Highlights from the 2026 Nashville Film Festival
The 57th Nashville Film Festival kicked off with an appropriately musical bang on Thursday, Sept. 24, setting the course for a week of nearly 150 screenings plus panels, conferences and other celebrations of Music City creativity. Here’s my highlight reel, with three very different films.
Frampton Comes Alive in New Documentary
Pop-rock guitar fixture Peter Frampton, who’s been a Nashville resident for nearly 30 years and operates a recording studio here, opened the film fest with double screenings of his new documentary, Frampton. It’s a sweeping musical biopic, directed by his longtime keyboardist and band leader Rob Arthur, that takes viewers along through the ups and downs of a career that rocketed Frampton into the stratosphere of superstardom with his explosively successful live album, Frampton Comes Alive, making him a household name (and a “teen” idol) in 1976.
Using contemporary interviews with archival footage, there are illuminating side trips into his longtime friendships with fellow British rockers David Bowie (they were school mates!) and Roger Daltry; his studio work alongside former Beatles George Harrison and Ringo Starr; his formative years with the British band Humble Pie and its mercurial lead singer Steve Marriott; the ‘70s movie-flop he calls “disgustingly horrible”; the 1978 car crash in the Bahamas that broke his arm, his hands and his feet; and the discovery soon after that exploitive management had siphoned off most of his money.
Introducing the film in person, Frampton, now 76 years old and walking with a cane, noted it traces “the good, the bad, and not-so-good,” which includes his overindulgence in drugs, and dealing present-day with IBM (Inclusion Body Myositis), a degenerative condition that causes muscular weakness, especially in the hands and fingers.
The film introduces us to his now-adult children, examines the early teenage roots of his guitar prowess and features commentary by a spectrum of celebs. Sheryl Crowe admits that seeing him in concert as a young girl sparked her own musical ambition; director Cameron Crowe and actors Kate Hudson and Billy Crudup recall his essential contributions as a guitar coach to their 2000 film Almost Famous; and a chorus of admirers sing his praises, including Heart’s Nancy Wilson, Alice Cooper and Bill Wyman, the Rolling Stones’ bassist who produced some of Frampton’s earliest recording sessions. It’s a sprawling, emotionally rich salute to an artist who’s still faithful to the musical muse that first called out to him as a skinny, blue-eyed, baby-faced guitar prodigy growing up on the outskirts of London, before coming “alive” with a double-disc album that spent 10 spectacular weeks at No. 1
“Breeder” Brews Up Unholy Horror
It’s not a proper film festival without something scary, and Breeder fills that bill. Writer-director Alex Goyette puts an unsettling spin on the horror genre with his tale of Russell (Daniel Doheny), a bright young college student seeking funding for his research on bees. When Patti (Glee’s Dot-Marie Jones), a championship dog breeder, offers to fully finance Russell’s project, he finds out she’s got more than puppies on her mind.
Patti has moved on from breeding dogs to breeding humans, and she wants to pair Russell with one of her adoptive daughters, Ainsley (Maddie Phillips), to produce genetically superior offspring. And Ainsley, it turns out, has her own plans for fleeing Patti’s baby-making breeding farm.
Breeder avoids the jump scares, goop and gore of many horror flicks, instead focusing on moody, claustrophobic terror and wrenching up the weirdness as Russell makes a desperate deal, agreeing to become a “stud” to Ainsley’s “bitch” in exchange for Patti’s unlimited research dollars. The film walks a razor-thin line in its exploration of just how far science can—and should—go when it comes to genetic engineering and manipulation. Is monkeying with bee DNA different from dog breeding, or Patti’s plans to modify the human gene pool through controlling the “birds and bees”? It also gives a nod to generational angst (with Patti’s deep-rooted “mommy issues”) and the trauma of children who feel abandoned when “given up” for adoption.
And for a movie about the forced breeding of humans, sexual activity is scarce. And there’s more full male nudity than female, another departure from familiar horror tropes.
