Sarah Gavron‘s Suffragette (Focus Features, 10.23) is the shit — a near-certain Best Picture contender and a cast-iron guarantee that Carey Mulligan will be Best Actress-nominated for her subdued but deeply emotional, fully riveting performance as Maud Watts, a married factory worker and mother of a young son who becomes drawn into the women’s suffrage movement in early 1900s London, just as the militant phase (led by the Women’s Social and Political Union, or WSPU) begins to kick in.

This is one top-tier, richly textured, throughly propulsive saga, and a good four or five times better than I expected it to be.

The Suffragette trailers were promising enough but the people at Focus Features had done a brilliant job of tamping down any expectations on a word-of-mouth basis. I’d come to suspect, based on a lack of any palpable advance excitement, that it might turn out to be a decent, good-enough film that could possibly provide a springboard for Mulligan…maybe. Well, it’s much more than that, such that I felt compelled explain to Gavron at the after-party that I was fairly gobsmacked.

Mulligan, looking appropriately hangdog for the most part, handles every line and scene like a master violinist. She’s always been my idea of a great beauty, but when she chooses to go there she has one of the saddest faces in movies right now. The strain, stress and suppressed rage of Maud’s life are legible in every look, line and gesture. Mulligan is fairly young (she just turned 30 last May) but she’s a natural old-soul type who conveys not just what Maud (a fictitious everywoman) is dealing with but the trials of 100,000 women before her, and without anything that looks like overt “acting.” All actors “sell it,” of course, but the gifted ones make the wheel-turns and gear-shifts seem all but invisible.

I was saying last night that her Suffragette perf is on the same footing with Mulligan’s career-making turn in An Education, but now, at 8:15 in the morning after less than six hours of shut-eye (and with my heart breaking over the realization that I’ve blown my shot at catching the 9 am screening of Spotlight), I’m thinking Maud is her signature role.

This afternoon’s Telluride Film Festival showing of Davis Guggenheim‘s He Named Me Malala (Fox Searchlight, 10.2) was very warmly received. The people on my gondola coming down from the Chuck Jones Cinema were beaming, almost swooning. They were reacting, trust me, more to the subject matter than the film itself. Which feels and plays like a lesson, a sermon, an 80-something minute educational piece that…you know, we all need to see and contemplate and so on.  It’s a good-for-you spinach movie, as I supposed it would be yesterday.

Malala Yousafzai, the star and subject of Davis Guggenheim/s He Named Me Malala, vis Skype feed during a post-screening discussion.

One can’t help but feel touched and inspired by the saga of teenaged Pakistani education activist (and current resident of Birmingham, England) Malala Yousafzai, and particularly how she managed to not only survive being shot in the head three years ago (when she was 15) by a Taliban fanatic, but how she recovered and continued to campaign for female education in Pakistan and other Muslim countries, and how she won the Nobel Peace Prize late last year. The more this film is seen worldwide (particularly in Middle-Eastern territories where the suppression of women is appalling), the better.

But Guggenheim’s film is just okay. If you wanted to be a sorehead you could say it almost flirts with mediocrity. But I don’t want to say that because I don’t want to discourage anyone from seeing it. He Named Me Malala stands for the right things, shows the right things, says the right things and uses watercolor-like animation to convey portions of Malala’s life…all to the good. But it never seems to find any kind of levitational groove or strategy that would result in a 2 + 2 = 5 equation.

I’ve been debating whether or not to reveal an embarassing thing that happened in the late ’80s, and I realized this morning that I need to just flush it out. Always a good thing to expose disturbing, uncomfortable memories. So here goes.

I took part in a paintball game when I was working at Cannon Films in the summer of ’87. I had suggested some bold, George S. Patton-type strategies to my fellow warriors, but when you actually get out there with your paintball gun in that sticky and sweltering Los Angeles heat and you’re dealing with dust and sweat and the sobering fact that you’re not exactly Steve McQueen in Hell Is For Heroes, things are a little different. The Cannon team lost that day, and I was one of the reasons.

I’m just going to spit this out. We were losing and I was in a bad position, surrounded by the opposing team and anxious and furious that we were getting clobbered, and in my haste and rage I saw someone appear in the corner of my left eye and I whipped around and fired. I shot one of our own guys. Actually it was a woman. I got her in the arm…thwack! She let go with a loud and angry “aah!” She was expressing two things: (1) “That hurts!” and (2) “You just shot someone on your team…asshole!”

Those gray skies and cool temps had me worried, but I attended the Telluride Film Festival picnic all the same, leaving on the bus at 9:45 am and arriving at 10:10 am. Five minutes later it began to sprinkle.  I got my umbrella out as I waited in line for food.  I started to feel chillier and chillier.  And then flat-out cold.  “God, this is fucking miserable,” I said to a couple of pals.  Then some kind of cooking gas ignited and a sizable surge of flame appeared next to a serving table.  Two fast-acting chefs snuffed it out but I wondered if this was an omen of some kind.  I was Nicholas Hoult in Mad Max: Fury Road:  “What a damp and uncomfortable day!”  I decided to get on a shuttle bus back to town. along with THR’s Scott Feinberg and Stephen  Galloway.  This was my first gloomy Telluride picnic — the weather had always been sunny and delightful in years past.

