Last week I saw Denis Villeneuve‘s Sicario at the CAA screening room in Century City. It played a whole lot better than it did in Cannes, entirely due to the CAA facility’s perfectly tuned sound and the fact that it’s not overly bassy and echo-y, as is the case in the Grand Lumiere. I understood each and every line, and the difference was significant. I now regard this drug-war flick as an above-average mood piece about the near-futility of going by the book in fighting (i.e., trying to contain) the Mexican drug lords. I still have a problem with Emily Blunt‘s DEA agent, who is forever behind the eight-ball — struggling to understand the nature of the game, doing something stupid (i.e., picking up a Latin-looking guy at a honky tonk) or saying something tedious. But I no longer have Sicario on my black list.

From my 5.19.15 Cannes review: “Sicario is basically about heavily militarized, inter-agency U.S. forces hunting down and shooting it out with the Mexican drug-cartel bad guys, and also flying here and there in a private jet and driving around in a parade of big black SUVs. It’s a strong welcome-to-hell piece, I’ll give it that, but Sicario doesn’t come close to the multi-layered, piled-on impact of Steven Soderbergh‘s Traffic, which dealt with more or less the same realm.

Last year I missed by Durango-to-Phoenix flight by ten minutes, which forced me to stay in the area in order to grab a flight the next morning, etc. I didn’t miss the flight itself but I failed the 30-minutes-before-the-flight rule that Durango Airport are the FAA insists upon. Well, I missed the same damn deadline today, but this time only by five minutes. 300 seconds earlier and everything would’ve been fine.

My fault, of course — I felt I had to finish that Beasts of No Nation review in a way that I was fully satisfied with. But then I tore out of Telluride and sped like a motherfucker, passing car after car over those winding mountain roads, risking life and limb.

I arrived breathless at the US Airways desk at 3:15 pm, or 25 minutes before the flight was due to leave. “Sorry but you’re too late,” the US Air clerk said. Durango Airport is a small operation, remember, and I was there with 25 minutes to spare. I begged, whined, cajoled. I also offered to pay him a “late penalty fee”…nope. A little lenience wouldn’t have hurt anyone and I doubt if FAA would have given a damn, but the guy wouldn’t budge. (He would have made an exception if I’d been a hot blonde in her mid 20s, trust me.) This meant I’d be stuck in Durango again as there are no flights out until early tomorrow morning.

I just couldn’t settle for that plus I’m determined to stick to my plan (i.e., spending Tuesday and Wednesday morning in Manhattan before flying to Toronto) so I swore, gritted my teeth, slapped my thigh, swore again and booked a flight to NYC from Alberquerque ($600 and change, arrives at JFK around 5:45 am). And then I rented a gray Toyota from Budget for the drive south. Durango to Alberquerque is 215 miles or roughly four hours.

The word from the Venice Film Festival was that Cary Fukunaga‘s Beasts Of No Nation is a riveting, beautifully captured, somewhat traumatizing portrait of a child’s experience of guerilla warfare in Africa, and no one’s idea of an easy sit or an engaging exotic adventure. Well, I saw Beasts last night at Telluride’s Werner Herzog theatre, and it’s a masterful thing that demands everyone’s attention — often jarring and horrific and in very few ways “pleasant” but a churning, ravishing injection, a cauldron of mad-crazy intense, something undeniably alive and probing and deep-in-the-bush authentic. Yes, it’s horrific but never without exuberance or a trace of humanism or a lack of a moral compass.

And it’s been made, mind you, by a cultivated, cool-cat artist — a guy of moderate temperament who wears fashionable glasses and cool-looking sweaters (check the below photo I took last night of Fukunaga and Beasts star Abraham Attah at last night’s after-party) — but who holds back just enough but never wimps out, who jumped right in and shot the whole thing himself in Ghana over a mere seven weeks, a guy who knows how to whip up strange brews and visual lather.

We’ve all seen violent films that try to merely shock or astonish or cheaply exploit — Beasts of No Nation is way, way above that level of filmmaking. It’s often about cruel, horrifying acts but filtered through a series of moral, cultured, considered choices, about what to use and not use and how to assemble it all just so. And yet over half of Beasts is gripped by madness — a kind of fever known only by war veterans and particularly (as this is the specific focus of the film) by children who’ve been forced into killing by ruthless elders.

