Jeffrey Wells

Is it really because of dropping revenues, or is it partly to do with Colbert being a Trump hater?

Besides ignoring the great Dolores Claiborne, what else was I doing in 1995? I’ll tell you what — I was watching all the other goody-goods.

HE’s top five films of ‘95 are Heat, Se7en, The Usual Suspects, Dolores Claiborne and Crimson Tide.

#6 through #10 are Swimming With Sharks, Leaving Las Vegas, To Die For, Before Sunrise and The Bridges of Madison County.

And then, in this approximate order: Leavibg Las Vegas, Get Shorty, Apollo 13, Living in Oblivion, Operation Dumbo Drop, The Brothers McMullen, Casino, Mighty Aphrodite, Sense and Sensibility, The American President, Toy Story, Nixon, Richard III, Dead Man Walking, Empire Records, The Basketball Diaries, Dangerous Minds, Clockers, Kids, Clueless, Beyond Rangoon. (31 films in all)

Braveheart won 1995’s Best Picture Oscar, but I can’t in all honesty call it one of my faves of that year. I haven’t re-watched it once in the 30 years that have elapsed.

“Sometimes bein’ a bitch is all a woman has to hold on to.”

Because I was lazy and cowardly I chose to avoid Taylor Hackford, Kathy Bates, Tony Gilroy and Gabriel Beristain’s Dolores Claiborne back in the late winter or early spring of ‘95. It really wasn’t cool that I shut this worthy film out, but I finally watched it last night and holy moley mother of God…it’s exceptionally good!

Shot roughly 23 or 24 years before the dawn of the #MeToo movement, it might be the best “most men are cruel and abusive animals, and especially the alcoholic ones” movie I’ve ever seen.

I didn’t experience even a twinge of my usual “okay, here we go again with another serving of rote anti-male diminishnent”…I believed every scene, every line, every plot pivot. It may be the best Hollywood-produced feminist film ever made. I trusted every frame.

It’s almost certainly Hackford’s finest effort, and Beristain’s shifting color schemes (Fuji amber for flashbacks, cold grays for present tense) are truly mesmerizing.

Gilroy’s dialogue is so well-honed and soothingly concise and bracingly articulate.

The co-lead performances by the 46-year-old Bates, whose titular tour de force should’ve won a second Best Actress Oscar in the wake of her startling Misery breakout, and the 32 year-old Jennifer Jason Leigh are keepers. Ditto the supporting David Straitharn, Judy Parfitt, Christopher Plummer and John C. Reilly.

Adapted from Stephen King’s same–titled, best–selling 1992 novel, this Castle Rock production is an exceptionally well-crafted melodrama (almost a kind of realism-based horror film) of the highest calibre…you’re never unaware that you’re chest-deep in a totally classy, #MeToo-ish truth testament made by grade-A people. Because the film is so deftly assembled and therefore persuasive and compelling, Gilroy’s altered adaptation (King’s book was one long first-person confession by Claiborne) isn’t as downerish as it sounds on the surface. And yet it’s basically about small-town confinement, suppressive conditions, domestic misery and exceptional spousal cruelty and abuse, dysfunctional family trauma, incest and blessed revenge.

The final half-hour really pays off in a way that top-tier films used to pay off in the old days (i.e., before the horror of Marvel and D.C., before Stalinist-woke narratives, before streaming multi-part sagas for couch potatoes).

As I wrote last February, an early draft of After The Hunt “planted expectations that Julia Roberts‘ lead performance might stir convos about a Best Actress nomination and perhaps the ultimate gold trophy itself. She’s playing one of those well-sculpted, sturm und drang roles that older actresses have always pined for.”

From Samantha Bergeson’s 7.16.25 IndieWire story:

Posted on 2.17.25:

Earlier today I read an early draft of Nora Garrett‘s After The Hunt screenplay, a #MeToo rape accusation drama that feels like a splicing of Todd Field‘s TAR, David Mamet‘s Oleanna and Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square.

It’s the basis of an upcoming Luca Guadagnino film that MGM-Amazon will release on October 10th — a whipsmart, dialogue-driven, pressure-cooker thing with Julia Roberts toplining.

Strong supporting performances from Andrew Garfield, The Bear‘s Ayo Edebiri, Michael Stuhlbarg and Chloe Sevigny will presumably round things out.

World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy recently reported that Hunt had test-screened in early December. He also sketched it out as one of those jarring, controversial, hot-button melodramas that stir the soup among educated audiences.

HE is guessing Hunt will debut six months hence at the Venice Film Festival.

Garrett’s page-turning screenplay (which a friend found on Reddit) vaguely summons the downswirling mood of Frank Perry‘s DiaryofaMadHousewife…if Perry’s 1970 film had been set in the realm of elite academia and concerned a middle-aged female professor (Roberts) on the brink of tenure.

