Last March a research-screening guy expressed measured enthusiasm for Joseph Kosinski‘s Granite Mountain, which at the time was a Lionsgate film slated for a 9.22 release. Now it’s a Columbia film called Only The Brave, and slated to open on 10.20. Josh Brolin, Miles Teller, Jeff Bridges, James Badge Dale, Taylor Kitsch, Jennifer Connelly, et. al. Don’t jump to conclusions. Kosinski is a strong, above-average director. 

From my 5.25.17 Cannes Film festival review: “Brigsby Bear espouses a belief in clinging to adolescent dreams and oddball weirdnesses as a way of keeping reality at bay. It doesn’t advance the idea that integrating into ‘normal’ society is a particularly good thing. It insists, in fact, that feeding and sustaining obsessional realms can actually be a recipe for emotional health, and that normal realms are healthier, happier places for understanding and celebrating outsider sensibilities. Or something like that.

“Brigsby Bear isn’t about going for breakneck hilarity or building up a head of steam, but it does understand itself, and it sticks to that. It has a certain patch of ground that it proudly owns, and you either get that or you don’t. Again — I’m the farthest thing from a geek type or any kind of pre-indoctrinated member of the Brigsby Bear society, but I got this film. I went in with a guarded attitude, but I had a smile going by evening’s end.”

Sony Pictures Classics is opening Brigsby Bear on 7.28.

If I took the time to dredge my memory and think it through, I could come up with 20 or 30 movies that I found riveting and pulse-quickening when I first saw them in my teens and 20s, but felt like pale, under-energized remnants when I re-watched them as a wise but creased adult. But I haven’t the time right now. (I have to leave at 10:30 am for an 11 am screening.) The best I can come up with are two letdowns I’ve already written about — Steven Spielberg‘s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and John Sturges‘ The Great Escape. Surely there are scores that qualify in the thorny minds of HE readers.