This is a major, triple-A-approved, Apocalypse Now-influenced African inferno flick — a real original, like nothing I’ve ever quite seen before, like nothing I knew how to handle. Steven Soderbergh is going to shit his pants when he sees it. Anyone who attends Sunday services at the Church of the Devoted Cinephile will have to grim up, man up and buy a ticket. (And that means women also.) It’s harsh and brutal but poetic — one of those films that’ll hold up a decade or two or a half-century from now. If you miss or avoid it you’ll be embarassed to admit this down the road.

A few days ago Variety‘s Justin Chang called Beasts “the rare American movie to enter a distant land and emerge with a sense of lived-in human experience rather than a well-meaning Third World postcard,” but to me it’s more that just a lived-in thing — it’s orchestrated and painted and cooked to a full boil. Start to finish it has a feeling of keen impulse mixed with carefully honed art.

I was on my way from the Sheridan bar after-party for Cary Fukanaga‘s Beasts of No Nation (which kicks the shit out of you but is a work of undeniable visual poetry of war and carnage — a 21st Century successor to Apocalypse Now) and had just passed Alpine Street when I ran into a 20something woman who seemed a bit unnerved. Even a bit scared. If a woman strikes up a conversation with a total stranger on a really dark street, you can assume she’s been motivated by something.

“Have you seen any bears?” she asked me. “Uhhm, no, I haven’t,” I smirked. “Seriously, I’ve been coming to this festival for five years and I’ve never even heard of bears in town.” But she was serious.

She: “I’m telling you I just saw two bears walking down this street…really, no joke.” Me: “Really?” She: “Actually walking on the sidewalk.” Me: “You’re kidding! Really? How big were they?” She: “One was bigger and the other was smaller. Probably a mama bear and a baby bear on a scavenge hunt.”

We discussed ways of scaring them off or at least, you know, avoiding getting attacked. Make a lot of noise, she said. I said I’d heard you’re supposed to be cool and stand your ground and not run. I don’t think bears are very aggressive unless a mama bear thinks you might hurt her cub, I added. But what does a city slicker know?

Laszlo Nemes‘ Son of Saul (Sony Pictures Classics, 12.18) has been praised over under sideways down since it premiered at last May’s Cannes Film Festival. I found it devastating along with nearly every other critic of note. “No day at the beach but one of the most searing and penetrating Holocaust films I’ve ever seen,” I wrote on 5.14.15, “and that’s obviously saying something.” Yes, a Holocaust film — one of the most well-worn genres of the last three or four decades — but one with an urgent sense of interiors and intimacy. Saul will almost certainly be among the five nominees for the 2015 Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar, and I’d be more than a little surprised if it doesn’t win. It’s that kind of stand-out and a definite must-see.

Son of Saul director & co-writer Laszlo Nemes at Telluride’s Sheridan Hotel — Sunday, 9.6, 12:40 pm.

So I asked yesterday if I could speak with Nemes around lunch today. We sat down in a rear parlor at the Sheridan Hotel. Here’s the mp3. Born in Hungary, raised in Paris and an occasional childhood visitor to the U.S., the 38 year-old Nemes speaks excellent English. He seems fairly brilliant in a fair-minded, relatively easygoing way. He smiles easily. His eyes don’t look away much and they don’t seem to lie.

Shot entirely in close-ups (and occasional medium close-ups), Son of Saul is a Hungarian-made, soul-drilling, boxy-framed art film about an all-but-mute fellow (Geza Rohrig) with a haunted, obliterated expression. This titular-named survivor — a walking dead man, a kind of ghost — toils in an Auschwitz Birkenau concentration camp as a Sonderkommando — i.e., prisoners who assisted the Germans in exterminating their fellow inmates in order to buy themselves time. The film is basically about Saul risking his life — foolishly, illogically — in order to properly bury a young boy who’s been exterminated, a boy he doesn’t know but whom he repeatedly claims in his son.

Why? Because Saul wants to fulfill a small act of honor before he dies — he wants to show reverence and respect for the boy, for his people, for life itself before the end.

Yesterday morning was a writing frenzy followed by three films over a ten-hour period — Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson‘s Anomolisa at 1 pm, Tom McCarthy‘s Spotlight at 4:15 pm and Danny Boyle and Aaron Sorkin‘s Steve Jobs at 8 pm (starting a half-hour late). Each involved a longish line-wait. Then a steady downpour arrived with the darkness. And then I attended a smallish, elegant Steve Jobs after-party a little after 10 pm.  Around 11 pm I hit the Sheridan bar for about ten minutes, and then a combination of elements (spirit, energy, stamina) began to sag and collapse and I decided to march back to the pad.  Now I’m up again at 5:30 am.

