SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Ah, Toronto in September - glitz, glamour, stars. And I just don't mean the Maple Leafs. The Toronto Film Festival screens many of the movies that we'll all soon get to see. Critic Siddhant Adlakha joins us now from Toronto. Thanks so much for being with us, Siddhant.
SIDDHANT ADLAKHA: Thank you for having me, Scott.
SIMON: Tell us about some of the films that have received a lot of attention there.
ADLAKHA: Of course. One of the films that has really stood out is "Babygirl," starring Nicole Kidman. It's got Kidman as a powerful, high-strung tech CEO who begins a very salacious and kinky affair with her much younger intern, played by Harris Dickinson. And it's a film about power and everything that means, both in a professional and personal as well as a sexual context. And it's a very exciting but, at the same time, a very human film. It's intimate and funny and thrilling all at once.
SIMON: I must say, we don't hear the word kinky on NPR a lot. Thank you very much.
ADLAKHA: (Laughter).
SIMON: Any other films?
ADLAKHA: One that I've really enjoyed, which has received a bit of a mixed reception - but understandably so - is the postapocalyptic musical "The End" from Joshua Oppenheimer. It's his first foray into narrative features. Prior to this, he has made exclusively documentaries about genocide, so you can imagine what a musical from a mind like that might look like. It is about a family who has been in an underground bunker for about 20 years, a wealthy family. They have, you know, servants and household help down there, and they're reckoning with the fact that they have also contributed to the downfall of society and civilization as people in, you know, the energy sector. And their lives underground kind of turn upside down when a mysterious survivor shows up.
SIMON: What performance has stood out for you, Siddhant?
ADLAKHA: One of the performances that captivated me most was Amy Adams in "Nightb****," which is - I don't want to say it's a body horror film, but it is a film in which this new mother of a 2-year-old is still dealing with the physical changes that she's gone through and the hormonal changes. And then she starts to turn into or believes she turns into a dog at night. Amy Adams is caught between these two worlds of wanting to be a good mother and wanting to be liberated from the constraints and expectations of motherhood, and I think she wrestles with that in really interesting ways. It's a very verbose and wordy film that explains its themes. But at the same time, all the things it doesn't explain you can kind of intuit just from Amy Adams' eyes. I think she is absolutely captivating to watch.
SIMON: Siddhant, I gather that you were just in Venice for that film festival.
ADLAKHA: That's right. I was.
SIMON: What are some films you've seen in Venice and/or Toronto that you don't want us to miss but might otherwise fly by?
ADLAKHA: The No. 1 film that comes to mind for me is Brady Corbet's "The Brutalist," which really embodies the feeling of, they sure don't make them like that anymore because it is this mid-20th-century American immigrant epic about a Hungarian-born Jewish architect who survives the Holocaust and then moves to the United States and then is drawn into not just the world of architecture but the world of wealth and power. And it's about what the American dream means in the modern world, and it also takes some of its cues from the works of Ayn Rand, which isn't to say that it necessarily falls along the same political gradient, but there are a lot of similarities it has to Rand's work "The Fountainhead."
SIMON: I was just - I was thinking that, the Gary Cooper film.
ADLAKHA: Yes, exactly, the 1949 version by King Vidor, especially. But it's almost in conversation with that movie and exists as kind of a flip side to that version of "The Fountainhead," especially. But it's a wonderful, absorbing and, at times, really rigorous story. And the film runs about 3 1/2 hours, but it's impossible to look away from it.
SIMON: Critic Siddhant Adlakha in Toronto, thanks so much for being with us and taking in so much for us.
ADLAKHA: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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