Thomas E. Ricks “is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post…he currently writes on defense topics, has a blog at ForeignPolicy.com” and basically knows whereof he speaks.

Occasionally Criterion jacket-cover art will convey an alternate-universe take on a well-known film that half convinces you that you haven’t quite absorbed everything the film has to offer, even though you’ve seen it 15 or 20 times. The white birds (which have to be seagulls and not pigeons) are an interesting invention. Their presence suggests that Elia Kazan‘s 1954 Oscar-winner was directed by Vittorio De Sica or Roberto Rossellini.

The goodies: (a) new 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition, (b) presented in 1.66, 1.33 and 1.85 aspect ratios (a landmark decision that brought about, in my humble view, the eternal discrediting of Bob Furmanek‘s research-fortified 1.85 fascism, and thank God in heaven for this), (c) commentary from Richard Schickel and Jeff Young, (d) new conversation between filmmaker Martin Scorsese and critic Kent Jones, (e) Elia Kazan: Outsider (1982), an hour-long documentary, (f) New documentary on the making of the film, featuring interviews with scholar Leo Braudy, critic David Thomson, and others, (g) New interview with actress Eva Marie Saint, (h) Interview with director Elia Kazan from 2001, (i), Contender, a 2001 documentary on the film’s most famous scene, and (j) New interview with author James T. Fisher (On the Irish Waterfront) about the real-life people and places behind the film.

Plus a booklet featuring an essay by critic Michael Almereyda and reprints of Kazan’s 1952 ad in the New York Times defending his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, one of the 1948 New York Sun articles by Malcolm Johnson on which the film was based, and a 1953 Commonweal piece by screenwriter Budd Schulberg.

In a Variety “Actors on Actors” piece, Kenneth Branagh has called Keira Knightley‘s Anna Karenina performance “breathtaking…her effervescence of spirit is tangible and irresistible. Her whole being seems to blaze with a ferocity that is mesmerizing.

“This is Knightley as we have never seen her before so completely: a mature woman who is also impulsive, troubled, deceitful, sexual, passionate, heartbroken. Everything about her work here sears and scorches itself into the memory. This is an actress of subtlety and delicacy fulfilling her potential in a performance that comes from the depths. Like the novel itself, her work in the role is at once elegant and wild and compelling at every moment. A classic.”

Congrats to the winners of the just-concluded IFC Gotham Awards. Wes Anderson‘s Moonrise Kingdom won Best Picture, and Beasts of the Southern Wild helmer Ben Zeitlin took the breakthrough director award as well as the inaugural Bingham Ray Award. Jared Leto‘s Artifact won the best film audience trophy, David France‘s How To Survive A Plague was given the Gotham Award for Best Documentary, and Terence Nance won the Best Film Not Playing at the Theater Near You prize for An Oversimplification of Her Beauty. Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon, David O. Russell and Participant Media’s Jeff Skoll were given career tributes.

As anyone might have predicted, the Gold Derby-ites (a.k.a., the Goldies) have tumbled for Les Miserables, pushing it ahead of Argo and Silver Linings to lead the Best Picture Oscar race. I had Les Miz at the top back in mid-October but Pete Hammond and Peter Travers, among others, have now ditched Argo for Tom Hooper‘s period operetta. Argo is now the proverbial ex-girlfriend — hurt, abandoned.

A friend’s wife has said that Les Miz ranks at the top of her personal weep-o-meter, and that’s often the name of the game when it comes to calibrating Best Picture winners. And then this HuffPost rave by longtime producer Jay Weston…it’s obvious what’s happening. It’s probably a lock to win.

But there’s a small cabal of Les Miz dissers out there, and I’ve just spoken to one. He’s a seasoned producer who tends toward generosity and has been around the block and loved, incidentally, Alan Parker‘s Evita — the last mainstream Hollywood translation of a musical and the last to deliver, in Hooper’s words, a musical in “through-sung” form.

“I don’t care what people are saying — this is an almost objectively dreadful movie,” the producer told me a few minutes ago. “And I know there’s a major effort underway but I don’t think it has a chance of winning the Best Picture Oscar. Anne Hathaway is fucking terrific and guaranteed to win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, but the early screenings have been stacked with fans of the stage musical version and it was a little embarassing at times, I thought, when somebody would start applauding after a song and nobody would join in.

“On stage Les Miserables seemed large because you’re using your imagination, but the film feels very small in a way,” he continuted. “Perhaps the biggest problem is the singing is apart from Hathaway…Hugh Jackman is mezzo mezzo and Russell Crowe is awful…he looks the part but it just doesn’t fly. And the early CG looks like a cartoon.”

An assessment of the here-and-now by TheWrap‘s Steve Pond contains elements of what I’m describing and reporting.

The usual deal when I visit and cover a regional film festival is balancing the necessity of respectfully attending and reviewing certain screenings and events with having to cover the general waterfront in the column (Zero Dark Thirty surge, coming Les Miz kickback) and going nuts in the usual hair-pulling way. What else is new?

The truth (of which I am not especially proud) is that yesterday I was a derelict guest of the Hanoi Film Festival and that all I did, really, was attend a nice festival party at a penthouse suite atop a big, swanky, Vegas-styled hotel. Apart form filing, I mean, and taking a two-hour walk in the old quarter. And that’s not much. After last night’s event I walked back to the hotel in the rain — about a 3 kilometer trek.

