Julianne Moore deserves to win her all-but-guaranteed Best Actress Oscar for her bravura performance in David Cronenberg‘s Maps to the Stars, and not so much for her earnestly skillful turn in Still Alice, which is basically slow-drip cyanide. Does anyone remember Maps? It broke last May in Cannes, played again in Toronto and then was kind of forgotten about. It shouldn’t be. This is apparently the first U.S. trailer for the Focus World release (opening on 2.27).

“I was amused when Maps to the Stars screenwriter Bruce Wagner claimed during the Cannes Film Festival that Evan Bird‘s Benjie Weiss character, a poisonous 13 year-old superstar who immediately summons thoughts of Justin Beiber, wasn’t written or cast with Beiber in mind. A friend told me he ran into Beiber at the AMFAR during the festival. He said he didn’t ask about the Cronenberg film because such a question would have seemed rude given that Wagner had stuck to the party line, etc. ‘Oh, please!,’ I replied. Never trust the artist — trust the tale.” — from a 5.30.14 post called “Blather.”

David Cronenberg‘s Map To The Stars (Weinstein Co., 9.26) is not just a brilliant, black-as-night satire of soul-less, impossibly fucked-up Hollywood players, although it’s certainly that in part. And it’s not just a film that will send Justin Beiber and his representatives into saliva-sputtering fits due to the fact that Beiber is clearly the model for a 13 year-old TV superstar named Benjie Weiss (Evan Bird) — an ice-cold, soul-dead monster who has the makings of a junior-league Hannibal Lecter. What Map to The Stars does altogether — and this is what makes it an historic film within the Cronenberg canon, and which may result in winning the Palme d’Or or some special distinction prize of some kind — is jump off a kind of grand guignol cliff. I went in expecting a stiff swig of vinegar and a smart-ass spoof, but Map, which was written by Bruce Wagner (Force Majeure), is much darker and more visionary and at the same time much more sincere in an unforced, even-handed way.

This is how you do a lethal comic satire, by having the cast perform and behave like they’re not kidding or winking in the slightest, like they really mean it…seriously. Map really cuts to the rancid bone of Hollywood fuckwad culture in a mad-brushstroke way. I think…no, I know it’s Cronenberg’s best since A History of Violence or Spider, and before that Crash, Dead Ringers and The Dead Zone. Julianne Moore owns it pretty much as a nearly over-the-hill actress who’s desperate to stay in the game, but everyone else is on the same page here — John Cusack, Mia Wasikowska, Olivia Williams, Robert Pattinson (yes, he’s on the stick), Sarah Gadon and the afore-mentioned Bird. They all get what’s going on, and it’s all quite perfect and complete.

Variety‘s Justin Kroll is reporting that Robert Pattinson is in negotiations to play The Batman in Matt Reeves’ forthcoming superhero film, which will open on 6.25.21.

Kroll explains that the RPatz thing isn’t a done deal, but that the former Twilight star is “the top choice and [the deal] is expected to close shortly.” Reeves and Pattinson will start shooting this summer.

RPatz will presumably be visiting Cannes this weekend to take bows for his performance in Robert Eggers‘ The Lighthouse, which costars Willem Dafoe.

Is Pattinson brawny and muscular enough to play Batman? He’s tall with moderately wide shoulders, but isn’t he a bit on the wirey and willowy side?

It’s ironic that just as Pattinson has solidified his rep as the Intrepid Indie King (Cosmopolis, The Rover, Maps to the Stars, The Lost City of Z, Good Time), he’s been sucked right back into a big-studio franchise. He’s only in it for the money, of course, and who wouldn’t be?

We’re now three and a half months into ’15, and a glance at the calendar tells me that except for Alex Garland‘s Ex Machina (which I’ve seen and admired but have yet to review), there are no films of any real consequence opening between now and May 1st. So let’s call this a four-month assessment — the 20 best films from the first third of 2015. And let’s get rid of any distinction between theatrical, VOD and cable — if it opened on a reputable screen of any size between 1.1.15 and 5.1.15, it qualifies. And no distinctions between docs and narrative either. A good portion of the following were seen at a 2014 festival, on HBO or during Sundance ’15 — relatively few are 2015 theatrical newbies.

