Let’s get something out of the way: Jonah Hill‘s Mid90s (A24, 10.19) doesn’t re-invent or re-invigorate the subgenre known as the L.A. skateboard culture movie (Lords of Dogtown, Wassup Rockers, Dogtown and Z-Boys, Sweet Dreams, Thrashin’). But Hill is more or less recounting his own teenaged saga here, and he’s honored that straight-from-the-pavement aesthetic by dealing no-bullshit cards, at least by the standards that I understand. Plus he knows how to write a story with a beginning, middle and ending. Plus how to shoot and cut and get decent performances out of non-actors and sustain a certain tone or mood or whatever. And so Mid90s holds its own, and that ain’t hay.

I’m in no way dismissing Mid90s by calling it a fully realized, nicely shaded, highly engaging first film. There are maybe a thousand things you can get wrong when you make a movie, and by my sights Hill hasn’t messed up in any discernible way. By the same token he hasn’t levitated his film off the pavement and into the realm of wild-blue-yonder greatness, but whaddaya want from the guy? Does anyone know how hard it is to make even a mediocre film? Hill has made a perfectly good one, and it must have been a bitch to get there. Here’s to the concept of making films about what you’ve been through personally and sticking to what you know. Hill has stepped up to the plate and swung on a fastball and connected…crack!

“When Jonah Was 13 Or So,” posted on 7.24.18: You can tell right off the bat that Jonah Hill‘s Mid ’90s is an exception of one kind or another. It sure doesn’t feel like just another Los Angeles skateboard flick. You can sense a focus on character and kid culture and ’90s minutiae. Fast and loose and raggedy — the rhythms and the atmosphere feel right.

Pic is set in the lower West L.A. region — Palms, Culver City, Venice — and partly focused on a Motor Ave. skateboard shop. (Born in ’83, Hill grew up in the Cheviot Hills neighborhood or just north of these regions.) Sunny Suljic (The Killing of a Sacred Deer) has a certain X-factor thing going, and I love that Hill has Lucas Hedges playing a domineering-shit older brother instead of the usual gentle-sensitive guy from Lady Bird, Boy Erased and Manchester By The Sea. Katherine Waterston plays Suljic’s mildly unstable mom.

Directed and written by Hill; shot by Christopher Blauvelt (Indignation) in HE’s own 1.37 aspect ratio (boxy is beautiful) and edited by Nick Houy.

“Raymond Shaw is the kindest, warmest, bravest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.” — Maj. Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra) in The Manchurian Candidate, 1962.

“[Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga] were two of the kindest, most gracious and most honest people I’ve ever had the chance to interview.” — Jake Hamilton following A Star Is Born junket interview, September 2018.

Nadine Labaki‘s Capernaum (Sony Pictures Classics, 12.14) is about a 12 year-old Lebanese kid (and a small-framed one at that, making him look eight or nine) going through hard-knocks destitution on the streets of Beirut.

Does it get you emotionally to watch a raw verite depiction of a parent-less, penniless kid struggle to survive while trying to take care of an infant boy in diapers? Of course it does, but I didn’t see Capernaum as manipulative because I didn’t sense any lying or exaggerating on the part of Labaki, the kid (Zain Al-Rafeea), the infant or any of the supporting characters. What other way could a director possibly depict extreme poverty except in a plain, matter-of-fact way?

I flipped over Capernuam four months ago when I first saw it in Cannes. “It isn’t really about a child who files a lawsuit against his parents for giving him birth, as the point is never vigorously or extensively argued in a courtroom setting,” I said. “It is, however, a deeply affecting hard-knocks, street-urchin survival tale in the vein of Pixote or Slumdog Millionaire.”

I thought Capernaum would win the Palme d’Or for sure; it wound up with the Jury Prize. Last weekend in Toronto I caught a version that was 13 minutes shorter, but I couldn’t sense any significant differences.