Guadagnino (Queer, Challengers, CallMeByYourName) made some changes to Garrett’s Swedish-flavored scenario before filming it last summer in London and Cambridge.

That’s as far as I’ll go description-wise, but the screenplay did plant expectations of Roberts’ performance possibly stirring convos about a Best Actress trophy. She’s playing one of those well-sculpted, sturmunddrang roles that older actresses have always pined for.

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The Toronto Int’l Film Festival destroyed itself when it began to go wokey–wokey in ‘19 or thereabouts, and then it was further crippled by Covid. I for one was happy to see TIFF gradually slide down the slope…good!

For the last four or five years TIFF has been a shadow of its former self, and everyone kind of despises it for having become a festival of second–tier, sloppy–seconds, Venice–and–Telluride–rejected or leftover attractions.

Initial TIFF 2025 rundown:

Nicholas Hytner’s The Choral

Agnieszka Holland’s Franz

Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet

Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound

Paul Greengrass’ The Lost Bus

Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life

HIKARI’s Rental Family

Derek Cianfrance’s Roofman

Peter Ho-Sun Chan’s She Has No Name

Clement Virgo’s Steal Away

Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

Galas (in alphabetical order):

The Choral | Nicholas Hytner | UK

World Premiere | Gala Presentation: Homebound | Neeraj Ghaywan | India

North American Premiere | Gala Presentation: Hamlet | Chloé Zhao | UK

Canadian Premiere | Gala Presentation: A Private Life | Rebecca Zlotowski | France

North American Premiere | Gala Presentation: Roofman | Derek Cianfrance | USA

World Premiere | Gala Presentation: She Has No Name | Peter Ho-Sun Chan | China

North American Premiere | Gala Presentation: Special Presentations (in alphabetical order):

Franz | Agnieszka Holland | Czech Republic/Germany/Poland

World Premiere | Special Presentation: The Lost Bus | Paul Greengrass | USA

World Premiere | Special Presentation: Rental Family | HIKARI | USA/Japan

World Premiere | Special Presentation: Steal Away | Clement Virgo | Canada/Belgium

World Premiere | Special Presentation: Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery | Rian Johnson | USA

World Premiere | Special Presentation: The 50th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival, presented by Rogers, runs September 4–14, 2025.

The full Festival schedule will be released on tiff.net on Tuesday, August 12.

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I’ve somehow missed a pair of three–month–old quotes from Marty Supreme dp Darius Khondry, one in which he said that he and director Josh Safdie have “pushed the negative to increase the grain” (i.e. an apparent assurance of an Egyptian grainstorm), and another in which he divulged that Marty Supreme contains “140 different characters”

14 characters means a film will be fairly verbose, but 140? A film with 25 characters means it’ll be a lot like Robert Altman’s Nashville (which has 25 characters) and 50 characters would be Nashville on Adderall. Double that and you’d have Nashville injected with “hoo-hoo!” Daffy Duck serum. Bump that up to 140 and you’d be going beepity-beep-beep and whoa-baby “hoodily-hoo-hoo!” and homina-homina-homina start to finish.

We all know that Josh Safdie is a human pogo stick on speed to begin with, and so what Khondji has conveyed should strike cold fear into the hearts of cineastes everywhere.

This plus a likely prospect of Timothee Chalamet and his 139 costars inhaling and re-inhaling hundreds of billions of Egyptian mosquitoes into their lungs between lines, and I’m scared…genuinely terrified of this film. I’m certainly exhausted just thinking about it.

This poster for Anthony Mann’s Bend of the River (‘52) shows “Julia” Adams (better known as Creature From The Black Lagoon’s Julie Adams) with a Native American arrow lodged in her upper right chest…above the breast, next to right armpit).

This amounts to a blatant theft of a scene in Red River (‘48) in which Joanne Dru is arrow-shot in almost the exact same spot. Not cool!

If I’d been directing the arrow would’ve pierced Adams’ left collarbone area.

Every film maven knows tall, dark and reptilian Steve Cochran, who played Virginia Mayo’s extra-marital boyfriend in William Wyler‘s The Best Years of Our Lives (‘46) as well as Mayo’s extra-marital gangster lover (“Big Ed”) in Raoul Walsh‘s White Heat (‘49).

Known for playing casual attitude bad guys on-screen, Cochran’s inside-the-industry rep was that of an insatiable party hound…booze, broads, fast cars, private planes and inevitably “scoring” with his female costars. The town gradually formed an opinion that Cochran was much more into cooze and trim than than investing in the basics of a solid film career (devotion to acting, playing his political cards right, trying to be cast in prestige projects). In the late ’40s and ’50s Cochran was almost the Bob Crane of his time.

