I was puzzled by some of Slate critic David Edelstein’s choices for best films of the year, but no matter. Point is that he hit the bulls-eye when he said that Rodrigo Garcia’s Nine Lives, released earlier this year, “boasts the best performance of the year, by Robin Wright Penn as a very pregnant woman who bumps into her old flame in a supermarket. As she circles the store with her grocery cart, her face alternately flushed and ashen, it’s as if we’re looking directly into her soul.”

Woody Allen’s Match Point “is a champagne cocktail laced with strychnine,” observes New York Times critic A.O. Scott. “You would have to go back to the heady, amoral heyday of Ernst Lubitsch or Billy Wilder to find cynicism so deftly turned into superior entertainment. Mr. Allen’s accomplishment here is to fool his audience, or at least to misdirect us, with a tale whose gilded surface disguises the darkness beneath. Comparisons to Crimes and Misdemeanors are inevitable, since the themes and some elements of plot are similar, but the philosophical baggage in Match Point is more tightly and discreetly packed. It is the film’s brisk, chilly precision that makes it so bracingly pleasurable. The gloom of random, meaningless existence has rarely been so much fun, and Mr. Allen’s bite has never been so sharp, or so deep. A movie this good is no laughing matter .”

Legend has it there’s a significant clue at the very end of Michael Haneke’s Cache (Sony Pictures Classics, 1.11.06)…some kind of visual tipoff about who’s behind the stealth videotaping of Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche’s home, lives, histories, etc. Esquire film writer Mike D’Angelo mentions the clue in a current piece. The clue has something to do with the son of a certain ill-fated Algerian character seen talking to a guy named Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky). Or maybe something to do with a black car driving by three times, or a blue station wagon…I’m a little hazy on the details. Anyone who’s seen Cache (also known as Hidden) knows the motive for the tapings has something to do with shameful French treatment of Algerians in the early ’60s. Cache star Daniel Autiel allegedly told a gathering at the London Film Festival several weeks ago that he’d seen the film three times and didn’t know where the tapes had come from either and neither to his knowledge did Haneke. This film isn’t a whodunit anyway. I don’t know what to call it but it’s way too smart to be concerned with matters of culpability. It’s more into arty obfuscation.

A whole lotta noteworthy critics have submitted their Top Ten films of ’05 lists to Movie City News, and Capote is third-ranked with 242 points, only 8 and 1/2 points behind the second-ranked A History of Violence with 255.5 points. (Top-ranked Brokeback Mountain is way in front with 299.5 points.) Good Night, and Good Luck (212 points) and King Kong (191.5 points) are fourth and fifth-ranked. But if you look at Rotten Tomatoes, which posts another critical ranking system, Capote has the 2nd highest general rating among these five (92%) and the only unani- mous creme de la creme rating (100%) for a tally of 192. The other four’s RT ratings, highest to lowest: Good Night (95% general, creme 95% = 190), Violence (86% general, 94% creme = 180), Brokeback (90% general, 90% creme = 180), and Kong (83% general, 76% creme = 159). What does this mean? Nothing much…who cares what the critics think?…but maybe (and I think the conclusion is obvious) Academy members should guard against considering Capote in a casual light.

Can we talk? Munich‘s 532-theatre release starting last Friday (12.23) resulted in $5.7 million and a $7,706 average….not fantastic but not bad. But this doesn’t portend an ecstatic reception when it plays Boobville in the hinterlands. This Steven Spielberg thriller has been booked into urban uptown theatres where it was expected to do very well…and it didn’t. It played pretty well, and if they couldn’t do seriously vigorous business in these theatres, it’s going to start slowing down and then bombing out when it plays the rube territories. Some of you are thinking I’m so anti-Munich I can’t see or think straight, but ask any hard- nosed analyst and they’ll tell you the same thing. Pretty good numbers in uptown theatres for this movie means not-as-good numbers once it goes wide and then it’s all downhill and into the crapper. Especially given how Munich plays (i.e., repetitively) and especially how it makes you feel when the closing credits come up (emptied out, dispirited), so it’s basically over.