I chit-chatted with Nabaki at the Sony Classics dinner at Morton’s. We spoke about the trims she and her editor, Konstantin Bock, have made. And about how Zain Al-Rafeea, who’s now 14, has grown taller and experienced a slight deepening of his voice. And about Tony Gilroy‘s Beirut, which she’d heard wasn’t so good from a nativist viewpoint but which I feel is actually quite good as a complex political thriller, and also due to the not-accidental fact that all the main characters are interlopers.

Sony Pictures Classics co-president Michael Barker, Capernaum director-writer Nadine Labaki at last weekend SPC dinner at Morton’s.

I’ve been trying like hell to find something to see aside from Jonah Hill‘s Mid90s, which has a press and industry screening at 12:30 pm. I tried to wangle a ticket to a 2 pm Roy Thomson hall screening of Brady Corbet‘s Vox Lux, but the press rep told me she has none. Which I kinda doubt. The film is looking for a distributor and they know I have a Brady Corbet issue, etc.

The rest of the day is wide open, and there just doesn’t seem to be anything happening that sounds even half-intriguing. The only evening activity is an 8:30 pm Roma party. It’s a shame — six hours of TIFF time and nothing on my plate. On top of which it’s raining. I guess I’ll just head home, tap out my Mid90s review and do some laundry. And then hit the Alfonso soiree tonight.

From Owen Gleiberman’s Mid90s review: “Mid90s is about as spiky and unsentimental as a youth-rebellion movie can get. Hill makes it feel like a documentary, and by that I don’t just mean that it’s shot in a mode of unvarnished simulated verite. The actors who play the skate punks all have a found-object quality. They may or may not be ‘playing themselves,’ but their personalities don’t feel concocted for the camera. And that’s why Mid90s, though made by a Hollywood star, isn’t a nostalgic indie ‘fable’ in gritty skate-punk drag. It’s something smaller and purer: a slice of street life made up of skittery moments that achieve a bone-deep reality. And because you believe what you’re seeing, what the moments add up to, in their artfully random way, is an adventure.”

A couple of days ago I did a phoner with WGN’s Chris Jones and Mark Caro from Toronto — the death of Burt Reynolds (“Too many redneck movies”), Kris Tapley and A Star Is Born, First Man, Melissa McCarthy in Can You Ever Forgive Me?. They kept trying to nudge me along — punch, punch, cut to the chase, cut to the chase, etc. Jones especially — he’s a pusher, a poker. Again, the link.

Remember the massive kiss-ass chorus that greeted Nate Parker‘s The Birth of a Nation in Park City two and two-thirds years ago? Remember Kyle Buchanan’s admission ten months later (on 10.5.16) about how he “talked to plenty of people at Sundance who felt the film was just okay or even mediocre, but they weren’t eager to share their reactions at the time, lest they step on Parker’s moment”?

A similar thing happened tonight in Toronto in response to the first public screening of Barry Jenkins‘ If Beale Street Could Talk (Annapurna, 11.30). Everybody loved Moonlight and everyone loves Barry, and the fix was in. The Princess of Wales audience was in the tank before the first beams of projector light hit the screen. Beale Street is slow and sad and lovey-dovey to a fare-thee-well, all amber-lit and yet shadowy and meditative and slow as molasses in February, and the crowd leapt to its feet when the film ended, and the shameless Twitter lapdogs lost their collective shit.

Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn called it “a sumptuous cinematic experience” that perfectly complements James Baldwin’s 1974 novel, or words to that effect. Yahoo Entertainment’s Kevin Polowy tweeted that Beale Street is “one of the most beautiful love stories I’ve seen told onscreen in a long time…heartbreaking, soul-piercing and, thank the Lord, at times bitingly funny.” Buchanan, now the N.Y. Times Carpetbagger, called it “a beautifully wrought and just plain beautiful film…lush in color, feeling, humor and love.”

