Such a flood of movies from earlier in the year, now the film festivals have shown us more. And even though we have a ways to go, here’s how things shake out right now, I think. More movies are coming, so watch this space.

In alphabetical order

45– Very small, and notable if only for Charlotte Rampling’s poignant performance

Beasts of No Nation– Netflix’s first ever theatrically released movie is incendiary and unforgettable, with Idris Elba in what should be his first Oscar nominated performance

Black Mass– I’m including “Black Mass” because I liked it. I don’t know if can hold out through the whole Oscar season.

Bridge of Spies–reviewed today

Carol–Todd Haynes’s little masterpiece, best cinematography by Ed Lachman, Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara absolutely insanely wonderful.

The Danish Girl– Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander in Tom Hooper’s exquisite piece about love and acceptance.

Grandma– Lily Tomlin’s shot at an Oscar should not be underestimated. She’s absolutely delightful and the Academy loves her. Everyone loves her.

Inside Out– A genius movie, deserves Best Picture nomination

The Martian– Matt Damon’s big moment has finally arrived. An artistic and commercial triumph.

Room– Unlike anything you’ve seen, with Brie Larson, Joan Allen, and a little boy who will get some awards action

Spotlight– The movie depicting Boston Globe reporters uncovering 90 pedophile priests. A SAG Best Ensemble nominee for sure, with like ten great supporting performances. They should Mark Ruffalo in lead.

Truth– the story of how Dan Rather and his “60 Minutes” producer Mary Mapes were undone by CBS. Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford are terrific.

Steve Jobs– Reviewed here yesterday. Phenomenal.

Youth–Michael Caine gives  a Best Actor performance, but close behind is Harvey Keitel. Jane Fonda literally steals the movie– you’ll pay just to see her extended cameo. Paolo Sorrentino’s made an important and highly entertaining film.

The true Cold War saga of spies and the exchange of Russian Rudolf Abel for Americans Francis Gary Powers and Frederic Pryor is a little lost now in American history. But it was a major story that went on for about five years in newspapers starting in 1962. Now Steven Spielberg has made a stunning film of it with Tom Hanks as James Donovan, the sketchy lawyer who defended first defended Abel then negotiated his swap. Abel is played Mark Rylance, maybe the best theater actor in the world. They are all headed to the Oscars, kids. They’ve made a great movie.

“Bridge of Spies” made its debut at the New York Film Festival last night with a star studded audience: Spielberg, wife Kate Capshaw, many of their kids; Tom Hanks (Rita Wilson had to stay in LA); Rylance and family, not to mention Alan Alda, who plays a crucial role in the film, Sebastian Koch, Billy Magnussen, and a fine supporting cast that includes the wonderful Amy Ryan as Donovan’s wife.

In the audience: Meg Ryan (we shared a laugh about tabloid reports that she’s destitute– she just finished directing her first film), plus Sting and Trudie Styler, Chris Botti, Ed Burns and Christy Turlington, Brian D’Arcy James, writer Nick Pileggi, Joel and Ethan Coen (who polished up and reworked the script– unusual to do an outside project), Joel’s Oscar, Tony and Emmy winning wife Frances McDormand, and Wes Anderson, as well as Bono’s daughter Eve Hewson (who’s in the movie), Nina Dobrev (from the TV vampire thing- gorgeous), Peggy Siegal, and so on.

Marvin Levy, Spielberg’s press agent since 1833, came in from the coast and everyone was happy to see him in New York. Spielberg’s ex wife, actress Amy Irving, was front and center as well. She sat with husband Ken Bowser and Meg Ryan.

Plus, sons and daughters of all the real people involved came, and spoke during a Q&A following the screening at Alice Tully Hall. James Donovan’s daughter praised Tom Hanks for capturing her dad. Hanks sported white-blonde hair under a hat because he’s starting the Sully Sullenberger movie.

From the you can’t believe it department: Nada Bobyleva, a beautiful young actress who has a pivotal role with actor Will Rogers, made it to the party after being denied a ticket to the actual screening. Wait til she’s a big star, Hollywood! She told me she’s just finishing a documentary about returning to Russia to meet her long lost father.

