The three hottest attractions of the forthcoming, COVID-threatened NY Film Festival (Friday, 9.25 thru Sunday, 10.11) aren’t exactly award-season rocket fuel — be honest.

The opening night attraction is Steve McQueen‘s Lover’s Rock, an ’80s-era film about a blend of young lovers (Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn, Michael Ward) and music at a blues party…whatever that suggests or amounts to.

Lover’s Rock (apparently the strange apostrophe placement is correct) was cowritten by McQueen and Courttia Newland. Rock is one of three films from McQueen’s Small Axe anthology that will screen at NYFF. The other two are Mangrove, about an actual 1970 clash between black activists and London fuzz, and Red, White, and Blue, based on the story of Leroy Logan (John Boyega) who joined the police force after seeing his father assaulted by cops.

The centerpiece attraction, as previously reported, is Chloe Zhao‘s Nomadland, a sad-eyed-lady-of-the-highway film with Frances McDormand.

The closing-night attraction is Azazel Jacobs‘ French Exit, an allegedly surreal comedy about “a close-to-penniless widow moving to Paris with her son and cat, who also happens to be her reincarnated husband.” Michelle Pfeiffer, Lucas Hedges, Tracy Letts, Danielle Macdonald and Imogen Poots costar.

from Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland — the pink dusky sky and the brightly glowing lantern are ravishing.

Michelle Peiffer, Lucas Hedges in French Exit, which was only PARTLY filmed in Paris with the remainder in Montreal.

From Michael Cohen’s opening essay in “Disloyal,” his forthcoming book about having served as Donald Trump‘s special attorney, close counsel, hatchetman and bagman:

“I urge you to really consider that fact: Trump has no true friends. He has lived his entire life avoiding and evading taking responsibility for his actions. He crushed or cheated all who stood in his way, but I know where the skeletons are buried because I was the one who buried them.

“I was the one who most encouraged him to run for president in 2011, and then again in 2015, carefully orchestrating the famous trip down the escalator in Trump Tower for him to announce his candidacy. When Trump wanted to reach Russian President Vladimir Putin, via a secret back channel, I was tasked with making the connection in my Keystone Cop fashion. I stiffed contractors on his behalf, ripped off his business partners, lied to his wife Melania to hide his sexual infidelities, and bullied and screamed at anyone who threatened Trump’s path to power.

“From golden showers in a sex club in Vegas, to tax fraud, to deals with corrupt officials from the former Soviet Union, to catch-and-kill conspiracies to silence Trump’s clandestine lovers, I wasn’t just a witness to the president’s rise — I was an active and eager participant.”

“Disloyal” will be selling for $40 a copy — $32 and change if you pre-order.

A saga of scurvy redneck trash in the Southern Ohio and West Virginia regions, The Devil All The Time (9.16) is the first of two 2020 Netflix features that will explore the low-rent depravity of rural yokels over a time span of a couple of decades (in this instance the late ’40s to mid ’60s).

The second Netflix film in this vein is Ron Howard‘s Hillbilly Elegy, which explores three generations of an Appalachian family, spanning between the ’80s and the aughts.

Directed and co-written by Antonio Campos (Simon Killer, Christine), Devil costars Tom Holland (whom I kind of half-dislike for his Spider-Man bullshit), Bill Skarsgård, Riley Keough, Jason Clarke, Sebastian Stan, Haley Bennett, Mia Wasikowska and Robert (“RBatz”) Pattinson.

In his 7.23.11 review of Donald Pollock’s same-titled novel, The Oregonian‘s Jeff Baker said that it “reads as if the love child of Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner was captured by Cormac McCarthy, kept in a cage out back and forced to consume nothing but onion rings, Oxycontin and Terrence Malick‘s Badlands.”

22 years ago, man. A program of procreative racial deconstruction, you bet. And if you prefer milk-fed Farmer’s Daughters or curvy blonde Russian types, you must be LexG or somebody in that realm…right?

Awards Circuit‘s Clayton Davis has been running around the award-season mulberry bush for 15 years, and now he’s ridden that horse into a new gig as Variety‘s film awards editor — the same position held by Kris Tapley until he left the trade publication 17 months ago, and more or less same job held down by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg.

A sharply observant, politically fleet-footed type of guy (and who can blame him in this current climate of political terror?), Davis will begin his Variety duties as of Sept. 1.

Davis will deliver the usual award-season razzmatazz and soft-shoe tap dance — racetrack odds on various Oscar contenders, predictions about this and that, softball interviews, assessments of the intrinsic or historic value of you-name-it and who-the-fuck-knows?, etc.

Variety film-awards editor Clayton Davis

The art of award-season coverage was aptly summed up by Laurence Olivier in a third-act line to Jean Simmons in Spartacus: “You tread the line between truth and insult with the skill of a mountain goat!” (Or, if you will, the line between truth and flattery.) Most showbiz journos and columnists never approach that line, much less tread it. They like to hang in the shade.

No offense and due respect but Davis will almost certainly never use the term “Ma Bumblefuck” as a nickname for Glenn Close‘s “Mamaw” character in Ron Howard‘s Hillbilly Elegy. (The term was coined by Hollywood Elsewhere on 2.24.20.) Variety doesn’t want that, and that’s not who Davis is.

Another likelihood: If West Side Story‘s Ansel Elgort is once again attacked by Twitter wolves over the non-issue of having insensitively cut things off with “Gabby” after a brief romantic fling, Davis isn’t likely to stand up and call bullshit like Sasha Stone did on 6.21.20, and like I did on on 6.19.

Davis now stands side by side with Variety‘s award-season team — the longstanding Tim Gray, deputy awards and features editor Jenelle Riley, senior editor and red carpet guy Mark Malkin, and Artisans editor Jazz Tangcay.

