Things might suck at the moment — the weather is real bad, the days are getting shorter, the Celtics and Bruins are getting off to a rough start, and a look at the front page of one’s favorite newspaper only causes further depression — but there are still plenty of reasons to find joy and hope in the muck and mire of modern life. Drake Maye rocks — in addition to putting up MVP-caliber stats, dude did a deep Pokémon reference when he showed up for a Halloween charity event dressed as a Dragonite — and the Pats are winning, the leaves are absolutely gorgeous even if the skies are grey, and there’s still a ton of great movies to see at IFFBoston’s second weekend of Fall Focus titles. Following a dynamite first weekend at the start of the month, the festival will return to the Brattle Theater in Cambridge from October 30 through November 5 to bring you the best of the festival circuit without you having to travel to Venice or a small town in Colorado to see them.
This weekend — elongated to Wednesday thanks to the last-minute addition of a big title from Searchlight — features new films by Rian Johnson, Bi Gan, Oliver Laxe, Paolo Sorrentino, HIKARI, and others, in addition to the filmmakers behind the five works we’ve chosen as our must-see picks. As always, if you have the time and the dough, definitely check out everything on the program, but these five are can’t-miss titles, including our current pick for the Best Movie of the Year. As always, you can find the complete list of titles at the IFFBoston website, where advance tickets for all of the festival’s selections and — if you’re a really cool cat — memberships are on sale. So, without further ado, here are our picks for what you should see during the second week of Fall Focus:
The Secret Agent
Kleber Mendonça Filho made waves back in 2020 with Bacurau, which you might remember as the first feature to hit all of the ad-hoc streaming platforms that local arthouses set up when the pandemic started, and his latest feature is an exceptional expansion of his skills and talents. This Le Carre-like neo-noir (think The Night Manager or Our Kind of Traitor rather than the “Karla” trilogy) tells the disjointed story of Marcelo (Wagner Moura), a researcher on the run from government-corporate persecution in late ’70s Brazil, back when a military junta controlled the country. You’ll hear a lot about very relevant political themes and whatnot, should you seek out a festival-authored synopsis, but what you’ll miss is that it’s a cracking good yarn full of entertainingly absurd digressions, tense action, black humor, and surprisingly personal touches related to Filho’s simultaneous work on the documentary Pictures of Ghosts (which, if you have the chance to see, you should). All of this is grounded in Moura’s astonishing performance, for which he received the Best Actor award at Cannes earlier this year. We saw it at TIFF and didn’t have the time to put together a longer review, and if we did, we’d basically say “Yeah, everybody on the Riviera got this one right. It’s great.”
‘THE SECRET AGENT’ :: Thursday, October 30 at 7:30 p.m. :: Advance Tickets
Train Dreams
If you’re in the mood for a well-earned ugly cry after a Halloween night where the only scary aspects of your outings were your pitiful prospects at not dying alone, you can’t do much better than this. We absolutely loved Clint Bentley’s adaptation of Denis Johnson’s novella back when we saw it at TIFF a month or so ago, a still and tranquil story of how, over the first half of the 20th century, a logger (Joel Edgerton) became a hermit in the Pacific Northwest. Family curses, lost loves, great fires, the ugly aspects of frontier life, the beauty of the deep forest: All are witnessed through Edgerton’s soulful eyes, building to a conclusion that would be corny in any other film if you weren’t sobbing at how well it hits. Narrated with rustic perfection by Will Patton and featuring great supporting turns from Felicity Jones and William H. Macy, Train Dreams is the rarest of all things — a Netflix acquisition worth getting out of the house for, as it deserves to be seen on the big screen.
‘TRAIN DREAMS’ :: Saturday, November 1 at 6:15 p.m. :: Advance Tickets
No Other Choice
Remember when we said in our review of this Park Chan-wook thriller, “So, go see No Other Choice. Seriously, just fucking go to it when it comes out on Christmas Day. You won’t be sorry?” Yeah, well, now’s your chance to see what we consider the Best Film of 2025 almost two months before it hits your local multiplex. If you haven’t read that rave, you should check it out. The equation is: The director of Oldboy and Decision to Leave, plus Lee Byung-Hun, plus a Donald E. Westlake plot about a salesman who decides to eliminate his competition while on the hunt for a new job. What does it all add up to? Go ahead and drop the Scorsese meme here, because “Absolute Cinema” only begins to cover it.
‘NO OTHER CHOICE’ :: Monday, November 3 at 8:30 p.m. :: Advance Tickets
Is This Thing On?
We’ll be real with you: each time we read the synopsis for a Bradley Cooper-directed feature, we think “Oh god, this is going to be a fucking disaster.” It was true for A Star is Born, it was even truer for Maestro, and it’s true for this, a tale of crisis and self-discovery based on the life of stand-up John Bishop. Will Arnett plays a divorced dad who decides to turn his pain into comedy for New York crowds, exacerbating his problems with his ex-wife (Laura Dern) while finding community in the comedy scene. You could call it “Marriage Story at the UCB,” and you’d probably not be wrong, but then again, you could have trashed Maestro before you got devastated by the humanity of the back two-thirds. Either way, a new Cooper film is always worth checking out, if nothing else to see if he can top the Thanksgiving Day sequence in his last movie — “Who abandoned Snoopy in the vestibule?” — in terms of comic brilliance.
‘IS THIS THING ON?’ :: Tuesday, November 4 at 8 p.m. :: Advance tickets
The Testament of Ann Lee
Looking at what we wrote about Mona Fastvold’s “epic” about the Patron Saint of the Shakers, you’re probably wondering why the hell we’re recommending you go see it. Your time’s valuable, right? Why would we tell you to waste it? Well, we don’t think you’ll waste your time — you might hate it (as we did), but you might love it, and we think a film this striking and bizarre deserves an audience’s broad consideration even if we didn’t really care for the final product. Starring Amanda Seyfried as Ann Lee, Fastvold creates one of the strangest musicals you’ll ever see on the screen and, unlike The End, the music’s actually pretty interesting. It all really hinges on whether or not you cared much for The Brutalist, with its austere visuals, slow movements, and boundless ambition. It may sound like we’re damning it with faint praise, but we really don’t mean to. Part of the joy of a film festival like Fall Focus is seeing something you’d otherwise never pay attention to, with, and this is important, a packed audience. Get into an argument with the guy in the seat next to you! Become best friends with someone who shares your opinions, or someone whose opinions differ from yours! Expand your horizons! Just don’t go to extremes: don’t throw anything at the screen or join the Shakers. They most likely won’t take you.
‘THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE’ :: Wednesday, November 5 at 7 p.m. :: Advance tickets