Over a holiday weekend dedicated to labor, this year’s Telluride Film Festival attendees couldn’t help being reminded of striking workers: the members of SAG-AFTRA, the television and film actors’ union currently in a standoff with the Hollywood studios. It wasn’t merely the absence of performers at pre- and post-screening events — or at the restaurants, parties and public conversations conducted in the park right off the main street of the former mining town. It was more that their presence onscreen made such a strong argument for the gifts they have brought to what is fast becoming a vintage year in film.
The list of notable performances included but wasn’t limited to Andrew Scott’s aching turn in “All of Us Strangers”; Emma Stone’s meticulously wild embrace of her character in “Poor Things”; Paul Giamatti’s dyspeptic mood of a prep school instructor in “The Holdovers,” Colman Domingo’s flourishes as the civil rights maverick Bayard Rustin in…