Small world dept: Sting told me that the real Rudolf Abel was not Scottish, as previously thought, but a
Geordie from Sting’s hometown of Newcastle born to Russian parents. “He was a legend there,” Sting said. “He worked in the shipyard.” He’d given Rylance, who’s also British, a little advice on the accent.

Shout outs to veteran character actors Peter McRobbie and Dakin Matthews, plus music by Thomas Newman and cinematography by Janusz Kaminski.

I asked Rylance, a most certain Best Supporting Actor nominee, if success would spoil him now. He had a good retort: “I thought I was successful already!” Indeed, he sure is. But Hollywood will embrace him.

We take Tom Hanks for granted. We know him so well. He’s good at everything. His portrayal of James Donovan is among his best work. Spielberg is methodical as he builds this movie’s pace, making it a very American story, a kind of red white and blue salute while still keeping it edgy and tirelessly fascinating. Spielberg-Coens is an interesting combination, kind of sweet and sour. They should do it again.

PS The long saga is condensed to make a two hour movie. Let’s not hear a lot of carping about certain details. The basic story is there, and it’s told very well.

NY Film Fest: Michael Fassbender, who heads an all star cast in “Steve Jobs,” was the star attraction at the press conference for the film Saturday afternoon. Fassbender was joined by cast members Kate Winslet (Jobs’ marketing exec and close friend Joanna Hoffman), Seth Rogen (Steve Wozniak), Jeff Daniels (Apple CEO John Sculley), Michael Stuhlbarg (key Apple player Andy Hertzfeld) and director Danny Boyle, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and writer Walter Isaacson’s, whose authorized biography of Steve Jobs is the basis for the film.

Anticipation by the press was so high, they started forming lines in the freezing cold three hours before the film began. (Fassbender photo c2015 Showbiz411 by Paula Schwartz)

Below are some highlighted quotes from the press conference:

Aaron Sorkin: “Before I knew what I wanted to do, I knew what I didn’t want to do and that was a biopic. That would be the conventional cradle to grave structure where you kind of land on all the greatest hits. It’s a structure that’s familiar to audiences and I didn’t think I would be able to shake it. I didn’t think I would be that good at. And what happened is I like claustrophobic spaces. I like compressed periods of time, a ticking clock. I like things that are behind the scenes, in this case literally behind the scenes, so I wondered if I could take all the work Walter had done, and if there was a way to dramatize the points of friction… and dramatize them in this way, with three, just three real time scenes, 30 minutes for the audience is the same for a character on screen. And I didn’t think there was a chance that the studio would let me do that, but they did.”

On the making of the film:

Kate Winslet: “It was so exciting. I have to be honest, it was terrifying. I do remember all of us walking into the room on day one of rehearsal just for a simple read-through. You’re trying out your accent and hoping to God that everyone else isn’t looking at you and thinking, ‘Oh, she’s shit.” And I remember Michael and I sort of greeting each other, and there was a hug that I almost remember as being a little bit like collapsing on one another…. Over to you Fassb.”

Fassbender: “Like, you can let go of me now. Stop hugging me!” (laughter).

Sorkin: “My favorite moment, at the very first table read. Each of them actually at at least at one point in the movie, there’s kind of a long list of things to say and Michael in one of his speeches where he’s saying that the 300 megahertz processor is twice the speed of the 200 Intel, this and that, just as he’s saying it and he glanced up at me and on a break I went over to Jeff and I said, ‘Listen, Michael’s a really big Irish guy and I think he’s going to beat me up.’ And Jeff, who had been doing this for three years already with ‘The Newsroom,’ just stared at me and said, ‘I’m a really big Irish guy and I’m …”

Michael Fassbender on his opinions of Steve Job and if his perception changed during filming:

“I didn’t know much about him. Obviously I knew who he was but I’m not very interested in technology. I use it pretty poorly so everything was new to me to be honest. I suppose the thing that really stuck with me was meeting people that knew him in his life. I got the opportunity to meet John Scully, Joanna, Woz, Hertzfeld, and the one thing that stuck with me was how much of an impression he made on these people, obviously when he was alive, but since he passed away, you could still see that he was very much present in their lives and even if relationships were difficult there was a sadness. There was a love there that I thought was pretty clear and that was something that stuck with me. Even though there’s all the stories about how he could a strong taskmaster – obviously the relationship with John Scully didn’t end well – I could really feel there was a love there for the man.”

