Best Pictures, Maybe, but Telluride Is Not About Oscars

The sense that we might, at any given screening, find ourselves at the start of a path that will terminated next March at the Dolby Theater (where the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences holds its little conclave) puts scribblers in a bit of a bind. We’d rather make discoveries than predictions, pick personal favorites rather than possible winners, observe the machine rather than spin like cogs inside it. But these are not entirely tenable distinctions. Our sincerity gets tangled up in our cynicism, and vice versa. That’s show business.

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The cynical eye might alight on “Darkest Hour,” Joe Wright’s depiction of Winston Churchill’s first days as wartime prime minister. The film embodies the Great Man Theory of History and, more to the point, the Great Man Theory of Acting. Gary Oldman, with twinkling eyes and prosthetic jowl, mutters and blusters, thumb in vest and cigar in hand, while a fine supporting cast (including Lily James, Kristin Scott Thomas and Ben Mendelsohn) goes through various motions of Englishness. “Darkest Hour” is both a companion to “Dunkirk” — it supplies some of the political background for Christopher Nolan’s military spectacle — and a sequel to “The King’s Speech.” Mr. Mendelsohn is the stuttering monarch previously played by Colin Firth. The climactic moment is an act of oratory. The upper lips of the British public are stiffened, while the lower lips of the audience are set aquiver.

Mr. Wright’s film is a display of pedigree and prestige, which are certainly part of the coin of the Oscar realm. It’s an aesthetically (and also to some extent politically) conservative movie, and as such representative of one aspect of the kind of quality mainstream filmmaking that Telluride provides a showcase and an argument for.

I intend no snark. I’m writing from inside a glass house, and I’ll leave the stones on the ground. And in any case I’m in favor of popular entertainment that shows ambition, even at the risk of self-seriousness. I like it when filmmakers try to infuse familiar genres with fresh ideas.

I like it a lot that Greta Gerwig, an actress and screenwriter making her solo-directing debut, has so thoroughly reinvigorated the senior-year-in-high-school coming-of-age comedy with “Lady Bird.” To some degree autobiographical — the heroine, like her creator, lives in Sacramento — the movie is sharp, shrewd, funny and impeccably cast. Saoirse Ronan is Christine McPherson, who prefers to be called Lady Bird and who grapples with some of the usual frustrations of adolescence: sex, school, friendship, parents (Tracy Letts and Laurie Metcalf, both superb). The story, set in the 2002-03 school year, unfolds episodically, through homecoming, college applications and senior prom, and a few John Hughesy notes are struck, but the overwhelming impression is of an original creative voice in the process of self-discovery: Christine’s, and also Ms. Gerwig’s.

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“Lady Bird” is one of a cluster of movies that might be described as declarations of independence, stories of individuals — of women, in many cases — asserting themselves in the face of cruelty, indifference or incomprehension and laying claim to their rightful share of dignity. Even when this process is mostly comical, as in “Lady Bird,” the stakes are serious. The famous 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs that is the subject of Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton’s “Battle of the Sexes” was in some ways a loopy spectacle of ‘70s craziness. The filmmakers capture the circuslike atmosphere, and Steve Carell emphasizes Riggs’s clownishness. But the center of the movie is Emma Stone’s Billie Jean King, a feminist pioneer without apology.

Will Ms. Stone win a second consecutive Oscar for the role? Will she compete with Sally Hawkins, who plays a mute cleaning woman in “The Shape of Water,” Guillermo del Toro’s passionately revisionist monster movie? I don’t care! But I am dazzled by Mr. del Toro’s ability to mobilize old-movie tropes and movie-geek scholarship with the heart-on-the-sleeve humanism he displays here.

There will be more to say about “The Shape of Water” in the coming months, and also about the sensual complexities and emotional nuances of Todd Haynes’s “Wonderstruck,” with its layered, stylized visions of New York in the ‘20s and the ‘70s. And about Alexander Payne’s “Downsizing,” a genial, barbed parable of consumerism, environmental crisis and social inequality disguised as a dystopian farce. Also about “First Reformed,” Paul Schrader’s austere, churning drama of wavering faith in the face of catastrophe. Those films will declare themselves in the coming months, competing for the attention of audiences, something they all deserve.

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But if I had to declare a favorite from this festival — with the caveat that no one trapped in the accordion can hear every tune — it would be “A Fantastic Woman,” the new film by Sebastián Lelio, the Chilean writer and director whose “Gloria” was one of my favorites a few years ago. Though it could be classified, in conventional genre terms, as a melodrama of a forgotten woman. Mr. Lelio’s film is also a work of trenchant social and psychological realism. The title character is Marina, a transgender woman whose lover dies suddenly, leaving her to deal not only with her own grief but also with his estranged family. Played by Daniela Vega, Marina suffers with the grace and ferocity of a ‘40s heroine, and also refuses to be defined by her suffering. The film neither politicizes her plight nor denies its political implications. It does what many of the people she encounters can’t seem to manage: It lets her be.

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