TELLURIDE, Colo. — Truth can certainly be stranger than fiction. If you look toward the Telluride Film Festival, it might also be stronger.

While the rest of Hollywood turns to far-fetched fantasies of flying superheroes, impossible romances and talking toys, the filmmakers behind the standout movies at the Colorado festival are finding that some of the year’s most powerful stories can be found in real-life events.

While that’s obviously the case with Telluride’s esteemed documentaries, three of the most enthusiastically received dramatic features at the just-concluded festival — the world premieres "The King’s Speech," "127 Hours" and "The First Grader" — are based on the extraordinary accomplishments of actual people. A number of the festival’s other prominent new features, including "The Way Back," "Of Gods and Men," "Carlos" and "Incendies," also have historical events undergirding their foundation. ...read more.

Someone needs to file an age-discrimination lawsuit in Hollywood -- to force the studios to hire a few more young actors.

The fall movie season has been geared more toward mature audiences for decades, but it’s hard to remember a year with so many centerpiece movies featuring actors who are old enough to remember when popcorn was 20 cents, most theaters had a single screen and Stanley Kubrick was just getting started.

Among the prominent co-stars of films coming out in the next two months are Eli Wallach (94 years old) and Ernest Borgnine (93). Directors Clint Eastwood (80) and James L. Brooks (70) have promising films coming out. Jeff Bridges, Robert De Niro and Helen Mirren have good showings. Meanwhile, Karl Urban, 38, is by far the youngest of the principal cast members in "Red." ...read more.

LOS ANGELES — For a man who’s so stone-faced on the screen, Danny Trejo sure has a lot to say.

Standing up at a banquette inside the classic Hollywood restaurant Musso & Frank on a recent afternoon, Trejo tells an elderly man hovering uncertainly in the doorway to "come on in," imitates director Robert Rodriguez’s text-happy fingers, gestures to the waiter for a refill of his cranberry and 7-Up ("Manny, another one!") and turns to a reporter to decry the flaws in the California prison system before offering some culinary advice ("You’ve never had the eggs Benedict here? You gotta have them!"). Then, he follows said reporter into the restroom, where the business at hand does little to stop Trejo’s riff about the time his then-9-year-old-son greeted Robert De Niro with a "Taxi Driver" imitation. ("I said 'Mi hijo, how do you know that movie?'") ...read more.

Years ago the great American movie critic Pauline Kael made it safe to enjoy bad movies. "Because movies are so rarely great art, if we can’t appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them," she wrote.

Based on early reviews, "Piranha 3D" sounded like great trash — a lightweight exploitation movie with a sense of humor to accompany its buckets of gore and gratuitous bare boobs. It goes out of its way — and then some — to be an outrageous, mindless good time, and in trying so hard to please it becomes exhausting. In a short while, the movie becomes something like a loud, drunken party guest whose dirty jokes prove embarrassing instead of amusing.

As remakes go, "Piranha 3D" has pretty good DNA. The original 1978 film was both a calculated rip-off and clever B-movie parody of "Jaws." It was easily the best of a sorry lot that included "Barracuda," "Orca: The Killer Whale," "Tentacles" (about a giant octopus) and, less subtly, "Great White," a movie that was such a shameless copy that "Jaws" distributor Universal sued and got the movie pulled from American theaters. ...read more.

Patricia Clarkson seems to lift any movie she’s in, and she’s in a lot these days, with no fewer than four releases this year.

Though she’s an indie-film stalwart, she hasn’t escaped the notice of big-name moviemakers. How many actors can say they did back-to-back Woody Allen movies (“Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” “Whatever Works”), then a Martin Scorsese picture (“Shutter Island”)? ...read more.

TOKYO — Dolphins have been herded into a cove as part of an annual hunt in the Japanese seaside town made famous by an Oscar-winning documentary about their slaughter, conservationist group Sea Shepherd said Friday. A town official said none were killed.

The dolphin hunt at Taiji, documented in "The Cove," begins Sept. 1 every year. The boats returned empty Wednesday. But on Thursday, some dolphins were corralled into the inlet, according to anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd and a fishing official in Taiji.

The official in charge of media queries at the Taiji fishing organization said a handful of dolphins were kept for aquariums, but the rest were set free Friday morning. He declined to give details. ...read more.

TELLURIDE, Colo. — Many tears were shed at the world premiere screening of "127 Hours" at the Telluride Film Festival on Saturday afternoon. But few in the audience of some 500 cried harder than Aron Ralston, the hiker who famously cut off his right forearm and is the subject of director Danny Boyle’s new movie.

Boyle has described the film, which Fox Searchlight is releasing on Nov. 5, as an action movie in which the hero doesn’t move — a reference to how Ralston (played fearlessly by James Franco) was pinned by a fallen boulder in an isolated canyon and was forced to amputate one of his limbs to survive. But as Boyle has proved throughout his filmmaking career — his last film, "Slumdog Millionaire," which premiered at Telluride two years ago, not only won the Oscar for best picture but also for directing, cinematography and editing — he can take a scene that at first glance looks unfeasible to film and make it both visually kinetic and emotionally moving.

Christian Colson, who produced "Slumdog Millionaire" and "127 Hours," said Ralston’s tale "was a story that on paper felt impossible to tell as a movie." ...read more.