At 8:15 am, it’s a bit damp and chilly outside my Telluride condo. The lineup for the patron’s brunch starts an hour from now, and I’m thinking about how it’ll feel as I stand around on damp grass and getting my shoes wet and wondering what the fuck. If it ain’t sunny and warm, I’d rather park it indoors. And I’m not the only one who feels a little let down that Davis Guggenheim‘s He Named Me Malala (Fox Searchlight, 10.2) will be the “secret” 2:30 pm screening at the Chuck Jones Cinema.

I’m in no way dismissing this doc about teenaged Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai‘s campaign for female education. I’m sure it’ll be stirring stuff. But I want to start this festival off with something ripe and sexy. I want to see Spotlight or Black Mass or Steve Jobs today at 2:30 pm, and not some nutritious spinach documentary about the tyrannical nature of Islam when it comes to women’s rights. And no one is happy about the overlapping scheduling of today’s films, which forces either-or choices or prods you into seeing something of a more offbeat or mercurial nature.

“His hair is Harlow gold, his brows odd surprise, his face looks icy cold, he’s got Whitey Bulger’s eyes.” — Venice Film Festival tweet from Playlist critic Jessica Kiang.

Following the 7.30 appearance of the most recent Black Mass trailer I wrote that “the assumption, of course, is that Johnny ‘Alaskan husky eyes’ Depp will slam it out of park as Whitey Bulger.” And the early Venice Film Festival reviews suggest that Depp’s performance as the notorious, now-incarcerated Boston crime lord is quite the thing. The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy writes that “long-time Depp fans who might have lately given up hope of his doing something interesting anytime soon will especially appreciate his dive into the deep end here.” But in the view of Indiewire‘s Jessica Kiang, the performance is hindered by excessive makeup.

“This is certainly the most interesting thing [Depp has] done in ages, and he never feels less than committed — and no doubt there will be those who’ll champion it as such,” she writes. “But…Depp is encased in a helmet of make-up and prosthetics [that] make him look by turns ghostly, corpse-like, lizardy and sometimes like a literal incarnation of the devil. It makes him fascinating to look at, but maybe for the wrong reasons — ones that have nothing to do with the quality of his performance or the menace and charisma he exudes, and more to do with trying to locate the single element that almost but doesn’t quite gel.

“Is it the too-light contacts with their unchanging beady pupils? Is it his odd, never totally convincing hairline? Is it the fact that his forehead seems peculiarly immobile? This feels like a rare case where a live action performance falls into what animators call the ‘uncanny valley‘ — the narrow but unbridgeable gap that exists between something realistic and something real.”

“A dryly amusing Bunuelian parlor piece about societal oppression, Yorgos Lanthimos‘ The Lobster felt partially successful to me, or at least intriguing for the first 45 minutes to an hour, but the second hour disassembled. The truth is that I was bored and hating on it almost from the get-go. I was even thinking about bailing as it went along but I figured ‘c’mon, be a pro, stick it out.’ And I did.” — from my 5.15.15 HE riff, filed from the Cannes Film Festival. But don’t listen to me with 80% of the Rotten Tomatoes gang having gone thumbs-up. Not to mention Guy Lodge’s Variety rave, also filed on 5.15: “A wickedly funny, unexpectedly moving satire of couple-fixated society.”

I have a pretty good idea of how tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday night will probably unfold here in Telluride, but I need more time to sift through things. It’s 7:44 pm now, and I have to scoot in order to be 15 minutes late for a dinner date with Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling at La Marmotte. 11:30 pm: Lovely dinner. The Amazon gang (Ted Hope, Bob Berney, et. al.) sat near our table; Brad Bird and a couple of others were over in the corner. The cool night air filled our lungs as we stepped out of La Marmotte. I strolled up to the Abel Gance outdoor theatre and watched the end of The Social Network, which was being shown as part of the festival’s Rooney Mara tribute. Then over to the Sheridan Bar to say hello to Kris Tapley, Eugene Hernandez, Greg Ellwood, Ryan Werner and Sony Classics co-president Tom Bernard. And then over to the Hotel Telluride for a lobby chat with Deadline’s Pete Hammond and award-season strategist Lisa Taback.

Daniel Craig is playing James Bond in Spectre and in one more film after that, but when that’s done I’d be hugely in favor of Tom Hardy taking over. Hardy looks dangerous. He doesn’t have Sean Connery‘s classy-casino-player handsomeness but he has that simmering brute beast thing. No one would have any trouble believing that Hardy’s 007 could not only kick OddJob’s ass but snap his neck like a breadstick. Yesterday Vanity Fair‘s Joanna Robinson wrote that Hardy is gaining on Idris Elba as the most popular Bond contender among English bookmakers. What do gamblers or bookies know? Nothing. Okay, maybe something. But the instant I imagined Hardy as Bond I knew. He’s perfect.

