'It's sheer gluttony' — IFFBoston's Fall Focus is packed with range

The Independent Film Festival Boston’s Fall Focus started out in 2015 with just five films. The partnership with the Brattle Theatre was originally intended as a supplement to the organization’s annual spring festival, providing early peeks at pictures that would soon be dominating end-of-year honors and award conversations. The Fall Focus has offered area audiences first looks at heavy hitters like “Moonlight,” “Lady Bird,” “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” “Eephus” and “The Brutalist.”

In recent years, the mini-festival has steadily expanded from weekend to weeklong affairs, but IFFBoston program director Nancy Campbell and executive director Brian Tamm have outdone themselves this time. The 11th annual Fall Focus spills out over two weekends (plus a few more days) bracketing the month of October at the Brattle with a whopping 27 titles unspooling from Thursday, Oct. 9, through Sunday, Oct. 12, and Thursday, Oct. 30, through Tuesday, Nov. 4.

“It’s sheer gluttony. I’m calling it ‘One Brattle After Another,’” laughed Campbell, delighting in the excess of exciting independent and foreign language films culled from this year’s Cannes, Venice, Toronto and New York Film Festivals. The Fall Focus selections span the globe and range from children’s animated adventures to Broadway biopics and drag queen zombie comedies. They’ve got domestic psychodramas, international political thrillers and Julia Roberts yelling at entitled college kids. This place has everything. I’ve only had the chance to see a handful of these films so far, but can already say that at least two of them are among the year’s finest.

“Sentimental Value” (Oct. 11) is the latest from writer-director Joachim Trier, whose “The Worst Person in the World” wowed Fall Focus audiences in 2021. I think this one’s even better. That film’s star, Renate Reinsve, returns as the actress daughter of an emotionally negligent, past-his-prime filmmaker played by Stellan Skarsgård, giving a great lion-in-winter performance. He wants her to star in a movie he wrote about his mother’s suicide, to be shot in their old family home. What follows is like a warmer, more wistful Ingmar Bergman film, wise to the ways in which we still love the people in our lives who always seem to let us down.

“Given the state of the world, when I started looking at films for this season, I was worried that they were all going to be complete bummers,” Campbell admitted. “But there are some that have turned out to be a lot funnier than you would have anticipated.” Foremost in that category is Jafar Panahi’s “It Was Just an Accident” (Oct. 11), which won the Palme D’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and is the other Fall Focus selection I’ve seen that knocked my socks off.

Panahi has spent the past 15 years or so in and out of prison and under house arrest for making films critical of the Iranian regime. “It Was Just an Accident” pours all that frustration into the haunting, sometimes furiously funny story of an auto mechanic and former political prisoner who suspects a new customer might be his old torturer, but needs his old cellmates to confirm. It feels almost like a screwball “Death and the Maiden,” both playful and deadly serious, exhilaratingly alive to the possibilities of cinema. “It’s nice to have things that aren’t completely draining at a time like this,” said Campbell.

The latest provocation from “Challengers” and “Queer” director Luca Guadagnino, “After the Hunt” (Oct. 9) gives Julia Roberts her meatiest role in ages as a feisty philosophy professor whose loyalties are torn when her favorite student (Dorchester’s own Ayo Edebiri) accuses her favorite colleague (Andrew Garfield) of sexual misconduct. Later that night, “Love Lies Bleeding” co-star Katy O’Brian headlines “Queens of the Dead” (Oct. 9) in which horror royalty Tina Romero updates her father George’s undead saga with a zombie apocalypse breaking out at a drag queen warehouse party.