They won’t admit this in so many words, but these guys were mainly talking about Beale Street‘s lovestruck mood and warm cinematography (soft yellows and greens) and so on. Ohhh, it’s so full of feeling and such tenderness and a certain kind of visual beauty, etc.

Jeffrey Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere called If Beale Street Could Talk “a decent film in a sluggish, warm-hearted, ‘I love you baby’ sort of way. The two leads, Stephan James and Kiki Layne, are highly appealing in all respects, not the least being that they’re physically beautiful. And I agree that Regina King (who plays Layne’s mom) might land a Best Supporting Actress nomination, but no win. James Laxton‘s cinematography and Nicholas Britell‘s musical score are probably the two best elements.

“The fact is that Beale Street is all about mood and faith and dreamy lovers giving each eye baths. It has no narrative tension or snap, no second act pivot or third-act payoff or anything in the least bit peppy or spunky, much less reach-for-the-skies. It’s languid and sluggish and awash in feeling that isn’t pointed at anything but itself. Not a disaster but definitely minor. On to the next one, Barry.”

I didn’t know what to make of the advance word on Steve McQueen‘s Widows, but it sounded a little hazy and thereby gave me the willies. Well, the word-givers were dead fucking wrong — the complex, Chicago-based, super-riveting Widows is one of the best heist films I’ve ever seen. It grabs you from the get-go and never lets go. Thank God almighty that it’s intensely opposed to the aesthetic of the aggressively empty Ocean’s Eight (i.e., another all-women heist flick) and is much, much better than, say, Steven Soderbergh‘s Logan Lucky, which was diverting but now seems piffly in retrospect.

The basic Widows plot may sound like a lot to swallow (wives of four dead thieves without any criminal experience pull off a difficult robbery) but I believed every minute of it.

I swear to God that Widows is on the level of Rififi, The Asphalt Jungle, Nine Queens, Ronin and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels…that line of country. That’s not an opinion but a fucking fact. McQueen may have in fact been slumming when he made Widows, but he really knows how to shoot gutslam action, and his general aesthetic about setting movies “in the world of real, recognizable human beings” (as quoted in Owen Glieberman’s 9.9 Variety review) makes all the difference.

I don’t have much time to explain as I have to leave for a 6 pm screening of Barry Jenkins‘ If Beale Street Could Talk, but Widows is the shit. It’s about protagonists who are scared and desperate (including the secondary bad guys), and is full of echos and currents that reflect the dark urban nightmare of present-day Chicago, and that’s what gives it such a formidable punch.

And I’m dumbfounded, I must say, by Gleiberman’s lament that McQueen might have perhaps played his cards in a “more irresponsible” fashion — i.e., more whoo-whoo escapist. McQueen not doing this is what makes Widows such a real-world, high-voltage thriller. This movie does not fuck around.

The Wikipedia logline for McQueen’s film is incorrect, as it turns out. “Four armed robbers (Liam Neeson, Garret Dillahunt, Jon Bernthal, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) are killed in a failed heist attempt, only to have their respective widows (Viola Davis, Cynthia Erivo, Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Rodriguez) step up to finish the job.” They do not “finish the job” — they pull off another job that their husbands never got around to.

Widows is based on Lydia LaPlante’s Widows mini-series that ran on British television in ’83 and ’85.

Widows also stars Colin Farrell, Robert Duvall, Daniel Kaluuya, Jacki Weaver, Lukas Haas and Brian Tyree Henry.

And yes, no question — Viola Davis is more or less a slamdunk for a Best Actress nomination. She grabs it, takes hold, wrestles it to the floor, opens herself up, toughs it out.

Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma has won the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion. All right, that settles it — this Netflix release clearly has the muscle to win two if not three major Academy Awards (picture, director, screenplay)…it’s that kind of accomplishment. Grand Jury Prize was won by Yorgos Lanthimos‘ The Favourite. The Silver Lion for Best Director went to Jacques Audiard for The Sisters Brothers. The Volpi Cup for Best Actress went to The Favourite‘s Olivia Colman (even though her role is clearly not a lead). The festival’s Best Screenplay went to Joel and Ethan Coen for The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Jennifer Kent‘s The Nightingale won the Special Jury Prize, and the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Young Performer went to The Nightingale‘s Baykali Ganambarr.

