20 Things I Loved at TIFF 2017 (and 5 Things I Didn’t Love)

TIFF ’17 is over (it’s been over for over a week, I’m just slow), so it’s time to take stock of the best and worst that the Festival offered. I saw 38 films (37 that I was conscious for at least most of), and 26 of them are mentioned here in one capacity or another. I missed some of the fest’s major titles (Molly’s Game, Battle of the Sexes, The Disaster Artist, The Current War, Call Me By Your Name, and I, Tonya), but saw several others, including four that have vaulted prominently into the Oscar conversation (Darkest Hour, Lady Bird, The Shape of Water, and the People’s Choice Award winner, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri). In other words, there’s still plenty to talk about. The first five entries on the list are the five best films I saw. After that, I dig deeper into the specifics of what really struck me about several films.

1.  Foxtrot

Something no one has ever accused me of is avoiding hyperbole. I love cinema, I always get excited when I see great cinema, and my excitement has traditionally involved throwing lots of excitable words around. In any given year, I usually see between three and six films that I don’t hesitate to call masterpieces, and I’ve been trying to get better about that. I realized I’ve become the moviegoer equivalent of the guy that just says “I love you” to everyone that sleeps with him. Are there really that many masterpieces? Can there even be that many? So I’ve been trying to get a little more conservative with my praise, and so far in 2017, I had only said it about one film (Get Out).

Well, here’s number 2—Foxtrot is a masterpiece. The simplest, non-spoiler-y way to describe Foxtrot is that it’s about a tragedy in the Israeli military, and the film alternates between revealing what might’ve happened, what didn’t happen, and what did happen. Like Moonlight, it has three distinctly separate acts. But unlike Moonlight, each act has a different tone and style, and a very different role in revealing what the hell kind of movie Foxtrot even is. The first act is domestic tragedy—Manchester by the Sea-like familial weight meets P.T. Anderson-styled long takes of devastating close-up acting. Then the second act is Kubrick-ian satire. Both acts have a dance scene. And the third act begins with an animated sequence involving masturbation. None of it should work, but it does, beautifully so. It was recently announced that Foxtrot is Israel’s entry for the foreign language film Academy Award. I think it has a great chance to win.

2.  Jane

I won’t lie, I wasn’t particularly excited to see Jane, and really only did so because I had a writing gig to cover it. I liked several of Brett Morgen’s previous films (Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, The Kid Stays in the Picture), but even still, I wasn’t sure how much I’d get into a 90-minute film about the primatologist Jane Goodall, built almost solely out of recently recovered footage from the 1960’s. But gods, what a gorgeous film. This is pure cinema in the best way.

To start, the footage from the 1960’s is all shot by Jane’s eventual husband, Hugh van Lawick, who is widely regarded as the greatest wildlife photographer ever, and the imagery is lovely. From that base, the film then overlays narration from Jane Goodall herself (taken from ‘80s recordings of her reading her writing for books on tape), and then overlays that with a stunning new Philip Glass score, which, contrary to Glass’s general oeuvre, actually goes for a grand emotional crescendo. Jane will be in art-house theaters next month, and then will be broadcast on the National Geographic channel next Spring. It’s definitely worth your time.

3.  The Shape of Water

At the TIFF premiere, director Guillermo del Toro said that his Venice-winning film, The Shape of Water, is partially about how, “Every morning, we can choose between fear and love. And love is the answer. Silly as it may fucking sound, it’s the answer to everything.” The Shape of Water is a Beauty and the Beast–esque story of a mute janitor at a top-secret science lab falling in love with the merman being held prisoner there. It’s an unabashedly romantic film, in its sentiment, its 1962 setting, and especially its execution. It reminds me of La La Land in that it’s a movie where you almost have to consciously decide you’re willing to let it sweep you away, or it won’t. If you make even the slightest effort to be immune to the goth-schmaltz it’s selling, then you probably will be. But if you can allow yourself to be lost in the gorgeously stylized romantic grandeur, which I was, then it’s a lovely viewing experience.

