Five and a half years ago Deadline‘s Michael Fleming described Gold, which was then a Michael Mann project, as “a contemporary Treasure of the Sierra Madre-type treasure hunt about prospectors and speculators involved in a chase for gold.” Mann bailed in 2012, and then Spike Lee was going to direct until he quit, and then it finally became a Stephen Gaghan project. I don’t know what Gold is or what it will feel like as a feature, but the trailer [after the jump] is trying to sell a jaunty, scary-funny tale of outrageous fortune. The interest in making something in the vein of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre may have been sincere four or five years ago, but that notion has clearly gone out the window since. Matthew McConaughey (transformed), Edgar Ramirez, Bruce Dallas Howard, Corey Stoll, Toby Kebbell.

“Did you lose a child, Howard?” There’s another film opening this fall (a good one) that deals with a similar situation, but the seeming difference in tone between that unnamed film and David Frankel‘s Collateral Beauty (New Line, 12.16) is quite marked. This thing feel so precious. The metaphor of the dominoes scares me. “You’ve been given a gift” gives me the willies. I began to mutter “uh-oh” less than 20 seconds in. We all know what a movie can feel like when Will Smith is playing a guy in pain. Remember Seven Pounds? Collateral Beauty feels like a close relation. I’ll tell you who’s in pain — costar Edward Norton. His face seems to say “I’m regretting this…I think I made a mistake.”

We all knew Hiddleswift would be over before long, but I was figuring on six months, not three. A hot but brief affair should endure, in my mind, a good half year. That’s how long my last firecracker relationship (May to October of ’13) lasted. Two months of undiluted bliss, two months of things levelling out with this or that issue surfacing but good times continuing, and two months for the wind-down and someone (usually me) finally getting the heave-ho.

There’s only one way to make an affair last six months or six years, and that’s to devote yourself hook, line and sinker to giving your Type-A , high-maintenance girlfriend absolutely everything she might want plus extras. If you hook up with a beautiful headstrong narcissist you’re going to get dropped sooner or later, but the ride is usually worth it because the sex is so good it makes you weep with gratitude. I’m guessing that’s what Hiddleston is telling himself right now.

Hollywood Reporter critic David Rooney: “Extraordinary in its piercing intimacy and lacerating in its sorrow, Pablo Larrain‘s Jackie is a remarkably raw portrait of an iconic American First Lady, reeling in the wake of tragedy while at the same time summoning the defiant fortitude needed to make her husband’s death meaningful, and to ensure her own survival as something more than a fashionably dressed footnote.

“Powered by an astonishing performance from a never-better Natalie Portman in the title role, this unconventional bio-drama also marks a boldly assured English-language debut for Larrain, the gifted Chilean director behind such films as No, The Club and Neruda.”

Variety‘s Guy Lodge: “Eschewing standard biopic form at every turn, this brilliantly constructed, diamond-hard character study observes as the exhausted, conflicted Jackie attempts to disentangle her own perspective, her own legacy and, perhaps hardest of all, her own grief from a tragedy shared by millions.

Barry Jenkins‘ Moonlight (A24, 10.21) was the favorite Telluride flick in an Indiewire critics poll posted yesterday. Eight out of 17 critics called it their #1. The second favorite film was Damien Chazelle‘s La La Land. The Moonlight acclaim is a good thing all around — good for Barry, A24, the p.c. brigade — except for the fact that it’s a little too emphatic. Down the road it may have the same effect that Peter Sellars calling it a “masterpiece” had on my reaction last weekend.

“Moonlight didn’t destroy me or rock my soul, but I was impressed and moved,” I wrote last Saturday. “I admired it as far as it went. I just had to adjust myself to what it is as opposed to the earth-shaker that some have been describing.”

A friend asked yesterday “what Moonlight‘s prospects might be with the Academy (or lack thereof)…hearing many different perspectives on this.”

“Moonlight is a 100% respectable, commendable, finely tuned accomplishment,” I replied, “but its overwhelming popularity in the Indiewire poll indicates another p.c. circle-jerk, akin to the ecstatic reception that Nate Parker‘s The Birth of a Nation received last January at Sundance. Get behind the cool new black helmer, the former Telluride volunteer, the guy who’s delivered an intimate, Boyhood-like exploration of black gayness…garlands for the conqueror.