The festival's 27th edition opens with an Alicia Keys documentary and closes with Pedro Pascal's cello drama, while honouring Variety's annual list of rising actors at an October 18 brunch.
Jaafar Jackson, who plays Michael Jackson in the upcoming biopic "Michael," is one of ten actors the Newport Beach Film Festival will honour at its 27th annual Honor Brunch on October 18. The festival itself runs October 15 to 22 in Newport Beach, California, with more than 100 features and 250 shorts from 21 countries screening across the week.
The list, assembled by Variety since 1998, also includes Inde Navarrette, whose work spans film and television this year, and Bernarda Creed-Miles, who plays Marianne Dashwood in a new Jane Austen adaptation. Creed-Miles told Variety her first audition for the part was "actually really bad," calling the process "intimidating and nerve-wracking." She got a second shot anyway, hit it off with director Georgia Oakley in a conversation about taste and the source material, and landed the role opposite Daisy Edgar-Jones, her co-star from the 2018 film "Pond Life."
"It just makes your job a lot easier when you're fighting the tide of someone else's work," she said of building the sister dynamic at the centre of the film with Edgar-Jones and Caitriona Balfe. "I had so many moments of days where I was like, 'Oh, my God, I'm actually doing something really good here,' and that's rare."
A festival stacked with names
Around the honorees, the festival's own programming reads like an awards-season preview. Opening night belongs to Alicia Keys' tour documentary "Keys to Summer." Closing night is Searchlight's "Behemoth!," Tony Gilroy's drama starring Pedro Pascal as a cellist returning to Los Angeles after two decades away, with Olivia Wilde, Eva Victor and Alexa Swinton rounding out the cast.
The Centerpiece slate is heavy with marquee pairings: Martin McDonagh's "Wild Horse Nine" with John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell, Anton Corbijn's "A Talent for Murder" with Helen Mirren and Alden Ehrenreich, James Gray's "Paper Tiger" featuring Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller, plus new films from Beth de Araújo and Danny Boyle.
The festival's international Spotlight section pulls from fifteen countries, and the title generating the most noise there is Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi's "La Bola Negra." The generational queer drama, starring Guitarricadelafuente alongside Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close, got a 16-minute standing ovation at Cannes in May and went on to win the People's Choice Award at TIFF. That's a trajectory film festivals tend to chase, and Newport Beach landing it for its Spotlight slot says something about how the festival is positioning itself this year.
Documentaries get their own weight on the schedule too, including Ron Howard's "Avedon," on photographer Richard Avedon, and the world premiere of "As Far Back as I Can Remember... The Story of 'Goodfellas,'" from Lisa Downs and Ashley Pugh.
NBFF's executive director Gregg Schwenk framed the lineup as capturing "bold storytelling and fearless voices" as awards season gets going. Whether any of this year's ten honorees end up on a different kind of shortlist come January is the question the festival exists to float a little early.
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