into a state of blissful submission, hoping for some kind of release. It’s why people come to a place like Telluride, surrounded by gorgeous mountains and refreshing breezes, primarily to see a bunch of movies. There are other reasons to be here, of course: to glean clues about the upcoming Oscar race. Publicists and prognosticators refresh their phones for news from the Venice Film Festival, already underway. When Toronto kicks off its annual showcase next week, awards season will be in full swing. But to spend a not-so-lazy Labor Day weekend in Telluride—industry-centric as it can sometimes be—is to cling to the dream of discovery.

And so far, the festival has delivered on that promise. “Nickel Boys,” a loose adaptation (by Ross and co-writer Joslyn Barnes) of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel about abuse at a 1960s Florida boys’ reform school, silenced its world-premiere audience. The film’s effect is cumulative and jarring, not as immediate as the one the Pulitzer Prize-winning book is celebrated for. Instead, Ross has made the radical decision to commit to a first-person approach, with the camera “seeing” instead of the speaker. It takes some getting used to, but it puts you in an outward-facing mood, listening to sounds and intimacy. (Not since the 1947 Hollywood film noir “The Lady in the Lake” – or, to be fair, the GoPro hyper-action flick “Hardcore Henry” – has this strategy been so well put into practice.)

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What we see are the first flashes of a young man’s curiosity. He helps decorate his home’s Christmas tree alongside a loving grandmother, Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), the tinsel falling from his hands like lightning. Elsewhere, he’s attentive in class, listening to Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches as his classmates bang on their desks. In a telling moment, we finally see through the eyes of who we’ve been watching, captured in the reflection of Hattie’s rocking iron: Elwood (first played by Ethan Cole Sharp, then by a haunted Ethan Herisse). Moreover, because this is Tallahassee during Jim Crow laws and Elwood is black, we’re treated to images of racism, brazen in their frankness. A large cross is dragged by a truck down the road, its metal base throwing up hateful sparks.

On the cusp of a brighter future at a technical college, Elwood is wrongfully implicated in a crime and sent to Nickel Academy, a place of barbarity and nightly beatings where he meets another frightened boy, Turner (Brandon Wilson), and the point of view suddenly shifts to him, bringing Elwood into the frame. Most of their education consists of learning that they are “grubs,” fit only for hard work and sexual predation, with little potential to become “explorers,” then “pioneers,” and finally “aces.”

Director Ross, who spent years as a photographer and professor, nearly reinvented the documentary with his superb 2018 debut, “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” an evocation of black life in Alabama that blurred the line between viewer and subject. It makes sense that he’d want to extend that style here, too, and one can be thrilled by Ross’s formal audacity while also wishing he had a better handle on direct, emotional storytelling. At times, “Nickel Boys” has a scabrous stiffness that distances us from the experience’s intent.

Grave-faced cardinals, like Ross’s sons, turn their gaze heavenward, searching for a sign in “Conclave,” which, for a movie about the solemn election of a new pope at the Vatican, feels a lot more like the trashy entertainment of an episode of “The West Wing.” (It also looks and sounds like a jewel in the crown of prestige television, Volker Bertelmann’s music running on autopilot.) Directed by Edward Berger, the conversational thriller takes the opposite approach of his “All Quiet on the Western Front,” trading the horrors of the World War I trenches for actorly fireworks — and, in one deliriously idiotic moment, a literal explosion that lets in a ray of cleansing light at a key moment.

“I’m not a witch hunter,” says Ralph Fiennes, tucking into a memorably dialogued four-course meal as the fictional Cardinal Lawrence, tasked with leading the internal vote that will hopefully result in white smoke rising over Rome as a sign of success. The process envelops you in intrigue: we see the oven and the fireplace, the ceremonial sewing of moulded pieces of paper.

