The big-ticket item last night was the world premiere screening of Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles, a film that—in what sometimes turns out to be an ominous sign (I’m thinking specifically of Terry Gilliam’s Tideland)—won’t be appearing in any of the other fall festivals. But that’s unaccountable: The movie is a delight, a thoroughly entertaining slice of historical fiction about a 17-year-old (Zac Efron) selected to play Lucius in Welles’s Mercury Theater production of Julius Casear. The movie is aided immeasurably by unknown Christian McKay, who not only sounds like Welles (in real life, too, judging from the onstage Q&A), but captures his mannerisms and his ability to make everyone around him feel like a world-class talent. The backstage intrigue finds a balance between celebrating the triumphs of ensemble work and depicting what it’s like to take a back seat to a genius; the film has the idealism of most coming-of-age films, but cut with a bracing dose of cynicism, particularly when it comes the life lessons the main character learns from the Mercury’s resident object-of-desire (Claire Danes, pictured above with Efron).

One of Linklater’s hallmarks as a director has been his consistency. Meanwhile, the dominant narrative here is that the previously slumming Jonathan Demme has returned to form with Rachel Getting Married, which has been touted as a throwback to the glory days of Something Wild. There’s much to admire in the film, but that strikes me as a knee-jerk counterpoint—for one thing, Rachel Getting Married’s rough-hewn DV style is worlds removed from Wild’s polished wackiness. For my money, Rachel is a case of a great director redeeming a slightly uneven script (by Jenny "Daughter of Sidney" Lumet), which is most interesting when exploring the dynamic between two sisters—one who’s negotiated a fragile rapport with her family (Rosemarie DeWitt) and the other (Anne Hathaway), a recovering addict, who’s returning to the clan on bad terms.

Like Margot at the Wedding, the movie audaciously allows a great deal to be left unsaid. The marriage is interracial, but that’s never commented upon; the parents’ divorce is taken as a given; the Hindu-themed wedding, between a secular Jew and an African-American, plays out as a multicultural cornucopia—above all, it’s a supremely inclusive film. Whatever contrivances it falls back on, the movie sends you out on a high.

The other major festival narrative has it that the Coen brothers have, to quote their movie, "screwed the pooch" with Burn After Reading, their first film since their Oscar hat trick with No Country for Old Men. (Indeed, it’s the second year in a row I’ve seen a Coens film here.) Supposedly written before No Country, Burn plays like a raspberry to that film’s admirers; imagine a movie just as nihilistic as that one, but imbued with the broad yuks of O Brother Where Art Thou? Exiting the screening, a colleague claimed that the Coens’ usual contempt for their characters is why the film doesn’t work, but I don’t think it’s so much that (actually, I kind of liked this movie’s take-no-prisoners attitude) as much as it is the fact that it isn’t quite funny enough. It’s not another Big Lebowski, as the trailer suggested it might have been. In Coen terms, I’d place it in the middle of the road, somewhere in the neighborhood of—appropriatedly enough—Intolerable Cruelty.