There are press & industry screenings Thursday afternoon at the Scotiabank plex — 45 Years (which I couldn’t get around to at Telluride), Jawar Panahi‘s Taxi, the uncut German bank robbery flick Victoria, etc. And then comes the opening-night double-header at the Princes of Wales — Jean Marc Vallee‘s Demolition and Michael Moore‘s Where To Invade Next. The only thing happening tonight is a Toronto Star-sponsored journalist soiree at some Mexican joint. The party has a name — “Critical Drinking.” Thanks to Peter Howell for the invite.

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HE’s Porter Air flight touched down in Toronto around 3:25 pm. I ran into the formidable but always friendly and laid-back Darren Aronofsky in baggage claim — he’s being interviewed tomorrow night at Koerner Hall about the relationship between movies and music. Picked up the press pass at Bell Lightbox around 4:15 or so. The staffers and volunteers are helpful and gracious, as always, but the press “lounge” in the BL’s third floor is the size of a large bathroom, and there aren’t enough electrical outlets. And the festival has no app, which is fairly shameful as Cannes, Berlin and Telluride have them. At least there’s a TIFF people’s app — 2015.tiffr.com. (Thanks to Awards Daily‘s Jordan Ruimy for the tip.)

A-training to Penn Station at 11 am, and then on to Newark airport. I’ll be strolling Toronto streets by 3:30 or thereabouts. The Martian, Trumbo, Truth, Our Brand Is Crisis, Freeheld, Stonewall, Black Mass, Spotlight, The Danish Girl, Beasts of No Nation, Brooklyn, Son of Saul — it all starts tomorrow. My latest speculative Best Picture top-ten rundown for Gold Derby, influenced by Telluride, not-yet-seen titles in boldface: (1) The Revenant (2) Spotlight, (3) Joy, (4) Suffragette, (5) Carol, (6) Son of Saul, (7) Beasts of No Nation, (8) Brooklyn, (9) Steve Jobs and (10) The Danish Girl. Here’s how the Gold Derby gang is spitballing things.

“Irish director Lenny Abrahamson clearly has a penchant for confining his actors to tight spaces — Michael Fassbender within a large fake head in Frank, and now Brie Larson and her little son to a 10×10 shed in Room (A24, 11.6). The result is rather better this time around, as this adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s celebrated 2010 novel, with a script by the author herself, is involving and moderately heartwarming here and there, even if doesn’t reach the higher levels of psychological insight and emotional profundity to which it aspires. Strong performances by Larson and young Jacob Tremblay as a mother and son held captive for years, as well as the book’s reputation, will provide a certain art house draw, more among female viewers than with men. But the claustrophobic and upsetting nature of the material will be a disincentive to many.” — from Todd McCarthy’s 9.4 Telluride review. And yet Rotten Tomatoes is assessing the Room reviews thus far (including McCarthy’s) as indicative of 100% rapture,

As noted, Fox Searchlight has two spring ’16 releases — Jean Marc Vallee‘s Demolition and Luca Guadagnino‘s A Bigger Splash — debuting as we speak at the Toronto and Venice film festivals, respectively. But without any crossover. A Bigger Splash (which has fared relatively well in Venice reviews) won’t play Toronto and Demolition‘s exposure is strictly confined to Toronto. This kind of either-or separatism has happened before, but rarely.

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Atom Egoyan‘s Remember screens tomorrow (9.10) at the Venice Film Festival. No disrespect but I stopped trusting Egoyan a long time ago. I had a particularly difficult time with The Captive, which I saw at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. So I’m taking a rave review of Remember (from an industry-involved guy called “Marlowe”) with a grain of salt.

For one thing it’s a Holocaust-related Nazi-hunt thing, and the calendar has pretty much shut that genre down, certainly in a present-day context. Everyone from that period is either dead or in their 90s and therefore less than ambulatory, and probably too weak or disoriented to accomplish anything. Marathon Man was 39 years ago. Give it a rest.

“It’s a small film that ultimately packs a powerful punch,” Marlowe contends. “Christopher Plummer plays a Holocaust survivor living in a retirement home with his dying wife along with Martin Landau, a weak, wheelchair-bound friend. Landau has persuaded Plummer that after his wife passes he has to track down the surviving Nazi who tortured him and Landau 70-odd years ago. The fact that Plummer has advanced Alzheimer’s compromises his likely effectiveness in this regard, but he has a handwritten letter from Landau that instructs him exactly how to proceed.

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Taken somewhere in rural wherever during the fall 1967 promotion for Warren Beatty and Arthur Penn‘s Bonnie and Clyde. The guy on the left, I’m guessing, is the Holiday Inn manager, and the tall blonde woman is a local also. Beatty in the center, obviously, with Bonnie and Clyde costars Estelle Parsons (second from left) and Michael J. Pollard (far right). Intrigued, I asked Beatty about the when, where and why…crickets.

A couple of years ago Oscar-winning documentarian Charles Ferguson (Inside Job) and CNN partnered to make a Hillary Clinton doc. The idea was to explore or explain how Hillary went from being “a very sincere, committed person,” in Ferguson’s words, to the guarded, secretive, heavily fortified figure she is today. Her changeover happened, says Ferguson, because of “what [she and Bill Clinton] went through in the White House…some of that is known, some of it is not…it changed her a lot.

But in a chat with Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn, Ferguson explains that the project stalled because “no one [would] talk to me. Absolutely no one. I encountered a wall of silence the likes of which I have never encountered before.

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Is David Gordon Green‘s Our Brand Is Crisis (Warner Bros., 10.30) a Sandra Bullock dramedy with a real-world political undercurrent, or a political dramedy in which Bullock stars? It will have three Toronto Film Festival screenings this weekend — a single showing on Friday, 9.11 at the Princess of Wales, and two screenings on Saturday (Ryerson, Princess of Wales again).

The Warner Bros./Participant film, produced by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, is an adaptation of Rachel Boynton’s 2005 documentary of the same name. The doc focused on the experience of Greenberg Carville Shrum (GCS) in the 2002 Bolivian presidential election. Green began shooting in New Orleans on 9.29.14 and presumably wrapped before year’s end.

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I know Leonard Bernstein‘s Oscar-nominated On The Waterfront score backwards and forwards. (Especially the main-title portion.) It would be nice, I agree, to hear the score performed live by the New York Philharmonic while the film plays on a big screen. The performance is slated for 9.18. But it’s still the same Bernstein score I’ve been listening to all my life, and the idea of plunking down $95 or $200 and change if you’re taking a date seems a bit much. N.Y. Philharmonic fans can afford it but Average Joes will hesitate. I’ll be in Toronto, in any event, from the 9th through the 18th, and then straight back to L.A.

Last night’s Alberquerque-to-JFK flight wasn’t pure adulterated hell, but like all red-eye flights it was fairly miserable. Sitting in your seat and trying to sleep but unable to really sink to the bottom of the pond. The flight was only three and a half hours, and I guess I “slept”…oh, maybe 90 minutes or so. I finally couldn’t stand the fake-sleep purgatory and decided to just wake the hell up, and at that very moment I looked out the left-side window and there was sprawled-out, golden-glowing Philadelphia, which meant only another 20 or 25 minutes before freedom. Whenever I suffer through a particularly unhappy red-eye and want to feel a sense of relief or deliverance after landing at JFK, I get out the headphones and play “Our Prayer” from the Smile sessions.

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