King Kong‘s weekend tallies suffered a sobering 58% drop from last weekend, which is a pretty strong indication that people are not exactly over-the-moon about it, and yet Peter Jackson’s monkey movie edged out The Chronicles of Narnia for the four-day holiday weekend (12.23 through 12.26) with a $31.4 million haul vs. Narnia‘s $30.1 million. Narnia opened on 12.9 (five days ahead of Kong‘s 12.14 debut) and has earned a total of $163.5 million to Kong‘s $118.7 million cume. Variety‘s Ben Fritz has written that “one of the few things that can safely be said is that Narnia has momentum on its side” since the “the C.S. Lewis adaptation fell just 36% compared with last weekend, while Kong dropped 58%.” Kong “had the stronger Christmas day with $8.7 million compared with Narnia‘s $7.3 million…pics were virtually even Friday and Saturday,” reported Fritz. He added that “exhibs called [the long Xmas weekend] one of the toughest-to-read frames they’ve ever seen.”

Still haven’t found the right Sundance accomodation. If anyone knows of any last-minute shares, please get in touch. Maybe I just won’t go this year…I can roll with that. But habits die hard.

Forget that Variety‘s Lisa Nesselson is calling it “a sort of It’s an Adequate Life with token bad guys…as if the color-coded gangsters in Reservoir Dogs decided to get together and form a rainbow.” And that Screen Daily‘s Benny Crick is calling it “a modest directorial comeback.” All I care about Angel-A, which opened in Paris five days ago (on 12.21), is that it’s (a) a new Luc Besson film, his first since ’99’s The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, (b) it was shot in Paris last summer in the depopulated wee hours in anamorphic (2.35 to 1) black-and-white, and (c) it stars Jamel Debbouze (the little deranged guy who worked in the vegetable market in Amelie). I’m totally into it on these terms alone, and what kind of movie fan wouldn’t be? So why isn’t it showing in the foreign film section of Sundance ’06? Here’s the best trailer link I’ve found.

Christian critics feel that Ang Lee’s telling of the sad saga of Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist may be affecting, but is also influencing social norms in the wrong (i.e., contrary to Christian rightist views) way. What are ya gonna do with these people? But speaking from an anti-right Blue State perspective I wonder if there’s any such thing as going sexually-emotionally too far afield in terms of movie subjects? Like the story of Harold G. Hart of Neillsville, Wisconsin, for instance. What if the activity described in this story was the most profound, emotionally deep-down thing that had ever happened or would ever happen to Hart in his lifetime? And if he were otherwise a nice churchgoing guy with good kids? I could see this working as a thread in a David Lynch movie, but I could also imagine myself saying to a Chris- tian film critic, “Okay…I see your point in this instance.”

Here’s a graph by New York Times arts and cultural editor Edward Rothstein in a 12.26 piece that’s critical of Munich, and it’s worth quoting: “If terrorism is solely the result of injustice, then without the injustice there would be no terrorism. So the best response is to work for justice. Threats, vengeance, security strictures — anything other than the addressing of legitimate grievances is ultimately futile. In particular, since killing terrorists does nothing to alter injustice, it will do nothing to alter terror. Instead, it only leads to more injustice, turning the victims of terrorism into mirror images of the terrorists themselves.” For what it’s worth, this sums up what I like the most about this Steven Spielberg film…what it rhetorically says about the Israeli-Palestinian quagmire rather than what it delivers in dramatic/cinematic/European thriller absorption terms. This makes it “worthy” in a very sincere and genuine sense, but anyone who says Munich truly knocked their socks off and rang their bell as a visceral cinematic thing is…well, I don’t see how anyone can say that with any sincerity.

Nathan Lane and four chorus-line guys performed a funny spoof, about Brokeback Mountain a la “Oklahoma” on Late Night with David Letterman last week. Funny like skits on the “Carol Burnett Show” used to be in the ’70s. Funny if you just sit back and give in to the lame-itude for the sake of seeming like a good sport. But if you think about where Lane is coming from for more than two or three seconds…no, don’t! Then it won’t be funny. And nobody wants to be a sourpuss and not laugh at a venerated funny guy and Tin Pan Alley legend who happens to be a bit of an asshole. But if you take the skit as Lane’s audition for the Oscar-telecast gig, then I guess it was fairly successful.

My best Christmas moment so far was coming upon those carolers on East 3rd Street a few days ago, but my second best moment (and I’m a little ashamed to admit this) was walking around a Wild Oats store in Norwalk, Connecticut, on Saturday afternoon and hearing this impossibly dippy Paul McCartney song playing and starting to quietly hum along. I’m sorry but those McCartney hooks get me, and I always feel like a sap when I cop to this. I also feel Christmassy when this old Beatles chestnut plays…jeez.