I’m hearing that Woody Allen‘s Wonder Wheel is “good but not great”, and that while Kate Winslet might snag a Best Actress nomination for her performance as the tragic Ginny, she won’t win because her performance, fine as it is, doesn’t match Cate Blanchett‘s Oscar-winning turn in Blue Jasmine.

Allen’s latest will screen for NY Film Festival press and Los Angeles press on Friday.

“Yes, there’s that meltdown scene that people seem to be talking about,” a guy tells me. “It’s shot, if I remember correctly, in a single take and is just heart-wrenching. It proved to me that Woody still has a fair amount of cinematic juice left in him. It also upped the entire movie’s quality for me as well.

“Jim Belushi is fine. Not much of a well-sketched character if you ask me, but you do care for him. Juno Temple is better!

“Overall Winslet is very solid, but she won’t win. No way, no how. She doesn’t even come close to reaching Blanchett-level greatness. Possibly a fifth slot awaits her? The fact that she’s already won all but seals it for me. Plus her accent is quite strange here. I’m not sure what she was going for. She’s still a great actress, but some notes didn’t ring true. If people are expecting a Cate Blanchett-level performance, they’d best lower their expectations. She’s really good and deserves that fifth slot, but Winslet is not Blanchett.

“Vittorio Storaro‘s cinematography is incredible. (HE: Deakins loses again?) There are some scenes where he uses the light in a given room so well, and in a way that’s very similar to the way he bright colors to light rooms in The Conformist. This is exceptional work from a true master of the form. He’s basically schooled Deakins with this film. As much as I hope Deakins wins that Oscar, Storaro deserves it way more.

“The scenes involving the mob felt like a mix of comedy and violence. Reminded me of Bullets over Broadway. They feel a little bit distracting, mess up the tone, especially when the soul of the film is Winslet.”

Yesterday News in English in Norway reported that Tomas Alfredson‘s The Snowman (Universal, 10.20) has gotten creamed by Norweigan film reviewers. They were generally “deeply disappointed,” the piece says, “with several panning it and giving the film a score of just two on a scale of one to six.”

The Snowman will screen for Los Angeles critics on Wednesday, 10.18, or a day before it opens. What does that tell you?

Straight from the shoulder: “The local film critics, well-acquainted with Nesbo’s books about the unorthodox Norwegian detective Harry Hole, had been waiting almost breathlessly for the film’s release themselves. It’s not often that a film shot entirely on location in Norway and inspired by a Norwegian is about to be distributed internationally, and expectations were skyhigh. When they finally got to see it, just prior to its festive premiere in Oslo on Tuesday, many were all but stunned.

“’What in the world has happened here?’ read the headline on the review published by newspaper VG, Norway’s largest tabloid distributed nationwide. It went on to complain that the ‘thriller’ was anything but, that it lacked the ‘page-turning’ characteristics of the book and contained so many “dramatic” changes in the plot of Nesbo’s Snowman that fans of Harry Hole (pronounced Hoo-leh in Nowegian) are likely to sound off in online commentaries.

“Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK)’s reviewer was just as unimpressed. Marte Hedenstad, part of the so-called ‘film police’ at NRK, was most disappointed that the depth and personality of the Harry Hole character ‘disappeared’ during the transition from book to screen. She claimed that also removed the intensity that made The Snowman an international best-seller.

“What’s left is a standard and quite boring crime story, that never got me to feel my heart in my throat,’ Hedenstad wrote. She conceded on national radio in Norway Tuesday morning that film versions of books often disappoint fans of the books who think they’re much better, but in this case, she and other reviewers believe director Tomas Alfredson made some major mistakes.

“’This is not my Harry Hole,’ she wrote, making it clear that in her opinion, the film does not do justice to the hero of Nesbo’s books who’s brilliant but struggles with alcohol abuse and self-destructive behavior.”

Last March a research-screening guy expressed measured enthusiasm for Joseph Kosinski‘s Granite Mountain, a true-life action tragedy costarring Josh Brolin, Miles Teller, Jeff Bridges, James Badge Dale, Taylor Kitsch and Jennifer Connelly. At the time it was a Lionsgate film slated to open on 9.22. Then a conflict arose between Lionsgate and production company Black Label Media, and the distribution rights shifted over to Sony. It was re-titled as Only The Brave and is now slated to open on 10.20. I just saw it the day before yesterday at a Dolby screening facility on Hollywood Blvd.

The squabble suggested it might somehow be weak or insufficient on some level, but Only The Brave is actually a well-made, better-than-decent film about tough Arizona firefighters who love their demanding, dangerous work, and how some of them care more about each other more than their wives or kids (or at least are still weighing the relative merits). In movie-lore terms they’re a team of Howard Hawks hombres, or guys who measure themselves by the same macho yardstick that Cary Grant applied in Only Angels Have Wings and which John Wayne demanded of his men in Red River. “How good are you?”, “Do you have what it takes?”, “Can I depend on you when the heat comes down and the going gets tough?,” etc.

Only The Brave is about the infamous Yarnell Hill blaze — an inferno that killed 19 Prescott-based firefighters in June 2013. All of them youngish and white (Prescott is one of the whitest cities in the country) and intensely proud of being a member of the elite Granite Mountain hotshots. It was the deadliest incident of any kind for U.S. firefighters since the 9.11.01 attacks, and the sixth-deadliest American firefighter disaster of all time.

So it’s basically about a merging of the Hawks ethos and 21st Century red-state attitudes, and then served on a silver tray as a big, sad-ass tragedy from director Jospeh Kosinski (Oblivion, Tron: Legacy), who knows from smooth, clean and decisive chops.

It’s based on a 9.27.13 GQ story by Sean Flynn (“No Exit: The Granite Mountain Yarnell Fire Investigation”). The screenplay is by Ken Nolan and Eric Warren Singer.

The lead-up to the tragedy (i.e., the first 75% or 80%) is what sold me. This is one of those unassuming, middle-of-the-road, regular-guy, red-blooded, beer-drinking action movies that you just know is going to work out. Not for the characters but as a dramatic piece. It just makes you relax and wait for it. Well-acted, nicely written and paced and just an all-around, well-handled ensemble piece about hairy-ass firefighting.

Josh Brolin and Miles “don’t be a pervert, man” Teller have the biggest roles and, as you might expect, deliver the strongest performances.

I was slightly bothered by the fact that these guys are all conservatives but I got past that. When the big tragedy finally hits…I wouldn’t want to lie and say I didn’t feel slightly conflicted about the fact that these 19 guys who probably would have voted for Trump if they’d lived, but I felt the sadness, for sure.

What I’m about to mention wouldn’t have been mentioned in the ’90s or even the early aughts, but we live today in a p.c. realm that pretty much insists upon a vision of multicultural plurality and progressive racial identity politics, even when such a depiction doesn’t stand up to historical fact or likelihood (such as the casting of Leslie Odom, Jr in Kenneth Branagh‘s Murder on the Orient Express.

Each and every character in Only The Brave is Wonderbread because the town is almost entirely that. Needless to add this depiction goes against the multicultural projection ethos of present-day Hollywood, which usually insists on at least one or two Hispanic or African American cast members in any ensemble. Strange as it sounds, Kosinski, Nolan and Singer actually stuck to the demographic facts. Imagine that.

According to a chart I’ve found online, Prescott is 92.93% white, only 1.27% American Indian and Alaska native and 0.5% African American, and 0.83% Asian. Suburbanstats.org claims that 8% of Prescott is Hispanic.