4.  Faces Places

What could possibly make for a sweeter, more life-affirming documentary than a legendary French filmmaker (89-year-old Agnès Varda) and a world-renowned street artist (JR, famous for installing large black & white photo images in public locations) teaming up to drive around France and bring public art to the people and towns? The most wonderful thing about Faces Places is that the type of art being created and displayed is hinged upon audience participation. The people receiving these lovely images in their towns are the ones bringing their own likenesses to its creation. As a result, the film ends up as a wonderful meditation on the communal nature of art—why it matters to our public sphere, how creating it brings us together, and how we are all the subject of something beautiful.

5.  Darkest Hour

If you follow film at all, you’ve probably heard by now that Gary Oldman virtually has the Best Actor Oscar in the bag for his portrayal of Winston Churchill. But what you might not have heard is that Darkest Hour is also, actually, a great film. It’s important that this isn’t thought of as a Churchill biopic, because it’s not. It’s a film about a historical event. The whole thing takes place over about 18 days in May of 1940, and it’s about Churchill convincing both the British Government and the Crown that they can’t surrender to Germany while their troops are all stranded at Dunkirk. It’s a brilliantly crafted film, particularly in the lighting and score. But it’s also a great script. It’s a true return to form for Joe Wright (whose Atonement is one of my favorites of the 2000s), after last year’s disastrous Pan.

6.  Greta Gerwig, Writer/Director

Greta Gerwig’s debut as a solo writer/director, Lady Bird, is a film that I really liked, but was one slight notch below loving. In some ways, it’s about such a specific type of high school experience that it might not perfectly resonate for anyone that didn’t come very close to living it. But one thing that the film does make very clear is that Gerwig, as a filmmaker, is the real deal. This isn’t just an actor deciding they can direct now; this feels like the natural artistic progression of what has already been a fascinating young career, full of life and creativity. Sometimes you can just tell from a first film that it’s the beginning of a major voice in cinema. Lady Bird is one of those times.

7.  The Sound Design of The Killing of a Sacred Deer

While I always strongly advocate for the theatrical experience, when people ask me what films they need to see in theaters, I’m less likely to recommend films with big effects or strong visual components than I am to push for films that most benefit from total immersion. The Killing of a Sacred Deer is a movie that needs that level of immersion from its viewers. This is a movie where you need to be sitting in the dark, in total silence, and just listening to the bizarre, unsettling noises and disjointed strings that are trying as hard as they possibly can to make you queasy and uncomfortable. It’s a great horror movie, but it only works if you let it completely envelop your sensory experience.

8.  Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

The third film by Martin McDonagh (In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths) was somewhat of a surprise winner for TIFF’s People’s Choice Award, which is a pretty major Oscar-predictor (eight of the previous nine winners have gone on to receive Best Picture nominations). But perhaps the win shouldn’t have been that surprising; one thing the Award has been an especially great predictor of in recent years is the Best Actress Oscar. La La Land, Room, and Silver Linings Playbook all won the TIFF People’s Choice Award, and they all eventually vaulted their female lead onto the Oscar acceptance stage. Given how wonderfully profane and deceptively vulnerable Frances McDormand is in Three Billboards, we may be looking at a continuation of that trend. And Sam Rockwell, in a meaty and hilarious supporting role, has the goods to join her in the Oscar hunt.

9.  The Veep-Meets-Fascism of The Death of Stalin

Armando Iannucci, the creator of Veep (and a screenplay Oscar nominee for his 2009 film, In the Loop), has been a true expert at chronicling the hysterical inanities of democratic systems. But with The Death of Stalin (which takes place over the few days during and following that titular event), Iannucci turns his focus to fascism. If you think the power grabs in Veep were hilarious, where everything is about maximizing voter optics, just wait ‘til you see how absurd the power grabs look when they involve actual grabbing of actual power, and the people in the way don’t merely lose elections.

10. Thinking About the implications of On Chesil Beach and I Love You, Daddy

With some films, it’s not necessarily the quality or style of the artistry that stands out to you, but the ideas presented in the film. This was especially the case with On Chesil Beach, an Ian McEwan adaptation that I thought was only a decent film, but has stayed with me really well despite being the first film I saw of the fest. It has two major takeaways that I’ve been thinking a lot about—the perils of crafting narratives about what sexual experiences are supposed to be like, and the ways in which people in long-term relationships can almost feel like they’ve been victims of false advertisement when they find out something new about their partner

I liked Louie C.K.’s I Love You, Daddy a lot better—it was one of my favorites of the fest—but even still, it’s the ideas in the story that I can’t stop thinking about. It’s basically a commentary on how we should react to Woody Allen as a filmmaker, knowing what we (probably) know about him. Meanwhile, the movie looks and feels almost identical to Woody’s 1979 classic, Manhattan. So there’s a lot to unpack there, and I can’t wait to see how people react to it when it’s released next year.

