From Vulture‘s Kyle Buchanan: “As a riveting procedural story, I’ve seen Spotlight compared to films like Zodiac and All the President’s Men, but the more instructive example for Oscar voters will be Argo, another well-engineered, fact-based drama that eventually became the Academy’s consensus pick for Best Picture. Plenty of Oscar voters will give Spotlight their No. 1 spot, but this audience-pleaser is sure to collect just about everybody else’s No. 2 votes, and that may be crucial in a year where several of the biggest movies yet to screen, like Joy and The Revenant, come from some of our most polarizing auteurs.

“Boy, is this movie good. It’s not a showy, bombastic picture — it has that in common with the journalists it portrays, who are mostly concerned with ducking their heads down and doing the work — but it’s so assured, so deft, and so satisfying that I think it’s destined to go far with Oscar voters of just about every demographic. The Academy has made daring picks for Best Picture over the past two years, anointing the tough, arty 12 Years a Slave and the wordy Birdman, but I think voters are yearning to return to something conventional, and Spotlight’s got a down-the-middle, perfectly executed pitch they’ll find hard to resist. It also has the sort of social significance that Oscar voters like from their Best Picture winner: You can pat your back for putting it on your ballot.”

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The main difference between this new trailer for Ryan Coogler‘s Creed (Warner Bros., 11.25) and the one that popped on or about 6.30 is the amount of Sylvester Stallone footage. Michael B. Jordan (Fruitvale Station) is central in both, of course, but the earlier version indicated an all-black ensemble delivering a rotely inspirational boxing tale with Stallone pinch-htting. The new trailer is selling a two-character boxing drama (Jordan, Stallone) on a more equal basis. What eastern-seaboard city is uglier than Philadelphia? If some God of Fate were to visit me at 4 am and say “you will never visit Philadephia again for the rest of your life,” I would say “okay, whatever…I can live with that.” Pic costars Tessa Thompson, Phylicia Rashad, Wood Harris and real-life British champion boxer Tony Bellew.

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Why are we still without at least one female talk-show host? I’m afraid to even discuss this for fear of being gutted on Twitter. It would have to be a comedienne, of course, but specifically a cutting-edge, across-the-board iconoclast (i.e., no p.c. agendas). Like Amy Schumer. I would be levitating if Schumer had agreed to host The Daily Show, but of course she didn’t. All of these guys are cool in their own way, but I’m happiest in the company of Bill Maher, Larry Wilmore and John Oliver — the least bullshit-tolerant and most politically-attuned. The remainder in order of most-liked first and least-liked last: Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Fallon, Conan O’Brien, James Corden. No opinion: Trevor Noah.

James Vanderbilt‘s first-rate Truth opens a month hence (10.16) and this is what Sony Pictures Classics is issuing in the wake of the first triumphant showings at the Toronto Film Festival? The apparent idea is to emphasize to your basic older, not-keeping-up-like-they-used-to viewers that Truth is about the famous Dan Rather (obviously played by Robert Redford). Which of course it isn’t — it’s really about Mary Mapes (Cate Blanchett) and a story that was hurriedly aired before it was ready, and how the negative blowback killed her TV news producing career along with Rather’s. Where’s the trailer? SPC has had all summer to throw one together and this is their opening marketing salvo?

Yesterday two journalist-critics happened to mention that Johnny Depp, recently arrived in Toronto for the premiere of Black Mass, looked fat to them. Separate conversations, no prompting — they just said this out of the blue. Depp is 52 and it’s really easy to put on weight at that age, but he’s always kept things in check. Then I saw this pic today. He’s obviously not conventionally “fat” but by his own Captain Jack standards he sorta kinda is. He’s obviously chunkier than when he portrayed James “Whitey” Bulger. Is it a crime to channel the physicality of Ernest Borgnine or ’70s-era Marlon Brando? No, it isn’t. Happens to the best of us, and I should know. Six or seven years ago (i.e., the last gasp of my drinking days) I was looking like a middle-aged lesbian. It’s easily dispensed with — you just have to quit drinking, eat less bread and dairy, hit the treadmill and ride your bike.

Matt Damon is being slammed for advocating merit above diversity in a conversational snippet from the 9.13 debut episode of HBO’s back-from-hiatus Project Greenlight. It happened duing a polite dispute with producer Effie Brown (Dear White People). Yesterday Jezebel‘s Kara Brown derided Damon for whitesplaining, but what did Damon actually say? Simply that quality could be compromised if there’s an over-emphasis on hiring diverse filmmakers, and that “merit” is the only thing that should matter at the end of the day, leaving “all other factors out if it.” Btu he expressed it a little too bluntly when he said that “when we’re talking about diversity you do it in the casting of the film not in the casting of the show.” In response to which Brown said “whoa!”

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Tom McCarthy‘s Spotlight hit a grand slam with everyone who attended Monday night’s Princess of Wales’ screening — hearty cheers, whoo-whoos, crowd on its feet. You could feel the love all over. And then McCarthy and the brilliant ensemble cast — Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Brian d’Arcy, John Slattery and Liev Schreiber — came on-stage with the real-life, real-deal Boston Globe guys they play in the film — ‘Spotlight’ editor Walter “Robby” Robinson (Keaton), Globe reporters Michael Rezendes (Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer (McAdams), Matt Carroll (d’Arcy), former managing editor Ben Bradlee, Jr. (Slattery) and former Globe editor Marty Baron (Schreiber).