Dot-Marie Phillips is a commanding presence as a bulky barnyard Dr. Frankenstein, fully committed to her monstrous mind games, selling human babies on the black market like miniature poodles and treating her daughters as she would treat and breed dogs, expecting total obedience. Russell’s fiancé (Yellowstone’s Tanaya Bailey) starts wondering what he’s up to on the secluded, rural ranch, with no idea he’s become a captive for Patti’s unholy plan.
How can Russell escape the trap she’s laid for him?
“You’re a special breed,” Patti ominously tells him. Breeder likely won’t go down as a cult classic, but it nonetheless breeds its own blend of uniquely unholy horror.
Breeder opens in theaters Oct. 28.
Stallone’s “Rocky” Road
I Play Rocky is the behind-the-scenes story of how a failing actor fought to make a film that became an all-time classic. That no-name actor, of course, was Sylvester Stallone and the movie was Rocky, the now-iconic 1976 tale of an underdog boxer who became a winner.
It’s the story you didn’t know about a movie almost everyone knows—and one that became a multi-film franchise, a pop-cultural touchstone, a multiple Oscar winner and the launching pad for Stallone’s blockbuster acting career.
Anthony Ippolito (who played another actor, Al Pacino, in the Paramount+ series The Offer, about the backstory of The Godfather) stars as Stallone. But more than that, he becomes Stallone—he’s got the hangdog face, the droopy eyes, the curled lip, the mouthful-of-marbles mumble and the walk. He transforms into his character, inside and out. It’s a mesmerizing performance, one that’s already generating Oscar buzz. That buzz will get even louder once the film is released wide into theaters just ahead of Thanksgiving.
Director Peter Farrelly (Dumb and Dumber, There’s Something About Mary, The Green Book) steers the story, showing the long, grueling grind that led to Stallone’s ultimate breakthrough and a movie that made Hollywood history. We see Stallone struggling to find his way as a fledgling actor, falling behind on his rent for a shabby room in New York City, even sleeping on the street. He’s so desperate for cash, he strips down for a cheesy “adult” skin flick.
Then he meets a girl (AnnaSophia Robb), falls in love and moves to Los Angeles to pursue his dream. Inspired by watching boxing on TV in a bar—with world heavyweight champ Muhammad Ali struggling in 1975 to defend his title from scrappy “underdog” contender Chuck Wepner—he writes a screenplay. And he’s thrilled to get a meeting with a couple of big-wig studio producers, Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff (P.J. Byrne and Toby Kebbell). And even more thrilled when he finds out they want to make his story into a movie.
But he’s crushed when he finds out they want another “name” actor to star in it. Someone bankable, someone hot, maybe someone like Ryan O’Neal.
That’s not at all what Stallone has in mind. He tells the producers he wrote the film with so much of himself, with his own heart and soul and life experiences poured into Rocky Balboa, he can’t imagine anyone else stepping into the role. “This story, this is me,” he tells them. “So I play Rocky.”
And of course, that’s exactly what happened. But Stallone, and his movie, had to jump through multiple hoops and hurdles to get there. Jay Duplass plays John Avildsen, the director who worked with him to get Rocky to the screen. There’s Matt Dillon as Stallone’s dad, and their conversations peel back the raw memories of a difficult, tumultuous and even abusive childhood.
The movie faithfully recreates many familiar scenes from the 1976 film—and what it took to shoot them—like Stallone running through the streets, and up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. We see Rocky training, punching sides of frozen meat in a processing plant, working out “in the ring” moves with his costar, Carl Withers (Stephan James), and fighting the sniffles when he catches the flu from his female costar, Talia Shire (Kiko Seto).
But mostly we watch a young Sylvester Stallone “go the distance,” stand up for his dream against all odds, and emerge a Hollywood hero.
In a post-credits scene, there’s a clip from The Tonight Show shortly after Stallone’s underdog tale had become a sensation. Host Johnny Carson tells Stallone, his talk-show guest, that the story of how Rocky came to be would also make a terrific movie.
And now, half a century later, it has.
I Play Rocky opens in limited release Nov. 2, then wide in theaters Nov. 20.
—Neil Pond