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.

Why are we still without at least one female talk-show host? I’m afraid to even discuss this for fear of being gutted on Twitter. It would have to be a comedienne, of course, but specifically a cutting-edge, across-the-board iconoclast (i.e., no p.c. agendas). Like Amy Schumer. I would be levitating if Schumer had agreed to host The Daily Show, but of course she didn’t. All of these guys are cool in their own way, but I’m happiest in the company of Bill Maher, Larry Wilmore and John Oliver — the least bullshit-tolerant and most politically-attuned. The remainder in order of most-liked first and least-liked last: Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Fallon, Conan O’Brien, James Corden. No opinion: Trevor Noah.

James Vanderbilt‘s first-rate Truth opens a month hence (10.16) and this is what Sony Pictures Classics is issuing in the wake of the first triumphant showings at the Toronto Film Festival? The apparent idea is to emphasize to your basic older, not-keeping-up-like-they-used-to viewers that Truth is about the famous Dan Rather (obviously played by Robert Redford). Which of course it isn’t — it’s really about Mary Mapes (Cate Blanchett) and a story that was hurriedly aired before it was ready, and how the negative blowback killed her TV news producing career along with Rather’s. Where’s the trailer? SPC has had all summer to throw one together and this is their opening marketing salvo?

Yesterday two journalist-critics happened to mention that Johnny Depp, recently arrived in Toronto for the premiere of Black Mass, looked fat to them. Separate conversations, no prompting — they just said this out of the blue. Depp is 52 and it’s really easy to put on weight at that age, but he’s always kept things in check. Then I saw this pic today. He’s obviously not conventionally “fat” but by his own Captain Jack standards he sorta kinda is. He’s obviously chunkier than when he portrayed James “Whitey” Bulger. Is it a crime to channel the physicality of Ernest Borgnine or ’70s-era Marlon Brando? No, it isn’t. Happens to the best of us, and I should know. Six or seven years ago (i.e., the last gasp of my drinking days) I was looking like a middle-aged lesbian. It’s easily dispensed with — you just have to quit drinking, eat less bread and dairy, hit the treadmill and ride your bike.

Matt Damon is being slammed for advocating merit above diversity in a conversational snippet from the 9.13 debut episode of HBO’s back-from-hiatus Project Greenlight. It happened duing a polite dispute with producer Effie Brown (Dear White People). Yesterday Jezebel‘s Kara Brown derided Damon for whitesplaining, but what did Damon actually say? Simply that quality could be compromised if there’s an over-emphasis on hiring diverse filmmakers, and that “merit” is the only thing that should matter at the end of the day, leaving “all other factors out if it.” Btu he expressed it a little too bluntly when he said that “when we’re talking about diversity you do it in the casting of the film not in the casting of the show.” In response to which Brown said “whoa!”