The Telluride Film Festival draws a few thousand cinephiles from across the US who make the annual pilgrimage to this ski town in Colorado with the hope of catching the best films of the year, along with listening to unique conversations with filmmakers as well as the stars.
Telluride is held a week before the Toronto International Film Festival (scheduled to start on September 6), and thus it is here that the buzz about the Oscar frontrunners first starts. Telluride audiences were the first in North America to see Oscar winning films like The Artist, The King's Speech and Slumdog Millionaire.
As expected, this year's festival was full of surprises and many of the films are going to continue to build up the buzz as we approach the awards season.
Here then is my list of the top 10 films from the festival, in alphabetic order. I have not included two important 2012 films in the list, since I saw them before they were shown in Telluride -- Christian Petzoid's Barbara (Silver Bear winner for best director at the Berlin Film Festival and Germany's official entry for the foreign language Oscar race) and Michael Heneke's Amour (Palme d'Or winner at this year's Cannes Film Festival) are must see films.
Also not included in the list is Ben Affleck's gripping thriller, Argo, about a complex and hilarious plot to rescue six American Embassy employees who took refuge in the Canadian Ambassador's residence in Tehran in 1979, while the world was focused on the American hostages inside the US mission. While Argo is a well made film, I was offended by its politics -- the way it portrays Iranians as scary evil villains.
Take a look.
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