Eight years ago Vera Farmiga‘s powerhouse performance in Debra Granik‘s Down To The Bone was as vital as air and water. She was the shit, Anna Magnani with ice-blue eyes, the toast of the town, etc. And then came those knockout performances in The Manchurian Candidate, Breaking and Entering, The Departed, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Nothing But the Truth, Orphan and Up in the Air. And then performances in Henry’s Crime and Source Code and then her directorial debut, Higher Ground, in 2011. And now this dynamically talented hyphenate is doing…horror? The Conjuring plus the Bates Motel TV series gave me pause. How quickly this industry downgrades the brightest lights by casting them in factory crap.

Vera Farmiga, Hugh Dillon after invitational screening of Down to the Bone at Laemmle’s Music Hall — 1.12.06, 9:50 pm.

Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity (Warner Bros., 10.4) is a brilliant, visionary and groundbreaking film, and a great gift to exhibitors because it makes the theatrical experience an absolutely necessary component. And if it gets nominated for Best Picture, great. But at heart it’s a “ride” movie. And as a film about a woman alone trying to survive in space it’s obviously a close relation of J.C. Chandor‘s All Is Lost (Lionsgate, 10.18). And when you compare the two, Lost is a case of less-is-more — a richer thing thematically (the story of a 70-something sailor trying to stay alive by his resourcefulness is more metaphorically affecting than one about a 30-something female scientist trying to remember or figure out spacecraft technology) plus it’s aimed at intelligent over-30 adults while the $80 million Gravity is aimed at the ADD generation. Which is more exciting, entertaining and more visually breathtaking? Obviously Gravity. Which is the deeper, more meditative, and more stylistically audacious for the no-dialogue element alone? All Is Lost. Which is also a film that you have to see in a theatre.

In a 9.10 piece called “Should There Be (Gasp!) 20 Best Picture Nominees This Year?”, Variety‘s Timothy Gray has written that the 2013 Best Picture race could include 12 Years a Slave, August: Osage County, Captain Phillips, Dallas Buyers Club, Fruitvale Station, Gravity, Inside Llewyn Davis, Lee Daniels’ The Butler, Philomena, Prisoners and Rush. Not to mention…wait, he’s calling the drop-dead brilliant All Is Lost a “dark horse”? He’s lumping All Is Lost in with no-chance-in-hell 42, The Fifth Estate, Invisible Woman and Kill Your Darlings? What does Gray have against J.C. Chandor and Robert Redford?

Other dark horses, Gray says, are Labor Day, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom and Nebraska. And then you need to add the unreleased American Hustle, The Counselor, Foxcatcher, Her, Lone Survivor, The Monuments Men, Out of the Furnace, Saving Mr. Banks, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and The Wolf of Wall Street.

I don’t know anything but the Best Picture nominees will most likely be the following: 12 Years A Slave, American Hustle, The Wolf of Wall Street, All Is Lost, Foxcatcher, Saving Mr. Banks, Inside Llewyn Davis, Dallas Buyer’s Club and (I find this absurd but everyone keeps telling me it’ll happen) Lee Daniels’ The Butler. In a fair and just world Fruitvale Station — a much, much better film that The Butler — would also be a nominee.

The Associated Press is reporting that the plug has temporarily been pulled on the next Pirates of the Caribbean sequel…yes! This doesn’t mean the film won’t be made (and it probably will), but who out there doesn’t feel at least slightly elated that there’s chance (at least that!) there might be one less corporate-funded super-pollutant affecting U.S. film culture? The AP story says that the 7.10.15 release date for the fifth installment in the film series has been removed from Disney’s distribution schedule. Pirates Of the Caribbean 5: Tickle Our Balls With A Feather was expected to begin production next year under Kon-Tiki co-directors Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg.

Firstshowing.net‘s Alex Billington struck a blow for serious film devotees last night by raising a huge ruckus over some dickweed texting during a press & industry screening of Ti West‘s The Sacrament. Billington complained to TIFF volunteers, who threw up their hands. Then he bolted out of the theatre and, in an act of absurdist role-playing, dialed 911 — a call reportedly laughed off by authorities. Then he went on Twitter to lambast the Toronto Film Festival for (allegedly) officially permitting texting during films. I was going to call this a Hollywood Elsewhere-styled emotional reaction, but calling 911 goes beyond anything I would have done. Serious gonzo! (Wells to Anthony Breznican: I’ll give you $1000 if Billington’s 911 call interfered with the response time to any genuine emergency.) Despite having been a texting offender in the past, I take my hat off to Billington for his passion and his moxie. Texting should absolutely not be permitted during any screenings, and shame on TIFF if it’s true about them officially allowing this. Any journalist who texts during a p & i screening should be prevented from getting TIFF press accreditation for a minimum of three years.

