I was determined to see Amy Berg‘s Janis: Little Girl Blue, her American Masters doc about the great Janis Joplin a day or two ago, mainly because I wanted to hear that great legendary voice booming out of large theatre speakers. And I did that. Sat in a full house in a big, 45-degree-angle arena theatre, and we all sank in and went back to Joplinland. I can listen to her any old time with earphones, but this was almost a concert-like experience, I didn’t care if a certain portion of the footage is accessible on YouTube (such as the below clip from Joplin’s break-out performance at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival), and I wouldn’t have minded if Berg had served up a middling, good-enough portrait. But it’s better than that. And sadder than I expected. It reminded me that her run with Big Brother and the Holding Company was the most exuberant period of her life and career, and that the successful, big-time portion of that alliance lasted only from the Monterey Pop Festival to the very end of ’68 — 18 months. Then came her association with the Kozmic Blues Band (’68 and ’69) and the Full Tilt Boogie Band (’70) — a period not devoid of hits or highs but generally spotty. (Rock critic Ralph J. Gleason wrote that the Kozmic guys were a “drag” and that Joplin should “go right back to being a member of Big Brother.”) And then on 10.4.70 she was gone, dead in a Hollywood hotel room, a victim of too-strong heroin. Heavy drugs were so pervasive back then, so dominant and destructive. But the ’60s needed them as much drugs needed the ’60s, and everybody rode the train until it all turned banal with quaaludes and cocaine in the ’70s and early ’80s. And now it’s all back to alcohol, if that. Among your devil-may-care nocturnal types, I mean.

I didn’t see John Crowley‘s masterful Brooklyn (Fox Searchlight, 11.4 limited) here in Toronto, but in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago. I had initially watched it on a third-generation dupe DVD, but even under those crummy conditions the internals were unmissable. Brooklyn is a gentle, perfectly judged, profoundly stirring romantic classic — not just set in the early ’50s but shot, timed, cut and performed in a way that approximates the aesthetic standards of that era. It’s an amber time-capsule movie with a pulse and what feels to me like a real Irish heartbeat, and a feeling of things blooming and beginning and modest people trying to do the right thing.

Brooklyn could have been released in ’52 alongside High Noon, Singin’ In The Rain and The Bad and the Beautiful and audiences would have nodded and applauded and said the same things people are saying now — “This is a film I could take my mother to, but it’s good enough to satisfy the toughest, most cynical critics…a rooted love story, a film about decent and believable folk as well as tradition, discretion, real love and 1950s Brooklyn family values.”

A good movie doesn’t have to go wham-bam-kaboom and make audiences go “holy shit!…what just happened?” to earn a seat at the Best Picture table, and this is one such occasion. There’s a time and a place for every kind of film, and thank God an effort like Brooklyn has come along — a fine little reminder of the pleasures of emotional simplicity served up in a low-key, no-bull fashion. Cutting-edge cognoscenti might be looking for something flashier or jizzier but people who know from quality will warm to Brooklyn‘s timelessness. A Best Picture nomination seem assured, as I noted last month.

And there can be no doubt that Saoirse Ronan‘s performance as Eilis Lacey, a young Irish immigrant torn between two nice-guy suitors, is solemn and understated and quietly mesmerizing, and therefore a near-lock for a Best Actress nomination. Ditto Crowley for Best Director and Nick Hornby for Best Adapted Screenplay. Yves Belanger‘s elegant cinematography also warrants a nom.

Brooklyn is basically about young Eilis’s journey from Ireland to America to start a new life, and then falling in love with Tony Firello (Emory Cohen), a kindly Italian plumber of 25 or thereabouts who wants to marry her and build a home and start a family. But then she returns to Ireland to mourn the death of her sister, and soon after feels the pull of the heartland and wonders if she should maybe re-think her situation and stay with her own ones. Should she choose an American future or an Irish past?

Vulture‘s Kyle Buchanan doesn’t quite spit it out and call a spade a spade, but the gist is that three high-profile Toronto Film Festival movies about trans or gay characters — The Danish Girl, About Ray and Freeheld — all disappointed or under-performed with the cognoscenti. One reason, he believes, is that these films seem to be more about their cisgender (i.e., straight) characters than the characters they’re ostensibly focused on. Hence Alicia Vikander is the Danish Girl standout, Michael Shannon allegedly gives the strongest and most humanistic performance in Freeheld (haven’t seen it), and Naomi Watts‘ Maggie character, the mother of Elle Fanning‘s transitioning girl/boy, is more “favored”, Buchanan claims, than anyone else in the film.

But again, if it’s at all loyal to Nathaniel Philbrick’s novel, Ron Howard‘s In The Heart of The Sea (Universal, 12.11) is going to be a lot more about starving sailors in a small boat than great big fat leviathans leaping up and crashing down and spraying tons of water. You can’t blame the marketing guys for emphasizing this but at some point they’re going to have to sell what the movie more or less is…right? Another view is that the proverbial steak is what the filmmakers and the audience are focused upon, and that advertisers need only concentrate on the sizzle.

Grantland‘s Mark Harris enthused earlier today about William Wyler‘s The Best Years of Our Lives, which is airing next Tuesday as part of a night of war-related Wyler programming that Harris is guesting on. I should think that Harris’s well-reviewed “Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War” qualifies him as an authority in this regard.