A remastered 20th anniversary 4K version of Darren Aronofsky‘s Requiem for a Dream will pop on 10.13.20. The critically admired film, based on Hubert Selby Jr.‘s 1978 novel and worshipped by Midwestern Evangelical audiences, opened on 10.6.00. (I’m kidding about the Evangelicals.) Presented in Dolby Vision with a new Dolby Atmos audio track + a pair of new behind-the-scenes featurettes.

Danny Wolf and Paul Fishbein‘s Skin: A History of Nudity in Movies (on demand, 8.18) is a sharp, highly intelligent doc that covers its own waterfront in a diverting, dryly amusing fashion. It’s not so much the nudie clips (here’s a three-hour, 45-minute reel that offers a lot of the same stuff) but the commentary that seals the deal.

I wasn’t expecting that much at first, but I sat up as I began to realize that the talking heads were elevating and deepening the focus with sage observations and occasional razor-sharp quips.

I’m talking about Sean Young, Peter Bogdanovich, Eric Roberts, Traci Lords, Pam Grier (who’s put on a few pounds since Jackie Brown), Malcolm McDowell, Sybil Danning, Bruce Davison (who delivers a funny line about Ben), Mr. Skin‘s Jim McBride, HE’s own Joe Dante, former employer Kevin Smith, the great Amy Heckerling (Fast Times at Ridgemont High), the late Sylvia Miles, the very much alive Erica Gavin, Liz Goldwyn, critics Amy Nicholson, Richard Roeper and Mick LaSalle, CARA ratings board member Joan Graves, film maven Irv Slifkin, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Tatiana Siegel and several others.

I was a tiny bit scared about reviewing this doc with any enthusiasm for fear of getting the side-eye from #MeToo types. Right now we’re living through the blandest, most buttoned-up, erotically stifled and almost Victorian eras in U.S. (or even human) history, more so than even the Eisenhower 1950s

Time and again actors (mostly actresses) who were in their prime back in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and early aughts remind us that time and biology are assassins — they spare no one. You can’t watch this film and not think “wow, aging is a mother.”

As we watched Tatiana asked what my all-time favorite nude scene is, and I honestly couldn’t think of one off the top of my head. Now I’m thinking it might be Kim Novak‘s bedroom scene in Of Human Bondage (’64). In and of itself nudity has always gotten my attention, but it’s never been that transporting. The tingle quickly fades.

Boilerplate: “The definitive documentary on the history of nudity in feature films from the early silent days to the present, studying the changes in morality that led to the use of nudity in films while emphasizing the political, sociological and artistic changes that shaped that history. [Also] a study of the gender inequality in presenting nude images in motion pictures and will follow the revolution that has created nude gender equality in feature films today. It culminates in a discussion of ‘what are nude scenes like in the age of the #METOO movement’ as well as a look at CGI nudity that seems a large part of motion pictures’ future.”

Does anyone know any reasonably healthy, non-neurotic fellows in their late 40s who smoke? A significant percentage of party people (i.e., druggies and boozers) tend to smoke in their teens, 20s and 30s, but most of them realize they have to step off that train by age 40 if not sooner. Ben Affleck is 47, and days away from his 48th. I don’t know if he’s a regular smoker or if he’s just chipping, but giving in to a nicotine urge is just a step or two removed from drinking again. For years I was a Cannes Film Festival smoker, but that doesn’t count. U.S. residents can steal guilty cigs in Europe or Asia but no smoking on home ground — that’s the rule.

As it must to all men, death came yesterday to Sumner Redstone, the scrappy, swaggering, carrot-haired media magnate and “daring dealmaker” with a huge ego and, over the last 15 or 20 years, a messy “House of Borgia” private life. Not to mention that odd episode when he fired Tom Cruise off the Paramount lot for behaving like a hyper, couch-jumping eccentric.

The Boston-based Redstone began his entertainment career in the mid ’50s with a 12-theater drive-in chain (i.e., Northeast Theater Corp.). He gradually built it into a major megaplex exhibition chain in the ’60s and ’70s. In 1987 at age 63, Redstone engineered a hostile takeover of Viacom, the syndication company that owned MTV and Showtime, for $3.4 billion. In early 1994 he took control of Paramount in a $10 billion deal. Not to mention Blockbuster, CBS, yaddah yaddah…always the drive to dominate, acquire more money and power, a few missed opportunities and miscalculations, etc. You don’t wanna know. Okay, maybe you do.

And…well, read about his combative life if you care to, but it’s exhausting. Reviewing all of the super-strenuous clutching, grabbing, conniving, plotting and scheming by Sumner, his family members and especially a pair of girlfriend gatekeepers will drain your soul. Two Vanity Fair pieces — this and this — tell part of the tale.

I spent 75 minutes refreshing my memories of the man this morning…whew, whatever, later.

The 1979 Copley Hotel fire incident was quite the episode. Redstone nearly died, suffered major burns, needed about a year to fully recover.

If I’d been in Redstone’s shoes in the ’70s and ’80s I would have paid for some neck-wattle surgery, but that’s me.

And over the side with two dummies bouncing and flailing around in the front seat. Then it happens again at the finale.

If you listen to Dave Kehr, Otto Preminger‘s Angel Face (’53) is “an intense Freudian melodrama” and “one of the forgotten masterworks of film noir…a disturbingly cool, rational investigation of the terrors of sexuality…the sets, characters, and actions are extremely stylized, yet Preminger’s moving camera gives them a frightening unity and fluidity, tracing a straight, clean line to a cliff top for one of the most audacious endings in film history.”