11. The Sexy Feminism of Professor Marston and the Wonder Women

William Moulton Marston, who created Wonder Woman in 1941, was quite an interesting figure. He was a Harvard-trained psychology professor, he invented the lie detector test, and he was in a long-term, functional relationship with two women. Even though Marston died young, in 1947, his two partners still stayed together for the rest of their lives. The story of Marston’s relationship with these two women—and their relationship with each other—and how they inspired the creation of a feminist icon superhero, is a movie that achieves the balance of being really sexy without ever feeling exploitative. Some of us have always known that feminism is sexy, but for those that still don’t realize it, this is the movie they need.

12. Vince Vaughn, Action Star

Sometimes one starring role in a good action flick is all it takes to completely reframe someone’s career. Once upon a time, no one had ever thought of Bruce Willis, Nicholas Cage, or Liam Neeson as action stars. But then Die Hard, The Rock, and Taken came along, and none of their careers have ever been the same since. To be fair, Brawl in Cell Block 99, the prison revenge epic that Vince Vaughn brought to TIFF, has virtually no chance at lighting box offices on fire like those three aforementioned films. But the people that cast action movies will see it, and they’re going to love what they see. Vince Vaughn is about to be reinvented as an action star, and he’s going to be pretty damn great at it.

13. The Final Shots of Hostiles and What Will People Say

I’ve always been fascinated by the way a great final shot can frame how we think about a film, and two that I saw at TIFF displayed that perfectly. Hostiles, a bleak western by Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart) and starring Christian Bale, had a surprising final image, deployed in slow motion, that was basically a reverse Searchers. What Will People Say—a powerful Norwegian drama about Pakistani immigrants—ended on a stark set of two silent facial expressions, acknowledging everything that the characters had experienced and learned about themselves over the entire film. In both cases, the ways I’ve thought about these movies have been predicated by the final images they left me with.

14. The Subtleties of Chappaquiddick

I didn’t know what to expect of Chappaquiddick, a film that arrived in Toronto with very little buzz and was by a director, John Curran, whose films I’ve really liked (Tracks), really hated (Stone), or been completely indifferent to (The Painted Veil). But Chappaquiddick—starring Jason Clarke as Ted Kennedy, Kate Mara as the campaign worker that died in his car, Ed Helms as his closest advisor, and Bruce Dern as his father—was a nice surprise. What works so well about it is that it doesn’t go for sensationalism. It’s about your entire life building and pressurizing a narrative of impending greatness, and how you might react when you see it start to spiral away. If there’s a major flaw, it’s that the film doesn’t care enough about a tragically dead girl. But Chappaquiddick is about the realities of America’s relationship to scandal and moral compartmentalization, and it’s a film that keenly (and sadly) knows, America never really cares about the dead girl.

15. The Norwegian Non-Horror Version of Carrie

With all content ideas being constantly re-farmed into reboots or new mediums, Thelma (Norway’s official Oscar entry) is something I haven’t quite seen yet—a film remade into a different genre. To be fair, Thelma isn’t actually a credited remake of Carrie, but like Carrie, it’s also about an eponymous, sheltered young virgin discovering she has a strange control over her surroundings. However, Thelma isn’t a horror movie; it’s a psychological drama with this discovery treated as a powerful element of sexual awakening, rather than the igniter of a killing spree.

16. Charlie Hunnam, Movie Star

In 1973, Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman starred in a prison escape drama called Papillon, and it was a huge hit. I watched it recently and struggled to get through it. It’s only watchable because McQueen and Hoffman are so compulsively watchable. So when I saw the new remake, starring Charlie Hunnam and Rami Malek, I was dubious of whether Hunnam could evoke the effortlessly cool masculinity of McQueen. As a movie, the new Papillon is fine. Pretty good, even. But what impressed me about it was Hunnam. He truly does pull off being as much of a cool alpha male as Steve McQueen. I’m not sure yet what movie will be the one that does it (doubtful it’s this one), but I’m now confident that Charlie Hunnam will be a movie star. And deservedly so.