And then Ruffalo delivered an impromptu “thank you, hats off” speech to the real-deal guys (above), and everyone was just delighted and laughing and applauding. A total bliss-out.

Spotlight (Open Road, 11.6) is a drop-dead guaranteed hit. Even, I predict, with the dumb-asses who prefer escapist CG slop to smart movies. Every sector of the audience is going to be won over because it makes you feel good and proud all over. This is one brilliant film about tenacious good-guy journalists accomplishing a truly heroic and compassionate thing in a thorough, uber-professional way — what’s not to applaud? Best Picture-wise Spotlight is the movie to beat right now.  That’s not to say that some film won’t come along and kick its ass, but no other contender I’ve seen this year delivers quite as fully.  

(l. to r.) Walter “Robby” Robinson, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Sacha Pfeiffer, Matt Carroll, Brian d’Arcy, Tom McCarthy.

(l. to r.) Baron, Slattery, Bradlee, Rezendes, Ruffalo, Robinson, Keaton, McAdams, Pfeiffer, Carroll, d’Arcy, McCarthy.

(l. to r.) Marty Baron, John Slattery, Ben Bradlee, Jr., Michael Rezendes, Mark Ruffalo.

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With Get It While You Can still stalled in lawsuit hell, Amy Berg‘s Janis: Little Girl Blue is the only Joplin project around. In his Venice Film Festival review, David Rooney called it “essential viewing for ’60s counterculture junkies”…what else? Excerpt: “Berg enlists Chan Marshall as narrator, chiefly to read excerpts from Joplin’s letters, either to her family at home in Port Arthur, Texas, or to friends and lovers. This turns out to be a smart choice. Marshall doesn’t ‘act’ her readings but — with her gentle Southern accent and self-evident connection to the subject as a female performer — simply lets the words and sentiments speak for themselves.

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Yesterday afternoon I was thanking God Almighty and the forces of chance for allowing me to savor each and every line of dialogue in James Vanderbilt‘s Truth. That’s because I was watching it in an aurally exquisite Scotiabank theatre instead of the dreaded Princess of Wales, which is mostly an echo-phonic, bass-thromp nightmare. I’ll be catching my second viewing of Spotlight there tonight, and my heart is already breaking over the dialogue that I won’t hear as clearly as I did in Telluride because of that godawful echo-chamber effect that I hate with a passion. The Toronto Film Festival leases the Princess of Wales from Mirvish Productions, a Toronto-based stage-show operation. The business was launched by the late “Honest Ed” Mirvish and is run today by his son, David. HE to Mirvish, Cameron Bailey and Piers Handling: please improve the sound at this godawful facility. I saw The Danish Girl there the other day, and I was only able to decipher about half of the dialogue. It was dead fucking awful. Do yourselves and festivalgoers a favor and ask Boston Light & Sound’s Chapin Cutler to fix things. Every time I’m about to see a film at the Princess of Wales I sink into a mood pocket…please. Respect the movies, respect the sound. “Good enough” isn’t good enough.

Read this short recollection of a 1995 encounter between Bob Dylan and Joe Wright-favorited cinematographer Seamus McGarvey (Pan, Fifty Shades of Grey, Ana Karenina, The Soloist, Atonement). How can anyone do what Dylan is described as having done here? Who is this lame, this retarded, this flaky?

There’s nothing wrong with being an intelligent, pruned-down, HBO-level biopic, which is pretty much what you get with Jay Roach‘s Trumbo (Bleecker Street, 11.6). A political biopic, I should say. I saw it last night from a balcony seat at the Elgin, and it just flew right by. Call it an above-average portrait of the Hollywood blacklist era, and a better-than-decent capturing of one the most gifted and industrious blacklisted screenwriters ever. A moustachioed, sandpaper-voiced Bryan Cranston portrays the stalwart titular hero; I felt completely at home with the guy. Trumbo was one of the most gifted wordsmiths in Hollywood history — a winner of two screenwriting Oscars (Roman Holiday, The Brave One) during his under-wraps period, and also the author of A Guy Named Joe, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Cowboy, Spartacus, Exodus, Lonely Are The Brave…the list is quite lengthy. He was also a man of balls and honor. I just wish that Roach and screenwriter John McNamara had paid at least some attention to the legendary Gun Crazy (’50), which Trumbo co-wrote under an alias. My favorite supporting performances (in this order): Michael Stuhlbarg as Edward G. Robinson (particularly during a scene in which he explains to Trumbo why he became a friendly HUAC witness), Helen Mirren as the maliciously right-wing Hedda Hopper, John Goodman as schlock producer Frank King, Louis C.K. as Arlen Hird, and David James Elliott as John Wayne.

Sasha Stone and I got right down to things in the latest Oscar Poker. We only had a half-hour as I had to leave for a 2 pm TIFF screening of Truth, but then Sasha and I spoke again after I saw James Vanderbilt’s film. We covered how Telluride and Toronto have clarified matters regarding the Best Pic chances of Black Mass (nope), Bridge of Spies (Sasha thinks it’s at least half-likely), Brooklyn (yes), Carol (ditto), The Danish Girl (odds are ebbing as we speak), Our Brand Is Crisis (not that kind of film), The Revenant (lock), Spotlight (lock), Steve Jobs (maybe), Beasts of No Nation (deserves Best Pic consideration), Trumbo (very good HBO-level drama) and Truth (yes!). Again, the mp3.