Author: rb809rb

Forty years into a career that has made him one of American cinema’s most recognizable character actors, John Turturro has a Cannes best actor prize, an enviable résumé and exactly zero Oscar mornings when his name was read aloud with the words “and the nominees are.”

Sony Pictures Classics is determined to end the drought with his work in the acclaimed “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York,” which premiered at Sundance last January and made its fall festival bow at Telluride this weekend, where the film and Turturro’s invigorating turn as an aging pickpocket are drawing acclaim.

Turturro, 69, has been making the rounds in the Colorado mountains, attending Q&As and a Saturday night dinner hosted by Sony Pictures Classics, where writer-director Noah Segan mingled with press and industry attendees.

Turturro has spent four decades operating in the space reserved for actors everyone recognizes and almost nobody thinks of as an Oscar nominee. He has worked with masters of cinema such as the Coen brothers, Spike Lee and Robert Redford and has appeared opposite everyone from Tom Hanks to Adam Sandler. He’s played gangsters, professors, detectives, eccentrics, husbands, fathers and men who seem to have wandered into the wrong movie and somehow made it better.

And yet, the Academy has never invited him to the party.

And it’s not like he hasn’t been close. Turturro won best actor at Cannes for the Coen brothers’ “Barton Fink” in 1991. Three years later, his combustible Herbie Stempel in Robert Redford’s “Quiz Show” collected Golden Globe and SAG Award nominations, the kind of precursor support that usually precedes an Oscar bid. But each time, the industry seemed to look elsewhere.

The television world has been kinder. His weary defense attorney in “The Night Of,” HBO’s 2016 crime drama, drew Emmy, Golden Globe and SAG Award nominations. His tender, unraveling Irving Bailiff on “Severance,” Apple TV’s dystopian workplace thriller, has since earned him two Emmy nominations, the most recent lost to his own castmate Tramell Tillman in 2025.

“The Only Living Pickpocket in New York” can change that.

In a similar vein to Richard Jenkins’ first career nomination for the 2007 drama “The Visitor,” Turturro can be the overdue veteran to finally see his name in lights. Segan’s Sundance breakout, acquired by SPC for a fall release, gives Turturro something four decades of great supporting performances never could: a movie that he leads, one that lives and dies on him.

He plays Harry Lehman, an analog thief operating in a city where the very concept of pickpocketing has become obsolete. Wallets increasingly contain less cash, phones have replaced maps and tickets and two-factor authentication has made the modern world almost aggressively hostile to the old-fashioned criminal. Harry is clinging to a disappearing profession while caring for his ailing wife, Rosie.

While that metaphor is hardly subtle, it’s also part of its appeal. Harry is not simply a thief whose trade is dying; he’s a man confronting his own obsolescence.

SPC calls it the finest performance of Turturro’s career. Distributor hyperbole is usually best treated as campaign copy. But here, it resonates. Turturro has never been an actor who needed to announce himself. He slips into other people’s scenes, finds the detail nobody else thought to play and then, almost imperceptibly, becomes the most interesting person in the room. The Academy has rewarded that instinct repeatedly, just not when Turturro has been the person standing at the center of the frame.

As an awards campaign, the studio is following a familiar formula: a beloved, never-nominated veteran finally gets a leading role worthy of his gifts. But the strongest version of the pitch is not “Give John Turturro an Oscar.” It is “Look at what John Turturro has been doing all along.”

The Academy has historically responded to overdue narratives, particularly when the performance provides a credible reason to act on the sentiment. Turturro has the résumé, the festival pedigree and the late-career showcase that can turn years of admiration into a voting impulse.

“The Only Living Pickpocket in New York” is a movie about a man whose skills belong to another era, trying to prove they still have value. The meta-text is impossible to miss. Turturro’s awards case makes essentially the same argument about the actor himself.

It also helps to have Steve Buscemi in the cast, who could mount his own first awards run for “Wild Horse Nine,” along with the best awards campaigner this side of the sun, Jamie Lee Curtis, who delivers a killer one-scene wonder.

Like a lot of SPC films, neither the movie nor Turturro may seem the loudest voice in the room right now and plenty of pundits will write it off early, especially once precursors start rolling in. But as the studio has shown with titles like “The Father,” “Parallel Mothers” and “I’m Still Here,” the ground game and striking when it matters most, is what wins these campaigns.

And Turturro may not even be the film’s only awards story. Segan, long a familiar face in front of the camera, wrote and directed “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York” himself and a spare, mournful original like this one is exactly the kind of writer-director calling card the original screenplay race tends to reward. It happens more than voters remember. “Frozen River,” another SPC sleeper, paired Melissa Leo’s lead nomination with a surprise original screenplay nod for writer-director Courtney Hunt and “Nebraska” did the same for Bruce Dern and scribe Bob Nelson. If the film connects with voters, Segan’s script could ride in alongside its star.

The best actor field, notably, is shaping up to be incredibly crowded. Heading into the fall festivals, pundits had already penciled in the likes of Matt Damon (“The Odyssey”), Ryan Gosling (“Project Hail Mary”) and Sebastian Stan (“Fjord”), and Venice and Telluride added John Malkovich (“Wild Horse Nine”) and Andrew Scott (“Elsinore”) to the conversation. SPC will have to make noise without overselling a performance whose appeal lies in its subtlety. But if the campaign can persuade voters to see Harry not as a novelty but as the culmination of everything Turturro has spent a career doing, the narrative becomes difficult to ignore.