Harvard alum and sometimes Brattle programmer Natalie Portman produced and lent her voice to the English dub of “Arco” (Oct. 11), a French animated film about two 10-year-olds who time-travel through a magical rainbow. Fellow Harvard grad and favorite son of Brookline Conan O’Brien makes his dramatic acting debut in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” (Oct. 10), playing the oddly hostile therapist to Rose Byrne’s woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown in writer-director Mary Bronstein’s edgy Sundance favorite. Ethan Hawke dons a bald cap to play soused Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart in Richard Linklater’s “Blue Moon” (Oct. 12), pining for a showgirl played by Margaret Qualley at the premiere party for his former writing partner Richard Rodgers’ “Oklahoma!”

Campbell and Tamm have long wanted to present a Kelly Reichardt film at IFFBoston, but her release dates always seem to land just a few weeks before the spring or fall festivals. The fates have finally aligned in time for “The Mastermind” (Oct. 12), Reichardt’s characteristically moody thriller about a museum heist in 1970s Framingham. (The film was shot in Ohio.) The internet’s boyfriend Josh O’Connor and my imaginary girlfriend Alana Haim co-star as a suburban couple caught up in the art theft underworld, alongside a cast that includes Bill Camp, Hope Davis and Reichardt regular John Magaro. Distributor MUBI declined requests for an advance look at the movie, but with a pedigree like this, you’ll find me first in line.

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “Bacurau” was my favorite film of 2020. He kicks off the back half of this year’s Fall Focus with “The Secret Agent” (Oct. 30), an espionage throwback set under a military dictatorship in 1977 Brazil, starring “Narcos” and “Civil War” scene-stealer Wagner Moura. “Oldboy” director Park Chan-wook follows up his dazzling “Decision to Leave” with “No Other Choice” (Nov. 3), an adaptation of a Donald E. Westlake novel about a laid-off middle manager who tries to get a foothold in today’s job market by killing off the competition.

Romanian prankster satirist Radu Jude is at it again with “Kontinental ’25” (Nov. 2) about a Transylvanian bailiff spiraling out after performing one too many evictions. Jude’s last film, the astonishing “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World,” got buried by its distributor with an unadvertised three-day release at the Alamo Drafthouse Seaport, so don’t miss your chance to see this one. “The Great Beauty” director Paolo Sorrentino’s Berlusconi burlesque “Loro” was one of the highlights of IFFBoston’s spring festival in 2019. He takes another jab at Italian presidential politics in “La Grazia” (Nov. 2), starring his regular collaborator Toni Servillo as a fictional leader nearing the end of his term.

The 2022 Fall Focus featured a Halloween night costume party screening of Rian Johnson’s “Glass Onion.” The tradition continues this year with the new Benoit Blanc mystery, “Wake Up Dead Man” (Oct. 31), which finds Daniel Craig’s fey detective investigating the murder of a monsignor in upstate New York. Joshes O’Connor and Brolin co-star, along with Glenn Close, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington and Andrew Scott. The director has been a friend of the festival ever since they opened with his sophomore feature “The Brothers Bloom” in 2009. Johnson and his wife, the brilliant film historian Karina Longworth, attended the Fall Focus in 2018 for a screening of Alfonso Cuaron’s “Roma,” sitting directly behind a local film critic and huge fan who didn’t notice because he has no situational awareness.

There’s also Bradley Cooper’s stand-up comedy drama “Is This Thing On?” (Nov. 4) starring Will Arnett — who seems to have borrowed his director’s hairdo — as a recent divorcee taking out his frustrations onstage. The surreal Cannes sensation “Sirât” (Nov. 1) follows a father searching for his daughter in the Moroccan desert, while “Kali Blues” director Bi Gan’s “Resurrection” (Nov. 1) is being billed as “a phantasmagoric dream machine.” And there are still almost a dozen other titles I haven’t mentioned yet.

“If you can’t find something you want to see in this lineup, I don’t know,” Tamm shrugged with a smile. “Maybe movies aren’t for you?”

IFFBoston’s Fall Focus runs at the Brattle Theatre from Thursday, Oct. 9, through Sunday, Oct. 12, and Thursday, Oct. 30, through Tuesday, Nov. 4.