The Venice Film Festival reviewers were not wrong — Damian Chazelle‘s La La Land (Summit, 12.2) is a winning, audacious, often delightful Jacques Demy-styled musical for the 21st Century. Some of them added that it’s not quite a fall-on-the-floor great, and they were right about that too. Most of it, in my book, is an 8 or an 8.5. But hold on.

Because the opening song-and-dance-on-the-freeway sequence is a 9.5. And the last 15 minutes are an absolute 10 — they deliver, no exaggeration, one of the best-written and well rendered finales of any non-comedic musical ever. Sad, dazzling, wise and just right. So that makes La La Land better than an 8 or 8.5. Call it a 9.

And Emma Stone‘s performance as a struggling actress, trust me, is an absolute grand-slammer. A Best Actress nomination is 100% locked. Gosling is very good also but she dominates him. A friend who knows this racket thinks the Best Actress race will probably come down to Stone and Viola Davis in Fences.

Take away the songs and the dancing and Chazelle’s bravura direction…a silly thing to say, right? But take those away and La La Land, story- and acting-wise, would be an appealing, well-written, nicely done Los Angeles love story between two aspiring artist-performers in their late 20s — Ryan Gosling‘s Sebastian, a jazz pianist whose passion is too pure to pay the rent with, and Stone’s Mia, an actress who has the goods but has been bombing out at auditions for years, and she’s starting to wither.

But add the songs, dancing and bravura direction and you have…well, a helluva lot more.

The only speed bump, for me, is that Stone has a pleasing but fairly tiny voice (non-problematic but maybe a little above the level of Diane Keaton‘s singing in Annie Hall) and Gosling is no skilled croooner either so you have to accept these limitations. And I did. Speed bumps are finessable, negotiable.

A friend says that the fact that they can’t sing all that wonderfully works for the film — these are real people singing their feelings with real-people voices. I get that, a good point. But I still wanted to better pipes. Just a little.

It’s now 7:55 pm. I have to catch Moonlight, which starts at 8 pm. Did I state that La La Land is a definite Best Picture nominee? It has to be. The thing that gives it character and cojones is that it’s not a “happy” musical. It has the character to end…well, not joyously.

The pugnacious, raspy-voiced Jon Polito, whom I always found a distinctive if somewhat overbearing performer, particularly in his Coen Brothers roles (Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn’t There), has passed at age 65. Sorry. I wish that just once he had played (or that I had seen him play) a calm, mellow type who never yelled. I never knew Polito was openly gay — hilarious. His career got rolling in ’81. He worked like a sonuvabitch on television. Big voiceover guy — he voiced “Conquedor” in the 2011 TV series Thundercats. I sometimes thought of him as am angrier, less thoughtful Danny De Vito. I even had an idea they were roughly the same size…wrong. De Vito is 4′ 10″ — Polito was 5′ 8″.

Having experienced the trauma of last year’s “damp, windswept, bone-chilling Telluride Film Festival patron’s brunch,” I’m thinking I might sidestep the 2016 version, which some are lining up for as we speak. It’s damp and gray out there, and it was flat-out raining an hour or so ago. The special patron’s screening, 2:30 pm at the Chuck Jones theatre, will be La La Land, I’ve been told. Added: There’s a Frank Marshall-produced doc, Finding Oscar, screening tomorrow afternoon, about a “search for justice in the case of the Dos Erres massacre of the ’80s,” etc. 11:05 am Update: Now it’s sunny — maybe I’ll hit the brunch after all.

I truly regretted missing Paul Verhoeven‘s Elle at the end of last May’s Cannes Film Festival. (It’s not like I didn’t ask repeatedly about rue d’Antibes market screenings or any chance to catch it early….stonewall.) Just about every critic loved it. Why isn’t it playing Telluride? It pops a few days hence in Toronto.

I was hugely irked yesterday afternoon, sitting on a doorstep on Telluride’s Colorado Avenue as I berated those Booking.com bozos on a Skype line. I hadn’t eaten anything, the iPhone 6 Plus couldn’t be repaired (the thought of not being able to snap any photos during this festival distress me to no end), the iPhone rental was a no-go, and I’d missed the deadline to pick up my press pass. And then a pretty lady slowed and leaned down and patted my recently bought saddle shoes and gave me a thumbs-up as she kept walking. Thank you. And then Telluride’s press rep Shannon Goodwin Mitchell walked by and saw me sitting there all cranky and pissed off and reached into a bag and gave me my Telluride pass pass…thanks! And then Sasha Stone pulled up with my wallet, which she’d retrieved at the Dolores Mountain Inn. And then four or five hours later I was sitting in Glenn Zoller‘s big, comfortable, well-lighted kitchen and enjoying a Grateful Dead track for the first time in eons. Glenn was listening to KOTO, the local cool-cat FM station, and all of a sudden Bob Weir singing “Satisfaction” put me in the greatest mood. On the worst days the nicest things can happen out of the blue.

Telluride’s vp public relations Shannon Mitchell during last year’s rain-soaked picnic.

Something about Tom Ford‘s Nocturnal Animals hasn’t quite rung Owen Gleiberman’s bell. Some tingly little itch that hasn’t been scratched in the right way. It’s not that he dislikes it, far from it, but it’s not as good, he says, as Blue Velvet or In The Bedroom. And yet he’s calling it “a suspenseful and intoxicating movie — a thriller that isn’t scared to go hog-wild with violence, to dig into primal fear and rage, even as it’s constructed around a melancholy love story that circles back on itself in tricky and surprising ways.

Jake Gyllenhaal in Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals.

The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw, on the other hand, has totally flipped for it. “There’s a double-shot of horror and Nabokovian despair in this outrageously gripping and absorbing meta mystery-thriller,” he writes. “It’s a movie with a double-stranded narrative — a story about a fictional story which runs alongside — and it pulls off the considerable trick of making you care about both equally, something I think The French Lieutenant’s Woman never truly managed.

“Clive James once wrote that talk about ‘levels of reality’ never properly acknowledges that one of these levels is really real. That probably holds true. But in Nocturnal Animals, these levels are equally powerful, and have an intriguingly queasy and potent interrelation.

Gleiberman: “With Amy Adams as a posh, married, but deeply lonely Los Angeles artist, and Jake Gyllenhaal as the novelist from her past who finds himself trapped in a nightmare, the movie has two splendid actors working at the top of their game, and more than enough refined dramatic excitement to draw awards-season audiences hungry for a movie that’s intelligent and sensual at the same time.”

Nocturnal Animals, which apparently didn’t make the cut at Telluride but will screen in Toronto next week, “seizes and holds you — with its suspense, and its vision. It leaves no doubt as to Ford’s fervor and originality as a director, and it leaves you hoping that he’ll make his next film before another seven years passes by.”