But you don’t bring in hungry actors like Fiennes, John Lithgow, Stanley Tucci and “Game of Thrones” roguish pirate Lucian Msamati if everything is going to go smoothly. In fact, while they may wear the reds, this group probably should have spent more time in church. The film becomes a procession of revelations, as Lawrence digs into their pasts to unearth discrediting episodes while a stern sister (Isabella Rossellini) has her own issues to deal with.

The film’s grandiosity becomes entertainment in itself, all with a touch of current political relevance (the liberal wing of the faith, such as it is, is in danger) designed to flatter the audience into believing they’re watching something more than a “Succession”-style collection of power plays. Tucci’s scheming priest chafes at the thought of becoming the “Nixon of popes,” a line aimed at the bottom of the class. Your parents will love watching this.

Could Fiennes go all the way? That’s the kind of thing you hear in the Telluride lineup, where moviegoers are hoping to make their own choice and their own consecration. Other Oscar contenders at Cannes have extended their campaigns with sold-out screenings that shut out hundreds of potential converts, like Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner “Anora” and the musical crime saga “Emilia Pérez.”

Angelina Jolie has arrived in town for “Maria,” an obliquely cold biopic about the final days of the great opera singer Maria Callas that sits uneasily next to director Pablo Larraín’s richer “Jackie” and “Spencer.” While never the diva some expected, “Maria” is also stubbornly unrevealing of the person behind the character, with Jolie’s lacquered mask extending even to scenes in which a heavily medicated “mother” lounges at home with her butler and cook.

“I’m in the mood to be fawned over,” intones La Callas, requesting a table where the waiters know her name or an appointment with a “hairdresser who doesn’t talk.” (This dialogue makes the oppressive, airless film seem much juicier than it is.) Larraín, working from a script by “Spencer” writer Stephen Knight, is generally more adventurous than this. His use of clichéd black-and-white flashbacks with the nervous pinholes (someone has to beat that filter) is a disappointment. With “Maria,” he has the gilded cage but little of the bird’s desperation. A cartoonishly authoritarian Ari Onassis (Haluk Bilginer) helps bring out Jolie’s reserve, but she still feels like a robot.

The opera’s music is nonetheless very present: glorious classical versions of “La Traviata” and “Carmen” provide a kind of transport all their own. Let others debate the precise amount of raw bison liver and training required for Jolie’s vocal performance (there’s also a fair bit of Callas in the film). She worked hard to capture the voice and the pose, even if the film fails to make it ravishing.

The same could be said of “Saturday Night,” Jason Reitman’s frenetic, so-vigorous-it-hurts homage to Lorne Michaels’s 1975 debut “Saturday Night Live.” Accelerated by a relentlessly catchy soundtrack by Jon Batiste (a hat on a hat), these 90 minutes of overstuffed, drug-fueled pre-air doubts can’t be the truth about what really happened, even though much of it is. The young cast largely carries the torch, especially Gabriel LaBelle, last seen as Steven Spielberg in “The Fabelmans” and here as Michaels, carving out a path for himself as neurotic versions of modern artists on the creative rise.

Packed with nostalgia and Gen X fan service — all bee costumes and apocryphal arguments are there — “Saturday Night” is crafted in an ultra-devotional spirit that is the opposite of why the show was so necessary. The movie is very much about the old guard of comedy (best embodied by Milton Berle, played by J.K. Simmons, who stalks the NBC studios to get a taste) getting knocked off their pedestal by these denim-clad kids, as if Reitman’s film weren’t a perfect clone of a half-century-old show.

Reitman’s case is troubling. His 2018 mommy comedy “Tully” demonstrated that the “Young Adult” filmmaker is still alive. But “Saturday Night” and the “Ghostbusters” reboots show an obeisance to his father’s legacy that represents a step backward. In the new film, a set of light fixtures crashes onto the burning stage, nearly taking out several future comedy legends. We’re still supposed to think: Can you believe a show this big happened? so close that this doesn’t happen? Someone should have looked up.

This article was originally published in the Los Angeles Times.