Pablo Larrain‘s Jackie is a major stand-out in a long line of docudramas about the tragedy and travails of the Kennedy family. It’s the only one that can be truly called an art film — intimate, half-dreamlike, cerebral, not entirely “realistic” but at the same time a persuasive and fascinating portrait of what Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (Natalie Portman) went through between the lunch-hour murder of her husband in Dallas on 11.22.63 and his burial at Arlington National Cemetery on 11.25.63.

Some of Jackie is about grief and weeping (naturally) but mostly it’s about steel — holding it together, arranging the funeral, standing up, refusing to wilt. It’s almost all shot in close-ups, right in there, no blinking or downshifting.

And the music! Mica Levi‘s melancholy strings, not so much “melodic” as a kind of melodic wailing, filled the Winter Garden last night and it was like “whoa!” The strings and a couple of tracks from the original B’way cast album of Camelot comprise the entire musical scheme. Not even those haunting funeral drums are heard — a ballsy move when you think about it.

Larrain, the respected Chilean-born director of No, The Club and Neruda, makes Jackie his own, and particularly Portman’s. It’s the best thing NP has done since Black Swan, and it puts her right dead smack into the hallowed circle of Best Actress contenders now — Portman plus La La Land‘s Emma Stone plus (here’s hoping) Viola Davis in Fences along with Loving‘s Ruth Negga.

I was told yesterday that the famously non-functioning Scotiaplex escalator is now working again. I haven’t personally witnessed this but the reports are apparently true. While this is obviously good news, Scotiaplex management retains its poor reputation now and forever. The people who waited until the Toronto Film Festival was half over to fix this situation are ignoble and derelict. If there’s a God these guys will be dogged by this failure for the rest of their lives. Every time they look in the bathroom mirror they’ll say to themselves, “I’m a nice guy with certain attributes but when it came to the Scotiaplex escalator catastrophe of 2016, I fucked up badly…and because of this I will always be a fuck-up in a certain residual sense. Beat me with birch branches. My hands will never be clean.”

According to Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, TIFF-attending critics are building upon the ecstatic praise for Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight that began in Telluride. “Strong marketer A24 will keep pushing for this,” she writes, “[but] the likeliest outcome [is that] House of Cards costar Mahershala Ali will score a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his heart-tugging role as a tough drug dealer who mentors the vulnerable young ‘Little.'”

Good for Moonlight, A24 and Ali (whose performance is a grabber), but I’m telling you two things: (1) the Telluride foo-foos did this intimate, small-scale drama no favors by overpraising it, and (2) I’ve been hearing more balanced reactions since arriving in Toronto. Yesterday a certain hotshot columnist told me “there’s not enough there there” and “it’s not gay enough.” Prior to last night’s Jackie screening a New York-based film critic said he wasn’t all that taken with Jenkins’ film. It deserves an audience and whatever accolades it may receive, but Team Moonlight needs to face facts about the likely reception among Academy/guild members as well as Average Joes.

I saw Oliver Stone‘s Snowden (Open Road, 9.16) in late August, but the embargo has only just lifted. It’s Oliver’s finest and most satisfying film since Any Given Sunday, which is no small equivalency. Oliver has rebounded! Compelling and comprehensive, Snowden tells the tale of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden (Joseph Gordon Levitt), who in my eyes is a kind of Paul Revere of the digital invasion age.

Human nature being what it is, most people out there want security more than freedom. They want the government to waste Islamic bad guys, and, being of relatively clean conscience, are okay with their privacy being invaded as a trade-off. The longer view is that if some rash authoritarian is elected President one day, he/she could utilize the NSA’s vast surveillance network to create an Orwellian thought-police state. There’s also the matter of political resistance, an essential tenet of any democracy, being weakened by the lack of private agency.

Snowden is a well-measured complement to Laura Poitras‘s Oscar-winning Citizen Four, which of course means zip to the tens of millions of potential ticket buyers who’ve never even heard of Citizen Four, much less seen it, or who’ve otherwise bought into the MSM’s view that what Snowden did was dicey if not verging on treason.

Outside of your educated, progressive X-factor lefties, sensible centrists and smart righties the U.S. is mostly a nation of comfort-seeking, mall-meandering sheep. For every person interested in seeing Snowden, there are 20 or 25 who would much rather see Garth Jennings‘ Sing (Universal, 12.21).