Last night’s The Night of episode, “Samson and Delilah”, finally got going in a forward-motion narrative sense. The first five episodes were mostly atmospheric procedurals. Slowly and deliberately placed, they repeated the same idea over and over about how New York City’s legal system can grind an innocent man down, all but suffocate his soul and instill a criminal attitude even before his trial begins.

(l. to r.) Amara Karan, Riz Ahmed, John Turutrro.

Things picked up somewhat during episode #5 (“The Season of the Witch”) but now, finally, we’re starting to look at seriously plausible suspects in the brutal stabbing murder of Andrea Cornish. Besides, of course, Nasir Khan (Riz Ahmed), whom the authorities have imprisoned and are prosecuting, and whom we’re all presuming is innocent.

The three suspects are (1) Duane Reade, some kind of lowlife druggie whom John Stone (John Turturro) chased last week through some abandoned basement area; (2) Mr. Day, a thoroughly creepy mortician and limo driver whose Biblical loathing of women is revealed in a brief discussion with defense attorney Chandra Kapoor (Amara Karan); and, most intriguingly, (3) Don Taylor (Paul Sparks), Andrea’s stepfather who had been battling with Andrea over the inheritance of ownership of a home owned by her late mom.

On top of which Turturro’s foot eczema was miraculously cured last night by a Chinese herbalist.

During a breakfast at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, director Guillermo del Toro said something about wanting to downshift out of the super-fantasy, design-heavy, uber-FX realm and focus on smaller-scaled, more character-driven projects. I took that to mean films in the vein of Mama and particularly GDT’s Spanish-speaking roster — The Orphanage, The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth, Chronos. Perhaps The Shape of Water, “a magical, other-worldly story set against the backdrop of Cold War America circa 1963,” will be a step in that direction.

Shape began filming today in Toronto. (Which means it’ll still be shooting during the Toronto Film Festival.) Costarring Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Doug Jones, Michael Stuhlbarg and Octavia Spencer. The dp is Dan Laustsen (John Wick: Chapter Two, Crimson Peak, Mimic).

Fear factor: GDT’s co-writer is Vanessa Taylor, whose credits include Game of Thrones and Divergent. This guarantees a fantastical concept. Plus I hated Divergent.

Non-judgmental confession: The Shape of Water title bothers me a bit. As would The Shape of Air. It reminds me of the title of that book written by Paul Giamatti‘s Miles in Sideways — “The Day After Yesterday.” (Virginia Madsen: “Uhm…you mean today?”)

Apologies to the Captain Fantastic crew for failing to include it in HE’s Best of 2016 roster (posted on 8.12). It deserves to be there (“Intriguing, admirable, thoughtful, nicely crafted”) and now it is.

Repeating 2016’s top 15, in this order: Kenneth Lonergan‘s Manchester by the Sea, David Mackenzie‘s Hell or High Water, Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper, Luca Guadagnino‘s A Bigger Splash, Robert Eggers‘ The Witch, Gavin Hood‘s Eye in the Sky, Paddy Breathnach and Mark O’Halloran‘s Viva, Karyn Kusama‘s The Invitation, Bob Nelson‘s The Confirmation, Ben Wheatley‘s High-Rise, Sausage Party, Matt Ross‘s Captain Fantastic, John Carney’s Sing Street, Jacques Audiard‘s Dheepan, the first 50 minutes of Captain America: Civil War.

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, the title Hidden Figures doesn’t exactly go zing. Brainy mathematicians, Florida sunshine, soul music, Kevin Costner, clever quips, a little romance. Celebrate and salute, but I can see the scheme of this thing from a mile away.

The leads are Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe. I love that House of Cards and Moonlight costar Mahershala Ali is costarring.

Set in the early ’60s and based on a forthcoming non-fiction book by Margot Lee Shetterly, the film recounts the tale of three African-American women — mathematicians Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and colleague Mary Jackson — who helped NASA “catch up in the space race.”

From an 8.14 N.Y. Times report by Michael Powell, about a journey through Rio de Janeiro’s Favela do Mandela, a ramshackle collection of brick-and-tar-paper buildings, a thousand metaphysical miles from the well-heeled Olympic zone:

“We scrambled up a hardscrabble path to the new police precinct that commands the hill like a medieval castle keep. Inside, three police officers in body armor nodded warily. They pointed to one, two, three bullet holes in the glass windows of the precinct, each the size of a ping-pong ball; the police attack and the gangs counterattack.

“The precinct wall is dominated by a painting of a knight kneeling and holding his sword, accompanied by these words: ‘You may die but if you don’t fight, you’re already dead.'”

So who saw Hell or High Water and what are the reactions? The other day I called it the year’s best — is it? And how did the room feel, what was the after-vibe? Do you concur that it’s a social undercurrent drama disguised as a cops vs. bank-robbers movie? That it’s a meditative moralistic thing that stands up for the yokels? Or does it mainly play like a good, unpretentious Texas desperado flick? Should CBS Films be trying to sell it to red-state audiences or is it destined to connect only with blue-state urbans?

