Three or four years ago I got bounced from Peter Howell‘s annual “Chasing the Buzz” Toronto Film Festival poll for the Toronto Star. (I had criticized what struck me as lame choices by some of the other respondents.) But this year Pete found it in his heart to forgive and invited me back. “This was the first year since ‘Chasing the Buzz’ began in 2001 that no movie tallied more than two votes,” Howell notes. “Four films took two votes apiece: Sydney Pollack’s Aretha Franklin song doc Amazing Grace, Tom Hooper’s transgender biopic The Danish Girl, Denis Villeneuve’s drug-war thriller Sicario and Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth.”

We were told to choose only one film and to very briefly explain why we’re particularly interested in seeing it. I chose The Danish Girl and here’s why: “The months-long buzz has been that Eddie Redmayne may snag another Best Actor Oscar for playing transgender pioneer Einar Wegener/Lili Elbe, the Caitlin Jenner of his/her day. I want to be among the first on the North American continent to publicly agree or disagree with that notion.”

During last night’s Suffragette after-party I sidled up to Meryl Streep and asked what she thought of Davis Guggenheim‘s They Called Me Malala, an affecting if somewhat sermonizing doc about teenaged education activist Malala Yousafzai. (Here’s my review.) “We’re living through quite a time, aren’t we?,” Streep said. “With films like this people are really getting an understanding what an arduous struggle it was and still is in many places to be a woman.” I replied that Suffragette really conveyed this to me, the struggle aspect. “What?,” she said. (It was a noisy party.) “Suffragette really conveyed the struggle thing,” I said.

Then I mentioned Islam’s notoriously repressive beliefs and confining policies about women. Streep gave me one of those narrow-eyed “oh, yeah?” looks.  

Me: “What…you don’t subscribe to the view that Islamic culture is the worst in the world in terms of repressing women, keeping them from being educated, subservient to men and all that?” Streep: “I don’t really know all that much about Islam. Do you?” Me: “Well, when you put it that way, no.  I’ve never spent any time in the Middle East or studied Islamic faith. But others have studied it and the culture and there’s a considerable body of opinion that Muslims are not what anyone would call enlightened as far as women are concerned.”

Daily Mail columnist Baz Bamibgoye was listening in and suggested to Meryl that the Muslim faith has been hijacked by radicals. Streep: “I think that Malala showed that there are some enlightened aspects of Islam…open minds, kind hearts…that Islam can be a forgiving faith.” 

I was about to change the subject when Streep was pulled away by a publicist and introduced to someone else. Note: I didn’t tape our chat — it’s strictly reconstructed from memory but I’ve got a Truman Capote-like recall.

Suffragette costar Meryl Streep, director Sarah Gavron during last night’s after-party at Telluride’s Arroyo Wine Bar.

Only now can these be straight-from-the-cold-zone pics be posted. Only now can the dull, windswept, bone-chilling trauma of the 2015 Telluride Film Festival patron’s brunch be fully conveyed. It was awful but I was there, experiencing it firsthand like a champ and taking notes on the small fire that broke out in the serving area. Seriously, it wasn’t that bad but it kind of was in a sense because I was under-dressed. I hated the fucking dampness and those chilly-ass raindrops messing with everyone and everything.

Telluride Film Festival press liason and spokesperson Shannon Mitchell, snapped two minutes before I got the hell out of there and took refuge on the shuttle bus.

“Adapted by Lucinda Coxon from David Ebershoff’s novel, Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl retells a true-life story: that of painter Einar Wegener, who underwent a pioneering gender reassignment operation in the 1930s to become Lili Elbe. Einar/Lili is played by Eddie Redmayne, who is certain to reap plentiful laurels in the forthcoming awards season, with another role — following his Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything — about a slow process of physical and psychological transformation. And no doubt this sumptuously mounted, high-minded and unabashedly Oscar-baiting undertaking will overall emerge dripping with honors. But well-meaning and polished as it is, The Danish Girl is a determinedly mainstream melodrama that doesn’t really offer new perspectives. It smacks more of the coffee table than the operating table.” — from a Guardian review by Jonathan Romney.

From Variety’s Peter Debruge in Venice Film festival review: “Clearly, The Danish Girl was never not going to be a ‘prestige’ picture,” “And while that ultra-respectful approach will engender allergic reactions in some, who’d sooner see a gritty, realistic portrayal than one seemingly tailored for the pages of fashion and interior-design magazines, there’s no denying that Tom Hooper and screenwriter Lucinda Coxon have delivered a cinematic landmark, one whose classical style all but disguises how controversial its subject matter still remains. In order to penetrate the conversation of ‘polite’ society, one must play by its rules, and The Danish Girl is nothing if not sensitive to how old-fashioned viewers (and voters) might respond, scrubbing the story of its pricklier details and upholding the long-standing LGBT-movie tradition of tragically killing off the ‘monster’ in the end.”