Six years ago I complained about Criterion’s choice of a jacket cover for the forthcoming Downhill Racer DVD (due 11.17). I said I preferred the original 1969 movie poster — a bedroom metaphor for the glamour of Olympic-level skiing — to designer Eric Skillman‘s concept of a droid skiier (i.e., Robocop negotiating a slope on the ice planet of Hoth) that came from a Downhill frame capture.

Skillman blogged about the various options he came up with for Criterion and why the robot-droid art was chosen, etc.

“The concept for Downhill Racer came pretty easily,” he wrote. “The film, about an arrogant but talented athlete, has some really dynamic skiing visuals, and a freeze-frame sequence during the opening credits that just begs to be made into a cover.

“There was also this pretty great-looking original poster…but frankly, the film is anything but a love story, and we all felt it was pretty misleading. Better, I thought, to focus on the great skiing cinematography — shot on skis in large part — that’s such a big part of the film.”

I avoided Lenny Abrahamson and Emily Donoghue‘s Room during the Telluride Film Festival for understandable reasons. Thoughts of confinement and claustrophobia have always unsettled me, and who, really, would want to submit to a film that’s essentially about imprisonment? Mine, I mean. I was locked inside Room for two hours last night as I sat in my Princess of Wales orchestra seat, and the sputtering rage I felt when it finally ended was considerable. (Just ask Coming Soon‘s Ed Douglas — I ranted his ear off as we walked over to the Soho House after-party.)

Room, which Donoghue adapted from her own 2011 novel, is essentially a mother-love film about nurturing a young child (the very young and quite good Jacob Tremblay) through years of grotesque imprisonment imposed by the biological dad, and about the child’s gradual recovery after he and his mom (Brie Larson) have managed an escape.

Last night a New York-based female journalist told me and another columnist that she “really loved” Room. There are many sensitive souls out there who have felt and will feel the same way. But I’m telling you straight and true that it was hell for me. The story sucks and the emotional currents, while strong, don’t go anywhere. They just fret and shudder and play out in a vacuum. I for one felt like a dog in an airless box. It was agony.

Room is about confinement, confinement and more confinement. Okay, with a nicely delivered spiritual uplift moment at the very end. But the feeling of physical and psychological entrapment is nothing short of lethal. I ask again — who would want to sit through something like this? To what end? I’ve got my stress levels and deadlines and the weight of the world on my shoulders and you want me to sit through a movie like Room on top of everything else?

Confinement situation #1 involves a working-class fiend named Old Nick having imprisoned twentysomething Ma (Larson) and five-year-old Jack (Tremblay) in an eight-by-eight-foot shed for seven years. This situation, which is ghastly and yet boring, occupies the first 50 or 55 minutes. Then they escape (the most interesting part of the film) and then comes confinement situation #2 in a hospital, and then confinement situation #3 in the leafy suburban home of Larson’s mother (Joan Allen) and her second husband Leo (Tom McCamus) in which various resentments eventually erupt. And it goes on and on like this. And on and on. The rooms change but the caged atmosphere persists.

Ilya Naishuller‘s Hardcore is obviously adrenalized madness. The Grand Theft Auto POV strategy was first used on Robert Montgomery‘s Lady in the Lake, except that was much tamer, almost all dialogue, etc. Occuring in Moscow over the course of a single day, the unseen main character is “a cyborg super-soldier who goes on a blood-drenched rampage in a frantic attempt to rescue his scientist wife from an evil group of heavily-armed mercenaries,” blah blah. I’m seeing it tomorrow night at 9:45 pm.

From Vulture‘s Kyle Buchanan: “As a riveting procedural story, I’ve seen Spotlight compared to films like Zodiac and All the President’s Men, but the more instructive example for Oscar voters will be Argo, another well-engineered, fact-based drama that eventually became the Academy’s consensus pick for Best Picture. Plenty of Oscar voters will give Spotlight their No. 1 spot, but this audience-pleaser is sure to collect just about everybody else’s No. 2 votes, and that may be crucial in a year where several of the biggest movies yet to screen, like Joy and The Revenant, come from some of our most polarizing auteurs.

“Boy, is this movie good. It’s not a showy, bombastic picture — it has that in common with the journalists it portrays, who are mostly concerned with ducking their heads down and doing the work — but it’s so assured, so deft, and so satisfying that I think it’s destined to go far with Oscar voters of just about every demographic. The Academy has made daring picks for Best Picture over the past two years, anointing the tough, arty 12 Years a Slave and the wordy Birdman, but I think voters are yearning to return to something conventional, and Spotlight’s got a down-the-middle, perfectly executed pitch they’ll find hard to resist. It also has the sort of social significance that Oscar voters like from their Best Picture winner: You can pat your back for putting it on your ballot.”

The main difference between this new trailer for Ryan Coogler‘s Creed (Warner Bros., 11.25) and the one that popped on or about 6.30 is the amount of Sylvester Stallone footage. Michael B. Jordan (Fruitvale Station) is central in both, of course, but the earlier version indicated an all-black ensemble delivering a rotely inspirational boxing tale with Stallone pinch-htting. The new trailer is selling a two-character boxing drama (Jordan, Stallone) on a more equal basis. What eastern-seaboard city is uglier than Philadelphia? If some God of Fate were to visit me at 4 am and say “you will never visit Philadephia again for the rest of your life,” I would say “okay, whatever…I can live with that.” Pic costars Tessa Thompson, Phylicia Rashad, Wood Harris and real-life British champion boxer Tony Bellew.