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August 29, 2025 
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Even though it’s a holiday weekend, there’s so much going on in movies that I hardly know where to start. How about with dogs, a pet subject of mine (pun intended). I’m crazy about them, especially my stoic dachshund, Dolly, and never miss a chance to assign related stories.
Our chief film critic, Manohla Dargis, took a fascinating look at how movies from the silents through “Superman” this summer use canines to forge human connections — with characters onscreen and with those of us in the audience. She writes, “Dogs can be comic, lovable, heroic or tragic; much depends on their humans because, while man rarely bites dog, he does execute unspeakable abuse on his ostensible best friend.”
(If you’re more of a cat person, we’ve got you. My colleague Esther Zuckerman talked with Darren Aronofsky about the winning star of his new crime thriller, “Caught Stealing”: the feline Tonic. Truth be told, the director isn’t crazy about cats and even has socks with his dog’s picture, but Tonic won him over. He said, “I was like, ‘Look at this brilliant cat.’”)
While it’s technically August, the fall festival season is already heating up. Telluride, which begins Friday, just unveiled its lineup, and it includes a new documentary about E. Jean Carroll, who sued President Trump for defamation and sexual abuse and won jury verdicts in both cases. While the festival and the filmmaker, Ivy Meeropol, are enthusiastic about the movie, it arrives as distributors are getting cold feet about documentaries, especially political ones, and it’s not yet clear if the new film will get released.
Also at Telluride will be the biopic “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.” The filmmaker, Scott Cooper, and the stars Jeremy Allen White and Jeremy Strong, are taking an unexpected approach, focusing on the making of the 1982 album “Nebraska,” as opposed to one of the Boss’s bigger hits. By covering that album and “the depressive breakdown that Springsteen experienced in the aftermath of its creation, the film instead tells a story about the fragility of mental health and the limits of art alone to sustain it,” writes my colleague Ben Sisario, who spoke with the team about the production.
Of course Telluride isn’t the only festival underway right now. Venice is in full swing and my colleague Kyle Buchanan has already filed several dispatches, including this one about “Megadoc,” a documentary about the tumultuous production of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis.” It sounds fascinating and I’m already making plans for a double feature of that and “Hearts of Darkness,” the classic 1991 doc about the tumultuous production of the director’s “Apocalypse Now.”
In the meantime, enjoy the movies!