This is the gig and the burden, and sometimes you just have to shake it off and man up and come up with terse, shorter-that-Twitter responses. Spotlight = total pleasure-principle moviegoing within the realm of a go-getter journalism saga.  Steve Jobs = a brilliant, bold-as-brass, somewhat arid tour de force that’s written like a play but is expertly goosed and pumped by bravura directing and editing and stellar performances, first and foremost Michael Fassbender‘s Steve Jobs but also Kate Winslet‘s Joanna Hoffman. Anomalisa = another humanistic downhead visit to Charlie Kaufmanland — an amusing, occasionally touching stop-motion piece about a pudgebod asshole visiting a No Exit hotel in Cincinatti and slowly dispensing his depression-fueled mustard-gas vibes to one and all.

I was so happy and delighted with Spotlight that 20 minutes after it began I was telling myself I want to see it again. Obviously I was debating whether I should even toy with this idea as it would interfere with the professional necessity of seeing other festival attractions like Room, Beasts of No Nation, 45 Years, Marguerite, Time To Choose, etc. But I was getting such a gripping, step-by-step, mother’s milk high from Spotlight that I really wanted to double up on it. This is what a pleasurable experience does to you. It makes you a little nuts.

This is the best pure-journalism flick since All The President’s Men, and it doesn’t have any emotional relationship sideplots or car chases or bogeymen stalking journalists in dark, rain-slicked alleys…nothing to supplement or distract from the story at hand. Spotlight is completely familiar and by-the-book — it’s certainly no ambitious game-changer like Steve Jobs — and yet it’s immensely smart and engagingly complex and quite satisfying. It runs 128 minutes, and I was feeling so engaged and fulfilled that I would have been totally okay with a three-hour running time. It’ll definitely be a hit with Joe Popcorn, critics, Academy and guild members — nothing but smooth sailing. Yes, I understood that it wasn’t delivering anything bold or brash in terms of approach or execution, and I didn’t care and neither will you.

Spotlight is a fact-based procedural (set in ’01 and early ’02) about a team of Boston Globe journalists going after a Boston archdiocese and a political network of Catholic-kowtowing flunkies who were either ignoring or protecting child-molesting priests. It’s directed in such a clean and unobtrusive manner and acted in a not-too-forced, just-right fashion by everyone top-to-bottom (Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber, Brian d’Arcy, John Slatery, Gene Amoroso, Jamey Sheridan, Stanley Tucci, Billy Crudup…a knI ckout cast) that right after it ended I tweeted as follows: “It sounds distasteful to say this given the root subject matter, but Tom McCarthy‘s Spotlight is pure pleasure…totally gripping stuff.”

Three or four years ago I got bounced from Peter Howell‘s annual “Chasing the Buzz” Toronto Film Festival poll for the Toronto Star. (I had criticized what struck me as lame choices by some of the other respondents.) But this year Pete found it in his heart to forgive and invited me back. “This was the first year since ‘Chasing the Buzz’ began in 2001 that no movie tallied more than two votes,” Howell notes. “Four films took two votes apiece: Sydney Pollack’s Aretha Franklin song doc Amazing Grace, Tom Hooper’s transgender biopic The Danish Girl, Denis Villeneuve’s drug-war thriller Sicario and Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth.”

We were told to choose only one film and to very briefly explain why we’re particularly interested in seeing it. I chose The Danish Girl and here’s why: “The months-long buzz has been that Eddie Redmayne may snag another Best Actor Oscar for playing transgender pioneer Einar Wegener/Lili Elbe, the Caitlin Jenner of his/her day. I want to be among the first on the North American continent to publicly agree or disagree with that notion.”

During last night’s Suffragette after-party I sidled up to Meryl Streep and asked what she thought of Davis Guggenheim‘s They Called Me Malala, an affecting if somewhat sermonizing doc about teenaged education activist Malala Yousafzai. (Here’s my review.) “We’re living through quite a time, aren’t we?,” Streep said. “With films like this people are really getting an understanding what an arduous struggle it was and still is in many places to be a woman.” I replied that Suffragette really conveyed this to me, the struggle aspect. “What?,” she said. (It was a noisy party.) “Suffragette really conveyed the struggle thing,” I said.