17. The Non-White-Savior-ness of Woman Walks Ahead

I was a little worried going into Woman Walks Ahead, in which Jessica Chastain plays a woman who travels west to paint a portrait of Chief Sitting Bull and finds herself in the middle of a major conflict between the Sioux and the U.S. Military. It seemed like an obvious and egregious White Savior trope with a movie built around it. But I also trusted Chastain, who has great taste and tact in choosing roles, so I was cautiously optimistic. Chastain chose well. It’s a pretty good film, with beautiful landscapes and a moving story. But what I was most impressed by is how defiantly it *isn’t* a White Savior film. First of all, Chastain’s character is mostly on the sidelines for the climactic scenes. Secondly—and more depressingly—she doesn’t succeed in saving anyone. (I guess spoiler alert for those that don’t know their late-19^th-century American genocides.)

18. The Held Shots of Loveless

Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev’s previous film, Leviathan, was a foreign language film Oscar nominee two years ago. Leviathan and his new film, Loveless, are both heavy, slow movies, but they’re also incredibly powerful, and part of that power comes from the way Zvyagintsev tends to hold his shots for a few seconds longer, or start them a few seconds earlier (or both), than most directors would. It adds an almost voyeuristic quality to the films where you feel like you’re watching real lives unfold, and of course you see more of the dull moments of those lives than in the tightly compacted Hollywood editing we’re used to. But the added realism is palpable.

19. Spending Some Much-Needed Time With the Obama State Department

The last film I saw at TIFF’17 was a documentary called The Final Year, which is an inside look at John Kerry, Samantha Power, Ben Rhodes, and the Obama State Department’s actions and goals throughout 2016. The doc covers the entire year, which started with so much hope, and ended with so little. But seeing these people try so hard and believe so strongly in the global message of peace and tolerance they were advocating for proved especially inspiring, no matter how distant that sentiment seems now.

20. The “Eight Kinds of Fucks” Americans Give

Downsizing was an interesting and pretty good movie, though definitely not up to the standard of the rest of Alexander Payne’s work. But there was one line, toward the end, that probably elicited the biggest laugh from me of the entire 11-day festival, about the “eight kinds of fucks” Americans give. And I won’t spoil the rest of it here.

…And 5 Things I Didn’t Love

1. Kings

Two years ago, Turkish director Deniz Gamze Ergüven received a foreign film Oscar nomination for her lovely and powerful film Mustang, about the rebellious sexual awakenings of five young sisters in modern day Turkey. When I heard her English language debut—about the 1992 L.A. Riots and starring Halle Berry and Daniel Craig—would be at TIFF, it leapt to the top of my Must See List. But, sadly, Kings was my biggest disappointment of the festival. The film is a disaster, and I try really hard to not use that term lightly when discussing art that people spent years on. But here are the opening two scenes of the film: in the first scene, a teenage black girl gets fatally shot in the back while trying to buy orange juice; in the second scene, a teenage boy is trying to masturbate while his younger siblings are banging on the door yelling for breakfast. It’s just not possible to screw up tone more than that.

2. The Square

The Palme d’Or winner from the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, this Swedish film about the absurdities of the modern art world (by the director of 2014’s excellent Force Majeure) is expected to be a contender for the foreign language film Oscar. But after Force Majeure was such a tight narrative about the moral fallout of one action, The Square is so all over the place that it utterly forgets where it’s been and where it was going. Yes, there are some great sequences. But for something partially about the seemingly inane meaninglessness of contemporary art, the film kind of forgot to hone in on a meaning of its own.

3. Unicorn Store

Brie Larson’s directorial debut is something I really wanted to love, but it’s kind of a mess. The best way I can describe my disappointment is, I was wishfully thinking the title was a metaphor. But nope, it’s not. I was happy to find out that Brie at least didn’t write the script, because that would have made me feel much worse for her creative future. As a director, she does show a decent knack for comic timing, and the thematic motivation behind the project comes from a good place. But it mostly just left me feeling like I’d been suckered into seeing a Lifetime movie meant for pre-teen girls.