Let’s see if this pickpocket can steal some hearts along the way.

Netflix wants the “ink” to dry on its Oscar prospects.

Danny Boyle made his first trip to Venice with “Ink,” his adaptation of James Graham’s stage sensation, which opened the 83rd edition in competition before moving through Telluride and Toronto, with the streamer giving it a December theatrical release and a January streaming date.

The early temperature is reading warm. “Ink” drew a four-minute standing ovation on opening night in Venice, and the reactions filtering out of Telluride have been buzzing across the mountains, the kind of enthusiasm and respect a Netflix campaign is built to amplify.

The subject is an origin myth of modern media: Rupert Murdoch’s 1969 acquisition of a dying tabloid called The Sun and the rapid transformation that followed. Graham, adapting his own Tony-nominated play, approaches the story with the mechanics of a heist. Boyle supplies the velocity.

The central question is not simply how Murdoch built a newspaper. It is how two men helped invent the modern attention economy that shapes all of our lives today.

Guy Pearce plays a brash, thirty-something Murdoch, an outsider with a chip on his shoulder and a plan for disrupting Fleet Street. Jack O’Connell plays editor Larry Lamb, the working-class newspaperman Murdoch pushes past every line the establishment believes cannot be crossed.

Both actors have obvious awards narratives, but two very different categories to break into.

Pearce arrives two years after his first Oscar nomination, a supporting actor bid for “The Brutalist,” which gives him the benefit of recent Academy recognition. And the role could hardly be more of the moment. Murdoch is a figure many hold responsible for the fractured, combustible information environment the U.S. is living through right now and there is a particular charge in watching an actor humanize the young man who lit the fuse. That timeliness is the kind of thing that fuels an Oscar campaign.

O’Connell arrives with something different: momentum. Between “Sinners” and the “28 Years Later” films, he is coming off a stretch that has significantly raised his visibility. Being a hot commodity right now, and perhaps even a package deal with Pearce in voters’ minds, could give him a fighting shot in a very crowded best actor field.

We have seen roles like Pearce’s cakewalk to nominations before, purely on the nature of the part, even when pundits wrote them off early. Look at the run of real-life figures who landed supporting bids: Jon Voight in “Ali” (2001), Matt Damon in “Invictus” (2009), Kenneth Branagh in “My Week with Marilyn” (2011), Christopher Plummer in “All the Money in the World” (2017), Sam Rockwell in “Vice” (2018), J.K. Simmons in “Being the Ricardos” (2021) and Jeremy Strong in “The Apprentice” (2024).

Pearce may not have the most screen time, but he is memorable in every frame. O’Connell has the more obvious breakout narrative and, as the story’s beating heart, the showier dramatic arc.

Two performances from one film can coexist comfortably in an awards campaign, but they can also create a strategic problem. The distributor must establish why both actors are essential without letting voters perceive one as stealing oxygen from the other.

There is also a screenplay story here, and a recent precedent worth studying.

Graham is adapting his own acclaimed play, which puts “Ink” in the adapted screenplay conversation and on a path that “One Night in Miami” walked in 2020. That film, too, launched at Venice and Kemp Powers turned his own stage work into an adapted screenplay nomination while the movie also landed an acting nod for Leslie Odom Jr. A playwright translating his own material, a festival launch and a performance the industry embraces: the template is right there.

But Netflix will look to check even more boxes.

Beyond the two actors, “Ink” is built to contend in the crafts. Its production design, by Carson McColl and Gareth Pugh, rebuilds a vanished Fleet Street. Fin Oates cuts the film with a fragmented, kinetic energy that recalls the associative style Hank Corwin brought to Adam McKay’s “The Big Short” and “Vice.” Johnnie Burn, the Oscar-winning sound designer of “The Zone of Interest,” lends the film one of the most decorated ears in the business. And composer Daniel Pemberton supplies an original score with the propulsion Boyle’s movies demand, capping a bombastic year that also includes “Project Hail Mary.”

Netflix has the resources to make all of those cases.

The larger question is whether the company has the bandwidth. Its fall slate is stacked, with “La Bola Negra,” “The Adventures of Cliff Booth,” “Possible Love,” “Gentle Monster” and “The Mosquito Bowl” all angling for the same oxygen. “Ink” will have to compete not only against rival distributors but against Netflix’s own contenders for screeners, headlines, events, Q & As and voter attention. The Venice-Telluride-Toronto sequence helps enormously, giving the movie the sort of early critical footprint that can turn an awards campaign into a sustained conversation.

And Boyle’s presence adds another narrative. As the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind “Slumdog Millionaire,” he brings such a distinctive visual and kinetic signature that the fall circuit was an obvious place for the film to bow.

The James Graham connection gives “Ink” a larger cultural context. His work has repeatedly mined the intersection of power, institutions and public life, from politics to journalism. “Ink” arrives in a media environment in which the questions surrounding Murdoch’s influence feel less like history than an origin story for the world audiences inhabit now.

That resonance is the film’s best weapon, and the campaign will not have to manufacture it.

“Ink” argues that we are all still living in the paper they printed.