Disputes, additions and subtractions are encouraged. Pics are listed in order of value, preference, voltage, intrigue and in some cases importance:

First Quintet: (1) Alex Gibney‘s Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (HBO); (2) Douglas Tirola‘s Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon (Sundance ’15); (3) Yann Demange‘s ’71, (4) Asghar Farhadi‘s About Elly (no chance to review it yet, but Farhadi is a master — this is easily one of the most grounded, on-target and yet disquieting films I’ve seen this year); (5) Noah Baumbach‘s While We’re Young;

In a David Cronenberg interview posted on 2.23, The Dissolve‘s Calum Marsh mentioned a quote from Mubi critic Miriam Bale: “Bruce Wagner wrote Maps to the Stars as a broad comedy, but it isn’t directed that way.”

Cronenberg’s response: “It’s almost true. There are elements that are broad comedy, but I can quote [Maps star] Julianne Moore, in fact, who said she thought Bruce’s extreme hyper-emotionality and humor and my cool, neutral observational direction made a really good combination. And I think that’s sort of a more detailed version of what this critic was saying.

“If you had a director who really went with that other stuff, you would get a very over-the-top, exaggerated, and, to me, maybe a false movie instead of what it is — which is still funny. But the humor comes from within the characters, from the observation of the absurdity of the human condition, rather than a sort of self-parodying thing, or something that you could’ve done with it. And I think that’s correct.

I said it last September and I’m saying it again: Paul Dano‘s performance as the youngish Brian Wilson in Bill Pohlad‘s Love and Mercy (Roadside, 6.5) is almost spookily great. I’m telling you straight and true this is 2015’s first must-nominate performance. “Wilson’s disturbed spirit hums and throbs in the 30 year-old Dano, who looks like he gained 35 or 40 pounds to play the genius Beach Boy maestro in his mid ’60s blimp period,” I wrote on 9.8.14. “You can really feel the vibrations and sense the genius-level ferment and the off-balance emotionality. Inwardly and outwardly it’s a stunning, drop-dead transformation and the finest performance of Dano’s career, hands down.

“Not to mention John Cusack also as the 40ish Wilson in the same film, which shifts back and forth between the mid to late ’60s (i.e., the recording of Pet Sounds and Smile) and the mid to late ’80s (i.e., “the Landy years”). For the last few years Cusack has been on a downturn, playing ghouls and creeps and psycho killers…my heart aches for the guy. True, he’s had two good roles over the last couple of years — Richard Nixon in The Butler and the husband-masseuse in David Cronenberg‘s Maps to the Stars — but this is a revelation. Cusack plays a gentle but very solemn and intimidated Wilson during the period in which he was under the firm hand of the disreputable Eugene Landy, who died in 2006. Cusack is child-like and Gentle Ben-ish, and as convincing and fully submitted to his task as Dano is to his. For the first time in my moviegoing life I wasn’t bothered by two actors playing the same character — quite a landmark.

I’ve re-posted my raves about David Cronenberg‘s Maps to the Stars once too often so here’s an excerpt from Peter Howell’s review: “Kicking at Hollywood foibles is as easy as booting an overripe Halloween pumpkin, [but] it’s a hoot to watch. Watching these appalling people brings to mind the exchange in All About Eve where Gary Merrill scolds Bette Davis for her acid tongue. ‘Have you no human consideration?’ he asks. Her reply: ‘Show me a human, and I might have!'”

I’m so late to the discussion about the moderately miraculous Jenny Slate in Gillian Robespierre‘s Obvious Child that I feel a little foolish bringing it up. It took me two weeks to write this piece because I felt so conflicted about this. But Slate is so alive and extra-dimensional and spunky with the right blend of vulnerability and brilliance with sprinklings of depression and self-destruction…I was floored. I still am. I asked about doing a phoner with her a week ago — here’s the mp3.

Everyone saw Obvious Child 11 months ago at Sundance ’14 or when it opened last June. I didn’t fucking see it until two weeks ago, and I knew right away I’d been a complete putz for not making a greater effort. Because Slate’s performance did something that more than a few current award-level performances haven’t. She woke me up and made me want more.