Is there any way to be a Hardy-over-Elba guy without sounding like a racist? No, there isn’t. Right now Glenn Kenny is starting to tweet something acidic and disdainful about the subterranean meaning of this post. As everyone knows by now Bond novelist Anthony Horowitz recently said that Elba is “a bit too rough to play the part…it’s not a color issue…I think he is probably a bit too ‘street’ for Bond.” Everyone presumed that Horowitz used “street” as a substitute for “urban.” I think he meant to say that Elba doesn’t look particularly upmarket — that he lacks that special 007 vibe of a professional killer with a certain elite urbanity and polish. Is that also a racist thought? 

I only know that Hardy, to me, looks like a much more threatening guy than Elba. Elba is rugged-looking enough but at the same time there’s something a little too amiable and moderate about him. He seems fairly willing to listen, open to reason — to some kind of civilized solution. But when Hardy gets that look in his eyes you have a feeling he could do anything. He could bite someone’s nose off.
Maybe I’ll feel differently after I see Elba’s performance in Beasts of No Nation, but I have this gut feeling about Hardy. He’s the guy….if he wants the role. And I wouldn’t blame him for a second if he doesn’t.

Hollywood Elsewhere landed in Durango about 25 minutes ago, or around 11:15 am. Half-blue, half-cloudy skies. Warmish. The Telluride Film Festival slate has been announced, and I’m flirting with the idea of watching Robert Frank‘s Cocksucker Blues for the first time in my life. Invitations to dinners and whatnot are hitting the inbox. Meryl Streep and the Suffragette gang (minus the pregnant Carey Mulligan) are throwing a small party this weekend. The usual scenic two-hour drive to Telluride awaits.

· CAROL (d. Todd Haynes, U.S., 2015)
· AMAZING GRACE (d. Sydney Pollack, U.S., 1972/2015)
· ANOMALISA (d. Charlie Kaufman, U.S., 2015)
· BEAST OF NO NATION (d. Cary Fukunaga, U.S., 2015)
· HE NAMED ME MALALA (d. Davis Guggenheim, U.S., 2015)
· STEVE JOBS (d. Danny Boyle, U.S., 2015)
· IXCANUL (d. Jayro Bustamante, Guatemala, 2015)
· BITTER LAKE (d. Adam Curtis, U.K., 2015)
· ROOM (d. Lenny Abrahamson, England, 2015)
· BLACK MASS (d. Scott Cooper, U.S., 2015)
· SUFFRAGETTE (d. Sarah Gavron, U.K., 2015)
· SPOTLIGHT (d. Tom McCarthy, U.S., 2015)
· RAMS (d. Grímur Hákonarson, Iceland, 2015)
· MOM AND ME (d. Ken Wardrop, Ireland, 2015)
· VIVA (d. Paddy Breathnach, Ireland, 2015)
· TAJ MAJAL (d. Nicolas Saada, France-India, 2015)
· SITI (d. Eddie Cahyono, Indonesia, 2015)
· HEART OF THE DOG (d. Laurie Anderson, U.S. 2014)
· 45 YEARS (d. Andrew Haigh, England, 2015)
· SON OF SAUL (d. Lázló Nemes, Hungary, 2015)
· ONLY THE DEAD (d. Michael Ware, Bill Guttentag, U.S.- Australia, 2015)
· TAXI (d. Jafar Panahi, Iran, 2015)
· HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT (d. Kent Jones, U.S., 2015)
· TIME TO CHOOSE (d. Charles Ferguson, U.S., 2015)
· MARGUERITE (d. Xavier Giannoli, France, 2015)
· TIKKUN (d. Avishai Sivan, Israel, 2015)
 
The 2015 Silver Medallion Awards, given to recognize an artist’s significant contribution to the world of cinema, go to filmmaker Danny Boyle (TRAINSPOTTING, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE) who will present his latest film, STEVE JOBS; documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis (THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES) who will present his latest work, BITTER LAKE; and actress Rooney Mara (THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO) who will present CAROL. Films will be shown following the on-stage interview and medallion presentation.

I was told a couple of days ago by an astute, always-perceptive friend that Tom McCarthy‘s Spotlight was trim, rigrorous and quite satisfying (“Definitely in the vein of All The President’s Men,” he said) so I was ready and waiting for the raves from Venice Film Festival. Sure enough, Variety‘s Justin Chang weighed in with one

“It’s not often that a director manages to follow his worst film with his best,” Chang begins, “but even if he weren’t rebounding from The Cobbler, Tom McCarthy would have a considerable achievement on his hands with Spotlight, a superbly controlled and engrossingly detailed account of the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into the widespread pedophilia scandals and subsequent cover-ups within the Catholic Church.

“Very much in the All the President’s Men/Zodiac mold of slow-building, quietly gripping journalistic procedurals, this measured and meticulous ensemble drama sifts through a daunting pile of evidence to expose not just the Church’s horrific cycles of abuse and concealment, but also its uniquely privileged position in a society that failed its victims at myriad personal, spiritual and institutional levels.