Toward the end of this redband trailer for Luc Besson‘s The Family (Relativity, 9.13), Robert De Niro‘s character quotes Al Capone, to wit: “It’s better to be polite with a gun in your hand that to just be polite.” That’s not quite it, according to BrainyQuote.com. They’re claiming that Capone said “You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.” Just saying.

I never said what I really thought when I finally saw the Shane Bluray. As good as it looks, last April’s big-screen projection of this restored 1953 classic at the TCM Classic Film Festival looked so much grander and riper and ultra-detailed…it was really and truly the shit. “I wasn’t just delighted by how good Shane looked last night,” I wrote on 4.28. “I was spellbound if not close to shocked. It was drop-to-your-knees — the most beautiful rendering I’ve ever seen of this 1953 classic. It was like seeing it new and fresh all over again. My eyes were going ‘wow,’ ‘wow’ and ‘double-wow.’”

It takes an awful lot of energy to sustain negative feelings (hate, resentment, lust for revenge) over the years. It’s much healthier to let it go and move on. But at the same time I don’t understand why people who have clearly suffered due to another person’s cruel or sadistic behavior need to forgive the perpetrator in order to flush it all out. Why does it have to be an either/or (i.e., keep the hate going or forgive the tormentor/torturer?). What about a middle road in which the former victim says, “The guy who made my life hell when I was younger was a vile, vicious fuck at the time. He might feel badly about this now due to maturity and mellowing and that’s fine, but there’s no way I’m giving him a ‘go with God’ card. Which isn’t to say I don’t believe in a ‘be here now’ lifestyle. I’m living in the present and the past is the past, but the guy who tortured me is going to have to deal with his karma on his own dime. He’ll get no backrubs from me. And if he dies of ass cancer sometime soon? C’est la vie.”

Adriano Goldman‘s distinctive cinematography for August: Osage County is one of the reasons that the film generally worked for me (except for that Julia Roberts-driving-around-in-a-pickup-truck ending). The images inside the Weston home are amberish and shadowed and melancholy and yet piercing, and the exteriors have a kind of dusty and muted and sort of windblown-looking vibe. It fits the mood of the film, and the framings never seem obvious or defaultish — you can sense a superior visualist at work. Goldman’s previous dp credits include Closed Circuit, The Company You Keep, Jane Eyre and Sin Nombre.

This clip from Alex Gibney‘s The Armstrong Lie is highly intriguing because (a) it doesn’t tell you anything and yet it suggests there’s information about Lance Armstrong‘s doping history that you might want to know, and (b) it reminds you that Armstrong is an articulate, reasonably open-minded, seemingly non-sociopathic guy who simply committed the sin of going down the wrong rabbit hole (which people do from time to time) and then compartmentalizing that journey by putting it in a box that he kept locked shut…until he was outed. I didn’t want to see this doc before because I was asking myself “why do I want to go through the whole Armstrong doping scandal again?” — and now I do.

Early last May I pointed out a simple but curious fact, which is that the house in the August: Osage County poster and the one seen/used in the film are different structures that don’t even resemble each other. The actual house has a huge, four-sided, two-story porch/veranda, and the poster version doesn’t. Why? I ran a photo of the home, a.k.a. “the historic Boulanger home north of Pawhuska, Oklahoma” — last March.

WARNING — IF YOU LIVE IN A CAVE AND READ BY CANDLELIGHT A PLOT SPOLER IS CONTAINED HEREIN: The Weinstein Co’s August: Osage County, which screened early this evening at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall, feels a tiny bit abbreviated and doesn’t deliver quite as much of a full-on emotional wallop as Tracy Letts‘ Tony Award-winning stage play, but it’s strong and direct and satisfying enough to give the play’s admirers what they’re looking for. I was intrigued and attuned from start to finish. And the film certainly delivers at least four…make that five top-notch performances — first and foremost Meryl Streep as the bitchy matriarch Violet Weston (an all-but-guaranteed Best Actress nominee), Julia Roberts as her angry daughter Barbara, Margo Martindale as Mattie Fae Aiken, Julianne Nicholson as Ivy Weston and Juliette Lewis as Karen Weston.