I got up at 5:30 am to give myself time to write a proper Suffragette review, but I got so caught up that I failed to make the 9 am screening of Tom McCarthy‘s Spotlight, which people have been calling a total keeper and an exceptionally solid journalism flick in the basic shoe-leather and note-pad tradition. It’s not a tragedy — I’ll catch it today at 4:15 pm at the Galaxy and also listen to a post-screening q & a. But now I have to blow off Cocksucker Blues.

I spoke briefly to costar Michael Keaton during last night’s Suffragette party. Me: “During initial discussions did McCarthy suggest that Spotlight might play as a kind of All The President’s Men-type thing?” Keaton: “Later on, yeah, but at first no, not at all. It was just, you know, ‘here’s the script, we’re doing it straight and plain’…very down to business, no pretensions.”

The Spotlight buzz is fairly hot right now, of course, and Keaton mentioned he’s starting to get a little bit worried about this. The second wave, he meant. The old pushback from the pushbackers. As he put it, “People are gonna see it and say, ‘Ehh, good but not as great as what I heard.'” That always happens, I said, “but then comes the third wave who push back against the previous guys and say it’s really as good as the initial hype and maybe better.”

Sarah Gavron‘s Suffragette (Focus Features, 10.23) is the shit — a near-certain Best Picture contender and a cast-iron guarantee that Carey Mulligan will be Best Actress-nominated for her subdued but deeply emotional, fully riveting performance as Maud Watts, a married factory worker and mother of a young son who becomes drawn into the women’s suffrage movement in early 1900s London, just as the militant phase (led by the Women’s Social and Political Union, or WSPU) begins to kick in.

This is one top-tier, richly textured, throughly propulsive saga, and a good four or five times better than I expected it to be.

The Suffragette trailers were promising enough but the people at Focus Features had done a brilliant job of tamping down any expectations on a word-of-mouth basis. I’d come to suspect, based on a lack of any palpable advance excitement, that it might turn out to be a decent, good-enough film that could possibly provide a springboard for Mulligan…maybe. Well, it’s much more than that, such that I felt compelled explain to Gavron at the after-party that I was fairly gobsmacked.

Mulligan, looking appropriately hangdog for the most part, handles every line and scene like a master violinist. She’s always been my idea of a great beauty, but when she chooses to go there she has one of the saddest faces in movies right now. The strain, stress and suppressed rage of Maud’s life are legible in every look, line and gesture. Mulligan is fairly young (she just turned 30 last May) but she’s a natural old-soul type who conveys not just what Maud (a fictitious everywoman) is dealing with but the trials of 100,000 women before her, and without anything that looks like overt “acting.” All actors “sell it,” of course, but the gifted ones make the wheel-turns and gear-shifts seem all but invisible.

I was saying last night that her Suffragette perf is on the same footing with Mulligan’s career-making turn in An Education, but now, at 8:15 in the morning after less than six hours of shut-eye (and with my heart breaking over the realization that I’ve blown my shot at catching the 9 am screening of Spotlight), I’m thinking Maud is her signature role.

This afternoon’s Telluride Film Festival showing of Davis Guggenheim‘s He Named Me Malala (Fox Searchlight, 10.2) was very warmly received. The people on my gondola coming down from the Chuck Jones Cinema were beaming, almost swooning. They were reacting, trust me, more to the subject matter than the film itself. Which feels and plays like a lesson, a sermon, an 80-something minute educational piece that…you know, we all need to see and contemplate and so on.  It’s a good-for-you spinach movie, as I supposed it would be yesterday.

Malala Yousafzai, the star and subject of Davis Guggenheim/s He Named Me Malala, vis Skype feed during a post-screening discussion.

One can’t help but feel touched and inspired by the saga of teenaged Pakistani education activist (and current resident of Birmingham, England) Malala Yousafzai, and particularly how she managed to not only survive being shot in the head three years ago (when she was 15) by a Taliban fanatic, but how she recovered and continued to campaign for female education in Pakistan and other Muslim countries, and how she won the Nobel Peace Prize late last year. The more this film is seen worldwide (particularly in Middle-Eastern territories where the suppression of women is appalling), the better.

But Guggenheim’s film is just okay. If you wanted to be a sorehead you could say it almost flirts with mediocrity. But I don’t want to say that because I don’t want to discourage anyone from seeing it. He Named Me Malala stands for the right things, shows the right things, says the right things and uses watercolor-like animation to convey portions of Malala’s life…all to the good. But it never seems to find any kind of levitational groove or strategy that would result in a 2 + 2 = 5 equation.

I’ve been debating whether or not to reveal an embarassing thing that happened in the late ’80s, and I realized this morning that I need to just flush it out. Always a good thing to expose disturbing, uncomfortable memories. So here goes.