4. Eric Clapton: A Life in 12 Bars

During TIFF I got the chance to interview Brett Morgen, the director of Jane, and we talked for a while about his process in crafting his films. One thing he mentioned was how little he cares for typical factoids like when someone was born, and that he just wants to get inside them. Eric Clapton: A Life in 12 Bars (which will air soon on Showtime) is the exact kind of documentary that Morgen could care less about. Over the course of 135 minutes (which feel like 200), it painstakingly goes through every era of Clapton’s life, starting with his birth and childhood pictures and interviews with his family, and it offers very little that Clapton fans wouldn’t already be familiar with, in the way of facts, interviews, or even music. This is as cookie-cutter as music docs get, and is basically just a really long episode of Behind the Music.

5. TIFF’s New Ticket Scanning Issues

You may have heard that lines were especially bad this year, and films consistently started 15-30 minutes late at the large venues. Well, there’s an easy explanation for that. This is the first year that tickets were kept (for most people) on the TIFF phone app instead of printed physical copies. I thought this would be great, because it meant forgoing the wonderful tradition of standing in a three-hour line to pick up my tickets on Day One. (And yeah, it was nice to skip that.) But here’s the downside—the ticket scanners used at the theaters had a difficult time reading phone screens. This meant that the lines of two and three thousand people that TIFF used to be able to shuffle into theaters in 20 minutes now took double or triple the time, because each person had to wait for the scanners to take seven tries to read the ticket, while we were instructed to change our brightness levels, stand at different distances to the scanner, and basically perform a rain dance just to get in. It was a daily disaster that caused me to miss the premiere of Molly’s Game.

TIFF 2015, Days 3-4: Got Women?

One of the big talking points of this year’s collective film conversation, and particularly at TIFF, has been women in film. Are women getting good roles in front of the camera, and are they allowed any control behind it? While TIFF is a much more specialized level of industry reality than Hollywood at large, here at least, the answer is yes.

My Saturday began with what is, so far, the best lead actress performance of 2015, Sandra Bullock’s Our Brand is Crisis. Directed by David Gordon Green (whose career has varied from the indie George Washington to the populist Pineapple Express), Bullock plays “Calamity” Jane Bodine, a mildly unhinged American political strategist hired to advise a Presidential campaign in Bolivia. She takes the job (of course she does!) mostly because the opposing candidate’s campaign is being run by her old nemesis, Pat Candy (Billy Bob Thornton). What ensues is basically a Latin American Tom & Jerry episode, with Bullock constantly quoting Sun Tzu’s “the Art of War,” and Thornton gleefully playing the entire movie with the self-satisfied smirk of a Roger Moore-era Bond villain.

Green and screenwriter Peter Straughan (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) do a great job of keeping the action relatively comical and light-hearted, while persistently maintaining an undercurrent that these actions do have actual consequences for an entire country. Occasionally the metaphors are too heavy-handed (the opening credits show Bullock on a potters wheel, literally getting her hands dirty), and the ending features a major tonal switch that simply doesn’t work. But that misfire at the ending doesn’t undo what is a highly entertaining movie, and if anything, serves to reinforce how un-preachy the bulk of the movie is. It also might mean that George Clooney, who produced this, has learned from the bogged down moralizing of his own Ides of March, which covered similar ground four years ago. In that, Ryan Gosling’s campaign strategist began the film an idealist, and ended it jaded and morally broken. Here, Bullock starts the film that way, but ends it somewhere a bit less label-friendly.

What’s especially interesting about Our Brand is Crisis is that it was written for, and based on the true story of, a man. It’s obviously rare in Hollywood for roles originally written for men to end up in the hands of women, but it does happen every once in a while. Angelina Jolie’s Salt is a notable recent example, which at one point was to be a Tom Cruise vehicle. But the key here isn’t just that the film was written for a man, it’s that the true story was about a man—James Carville, who really was hired to advise a Bolivian presidential race. So what does it tell us that a prominent Hollywood studio (Warner Bros.) and a prominent Hollywood star/director/producer (Clooney) collectively took the story of a prominent Washington figure (Carville) and gave it to a woman to star in? Dare I say it, but I think we call that progress.

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For as great a female lead role as Our Brand is Crisis is, and as groundbreaking as it may be in terms of its origins, it still doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test, as every single conversation in the entire film is about the two male presidential candidates. What’s especially hilarious is that neither of the other two movies revolving around strong female characters I saw this weekend—About Ray and Brooklyn—pass the test either. Brooklyn is a film about a young Irish immigrant in the 1950s, and the story is largely centered on her finding a husband. About Ray stars three women—Elle Fanning, Naomi Watts, and Susan Sarandon—but the story is about a family dealing with Fanning’s transition to becoming a man, and that’s what every conversation revolves around.

