Every December I tap out a list of the year’s best (excellent, very good and good) and I usually end up with a tally of maybe 20 films or 25 films, and 30 if I want to be liberal about it. But if you were to boil these down to the really good ones that will probably stand the test of time, you’d probably be closer to 10 or 15. Which is why 1962 seems like such an amazing year. Jules and Jim, The Manchurian Candidate, To Kill a Mockingbird, Knife in the Water, Lawrence of Arabia, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, L’Eclisse, Lolita, The Exterminating Angel, Ride the High Country, The Miracle Worker, The Longest Day, Days of Wine and Roses, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner — that’s 15 films and we’re less than halfway through the list. The Trial, Sundays and Cybele, Winter Light, Dr. No, My Name Is Ivan, A Kind of Loving, Mutiny on the Bounty, Billy Budd, The L-Shaped Room, Cape Fear, Freud, Carnival of Souls, Lonely Are the Brave, Advise & Consent, Birdman of Alcatraz, Eva, David and Lisa, Sweet Bird of Youth, Requiem for a Heavyweight, The Counterfeit Traitor, War Hunt, Phaedra, Lisa, Day of the Triffids and Antoine and Colette. 40 films that pretty much everyone who’s taken a film course or owns a film anthology book has seen and admired or or least respects, and at least 20 or 25 stone classics.

I’m going to be brave and admit something that undermines my fanatical film guy authority (if you want to call it that). I’ve twice seen Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski‘s Nosferatu the Vampyre (’79) and I’ve seen Shadow of the Vampire (’00), E. Elias Merhige‘s fictionalized story of the making of F.W. Murnau‘s Nosferatu, but I’ve never really sat down and watched F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu. Now, finally, tonight…the restored Kino Bluray version (which streets on 11.12).

You can’t go by the trailers, which suggest a flat-out satirical comedy. Trailer cutters always go for the socko stuff, the lowest-common-denominator defaults. But if it’s more or less a huge sprawling black comedy (and I say “if”), that may amount to a brilliant approach. Scorsese, screenwriter Terrence Winter and star Leonardo DiCaprio came to the Wall Street table way too late to play it as some kind of dark, solemn, high-stakes melodrama. The last 25% of Goodfellas (arguably the best part) was pure cocaine in the veins. Well, cocaine and then the comedown.

I was reading Andrew Stewart‘s 10.29 Variety story about Paramount having officially slated Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street for a 12.25.13 release when I was jerked alert by a phrase at the end of the story. Yes, okay, I stole that expression from Tom Wolfe‘s “The Painted Word,” but I nonetheless sat up and said “whoa.”

Stewart writes that “a list of other Oscar contenders have vacated the race in recent weeks, including Sony Classics’ Foxcatcher,” the Weinstein Co.’s Grace of Monaco and Sony’s The Monuments Men, which sources say the studio pushed back based on the assumption that Paramount would end up making the year-end release for Wall Street.”

In response to yesterday’s riff about the stone psycho who lives upstairs asking me twice “is that your cat?” and my reply being colored by a measured hostility and facetiousness, Glenn Kenny wrote the following: “It’s hilarious how Wells will pompously go on about how HIS ‘sobriety’ beats that of anyone who’s, say, been working a program for 20 years, and then spin out a shit fit of completely disproportionate rage if the wrong guy looks at him cross-eyed. ‘Sobriety” — I do not think that word means what you think it means.”

LexG/Ray Quick wrote something good about Javier Bardem‘s performance in response to yesterday’s “Foundas Joins Counselor Club” riff. “Minus Penelope Cruz‘s character, Bardem’s is probably the least venal in the movie: Honest, terrified, in thrall to Cameron Diaz against his better judgment, open with Fassbender. He’s the soul of the movie and his brutal, amimalistic downfall is one of the few poignant moments in it. Whereas Pitt’s comeuppance is played [with] all manner of notes, Bardem was pretty much a soulful straight-shooter through and through, and he goes out as undignified as anyone, into the ground, it’s over, fuck you, there go the cheetahs, steal his shit while we’re at it. It’s a merciless end for a character, [and yet] these critics [are] acting like it was Chigur Redux or Skyfall Ahoy. What movie did they even see?”

A nice fat payday for Bryan Singer, who hasn’t directed an X-Men film in ten years, plus big bountiful checks for all the cast members (Jackman, Fassbender, Lawrence, McKellen, Stewart, McAvoy, Berry, etc.) , but really, come on…when does this treadmill stop? It isn’t going to, is it? It’s like that mythical Dick Cheney line about U.S. forces in the Middle East: “We don’t leave.” The only thing that will put a cap on it will be a money-losing disaster, and that’s not likely. Even the most cynical franchise mentality should have some kind of answer to the age-old question of “is there any reason to make this film other than to just make money?” X-Men: Days of Future Past is going to cost around $250 million to make. Remember that the old Moody Blues album was called “Days of Future Passed,” not “Past.”