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I’ve seen Susan Lacy‘s Spielberg (HBO, 10.7), a two-and-a-half-hour doc about the journey and the psychology of Steven Spielberg, and I’m telling you there’s more emotional revelation and honesty and cinematic punch in this thing than in many of Spielberg’s features, certainly the ones he’s made over the last 20-plus years.

It begins with a taste of Lawrence of Arabia and then a recollection from Spielberg about how he saw it repeatedly at age 16 and how it seemed so masterful that he nearly gave up his dream of becoming a movie director. Right from the start I was saying to myself, “I love this…this is about my church, my faith and all the movie dreams I’ve carried inside for decades…I love it already and it hasn’t even begun.”

Does Lacy shamelessly brown-nose? Yup, ‘fraid so. Does she sidestep, avert her gaze, emphasize the positive and avoid tough questions at almost every turn? Yes, she does. Is Spielberg, in fact, a 150-minute blowjob? Yeah, it is. But it’s a classy and beautifully assembled one. Spielberg delivers what most of us refer to as “the goods.” It offers balance, panache, love, perspective, open hearts, insight, joie de cinema and elegant editing and…oh, just a feeling of immense comfort and familiarity and fraternal bon ami.

I kind of loved it despite Lacy’s herculean determination to avoid telling the real truth about Spielberg-the-magnificent-and-bowed-down-to, which is that he’s a truly gifted lightweight, a very clever and hugely energetic guy who knows how to shoot the hell out of anything but has come to few conclusions and has next to nothing to say about the human condition or the state of the world, but has been insanely successful and that’s all that matters to most of the people in this town so what the hell…ass-smooch!

I take back that “nothing to say” stuff — Spielberg has often expressed his sentiments about how suburban family life is the greatest thing and how moms are generally more reliable than dads and that having an inner fantasy life can save you, etc.

The best parts are about Spielberg recalling his home life in a Pheonix suburb, his early discomfort about being a supposed Jewish outsider (a mindset that he profoundly reversed with the act of making Schindler’s List), his parents’ divorce (although he never explains why), the early feelings of inadequacy, how he had no life until his first son, Max, came along, etc.

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Poor Anne Wiazemsky, the maiden of Au Hasard, Balthazar and star of Jean-Luc Godard‘s La Chinoise and Weekend, has died of cancer at age 70. She was married to the extremely thorny and difficult Godard for 12 years and went on to write 13 books, from “Mon beau navire” (’89) to “Un saint homme” (’17).

Wizaemsky was portrayed by Stacy Martin in Michel Hazanavicius‘s Redoubtable, which I panned after catching it at last May’s Cannes Film Festival.

It’s been reported that Wiazemsky was 17 when her affair with Godard began. I’m figuring more like 19. She was born in ’47, and was 18 when Au Hasard, Balthazar (released on 5.25.66) was shot in the summer or fall of ’65. In her book “Jeune Fille” Wiazemsky wrote that Bresson was obsessed with her and never let her out of her sight, so it seems unlikely that Godard was circling her then. The timetable indicates that the Godard coupling began in late ’65 or ’66.

Dan Gilroy‘s Roman J. Israel, Esq. is “a whipsmart, cunningly performed, immensely satisfying film in so many ways. Such a skillful job of character-building on Gilroy’s part, layer upon layer and bit upon bit, and such a finely contoured performance by the great Denzel Washington. My only hang-up is that I wanted a different ending. Gilroy’s ending isn’t ‘bad’, per se, but I didn’t agree with it — I didn’t want it.

“Otherwise this is such a brilliant, invigorating and fully believable film for over-30s — milieu-wise, legal minutiae-wise, Asperger’s-wise. It’s my idea of pound cake topped with whipped cream and strawberries…give it to me. You can take a terrific bath in this film and never feel unsatisfied that the story isn’t quite delivering the way you want it to. Until the last 25 or 30 minutes, that is, but even then it’s not a fatal problem, just an air-escaping-the-balloon one.” — posted on 9.10.17 from the Toronto Film Festival.

Everyone knew that the recently released Bluray for Arthur Penn‘s Night Moves (’75) wouldn’t be all that spellbinding. Bruce Surtees‘ 35mm cinematography was never intended to be anything more than professionally presentable in a workmanlike fashion, and that was fine. But the Bluray definitely looks better than the various versions I’ve been watching for the last 35 years or so, including the ones offered on DVD and Amazon SD streaming. And that’s all I wanted anyway.

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Devin Faraci, Cinefamily’s Shadie Elnashai and Hadrian Belove, Ain’t It Cool‘s Harry Knowles have walked the plank for alleged sexual assault and/or harassment…and now Harvey Weinstein, the swaggering king of the indie world in the ’90s and most of the aughts until ’13 or thereabouts, is being threatened along similar lines.

Variety‘s Brent Lang, Gene Maddaus and Ramin Setoodeh reported earlier this afternoon that the Weinstein Co. honcho “has hired a high-powered team of attorneys to push back on soon-to-be-published bombshell stories from the New York Times and the New Yorker detailing sexual allegations and improper workplace behavior against him.”

Variety says that “some women making the charges are believed to be on the record.”

“Multiple individuals with knowledge of the situation” have told Variety that Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey are the authors of the Times story, and that former MSNBC host and Woody Allen accuser Ronan Farrow is penning the New Yorker piece. One of the stories could appear as early as this week, the article says.

In a brief interview with Variety, Weinstein “declined to comment on the charges.”

I just flashed on the finale of Brian DePalma‘s Scarface with Harvey as Tony Montana and Kantor, Twohey, Farrow and Harvey’s alleged accusers as the Columbians scaling the fence of the Montana estate.

I don’t understand how anyone can dismiss Fatih Akin‘s In The Fade (Magnolia, 12.27), a traumatic-loss-and-revenge drama starring Diane Kruger, whose performance won the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Actress award last May. You can criticize the film, I suppose, for what it doesn’t address (i.e., European Islamic terrorism) but taken on its own terms, it’s close to unassailable.

In The Fade dispenses chilly, carefully measured hardball realism, and does so in a gripping, emotionally jarring way that I believed top to bottom. It’s now the official German entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar at next March’s Academy Awards telecast (3.4.18).

Set mostly in Hamburg, Fade starts with Katja (Kruger), her clean-living Kurdish/Turkish husband Nuri (Numan Acar) with a drug-dealing past, and their young son Rocco in happy-family mode. That lasts less than ten minutes. A home-made nail bomb outside Nuri’s office explodes, and Katja is suddenly a child-less widow. She wilts under agonizing pain and a near-total emotional meltdown, and understandably decides to temporarily medicate with drugs, and then nearly ends it all by slitting her wrists.

But a suspicion she’d shared with her attorney, Danilo (Denis Moschitto), about anti-immigrant Nazis having planted the bomb turns out to be accurate. Katja learns that evidence she had given the police has led to the arrest of Andre and Edda Moller (Ulrich Brandhoff, Hanna Hilsdorf), a pair of young neo-Nazis with international connections. There’s no doubt these two are the culprits — Katja had seen Edda leave a bicycle near her husband’s office two or three hours before the blast.

Then comes a second-act portion dealing with a trial of the accused that doesn’t end satisfactorily, and finally a third act in which the acutely frustrated Katja travels to Greece to carry out her own form of revenge-justice.

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