Then I mentioned Islam’s notoriously repressive beliefs and confining policies about women. Streep gave me one of those narrow-eyed “oh, yeah?” looks.  

Me: “What…you don’t subscribe to the view that Islamic culture is the worst in the world in terms of repressing women, keeping them from being educated, subservient to men and all that?” Streep: “I don’t really know all that much about Islam. Do you?” Me: “Well, when you put it that way, no.  I’ve never spent any time in the Middle East or studied Islamic faith. But others have studied it and the culture and there’s a considerable body of opinion that Muslims are not what anyone would call enlightened as far as women are concerned.”

Daily Mail columnist Baz Bamibgoye was listening in and suggested to Meryl that the Muslim faith has been hijacked by radicals. Streep: “I think that Malala showed that there are some enlightened aspects of Islam…open minds, kind hearts…that Islam can be a forgiving faith.” 

I was about to change the subject when Streep was pulled away by a publicist and introduced to someone else. Note: I didn’t tape our chat — it’s strictly reconstructed from memory but I’ve got a Truman Capote-like recall.

Suffragette costar Meryl Streep, director Sarah Gavron during last night’s after-party at Telluride’s Arroyo Wine Bar.

Only now can these be straight-from-the-cold-zone pics be posted. Only now can the dull, windswept, bone-chilling trauma of the 2015 Telluride Film Festival patron’s brunch be fully conveyed. It was awful but I was there, experiencing it firsthand like a champ and taking notes on the small fire that broke out in the serving area. Seriously, it wasn’t that bad but it kind of was in a sense because I was under-dressed. I hated the fucking dampness and those chilly-ass raindrops messing with everyone and everything.

Telluride Film Festival press liason and spokesperson Shannon Mitchell, snapped two minutes before I got the hell out of there and took refuge on the shuttle bus.

“Adapted by Lucinda Coxon from David Ebershoff’s novel, Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl retells a true-life story: that of painter Einar Wegener, who underwent a pioneering gender reassignment operation in the 1930s to become Lili Elbe. Einar/Lili is played by Eddie Redmayne, who is certain to reap plentiful laurels in the forthcoming awards season, with another role — following his Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything — about a slow process of physical and psychological transformation. And no doubt this sumptuously mounted, high-minded and unabashedly Oscar-baiting undertaking will overall emerge dripping with honors. But well-meaning and polished as it is, The Danish Girl is a determinedly mainstream melodrama that doesn’t really offer new perspectives. It smacks more of the coffee table than the operating table.” — from a Guardian review by Jonathan Romney.

From Variety’s Peter Debruge in Venice Film festival review: “Clearly, The Danish Girl was never not going to be a ‘prestige’ picture,” “And while that ultra-respectful approach will engender allergic reactions in some, who’d sooner see a gritty, realistic portrayal than one seemingly tailored for the pages of fashion and interior-design magazines, there’s no denying that Tom Hooper and screenwriter Lucinda Coxon have delivered a cinematic landmark, one whose classical style all but disguises how controversial its subject matter still remains. In order to penetrate the conversation of ‘polite’ society, one must play by its rules, and The Danish Girl is nothing if not sensitive to how old-fashioned viewers (and voters) might respond, scrubbing the story of its pricklier details and upholding the long-standing LGBT-movie tradition of tragically killing off the ‘monster’ in the end.”

I got up at 5:30 am to give myself time to write a proper Suffragette review, but I got so caught up that I failed to make the 9 am screening of Tom McCarthy‘s Spotlight, which people have been calling a total keeper and an exceptionally solid journalism flick in the basic shoe-leather and note-pad tradition. It’s not a tragedy — I’ll catch it today at 4:15 pm at the Galaxy and also listen to a post-screening q & a. But now I have to blow off Cocksucker Blues.

I spoke briefly to costar Michael Keaton during last night’s Suffragette party. Me: “During initial discussions did McCarthy suggest that Spotlight might play as a kind of All The President’s Men-type thing?” Keaton: “Later on, yeah, but at first no, not at all. It was just, you know, ‘here’s the script, we’re doing it straight and plain’…very down to business, no pretensions.”

The Spotlight buzz is fairly hot right now, of course, and Keaton mentioned he’s starting to get a little bit worried about this. The second wave, he meant. The old pushback from the pushbackers. As he put it, “People are gonna see it and say, ‘Ehh, good but not as great as what I heard.'” That always happens, I said, “but then comes the third wave who push back against the previous guys and say it’s really as good as the initial hype and maybe better.”