“In Liz and Dick, an actor who has been through several rings of hell — and may not, for all I know, have gotten back yet — portrays someone who went through something similar. Put another way, one of the most impulsively, spontaneously emotional actresses of our time portrays a similar performer.

“For all the differences in their circumstances, accomplishments, and worlds — Lindsay Lohan‘s performance (not her impersonation) is thrillingly immediate, not a composition of interpretive pieces but an incontrovertible, full-spectrum presence, even if the mirror itself is broken and some shards of character are still missing from view.” — New Yorker/”Front Row” columnist Richard Brody in an 11.26 posting.

If I was Lohan, whose performance as Elizabeth Taylor has made her one of the most reviled laughing stocks of the 21st Century and who is reportedly devastated by the pans, I would fly to New York immediately, contact Brody and absolutely insist on some sort of emotional reciprocity.

The Zero Dark Thirty aesthetic integrity train has left the station and has begun to share and confide. I’m not interested in producer-screenwriter Mark Boal‘s feelings of bafflement at the “surreal and bizarre” Republican attacks on the film, and it’s a given that Kathryn Bigelow‘s replication of the attack on the Osama bin Laden compound would be super-scrupulous. What I want to hear about is their decision to avoid the conventional emotionalism that most directors and writers would have gone for in telling this story because it “gets” people. This I respect enormously.

A current or ex-pothead parent cannot tell his kids to abstain. He/she hasn’t the authority. But he/she can tell them it’s a complete no-go as a steady lifestyle component, and that it’s almost guaranteed that daily or frequent turning on results in a lack of drive, ambition and discipline to some extent. In this sense pot is almost a worse thing to get down with than booze because boozers, at least, tend to perform better professionally.

“It’s an odd thing realizing that you’re seeing a movie that is a step above most of what you have seen in the commercial cinema this year,” MCN’s David Poland wrote last night. “My pulse gets faster, I start being a little hyper-vigilant, even though I don’t take notes in movies — at least the first time through — and I start hoping, beat after beat, scene after scene, that the high won’t disappear.

“And that’s what I felt from the very first minutes of Zero Dark Thirty tonight.

“Kathryn Bigelow & Mark Boal are in a kind of sync that is rare in the history of cinema. Boal has raised the bar on the output of Bigelow’s master-level visual skill by giving her material to work with that is seriously challenging and meaningful. She’d make a great Bond movie, I suspect, but that was her earlier career. This is the stuff of Lean and Bolt. Of course, even that relationship had its misses. But this, the second movie for this duo, was ripe to be mediocre or even horrible. So there was enormous pressure to deliver…and in spite of that, they did.

“Comparisons to All The President’s Men are completely valid. But an even stronger beating heart lies beneath this material. B&B personalize the big picture for the audience in a not-so-tricky way…they put us in the room with torture…they remind us of the violence and danger inflicted by terrorists…and they let us experience the ‘it’s a job’ side of life and death. Because the truth of this story…the truth of almost all stories…is the balance between all those truths. ATPM has a lot of that balance too… but in the end, it is still about reporters and The Big Story. The stakes are much higher when lives are on the line in a very human, not movie-like, way. And Jessica Chastain is B&B’s way into that humanity.

“There are some truly great performances by actresses this year. Marion Cotillard is a miracle in Rust & Bone. Jennifer Lawrence is going to be one of our great stars for years to come and her superstar turn in Silver Linings Playbook shows us why, beyond doubt. But Chastain turns the double trick…movie star stuff and the in-your-face character work…and her movie is a more overt heroic tale than either of the other films.

“The supporting cast – and everyone else is supporting the one character with significance in each of the three acts – is flawless. Jason Clarke, Jennifer Ehle, Edgar Ramirez and Mark Strong kill it in the first act. (Everyone else, including Kyle Chandler, is great too.) The second act brings us Stephen Dillane and James Gandolfini and the return of some 1st acters and more terrific turns. And then, the third act is fronted by The Edgerton Boys.

“And Bigelow creates three quite different worlds for each act: the foreign war, the polite suited war that is Washington, and the last, where she takes one of the most well-worn tropes of the film world, ‘the raid’, and finds new notes and flourishes (some by subtraction), making it one of the best ever.

“This is as fine a piece of filmmaking as you will see. And while many will prefer other types of films – and that doesn’t make them wrong, just with different taste – this film hits to all fields in a way that others just don’t even try for. There are a few ‘forever’ films this year, starting – for me – with Amour. But when you run into a movie that has some real epic size, historic subject matter, thrills, a few great laughs, and boasts the skill set on display here…this is a different kind of collectable. Plus, you get three films for the price of one.

“Can’t wait to see it again.”

There’s an art to crossing streets in Hanoi. You can’t do it the New York way, darting quickly to avoid oncoming cabs or buses. You have to feel your way across, moving casually but ready to speed up or stop in the space of a heartbeat. Scooters and cabs swerve around you rather than you getting out of their way, like in New York. And you might run into a stray chicken or rooster at any moment. Just this afternoon I was standing on a corner and a red-necked rooster standing next to me took a leak.