Slate plays Donna Stern, a Brooklyn-residing bookstore employee and stand-up comedienne. She’s in her late 20s or early 30s, and with the balls to just follow whatever’s on her mind when doing her act, which is kind of free-formish and scattershot. She’s less of a funny lady who “tells jokes” than a performance artist who’s sometimes funny and sometimes not, but she’s always riffing about her life. Right away I was saying to myself “okay, this woman is obviously wide open and super-vulnerable, and she’s either going to die of a broken heart or she’s going to rocket into fame but she’s not middle-of-the-road steady or flinty. She’s a bit shaky. But who isn’t?

When did everyone decide that Julianne Moore was all-but-locked to win the Best Actress Oscar? Roughly two and half months ago, or just after Still Alice, a morose but affecting Lifetime movie about a brilliant college professor suffering from the progressive malice of Alzheimer’s disease, was picked up by Sony Classics out of Toronto on 9.12. But of all the reasons that Moore deserves her big win (and I’m not arguing this in the least — she’ll almost certainly have her Oscar moment on 2.22.15), Still Alice, which I finally saw yesterday, is the least of them.

Moore plays her sad part with delicacy and the depth of feeling that only great actresses seem to fully harness — she’s convincing and then some. But for me, Still Alice is a hellish thing to sit through. It’s a dirge about a kind of death sentence or more precisely a spiritual suffocation, mitigated to some extent by the fact that the condemned (i.e., Moore) is attractive and wealthy and married to a nice man (Alec Baldwin) and surrounded by bright, sensitive family members who care a great deal and can do absolutely nothing to help.

Still Alice is a movie that says “okay, your brain is going to start dying now…okay, the symptoms are getting a little worse now…is the horror of this predicament affecting everyone? Getting worse, still worse…my God, this disease really sucks! And Julianne Moore can’t do anything about it. And neither can you, the viewer. Because we, the filmmakers, have decided that the most sensitive and affecting thing to do is for everyone — Moore, the costars, the audience, Jeffrey Wells sitting on his living room couch — to just ride it out to the end…sadly, gently, compassionately.”

Little did I know last September that in missing Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer‘s Still Alice at the Toronto Film Festival that I would be committing myself to being in the dark about Julianne Moore‘s Best Actress chances for nearly two months. I realize, of course, that her front-runner status is largely about her being “due” along with her bravura turn in Maps to the Stars, but her work in Alice has to count for something. The coping-with-Alzhiemer’s drama will screen at the 2014 AFI Fest twice, at the Egyptian on 11.12 at 8pm and then the following day at the Chinese at 2:30 pm.

As usual the rankings are based on a mixture of real-world likelihood, pressure of colleagues and the eternal, rock-solid assessments of the Movie Godz.

Birdman‘s Michael Keaton has been in the top Best Actor slot since Telluride and I don’t see that changing, but who knows? Special HE shout-outs to two guys no one is mentioning but whom the Godz are insisting upon — Tom Hardy for his performances in The Drop and Locke, and to Bill Hader for his career-changing Skeleton Twins performance as a sardonic, living-in-emotional-limbo gay guy.

It’s been widely observed that the Best Actress heat afforded to Julianne Moore and her Still Alice performance is about being “owed” plus her fading histrionic actress turn in Maps to the Stars (I still haven’t seen Alice, and probably won’t until the AFI Fest showing.)

In the Best Supporting Actor realm I’m a bit more of an Edward Norton-in-Birdman guy than a cheerleader for J.K. Simmons-in-Whiplash, although I recognize that some believe that Simmons is the current front-runner . I also recognize that conventional wisdom says that Boyhood‘s Patricia Arquette is in the lead for Best Supporting Actress, which is well and good except for the fact that Emma Stone‘s Birdman performance blows Arquette’s out of the water.

Obviously I’ve included speculative support for unseen performances…and so what? You know who’s also “owed” as far as the Best Supporting Actor category is concerned? A Most Violent Year‘s Albert Brooks because he wasn’t even nominated in this category for his delicious Drive performance.

Here’s the most recent HE Best Director chart. The Best Picture chart is sitting inside the Oscar Balloon box. Disputes and admonitions are requested. All charts are fluid and malleable.

By the way: I am in awe of Jett Wells‘s ability to bang these four charts out in record time — they had been pre-designed but he did all the resizing and zig-zagging and name-tagging in about 45 minutes.