The Telluride film festival returned yesterday, and aside from uploading proof of vaccination, providing a recent negative Covid-19 test result, and wearing masks inside, the biggest difference from recent years was that it started a day early (yay, more film!) and was marked by a series of drizzles and downpours. Every store in town was out of umbrellas and covered outdoor seating was at a premium.

We started our pre-festival stay with the customary gondola ride to get dinner at the Black Iron Kitchen with a great regional menu and — importantly for a group of friends from across the country converging on a film festival — a huge sheltered plaza with great airflow, fires, and table side heating for cool evening dining. The next afternoon, persistence paid off and we got a sidewalk table at the New Sheridan in time for brunch, great people watching, and the day’s first precipitation.

From there, it was off to my first screening of the festival, crashing the patron preview of Encounter, which is here in coordination with a tribute to Riz Ahmed. In a festival first, one of their Silver Medallion honorees won’t be here in person (damned Covid), but the Show will go on nonetheless via the modern miracles of Zoom.

Michael Pearce’s beautifully-shot new film bills itself as sci-fi, and the first act makes a very strong statement with a meteorite crashing to earth with lens flares and ominous debris entering the ecosystem via mosquito bites. Ahmed’s character becomes aware of this alien invasion, douses himself in insect repellent like it’s Axe body spray, and embarks on a quest to keep his two adorable children safe from the impending attack of mind-controlling microorganisms. It’s a great premise and the assaultive sound design and aggressive close-ups set a tense mood. Bugs are everywhere and they’re terrifying at any level of magnification. After a hasty exit, the paranoid overnight road trip finds moments of fun for father and son on the road to keep the kids at ease: toys, junk food, speeding down the highway, swims in mountain lakes, and scenic starlit campfires. However, the film stumbled (for me) when it widened its focus to the larger world, first in the form of Octavia Spencer’s empathetic parole officer then to the wider world of law enforcement and even some heavily armed “three percenters” and all of their intersections with the emerging crisis.

Relying heavily on monologued info-dumps to keep changing the context and putting children in peril to elevate the tension, the road trip goes off the rails so many times and in so many ways that it ends up in another dimension. By the time it reaches its comically fevered and emotionally overwrought finale with a bright light shining down from the heavens all that I could think about was “Can’t we just let Riz Ahmed have a nice time on film, just once?”

I wouldn’t call the next screening entirely successful, but it was a much-needed change of pace. After rushing across town through a downpour, I settled in at the Palm Theater for a tribute to Peter Dinklage, the festival’s other Silver Medallion honoree. He did make it to town and sat down for an engaging chat with John Horn, peppered with humility and humorous recollections of his career to date. These conversations can always feel a bit awkward, but Dinklage was a great sport and never failed to turn any question into an occasion for a witty and thoughtful response.

He is in town to support Joe Wright’s musical (!) adaptation of Cyrano, in which he plays the title role as a heartsick swashbuckling poet who channels his unrequited love for the young and beautiful Roxanne (Haley Bennett) into a series of romantic letters for a rabbit-brained soldier (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.) who is the object of her instantaneous affections. Based on a long-gestating script by Erica Schmidt, the film was ultimately filmed during the pandemic with a Sardinian town as a makeshift bubble for hundreds of cast and crew. With music composed by Aaron & Bryce Dessner and lyrics by their The National bandmate Matt Berninger & Carin Besser, the whole film has a bit of a feeling of watching someone’s locked-down fever dream. Wright throws his facility for scale into opulent stagings with storybook color palettes, lavish period costumes, credible sword fights, doomed battle sequences, as well as singing soldiers, dancing sheep, and sensual bread makers.

Although I was skeptical of the need to retell the story with song, I did appreciate that it was the type of musical where characters burst into song and dance only on the occasions when mere words simply won’t do. The story — which finds Ben Mendelsohn as the leering wealthy clown-faced antagonist and romantic competition — is a bit thin despite the two hour running time, which is padded with a few good songs and a, shall-we-say, wide variety of vocal talents. Dinklage is quite good as the anguished wordsmith, but Roxanne’s limited agency beyond as an object of obsession (who herself uses clever linguistic manipulations to preserve her station) makes it challenging to invest in these classic characters as anything more than avatars. As the tale lurches and swoons toward its tragic conclusion, the set pieces get grander, but the it missed the mark for me in terms of an emotional payoff. While it might be a hot mess of cinema, it’s fascinating nonetheless to see what kind of art people made while we were all losing our minds during the pandemic.

I followed up Cyrano with another film whose ending I knew in advance. And honestly, I’m not sure that I could have made it through The Rescue, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s account of the daring 2018 operation to free a Thai soccer team and their coach from a flooded cave, without knowing that all of those kids made it out alive. As with their Oscar-winning Free Solo the filmmakers again tell the story of those who dare to ask “what if the impossible … isn’t?”

This time, in place of a single guy with supernatural climbing abilities and a diminished response to fear, they focus on a makeshift alliance of inventive cave diving nerds whose hobbyist pursuits of deep dark holes and limited emotional response made them the only people on the planet with the expertise required to spearhead a perilous expedition to rescue twelve stranded and starving teen boys. They leverage fancy graphics to convey the scale of the challenge, some re-enactments with the actual people to provide a sense of the terrifying nature of navigating the tight spaces, and contemporary footage and news accounts to remind us of the doomed immediacy of those weeks that captivated the world.

But, amazingly, the most compelling elements of the documentary are the interviews conducted with the divers, a self-professed collection of oddballs whose outcast childhoods and ability to put their feelings on a shelf led them into the pursuit of this admittedly strange and dangerous recreational activity. Their recollections of the mounting challenges, consideration of the frankly terrible options that remained with infinitesimal chance of success, and their narration of finding a purpose to their own level of detachment in service of transporting their “precious cargo” through the murky waters made for a gut-wrenching, inspiring, and deeply riveting story. We all knew the approximate story, but Chin and Vasarhelyi take in the whole picture tho who us who made it happen, why them, and exactly how they did it. Their gift as filmmakers is in capturing the ways that improbable intersections of luck, talent, and social networks combined with hundreds of volunteers, multiple governments, and professionals from armed forces made something of a miracle. There’s perhaps nothing surprising in the way that the story itself turned out, but it didn’t in any way diminish the overwhelming sense of relief, admiration, and emotional release when it does reach its now-preordained conclusion.

A terrific way to end the night, even if the adrenaline made it hard to get enough sleep to start seeing more screenings early the next morning.