I’m starting late, but today’s schedule includes (a) a hotel-room interview with director Nadine Labaki, whose brilliant Capernaum (showing at TIFF) everyone flipped over in Cannes four months ago; (b) a 4 pm screening of Paul Greengrass‘s 22 July at the Elgin, (c) the big Sony Classics dinner at Morton’s, and (d) a 9:30 pm screening of Steve McQueen‘s Widows at Roy Thomson Hall. Update: The Labaki interview will happen during the Morton’s dinner.

As mesmerizing and swan-divey as Carey Mulligan is in Paul Dano‘s Wildlife, there’s no forgiving her character for boinking the Uriah Heep-like Bill Camp. I’m sorry but that’s a shutdown, an unforgivable; ditto her perverse decision to almost invite her son Joe (Ed Oxenbould) to participate in this infidelity.

For the fourth or fifth time, my Sundance ’18 review: Paul Dano‘s Wildlife is a sluggish but otherwise strongly directed middle-class horror film — cold, creepy, perverse. I didn’t hate it because of Dano’s visual discipline (handsome compositions, a restrained shooting style, extra-scrupulous 1960 period design) and because of Carey Mulligan‘s fascinating performance as a youngish cheating mom in a small Montana town. But it’s a funereal gloom movie, and it makes you feel like you’re sinking into a cold swamp.

On top of which I was appalled — astonished — by the cruel, self-destructive behavior of this sad 34 year-old woman, whose name is Jeanette, and particularly by her decision to invite her 14 year-old son Joe (Ed Oxenbould) to almost participate in some extra-marital humping with a rich, small-town fat guy (Bill Camp) while her irresponsible husband Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal) is off fighting a forest fire with local volunteers.

One question: what took him so long? What lofty goal was Barack Obama serving by being silent for the last 19 and 1/2 months?

I’m sorry but Felix Van Groeningen‘s Beautiful Boy (Amazon, 10.12) just lies there. It does a good job of pretending to be alive and human as far as the drug-addiction genre allows, but it has no pulse, no campfire-tale hook, no currents that pull you along.

Based on a pair of best-selling memoirs by journalist David Sheff and his son Nic, Beautiful Boy is a sensitive, well-intentioned, steady-as-she-goes saga of meth addiction. But the decision to tell the tale from the elder Sheff’s perspective, or that of Steve Carell‘s mopey-dope performance, was lethal. Because Carell is boredom personified here; ditto the other grim-faced adult characters played by Maura Tierney, Amy Ryan, Timothy Hutton, etc.

The only thing that could have saved Beautiful Boy would have been to shift the POV to Timothy Chalamet‘s Nic — to follow the lead of Otto Preminger‘s The Man With The Golden Arm by sinking into Nic’s secret subterranean life of copping, shooting, evasions, lying, low-downing and evading the law, etc. As is, the camera rarely buddies up with Nic and his girlfriend Lauren (Kaitlyn Dever) and their scumbag pallies, and the sense of fatigue that comes from hanging with dull-as-dishwater Carell becomes oppressive. And then numbing.

I was inwardly screaming last night as I sat in my balcony seat alongside Dave Karger and several other journos. HE mantra: “I’m dying…I’m sinking into boredom quicksand.”

Who thought that making a movie out of these books would be a good idea? This movie is going to expire and disappear so quickly it won’t be funny. Dead, dead, deader than dead.

Yes, Chalamet (whom I ran into at the Soho House after-party…”yo, bruh!”) is very convincing as Nic — he’s a highly skilled and charismatic actor who digs right in — but all you can feel as you’re watching the poor guy is pity. Because he’s trapped in a dull movie, and the only thing that can save him in this context is for the movie to fucking end.