I took part in a paintball game when I was working at Cannon Films in the summer of ’87. I had suggested some bold, George S. Patton-type strategies to my fellow warriors, but when you actually get out there with your paintball gun in that sticky and sweltering Los Angeles heat and you’re dealing with dust and sweat and the sobering fact that you’re not exactly Steve McQueen in Hell Is For Heroes, things are a little different. The Cannon team lost that day, and I was one of the reasons.

I’m just going to spit this out. We were losing and I was in a bad position, surrounded by the opposing team and anxious and furious that we were getting clobbered, and in my haste and rage I saw someone appear in the corner of my left eye and I whipped around and fired. I shot one of our own guys. Actually it was a woman. I got her in the arm…thwack! She let go with a loud and angry “aah!” She was expressing two things: (1) “That hurts!” and (2) “You just shot someone on your team…asshole!”

Those gray skies and cool temps had me worried, but I attended the Telluride Film Festival picnic all the same, leaving on the bus at 9:45 am and arriving at 10:10 am. Five minutes later it began to sprinkle.  I got my umbrella out as I waited in line for food.  I started to feel chillier and chillier.  And then flat-out cold.  “God, this is fucking miserable,” I said to a couple of pals.  Then some kind of cooking gas ignited and a sizable surge of flame appeared next to a serving table.  Two fast-acting chefs snuffed it out but I wondered if this was an omen of some kind.  I was Nicholas Hoult in Mad Max: Fury Road:  “What a damp and uncomfortable day!”  I decided to get on a shuttle bus back to town. along with THR’s Scott Feinberg and Stephen  Galloway.  This was my first gloomy Telluride picnic — the weather had always been sunny and delightful in years past.

At 8:15 am, it’s a bit damp and chilly outside my Telluride condo. The lineup for the patron’s brunch starts an hour from now, and I’m thinking about how it’ll feel as I stand around on damp grass and getting my shoes wet and wondering what the fuck. If it ain’t sunny and warm, I’d rather park it indoors. And I’m not the only one who feels a little let down that Davis Guggenheim‘s He Named Me Malala (Fox Searchlight, 10.2) will be the “secret” 2:30 pm screening at the Chuck Jones Cinema.

I’m in no way dismissing this doc about teenaged Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai‘s campaign for female education. I’m sure it’ll be stirring stuff. But I want to start this festival off with something ripe and sexy. I want to see Spotlight or Black Mass or Steve Jobs today at 2:30 pm, and not some nutritious spinach documentary about the tyrannical nature of Islam when it comes to women’s rights. And no one is happy about the overlapping scheduling of today’s films, which forces either-or choices or prods you into seeing something of a more offbeat or mercurial nature.

“His hair is Harlow gold, his brows odd surprise, his face looks icy cold, he’s got Whitey Bulger’s eyes.” — Venice Film Festival tweet from Playlist critic Jessica Kiang.

Following the 7.30 appearance of the most recent Black Mass trailer I wrote that “the assumption, of course, is that Johnny ‘Alaskan husky eyes’ Depp will slam it out of park as Whitey Bulger.” And the early Venice Film Festival reviews suggest that Depp’s performance as the notorious, now-incarcerated Boston crime lord is quite the thing. The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy writes that “long-time Depp fans who might have lately given up hope of his doing something interesting anytime soon will especially appreciate his dive into the deep end here.” But in the view of Indiewire‘s Jessica Kiang, the performance is hindered by excessive makeup.

“This is certainly the most interesting thing [Depp has] done in ages, and he never feels less than committed — and no doubt there will be those who’ll champion it as such,” she writes. “But…Depp is encased in a helmet of make-up and prosthetics [that] make him look by turns ghostly, corpse-like, lizardy and sometimes like a literal incarnation of the devil. It makes him fascinating to look at, but maybe for the wrong reasons — ones that have nothing to do with the quality of his performance or the menace and charisma he exudes, and more to do with trying to locate the single element that almost but doesn’t quite gel.

“Is it the too-light contacts with their unchanging beady pupils? Is it his odd, never totally convincing hairline? Is it the fact that his forehead seems peculiarly immobile? This feels like a rare case where a live action performance falls into what animators call the ‘uncanny valley‘ — the narrow but unbridgeable gap that exists between something realistic and something real.”

“A dryly amusing Bunuelian parlor piece about societal oppression, Yorgos Lanthimos‘ The Lobster felt partially successful to me, or at least intriguing for the first 45 minutes to an hour, but the second hour disassembled. The truth is that I was bored and hating on it almost from the get-go. I was even thinking about bailing as it went along but I figured ‘c’mon, be a pro, stick it out.’ And I did.” — from my 5.15.15 HE riff, filed from the Cannes Film Festival. But don’t listen to me with 80% of the Rotten Tomatoes gang having gone thumbs-up. Not to mention Guy Lodge’s Variety rave, also filed on 5.15: “A wickedly funny, unexpectedly moving satire of couple-fixated society.”