How to navigate the Philadelphia Film Festival

There are multitudinous ways to approach the 24th Philadelphia Film Festival.

It boasts more than 130 features, docs, and shorts, and shifts into full-throttle mode Friday, after Thursday's opening gala premiere of Charlie Kaufman's singular stop-motion animation gem, Anomalisa.

For the marathoners among us, this year's PFF - one of the strongest in recent memory - offers the chance to run from one end of town to the other, cramming in American films, French films, Spanish-language films, Asian films, the psychologically probing, and the psychotronic alike.

Take this Sunday, please. If you have the stamina, you could start your day at noon at the Ritz East with Remember, featuring Christopher Plummer as a nursing-home nonagenarian who plots revenge on the concentration camp commander responsible for the deaths of his family.

From there, it's a hop, skip, and jump to the Prince Theater for The Wave, a big-budget Norwegian disaster pic.

And what better way to chase down a Holocaust-themed thriller and a Scandinavian tsunami epic than back at the Ritz East with The Lobster, the Cannes-winning speculative fiction about a society where single men and women (the widowed, the divorced, the merely dumped) are required to find new partners within 45 days or else be turned into an animal, like the crustacean that gives Yorgos Lanthimos' dark satire its name. Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, John C. Reilly, and Léa Seydoux are part of the matchmaking scenario.

Still with us? It's only a trot across the Ritz East lobby to catch King Georges, Erika Frankel's documentary portrait of culinary lion Georges Perrier, whose world-renowned Le Bec-Fin was, for decades, Philadelphia's preeminent eating spot. But tastes, and times, change. C'est la vie.

And speaking of animals and food, you can end your night at the Ritz East with Men & Chicken, a surreal Danish farce about heredity and bioengineering, with an improbable turn from Hannibal's Mads Mikkelsen. PFF artistic director Michael Lerman calls Men & Chicken "the most unique movie we're showing."

What? Five movies in a day too much for you?

OK, how about a more modest diet of PFF Centerpiece fare: six films, most on different days, all at the Prince, that include at least three titles likely to proffer best-actress nominations come awards season. They are:

Room (Friday), a stunning mother-and-child hostage drama with Brie Larson and phenomenal kid actor Jacob Tremblay.

Our Brand Is Crisis (Saturday), with Sandra Bullock as an American political consultant called to Bolivia to run an unpopular leader's reelection campaign.

Carol (Sunday), Todd Haynes' exquisitely crafted 1950s love story starring Cate Blanchett as a wealthy woman who courts a young shopgirl, played by Cannes' best actress Rooney Mara.

Brooklyn (Tuesday), with Saoirse Ronan as a young Irish émigré starting anew in 1950s New York.

A Royal Night Out (Tuesday), one of those veddy British affairs, about Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret and their stealth escape from Buckingham Palace to celebrate V-E Day among the citizens of London. Bel Powley, virtually unrecognizable from the 1970s San Francisco coming-of-ager The Diary of a Teenage Girl, provides comic relief as Margaret, a very different sort of 15-year-old.

Youth (Wednesday), from The Great Beauty's Paolo Sorrentino, with Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel as two old friends - a composer and a filmmaker - contemplating life, love, aging, and art.

Of course, there are plenty of other ways to do the fest: culling from the American Independents program, the documentary lineup, the food-centric Feast servings (a new category this year), the vintage titles in the From the Vaults section, the crazy gore and depravity of the Graveyard Shift, the regionally focused Greater Filmadelphia program, the Masters of Cinema lineup (new ones from Terence Davies, Arnaud Desplechin, Jafar Panahi, and more), New French Films, the music-themed Sight & Soundtrack selection, Spanish Language Stories, the high-profile fare of the Spotlights section, and World Narratives. There's also a free outdoor screening of Monty Python's The Life of Brian at Shoemaker Green on the Penn campus, and a retrospective of the entire Charlie Kaufman oeuvre, from Being John Malkovich onward.

And for Halloween, the PFF programers have dreamed up a nightmarish treat: a back-to-back-to-claws-in-the-back run of the complete Nightmare on Elm Street canon, part of the fest's Wes Craven retrospective.

Michael Moore, who has scared moviegoers in altogether different ways with award-winning docs about gun violence, corporate downsizing, and the high costs of U.S. health care, is the special guest for the closing-night feature, Where to Invade Next. It's the documentarian's first film in six years, and it finds Moore heading abroad to observe how successful social and economic programs in other countries might be applied stateside.

And stop the presses: On Thursday, the PFF added Spotlight, about the Boston Globe's investigative series on sexual abuse in the Catholic church, to the schedule. The Oscar-bound ensemble drama, headed by Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo and Liev Schrieber, plays Wednesday at 6 p.m. at the Prince.

J. Andrew Greenblatt, the festival's executive director, proudly points out that there are 21 films on this year's slate directed by women. Of course, that's a ratio way below the real-world gender breakdown, but it's a considerable improvement over what passes for gender equality in Hollywood filmmaking these days.

And for cineasts who couldn't make it to Cannes, Telluride, Toronto, or Venice, some of the strongest work to debut at those fests in previous months are here, now, in Philadelphia. So, too, are many filmmakers and actors. A quick scan of the guest list of artists and actors showing off their respective wares includes Zoë Bell (Camino), Todd Haynes (Carol), Scream star Jamie Kennedy (for the Wes Craven retrospective), Brian Klugman (Baby Baby Baby), Iditarod champ Lance Mackey (The Great Alone), Josh Mond (James White), Gaspar Noé (Love), Patricia Riggen (The 33), and the aforementioned Moore and Perrier.

Go forth and festivalize.

srea@phillynews.com
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@Steven_Rea