Kevin Spacey “absolutely can sing,” says Roger Ebert, but Beyond the Sea, Spacey’s Toronto-screened biopic of Bobby Darin, “follows a fairly familiar formula.” It also “has some problems,” he says, “including a strange structure involving Darin as a child commenting on his own adult life, but it also has real qualities, including musical numbers that really deliver. The movie has many songs in it, and Spacey sings them…damned well. It takes nerve to put yourself on the line like that, but he knew what he was doing.”

Zap2it editor Michael Syzmanski wrote on his Toronto blog last Saturday (9.11) that Taylor Hackford’s Ray, the Ray Charles biopic with Jamie Foxx in the title role, “is the best thing I’ve seen this weekend. All the rumors about Foxx getting a Best Actor nod at the Academy Awards this year [are] definitely true…the film is probably a contender for Best Picture too.” Universal is releasing it on 10.29.

A friend in Toronto who’s been a reliable source on good movies to watch for is telling me to put Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda into the Oscar Balloon as a potential Best Picture nominee. The film is “a sensation,” he says. “It’s the new generation’s The Killing Fields.” The script by George (director of A Bright Shining Lie, writer of Jim Sheridan’s In The Name of the Father) and Keir Pearson is a true story of Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager who sheltered over a thousand Tutsi refugees during the slaughter seige mounted by the Hutu militia in Rwanda. The friend says Don Cheadle, who plays Rususebagina, is “a lock for a Best Actor nomination.” Nick Nolte and Sophie Okonedo costar.

I’m getting good vibes and a sense of the right pieces coming together from that story about Jim Sheridan’s next film, a DreamWorks-funded remake of Akira Kurosawa’s classic, deeply touching Ikiru (1952). Variety said pic might possibly star Tom Hanks, in the role first played by Takashi Shimura. (Don’t think about this one at all, dude…do it!). Richard Price’s untitled script, which Sheridan is now revising, is about a low-level New York bureaucrat, 30 years on the same job, who learns he’s got stomach cancer. His first instinct is to party away his last few weeks, and then strike up a thing with an attractive new lady. But then he decides to do something good and helpful. (In the Kurosawa film, I think it was build a park for kids to play in.)

An early I Heart Huckabee’s review from Toronto sounds encouraging. “Five years after Three Kings, writer-director David O Russell returns with an absurdist existential comedy that is more idiosyncratic and daring than anything he has made before,” writes Screen Daily‘s Alan Hunter. “Huckabees combines the lickety-split verbal gymnastics of a Preston Sturges with the philosophical musings of a Stephen Hawking and then adds a side order of Three Stooges-style anarchy just to make things more interesting. The result is chaotic, charming, often amusing and frequently exasperating. The closest affinity in recent years would be with the Charlie Kaufman scripts for Being John Malkovich and Adaptation and the all-star cast could help ensure a similar level of commercial interest, although this is simply too odd for mainstream tastes and will require careful nurturing.”

More on Huckabee’s: “It is a considerable tribute to Russell’s vision that everything eventually fits into place and makes sense,” Hunter declares. “Beneath the apparent anarchy there is actually a strong sense of discipline that prevents the film becoming a folly along the lines of Peter Bogdanovich’s They All Laughed or John Boorman’s Where The Heart Is. The top-notch cast [seems] up for the challenge and whilst old pro’s like Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin and Isabelle Huppert effortlessly rise to the occasion, Mark Wahlberg is the real revelation, bringing expert comic timing and an emotional connection to his role of a man angered by the state of the world. It is Wahlberg’s best performance in some time.”