Brooklyn was the better of the two films. It’s an unabashed period piece that doesn’t just take place in the ‘50s, the film nearly convinces you it could have come out then, too. I mean that as a compliment. This isn’t a revisionist feminist immigrant story; it adds no contemporary moralizing to the equation. The lovely and talented Saoirse Ronan (Atonement, Hanna) stars as Eilis, and the gist of the story is about whether she’ll go for the cute Brooklyn Italian boy or the handsome Irishman back home. The story is very simple on the surface, but screenwriter Nick Hornby (who has written two excellent films about a young woman’s emotional journey, An Education and Wild) mines the simplicity for the important human story at its core.

About Ray was a more troubling film, but still works reasonably well if you can reframe your expectations of what it fundamentally is. Watching the trailer, you’d think it’s a film about teenage Ramona (Fanning) undergoing gender reassignment surgery to become Ray, and his family (Watts as his mom, and Sarandon as grandmother) coping with the change. In reality, that isn’t the film we got. This is Naomi Watts’ movie, and it’s the story of a mother—and grandmother, to a lesser extent—dealing with their child’s desire to change gender. We don’t watch Ray transition, we just watch Ray want to transition. Ray is, in a very real and problematic way, just the movie’s MacGuffin. Combine that realization with the title’s obvious association to the famous song by The Lemonheads, “It’s a Shame About Ray,” and you officially enter difficult territory with what this film is conjuring about its transgender character. Is he just a plot device? Is it a shame about Ray?

Luckily, if you can get past those uncomfortable questions, there’s a good movie about parents here, albeit one very different than you might have been expecting. Watts is dynamite (as she often is), and the film’s tone reaches a nice balance of being about a heavy (and timely) subject without ever feeling heavy or preachy. Its characters are well written, and there’s great heart at its center. Yes, the same center where Ray probably should have been, but still.

Maybe it’s a bad sign that a movie headlined by three powerful actresses and no men is still, literally, About Ray, as that’s sort of the point of the Bechdel Test. But maybe it doesn’t matter. The Bechdel Test could be outmoded in that it’s meant to catch movies where women don’t matter to the structure at all. That’s clearly not the case here, but it doesn’t change the fact that these films are still about advising a man, finding a man, and even turning into a man.

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Okay, let’s change the subject and talk about movies that are not only about men, but also star them! I saw three good ones this weekend—Youth, Trumbo, and Beasts of No Nation. Youth, Paolo Sorrentino’s follow-up to 2013’s Oscar-winning foreign language film, The Great Beauty, was the best of the bunch. Starring Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel, Youth sees the two elderly men, playing a great composer in retirement and a great director in creative stagnation, respectively, meet at a spa in the Swiss Alps and reflect on life. That may sound boring, but nothing ever is with Sorrentino, who can turn seemingly anything into a stunningly vibrant visual composition.

Sorrentino can also turn seemingly anything into a visual manifestation of the mind’s search for beauty, and he does that here, almost to the point that it’s all there is. Yes, Youth is the kind of movie where Michael Caine can be sitting alone overlooking a field of cows, and then imagine conducting a symphony from the cowbells. Youth is also the kind of movie, as are many of Sorrentino’s works, where gratuitous nudity somehow feels utterly essential to the artistic journey the film is on.

There are other elements that drive the plot, such as it is—Paul Dano playing a bad boy actor preparing for a role (and wait until you see what the role is), Rachel Weisz as Caine’s daughter, and Jane Fonda as, more or less, Jane Fonda. All of them help the story get to its key beats, but those beats remain predominantly about the way things look and feel with Sorrentino’s formalist guiding hand. As with The Great Beauty, they feel lush, elegiac, and quite lovely.

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Youth will come out at the very end of the year, just in time for Fox Searchlight to give it an Oscar qualifying run mainly aimed at Michael Caine. It will find steady business in the art house circuit, and Caine will either just barely miss the nominations cut, or he’ll be the fifth nominee that everyone knows has no chance (my bet is on the former). In either case, we pretty well know what to expect from Youth as regards the box office and awards race. That can’t be said for Trumbo or Beasts of No Nation.

