Middleburg Film Festival — Year Two

The paint was hardly dry at Middleburg Virginia’s swanky new Salamander Resort when the first Middleburg Film Festival kicked off last year, but it was a spectacular start for both the festival and the resort, with Bruce Dern appearing to introduce “Nebraska.” This year, the festival hits its stride with an impressive schedule and an award for Oscar-winning costume designer Colleen Atwood (“Memoirs of a Geisha,” “Chicago,” “Silence of the Lambs”). The films featured at the festival include:

The Homesman, a frontier story based on the Putlizer Prize nominated novel by Glendon Swarthout, directed by Tommy Lee Jones, starring Jones, Meryl Streep, and Hillary Swank

Mr. Turner is a Mike Leigh film, with Leigh regular Timothy Spall, who won the Best Actor award at Cannes, as one of the 19th century’s most important artists.

The Overnighters is a documentary about how technology made it possible to extract oil in North Dakota, which meant that in a recession economy all of a sudden there were high paying jobs, which attracted a lot of men from out of state, more men than jobs.

The opening night film is “The Last Five Years,” the musical with Jeremy Jordan and Anna Kendrick, with the romance told from both perspectives.  Writer/director Richard LaGravenese will appear for a Q&A with Washington Post critic Ann Hornaday.