From my 8.12 review: “Any movie that rings the bell of people like me (somewhat educated, accomplished, well-travelled, blue-state values, Kooples T-shirts) as well as guys who live in the cocoon of lazy cynicism and insufficient brain-cell counts while wearing flannel shirts, cowboys boots, saggy Levi 501s and swigging Lone Star beer is definitely up to something.”

In an 8.14 Variety piece Owen Gleiberman writes that Hell or High Water is “a 2016 version of a 1970s movie…it transcends being a genre film [but also] respects how much audiences today crave genre elements.” He calls it “a crackerjack piece of entertainment” that “connects up to the most downbeat undercurrents of life in America today. That’s what gives the movie its ’70s flavor. It’s about poverty and insecurity, the gnaw of financial desperation, and the feeling that there’s no way out of it.”

I know Alfred Hitchcock over under sideways down, and yet this essay, assembled by the brilliant Nerdwriter, opened my Hitchcock windows and got me excited in a new way. The focus is on an early scene in Vertigo that I had always regarded as an exercise in rote set-up and exposition. But there’s more to it than that. “It’s a dance,” Nerdwriter observes. “[And] it holds up the rest of the film.” Definitely worth watching.

Whether or not Amber Heard had something to do with this TMZ-posted video of Johnny Depp getting furious in the kitchen, it sure makes Captain Jack look bad. This is a dirty, sordid business and certainly not mine, but I know what it’s like when an alcoholic is raging and shouting “motherfucker!” and slamming cabinet doors and slurping red wine in the early afternoon. My father was a drinker, and so was I (vodka) in the early to mid ’90s. “I am not responsible for the release of [this] video,” Heard told E! yesterday. “It was not what I wanted and I am doing what I can to force the media to take it off the internet. I am attempting to resolve this matter in the most private way possible.” If Depp hadn’t gotten fat, if he still looked like Tonto, half of his troubles wouldn’t be happening. But he looks like a rich, fat lush. Whatever Heard wants from their divorce settlement, she’s probably going to get. This video is a killer.

One thing I’ll bet Ron Howard‘s Eight Days A Week (Abramorama, 8.15 theatrical, 9.17 Hulu) will barely acknowledge, much less get into, is that during their big-stadium tours of ’64 and ’66, the Beatles’ sets lasted less than 30 minutes. I read somewhere that the sets were actually closer to 20 or 25. Their manager, the late Brian Epstein, felt it was better to give the audience a quick taste than serve a full meal. When you think of all those hundreds of thousands of fans who went through hell to score Beatles tickets and got their parents to drive them to Shea Stadium or the Hollywood Bowl and then only got a 25-minute show…the descriptive terms are “arrogant” and “unfeeling.”

Will Howard screen his doc at Telluride (best idea) or Toronto? Or will there be regular press screenings sometime in mid to late August? I haven’t heard jack squat.

Matt Zoller Seitz posted this message on Facebook yesterday. Can you imagine the frailty, the utter whimsicality and thoughtlessness of a relationship that goes south over differing opinions about Brooklyn, for God’s sake? It’s not that strong of a film. It’s tender and plain and affecting, but it doesn’t connect with strong values or ethics, not really. It’s mainly an early ’50s social-mood piece. I wouldn’t blink if a girlfriend told me she didn’t like it. Nor would I break up with her if she ordered take-out pizza for dinner and forgot about the red onions, despite my having requested this. Not worth the sweat.

If, however, a girlfriend were to review my list of the 160 all-time greatest American films (which I posted on 7.24.15) and announce that she doesn’t like, say, 40% or 50% of them, then we’d have a problem. She can dislike some of them…fine. It’s okay if she’s not a fan of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre…fine. or Out of the Past, Raging Bull, Who’ll Stop The Rain. Too cynical, too rough-and-tumble, too male-ish. But she can’t say there’s not a lot to worship about Paths of Glory, Zero Dark Thirty, Blow-Up, On The Waterfront, Shane, Notorious, Au Hasard Balthazar or Groundhog Day.

Women can be astonishing in their pre-conceived attitudes about certain films. An actress I got to know a couple of years ago had never seen Paths of Glory, and she didn’t want to because she didn’t want to see, she said, “a war film about guys getting shot and blown up.” She’d never read a single damn word about Stanley Kubrick‘s anti-war masterpiece. (That in itself was a huge problem.)  I had to use all the usual erudite arguments plus all the charm and cajoling I could muster to get her to watch it with me. She finally got it, of course, but without me in her life she never would have.  She would have pushed it away until her dying day.

Women can be completely strange about movies. They just want to see what they want to see.

Oh, what an amazing day we all had at Smashbox, shooting photos of a Los Angeles magazine piece about the new neo-film noir (The Usual Suspects, Leaving Las Vegas, Natural Born Killers, Killing Zoe, etc.) The article was dreamt up and written by editor Andy Olstein; I got a reporting credit but I was also the talent gatherer. The only difficulty was Olstein’s insistence that everyone had to pose with a gun, which Benicio del Toro didn’t want to do. He confided this to me, said he wasn’t gonna do it. I went up to Olstein and argued that it would be monotonous if everyone was aiming the same gun at the camera so why not let Benicio slide? I thought the issue was settled, and then when the was piece was assembled I discovered that Benicio had agreed to pose with a gun after all. Strange.