There seems to be near-unanimous opinion among journos and editors that Marc Forster’s Finding Neverland (Miramax, 11.12) is a very prominent contender for Best Picture honors. Baby, I’m amazed. As big a fan as I was of Forster’s Everything Put Together and especially Monster’s Ball, and as much as I’m looking forward to his next film, Stay, which 20th Century Fox may or may not release at the end of the year (although I’m sensing it may get pushed into ’05), I found this delicate period drama about playwright J.M. Barrie’s emotional undertow during the creation of ‘Peter Pan’ way too caring and tender-hearted. It’s tailor-made for the more-sensitive-than-thou’s. And while I’m on the subject…

Two or three weeks ago I nay-nayed Depp’s Neverland performance, and I feel I should run it again since I’m about to retire the Word column: “Depp seems to really get the eccentric Scottish playwright who wrote ‘Peter Pan.’ The actual Barrie, according to the press notes, was said to have a quiet, puckish personality and always spoke in a low burr…and that’s Depp in the film. The problem is that his Barrie seems so internal, so into his own quiet determinations and oddball kindnesses, that you feel a strange urge to strangle him after a while. Plus there’s something too actorly about his Scottish accent; it sounds at once uncertain and overly studied. In short, Depp did everything right…and in so doing created a character and a vibe that feels curiously wrong.”

Three comments from those who’ve recently seen Bill Condon’s Kinsey (Fox Searchlight, 11.12), the story of Alfred Kinsey’s pioneering studies of human sexuality in the late ’40s and ’50s. One, that it’s intelligent, absorbing and quite accomplished…although its appeal might be a tad stronger among sophisticated blue-staters than with the red-state mom-and-pop crowd. Two, that the sexual scenes are pronounced enough that some have expressed amazement that it managed to get an R rating. And three, that there’s a scene involving sexual intimacy between star Liam Neeson (who plays Kinsey) and costar Peter Sarsgaard that will grab attention. Kinsey will be screening soon at the Toronto Film Festival.

Oliver Stone’s Alexander opens in less than two months (only eight weeks from Friday, 9.10), and yet no editors or long-lead journalists I’ve spoken to have seen it or been told about a screening…yet. The historical epic is going through a final editing push, apparently. Warner Bros. executives have seen a version that runs about three hours, I’m told, and they’ve allegedly asked Stone to tone down the violence in the battle scenes. (When this info was relayed to a small group of journos after Thursday’s Polar Express press luncheon on the WB lot, a female writer quipped, “That Oliver…he’s so subtle!”) No word on what the WB suits thought of the quasi-gay sexual content scenes between Colin Farrell’s Alexander and…I don’t know who with. (One of the friends-of-Alexander characters played by Jared Leto or Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, I’m guessing.) There’s an expectation (hope?) that after all is said and done Alexander will run somewhere between 150 and 165 minutes.

A certain eyebrow-raising clip allegedly taken from the forthcoming Return of the Jedi DVD has already shown up online, but I wasn’t sure if it was bogus or not. But DVD Newsletter editor Doug Pratt has told me it’s definitely true: George Lucas has replaced that ghostly image of Sebastian Shaw (the British actor who played Darth Vader/Annakin Skywalker) in the 1983 theatrical version of Jedi‘s finale…you know, that sentimental farewell moment in which he’s shown standing next to Yoda and Alec Guiness’s Obi-wan Kenobi?…with a ghostly image of Hayden Christensen, who of course played Annakin in Attack of the Clones. But why stop there, George? As long as you’re taking this tack, why not eliminate Shaw altogether from Jedi and re-shoot Annakin’s death scene with Christensen and digitally paste it in? And then (what’s stopping you?) destroy the original ’83 Jedi negative and create an all-new Christensen version.

The Guardian has reported that Jonathan Glazer’s Birth, the Nicole Kidman film about a widow who comes to believe that her dead husband has been reincarnated in the body of a 10 year-old boy (played by 11 year-old Cameron Bright) “was greeted with a chorus of boos by journalists” at a Wednesday press screening for the Venice Film Festival. (I’m guessing that the booing, if it in fact happened to any noteworthy degree, came from British journos, who have a history of shouting down films they don’t like at press screenings.) The trailer for this New Line release looks intriguing enough, and it’s hard to imagine the director of Sexy Beast having cocked things up so badly as to trigger vocal outrage. A scene in which Kidman shares a bathtub with Bright “has already provoked criticism, prompting New Line [spokespersons] to insist that neither actor was naked when the scene was filmed,” the Guardian reported. So where are the reviews already? The official screening happened Wednesday night…hubba-hubba.