A journalist with a heavy accent told Kate Winslet – “I fell in love with Kate two years ago.”… Kate Winslet: “ Are you still in love with me? I’m so pleased.”

Seth Rogen on playing Steve Wozniak and how concerned he was with emulating his real-life counterpart: “My job first and foremost was making my boss, Danny, happy. Woz wasn’t paying me; I was hired by these guys, and so they were the ones I needed to please and if that happened to me, if they were like, forget everything about Woz, disregard everything about him, it’s better for the movie. I would have been like that’s totally cool with me because I don’t want to get fired and Woz can’t fire me, so that was really my goal. I think at the end Woz was actually very happy which is nice and I’m happy that Woz doesn’t hate because that would terrible.”

Michael Fssbender: “And I studied Ashton Kutcher.”

Seth Rogen: “I did too, weirdly.”

Roger Friedman asks whether Michael Fassbender thought about what occurred in Jobs life after the point it’s portrayed in the film and how he would have played it until the end:

“ I did watch footage of him past the point we were filming. You know, I kind of lived with him for those months that we were filming. So it was like December from when I first got on board, until mid-April, when we finished. Every sort of day was about him so when we finished I kind of washed it all away to be honest. I was going out to another job and I just got stuck into that. But, yeah, I thought about so many things about the man, about what he achieved, what happened, when he got ill, how he would have dealt with that, and how he could have dealt with it, how part of his reality distortion field got in the way in the end when he was diagnosed, but that was the man that also changed all of our lives because he believed he could change the universe and he did, so all of the parts of the man are sort of intrinsic, one to the other.

But yeah I thought about him a lot and even the stuff that we weren’t filming about, you know, just to get a rounded idea and it just didn’t leave me because I was either reading the script or I was listening to Youtube clips of him, whether it be the speech he gave at Stanford or interviews from when he was in the next computer phase of his life, and all the speeches that he was giving, so he was kind of was in and around me the whole time so I was actually quite happy to put him aside when I finished to be quite honest.

Michael Fassbender on his likeness to Steve Jobs: “Obviously I don’t look anything like Steve Jobs… That was the first thing l said to Danny was like, ‘Well, you know, Christian Bale looks a lot more like Steve Jobs than me.’ …He said, ‘I’m not interested in that, you know? I just want to get the energy and the essence of the man and go with that.’ So from the beginning the approach was to just not try and emulate that look, or copy that look, and so basically the only thing I did was I put in brown contacts but as we were going on and for filming, I think it was midway through the second act… the head of the make up and hair she amazing got these all these back up plans. We had the grey wig for the end but we were never sure whether we were going to use that, or, which way to go, so I think it was midway through the second act Danny and I started talking, it was like, let’s get the black turtleneck and the jeans and the New Balance, I think the audience will want that, and the glasses, and this sort of iconic look, more iconic look, and that just sort of happened. It just sort of developed as the third act came along. It was very organic.”

Kate Winslet: “I remember you saying, it was some sometime during that period, I remember Michael saying to me, ‘I really feel like him now.”

Michael Fassbender: “It took that long (laughs). Just as we finished, the last day I was like, ‘Okay I get it now.’”

If you care about Apple, and the way its cult like takeover of the gimmick conscious people of the world is like an industrial revolution, you’ll want to see Danny Boyle’s “Steve Jobs.” Boyle is such a good director, of films like “Slumdog Millionaire” and “127 Hours,” that he turns a pretty well known corporate saga into a fresh and exciting opera of greed, hubris, and technology.

