I’ve just come from the first TIFF screening of Rodrigo Garcia‘s Mother and Child, and if someone picks it up and puts it into NY and LA theatres before 12.31, it’s a Best Picture contender. Because sophisticated filmgoers of a certain age are going to cream over this. All right, don’t trust me…I don’t care. I know what I know and I go to sleep with that every night.

This is a great woman’s film except it isn’t, not really, because it got to me big-time and I generally don’t fall for films aimed at the opposite genre market so go figure. It’s so good and so exactingly and humanistically right that a fair-sized portion of the Julie and Julia audience may reject it because it’s not coarse or common enough.

On top of this Annette Bening, who gives what I feel is possibly the best performance of her life in this film, will be a Best Actress contender.

I know what Mother and Child is and I’m not going all breathless and gah-gah because that’s what some critics do when they see a new film at a film festival. For what it is — a super-sensitive, perfectly acted and exquisitely written adult drama about (the title kind of indicates this) mothers and daughters and parenting and re-establishing connections, Mother and Child is really and truly as good as this sort of thing gets. It’s got Fox Searchlight or Focus Features written all over it.

That’s all I have time to say right now. I’m at an IFC dinner party and I’m tapping this out on a bar and I don’t want be rude to my hosts.