It’s Time for the 22nd Philadelphia Film Festival! #PFF22

We are introduced to the Weston clan by way of patriarch Beverly, a melancholic poet (played here by an excellent Sam Shepard, in a role originated by Letts’ own late father, Dennis) who quotes T.S. Eliot’s immortal maxim that “life is very long” just before taking matters into his own hands: first by mysteriously disappearing, then by turning up drowned in a local lake. The ensuing funeral serves as a de facto family reunion, the previously empty house filling to the rafters with Beverly’s three grown daughters, their significant others and assorted relations. All have come to pay their last respects. None will leave without incurring the wrath of the widow Weston, Violet (Meryl Streep), a cancer-stricken, pill-popping martinet whose idol was Liz Taylor and who could be Albee’s Martha a few decades — and many rounds of marital prizefights — on from “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” – Scott Foundas Variety

Idris Elba stars as the South African leader in “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom,” which the Weinstein Co. will release in late November. The film, directed by Justin Chadwick, takes a classical, inspirational biopic approach to telling the epic tale of Mandela’s life story. While the brawny Elba, famed for his gangster Stringer Bell on “The Wire,” has a much larger frame than Mandela, Chadwick said he was “the brave choice” for the role. “We’re not going for a looky-likey, soundy-likey version of Mandela,” said Chadwick “We’re trying to catch the spirit.”- Jake Coyle The Grio

Nebraska, beautifully shot in expressive widescreen black and white by Phedon Papamichael, centers on an aging, dementia-afflicted resident of Billings, Mont., (Bruce Dern) who’s convinced he’s won $1 million in a sweepstakes and won’t be talked out of going to prize headquarters in Omaha to collect. His exasperated son (Will Forte) agrees to drive him there, a journey that includes a side trip to the small Nebraska town where his father was born and lived a chunk of his life. – Kenneth Turan Los Angels Times

Frears wants Pope Francis to see his latest film, Philomena, the true story of a shamed Irish woman (Dame Judi Dench) forced by nuns to give her son up for adoption in the 1950s.”I am very, very keen that the pope should see it, if you have any influence in those quarters,” Frears told reporters ahead of the film’s world premiere in competition at the Venice Film Festival.- news.com.au

Documentarian Errol Morris’s up-close portrait of onetime Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld — a man celebrated for not knowing his own aphorisms from a hole in the ground, including the saying about known knowns, unknown knowns, and so on that provides Morris’s title. The movie is a sequel of sorts to 2003’s The Fog of War, Morris’s Oscar-winning profile of Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. – Tom Carson The American Project

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