Telluride, Colo.

Every year the Telluride Film Festival pits the movies against the mountains—how much time do you want to spend sitting in the dark when you can be out on the town, surrounded to the point of besiegement by the splendor of the Rockies? This year the little town was especially seductive, what with cloudless skies by day, a bedazzlement of stars by night and, at an altitude of almost two miles, mountain air as fragrant as it was thin. Yet the movies won by a landslide. The program of films, old and new, was so rich and remarkably varied that the festival's screens opened windows to a greater world.

Watch a clip from the Israeli documentary "Precious Life." Video courtesy Origami Entertainment and Bleiberg Entertainment.

Of the mainstream features on display, the hands-down standout was "The King's Speech," with Colin Firth as King George VI—the father of Queen Elizabeth II—and Geoffrey Rush as a raffish Australian speech therapist who treats the king's paralyzing stutter. It's a rare combination of crowd-pleaser and triumphant artistry, and I'll have more to say about it later. Before that, though, comes the first of my adventures at Telluride last week—sitting in the dark for five and a half hours (with one short break around the four-hour mark) to watch "Carlos."

Geoffrey Rush stars in 'The King's Speech.' Weinstein Company

This epic achievement by Olivier Assayas (he made last year's exquisite "Summer Hours") stars the Venezuelan actor Edgar Ramírez, who gives a commanding performance as the international terrorist of the 1970s and early '80s. Technically speaking, "Carlos" is a miniseries. Shot on a TV budget in an astonishingly short 91 days, the production debuts next month on the Sundance Channel. It's unclear how many people will be able to see it as I did, in a packed theater on a big screen. But nothing I've encountered on any size screen matches the lucidity of this fact-based fiction—it amounts to a textbook on state-sponsored terrorism—and nothing I've seen in recent years has held my attention so relentlessly. Not a single squirm in those first four hours—the last section is a bit of a letdown—or a single sag in the action: "Carlos" also stood as a textbook case of the total immersion that one can enjoy only in a theatrical setting.

Colin Firth as King George VI in 'The King's Speech.' Weinstein Company

Another film, an Israeli documentary called "Precious Life," may or may not get wide distribution in theaters; if it doesn't, moviegoers will be deprived of an enthralling experience. It's the story of a Palestinian baby named Muhammad who was born in Gaza three years ago with a severe immune deficiency, then treated in Israel by Israeli doctors. I approached this one skeptically because of a tangential connection to its subject matter. Back in the '70s I wrote "The Boy in the Plastic Bubble," a TV movie of the week about a similar case that emerged from the network process with a high sugar content. Would "Precious Life" be similarly sentimental?

Not for a moment. The brilliance of this feature-length debut by a veteran Israeli journalist, Shlomi Eldar, lies in its tough-mindedness. When Muhammad's mother, Raida, cautiously hints at her hostile feelings toward Israel and Jews, Mr. Eldar never flinches from bringing them out into the open, however stunning they prove to be. Indeed, the dramatic center moves from the baby to the mother, and the evolution of her feelings is so surprising, and so stirring, as to hold out symbolic hope for eventual peace between Israelis and Palestinians. As of now, the only thing I can imagine standing in the way of an Oscar for "Precious Life" is peace breaking out before the ballots go in the mail.

A scene from 'Of Gods and Men.' Sony Pictures Classics

A superb and austere drama in French and Arabic, "Of Gods and Men," won this year's Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. At Telluride it served as a companion piece to "Precious Life," even though the two films could hardly be more different stylistically. "Of Gods and Men," which was directed by Xavier Beauvois and photographed by Caroline Champetier, is set in a village in North Africa. It tells in fictional terms the true story of a small brotherhood of French monks whose lives were threatened by Islamic extremists during the Algerian civil war of the '90s. Here the message of hope and reconciliation comes amidst brutally harsh events, but it's expressed with heart-stopping eloquence by Lambert Wilson's Brother Christian, who embraces Islam in the spirit of Christianity. The incomparable Michael Lonsdale plays Brother Luc, a physician who cares for the village's people, and whose love of life—and good wine, and Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake"—prompts a scene of celebration that is nothing less than sublime.

Watch a scene from 'Of Gods and Men.' Video courtesy of Sony Pictures.

The Tchaikovsky ballet also provides the framework for Darren Aronofsky's psychological thriller "Black Swan." Natalie Portman stars as Nina, a rigidly perfectionist ballerina trying to distinguish between reality and her delusions as she closes in on her goal of dancing "Swan Lake" at Lincoln Center. It's perfectly possible to tire of the director's gothic-horror tropes and the script's psychological banalities—I certainly did—without ever losing sight of Miss Portman's wonderful performance, or the scariness of Barbara Hershey as Nina's madly ambitious mother.