In Trumbo, Bryan Cranston plays the eponymous Hollywood screenwriter, legendary in the industry for being the face of the Hollywood Blacklist, going to jail, winning two Oscars under pseudonyms, then triumphantly writing Spartacus and Exodus under his own name. It’s a decently good movie, but ironically for being about a screenwriter known for his economy of dialogue, this one needed to make a few more cuts. Every scene, on its own, feels well placed and worth keeping in, but by the time you get to the end, you can’t escape the realization that the movie was at least 20 minutes too long, and didn’t flow especially well.

The power of a good story is what keeps things from getting out of hand, and this is one of the best true stories in Hollywood history. It also helps that the minor roles are almost all played by great actors that you love watching—John Goodman as a schlock producer, Helen Mirren as a gossip columnist, Louis C.K. as another blacklisted screenwriter, Diane Lane as Mrs. Trumbo, and Michael Stuhlbarg as blacklisted actor Edward G. Robinson.

It’s unclear what to expect with Trumbo. It’s not quite good enough to be an awards season player, but that doesn’t always stop distributers from trying. It also plays a bit more like an HBO movie than a feature film, and director Jay Roach (Austin Powers, Borat) has already been down that road twice with Recount and Game Change. On the other end of the spectrum, something that doesn’t at all play like a TV movie, Beasts of No Nation, will mostly be watched on one.

When TIFF director Cameron Bailey introduced the premiere screening of Beasts of No Nation, he thanked Netflix for providing TIFF with the film, and then said, “That’s the first time Netflix has ever been thanked at the festival; It will not be the last.” (Indeed it already happened again four days later, with the premiere of Netflix’s Keith Richards documentary, Under the Influence.) Bailey’s comment hinted at a major question Hollywood is asking about this film: Is this the new business model?

Beasts of No Nation will open in theaters on October 16, and will be available on Netflix on the same day. The theatrical run is only happening for the sake of Oscar eligibility, and Netflix stands almost no chance of making back the cost of the film from box office gross. What they’ve really paid for is to be a part of the awards conversation. If a film that comes to Netflix immediately upon release manages to get a Best Picture nomination, it not only changes the perception of Netflix as a provider of original entertainment, but also changes the very nature of theatrical releases. Of course, for that to happen, the movie also has to be good enough.

Written and directed by Cary Fukunaga, who is most well known as director of the first season of True Detective (another changer of business models), Beasts of No Nation is an African child soldier drama starring Idris Elba and newcomer Abraham Attah. It is, at times, absolutely stunning. A handful of sequences are reminiscent of Apocalypse Now, and the ending scenes are remarkably powerful and affecting. It’s the connective tissue that’s the problem. Between the very good first twenty minutes, and the great last twenty minutes, is a little over an hour and a half that only leaves fleeting impressions. The tragedy of child soldiers is one that has little nuance or depth to explore. The point comes across quickly, and a little goes a long way. The overly long middle of the film also doesn’t have enough plot to sustain it. As Idris Elba’s Commandant leads his child army from conflict to conflict, village to village, there reaches a point where nothing is being narratively gained anymore. The entire first two hours of the movie exists to drive home the power of the last twenty minutes, but that power wouldn’t be diminished if we got there a bit faster.

How the Academy will treat Beasts of No Nation is, in my eyes, the single most fascinating question of the 2015 awards cycle. With no mitigating factors, nominations for Best Picture, Director, Actor (Attah, who as the child Agu, is really the lead of the film), and Supporting Actor (Elba) should all be possibilities, but I think there’s a real chance of it being shut out of the major nominations. Five or ten years from now, the notion of a film needing a theatrical run for Oscar qualification could feel like an antiquated idea. But in 2015, that’s still how the business model works. If enough of the Academy sees Beasts’ same day drop on Netflix as killing the theatrical element of the film industry and biting the hand that feeds, it could be the subject of a huge backlash. On the other hand, as Anne Thompson pointed out when I asked her this question, the fact that Beasts of No Nation will be available for everyone on Netflix at least means that Academy members will watch it. And as we see every year, sometimes the list of nominees looks heavily determined simply by what the most voters saw.

Coming Next: Susan Sarandon and Brie Larson as two very different kinds of doting mothers, and the best film of TIFF 2015.