Fewer know about Cochran’s abrupt and curious death aboard his sailing yacht Rogue. It happened in mid-June of ‘65, somewhere off the coast of southern Mexico or perhaps Guatemala, when Cochran was 48. If you know the story of his sudden demise and especially the grisly aftermath, it’s hard not to imagine someone (perhaps Michel Franco?) making a dark twisted film about it. The Cochran saga could be a perfect vehicle for a feminist director making a standard-issue “all men are pigs” movie.

There’s something simultaneously chilling, existentially creepy and almost perversely “funny” about Cochran, who, in his late ’40s and ’50s heyday, surely dipped his wick as much as Errol Flynn or Charlie Chaplin or George Roundy or any other hardcore poon hound…there’s something simultaneously wicked and darkly funny (in a pathetic, lampoonish sort of way) about Cochran hiring three young Mexican girls to accompany him on a cruise to Guatemala in order to (heh-heh) research a film (Captain O’Flynn), and the ship being hit by a heavy storm and one of the masts being damaged, and the Cochran suddenly falling ill with an infected lung and wham, he’s dead two days later.

But the three girls don’t know how to sail and the Rogue is a long way from the coast, and so they’re stuck with Cochran’s stinky, decaying corpse — getting smellier and smellier as it bloats and turns black — for ten days until a fishing ship happens by.

The poor women had no choice but to tough it out. If they’d thrown Cochran’s body overboard and let the fish eat him, the authorities would’ve accused them of murder.

Here’s a pretty good Cochran piece by SFGate‘s Andrew Chamings, dated 10.24.22:

I’ve been sensing uh-oh vibes from Paul Thomas Anderson One Battle After Another since 3.29.25, which is when I talked to a fellow who’d recently seen a preview screening and called it “a satire of radical left revolutionaries”…”it’s played for comedy but the wokeys won’t like it”.

Who the hell cares enough about rural looney-tune radical lefties to see, much less enjoy, a satire of their behaviors? I hated PTA’s last Thomas Pynchon adaptation so what are the odds I’ll be receptive to this one?

Preview guy also called it “a guy movie like Uncut Gems but aimed more at black women and [even] white conservative women than liberal white women on anti–depressants…I wouldn’t take my girlfriend to it…it’s not a 2025 movie…it would’ve gone down well during Obama’s second term, but movies like this are not made today.”

It is therefore not surprising to read a Jordan Ruimy report that the Warner Bros. distribution team may have decided not to premiere the PTA at the 2025 Venice Film Festival (8.27 to 9.6):

I’ve been sniffing weirdo gas fumes (i.e. the eccentric “I love black women!” kind) from this pricey PTA flick all along. If the Italian Cinematore guy is correct, it would appear that WB p.r. execs are persuaded that the film will draw a “mixed” or half-negative critical reaction in Venice and have decided it’s better to cut bait rather than fish.

The Venice lineup will be announced on Tuesday, 7.22.

My system wasn’t just wilting from a massive injection of James Gunn geek arsenic, but from a feeling of terrible spiritual exhaustion…a feeling of defeat and hopelessness that had nowhere to go but down.

From Owen Gleiberman’s 7.13 essay about the movie-critic war over the horror of Superman:

Jackie Gleason’s 39th birthday party was held on 2.26.55 at Toot’s Shor’s (51 W. 51st Street). He was rolling in clover and adulation back then, and on this particular night (i.e., Saturday) he was being toasted and celebrated by every showbiz hotshot in town (including Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio).

Plus ratings for The Jackie Gleason Show had been surging since ‘53 or thereabouts, and Gleason had recently decided to gamble big on a full season (39 episodes) of The Honeymooners, a hugely successful half-hour series which ran from 10.1.55 to 9.22.56 and is still being re-watched as we speak.

Gleason was a genius madman back then — big drinker, smoker and spender, living for the highs, burning the candle at both ends — and he enjoyed a long and successful career, of course, but I hated his constantly seething Buford T. Justice in the Smokey movies, and I never cared much for his old-school, tweedle-dee mustache.

Gleason was beautiful when youngish and livin’ large and full of beans, but the old pizazz ebbed away as he got older. His heyday had happened in the ‘50s, and everyone knew that.

When you’ve got it, flaunt it. Life is short. Go for the gusto while it’s still gusting, etc.

Gleason’s final peak momrnt — at least in my estimation — was his performance as Minnesota Fats in Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (‘61). for which he was Oscar- and Golden Globe-nominated in the Best Supporting Actor category. Gleason should have damn well won the Oscar, but West Side Story’s George Chakiris unjustly edged him out.

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