Telluride has more distinctions than spectacular scenery. Since the festival doesn't give prizes, it isn't overrun with industrial prize-seekers. Since its loyal patrons prize a sense of history, the festival's programmers always come up with older films, or downright old ones, that could not otherwise be seen outside of university archives. One of this year's rediscoveries—or rather, discoveries, since it was seen by next to no one at the time—was Stanton Kaye's 1968 "Brandy in the Wilderness," a pioneering application of cinema verité techniques to autobiography in a diary form. The Brandy of the title, played by Michaux "Brandy" French, is the filmmaker's wistful girlfriend, a lost soul who wants to make a movie about her life. But the filmmaker, who also plays himself—his nom d'écran is Simon—seems no less lost. The complex stuff of this seemingly simple film is his gradual self-discovery.

Film history can be a tough sell these days at film schools, where students often resist watching anything in black-and-white, let alone the fragile treasures of the silent era. At this year's festival, though, substantial audiences turned out to see such silents as "Chicago" and "Rotaie." The former, a satirical melodrama with Phyllis Haver as the murderous Roxie Hart, was directed by Cecil B. DeMille, though he declined to take credit for it. The latter, directed by Mario Camerini, was the last silent film produced in Italy, and a masterpiece that's been all but forgotten. If I needed a reminder of how affecting silent films can be, it came in the film's opening sequence, when a man and a woman slowly make their way down a dark street to a small hotel, take a drab room and sit apart from one another in mysterious, melancholic silence.

"The Illusionist" embodies melancholy in its figure of an aging magician with a dwindling bag of tricks. This delicate—and sometimes tentative—animated feature was made by Sylvain Chomet, who won an Oscar nomination for his beautiful first feature, "The Triplets of Belleville"; he worked from a script that the late Jacques Tati wrote for a live-action film that was never shot.

It's one of several small, special pleasures that include two firsts: "The First Movie," an endearing documentary by Mark Cousins about movies and the power of imagination among young kids in Kurdish Iraq, and "The First Grader," an enjoyable if manipulative fiction film based on the saga of an octogenarian Kenyan farmer who entered elementary school so he could learn to read: Naomie Harris is lovely as the old man's impassioned teacher.

I was strongly impressed by a first feature from Romania, Florin Şerban's "If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle." The young hero, Silviu, will be released from a juvenile detention center in nine days, but that's longer than he can wait to save his younger brother from the clutches of their selfish mother. At the outset, Silviu seems explosive and inarticulate. When an explosion is triggered by more stress than his psyche can bear, his eloquence is startling, yet still unequal to the task of explaining himself to a warden who's decent enough, but unequal to the task of understanding.

James Franco as Aron Ralston in '127 Hours.' FOX Searchlight

Two years ago Danny Boyle caused a Telluride sensation with the first public showing of "Slumdog Millionaire." This year the English filmmaker was back with "127 Hours," a stunner of another sort that stars James Franco. The script was adapted from "Between a Rock and a Hard Place," Aron Ralston's remarkable narrative of his entrapment in a Utah canyon wall during the course of a solitary day hike, and his amputation of his right forearm to set himself free. An inevitable question is whether the movie is completely unsparing in its climactic details. The answer is not completely, though a couple of men passed out at one screening.

Another question is whether the filmmaker and his star have managed to transcend the visual and dramatic limits of what would seem to be a singularly confining story. The answer to that is a resounding yes. Mr. Franco is simply terrific, and Mr. Boyle's trademark exuberance creates a dizzying succession of images that get the movie not only out of the canyon but into its hero's mind. Mr. Ralston attended the festival. He's personable and articulate, and I talked to him at a postscreening party. In response to my gingerly query, he said watching the film had been extremely painful for him and his family. Then he grinned at the director, who was standing with us, and said, "But isn't it great how Danny brought in some of the horror techniques he used in '28 Days Later'?" You can't stop a movie lover from loving movies.

My own movie love found its ideal object in "The King's Speech," which was directed by Tom Hooper from a script by David Seidler, and which I saw under ideal circumstances—no knowledge of what it was about, thus no specific expectations, although only an idiot would expect little from a film starring two such virtuosi as Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush. In fact, the story it tells with surpassing wit and grace has been known only to scholars and historians since it unfolded in 1930s England prior to World War II; that's partly why the period drama seems so marvelously new. The main source of its vitality, however, is the electrifying counterpoint between Mr. Firth's magnificently tortured monarch and Mr. Rush's deliciously irreverent therapist (who broaches profound emotional issues without ever letting on that they're psychological). After a mostly drab summer at the multiplexes, here's a film that makes your spirit soar.

Write to Joe Morgenstern at