But you don’t have to care about Apple, or the actual Steve Jobs to get this film. That’s because Aaron Sorkin has adapted Walter Isaacson’s best selling biography of Jobs into a three act play for film (which then, wisely, Boyle has made highly cinematic). So change Jobs’ name, it doesn’t matter, call him Frank or Ted. Sorkin has used the elements of Jobs’ life and created a new structure– two, actually, that run parallel to each other.

The first structure is highlighting three product launches, from the 80s, 90s, 2000s. So the goal of each act is get the product launched. In each case, a theatrical production will be the result, and the show must go on as it overcomes countless glitches. It’s a little like “Birdman” or “Shakespeare in Love” as constant personal subplots are also occurring backstage that may derail the whole enterprise. It’s a wonder we got the original Macintosh, or Job’s NEXT computer, or the iMac because behind the curtain, all hell was breaking loose.

And that’s the second structure: the story of Jobs, his ex girlfriend Chrisann, and their daughter Lisa. Jobs denies Lisa is his child, Chrisann is suffering from no funds, and Lisa is longing for a dad. This is the story of “Steve Jobs” more than computers. Steve is an insufferable prick, Chrisann and Lisa are trying to make sense of him. Sorkin’s feat is that he’s made this an original drama (again, names don’t matter) that we care about as these three people jockey for position in each other’s lives.

The actors make Boyle and Sorkin’s efforts pay off. Michael Fassbender is far sexier and more sympathetic than the real Steve Jobs, but brings out his villain with aplomb. He is now the leader in the Oscar’s Best Actor race. Katherine Waterston gives Chrisann just the right vulnerability and spunk. The three young women who play Lisa at different ages are remarkable in that they fit right in without missing a beat.

The supporting cast is exceptional starting with Kate Winslet as Joanna, Job’s right hand woman and best friend. She also has a Polish accent, which Winslet pulls off impeccably. Winslet’s Joanna is tough, sarcastic, funny. and when she finally loses patience with Job, she expresses the audience’s frustration with him too. It’s a great performance.

You will also l0ve Jeff Daniels playing Will McAvoy as John Sculley (and he does it too as the head of NASA in “The Martian”– it’s a Jeff Daniels year), Michael Stuhlbarg as Andy Hertzfeld (who looks worse and worse over the years as he deals with Jobs, sort of like Jedidiah in “Citizen Kane”), and Seth Rogen as the put upon (and a little whiny device) Steve Wozniak.

Producer Scott Rudin, back again, yelled at me in 2012 because I didn’t think “The Social Network” (a really good movie) wasn’t “Citizen Kane.” But really, “Steve Jobs” is much much closer, and a more effective movie in that regard because it has a heart. Sorkin wrote that film, too, and maybe learned something from it. The Facebook people were kids who made a lot of money and were very unlikeable. The people in “Steve Jobs” are humans, with frailties and a lot to lose. This is a real tour de force.

PS great great music. And each segment is filmed differently to give it a look of the time. Beautiful idea.

“The Martian” made $55 million this weekend, making it the biggest hit in a long time for director Ridley Scott and star Matt Damon. I’d say they are each on the way, along with the movie, to Oscar nominations and a big final box office two months from now. It’s much deserved, too. I would guess there will be repeat visits, too, as “The Martian” is highly entertaining. 20th Century Fox has its long overdue smash.

Sony Pictures is pushing hard with Robert Zemeckis’s “The Walk,” which should be their Oscar entry. It’s still in limited release, but when it breaks out “The Walk” should be a “Martian” sized hit. “The Martian” and “The Walk” could be the big studio counterpunches to indie Oscar certainties like “Carol,” “Room,” “Spotlight,” and the not really indie but studio hit “Steve Jobs,” which is not an action movie but a real talkie.

“Mission Impossible Rogue Nation” is at $194 million, they make not make $200 million unless they stay in theaters three more months and do three-for-1 sales.

In other news, Universal can’t make people see “Everest.” They’re trying, but the story is obviously leaving ticket buyers cold. This reminds me of Universal’s Ron Howard movie “Rush.” A great movie, but Universal couldn’t force people to see it. They tried. Luckily, it doesn’t matter for the studio since they’ve broken records this year.