With Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux’s marriage having officially gone south (and not recently but several weeks ago), it needs to said that the Brad Pitt-getting-back-with-Jen scenario, which the tabloids have been pushing for a couple of years now, has to be bullshit.

First, even if there was some kind of half-rekindled relationship between the two (which is almost certainly imaginary) there would be no reason for Aniston to trust Pitt. The fact that he cheated before means the odds are at least 50/50 that he’ll cheat again. Second, Pitt would never go back to Aniston for reasons of pride, partly because of the trust issue and partly because you can’t go home again. Third, Brad’s next serious girlfriend or wife needs to be someone better than Angelina Jolie and way better than Aniston, and by that I mean someone like Amal Clooney…a lawyer or a diplomat, a brilliant book author or stage director or brain surgeon, someone classy and accomplished but without Jolie’s curious history.

Francis Lawrence, Peter Chernin and Steve Zaillian‘s Red Sparrow opens two weeks from now, technically on the evening of Thursday, 3.1. The first screening happens tonight in the Fox lot, and the review embargo ends tomorrow at 9am Pacific. This in itself indicates this 20th Century Fox release might not be too bad, as studio publicists would enforce a review embargo only hours before it opens if it stunk.

Mr. Lawrence has sent a message to all critics asking that they keep “all major plot points including the ending secret so other viewers may also enjoy the movie to the fullest.”

It goes without saying that Tatyana is very keen on seeing this potboiler, which costars Jennifer Lawrence and Joel Edgerton, and costars Matthias Schoenaerts, Charlotte Rampling, Mary-Louise Parker, Jeremy Irons, Ciaran Hinds and Bill Camp. She’ll be giving me an expert critique about how realistic the various Russian accents may or may not sound.

A Criterion Bluray of Cristian Munguiu‘s Graduation (Romanian: Bacalaureat) will street on 5.22.18. I don’t know why it’s been given a 2K mastering instead of 4K, but it has. Essential viewing for anyone with half a brain. Easily one of the best films of ’16 or ’17, whichever you prefer. It earned a pittance at the U.S. box-office, largely due to the fact that a majority of American moviegoers are morons.

“Cristian Mungiu‘s Graduation is a fascinating slow-build drama about ethics, parental love, compromised values and what most of us would call soft corruption. It basically says that ethical lapses are deceptive in that they don’t seem too problematic at first, but they have a way of metastasizing into something worse, and that once this happens the smell starts to spread and the perpetrators start to feel sick in their souls.

“I don’t necessarily look at things this way, and yet Mungiu’s film puts the hook in. I felt the full weight of his viewpoint, which tends to happen, of course, when you’re watching a film by a masterful director, which Mungui (Four Months, Three Weeks, Two days, Beyond The Hills) certainly is.

“And yet I tend to shy away from judging people too harshly when they bend the rules once or twice. Not as a constant approach but once in a blue moon. I’m not calling myself a moral relativist, but I do believe there’s a dividing line between hard corruption and the softer, looser variety, and I know that many of us have crossed paths with the latter. Let he who’s without sin cast the first stone.

“Politicians or dirty cops who accept payoffs from ne’er-do-wells in exchange for favoritism or looking the other way — that’s hard, blatant corruption. Soft corruption is a milder manifestation — a form of ethical side-stepping that decent people go along with from time to time in order to (a) prevent something worse from happening or (b) to help a friend or family member who’s in a tough spot and needs a little friendly finagling to make the problem go away or become less acute.

Tonight the first wave of the Black Panther faithful will swarm into megaplexes in every state of the union and ignite a seismic moment in Hollywood history. It’s not just the $150 million that Ryan Coogler‘s film is expected to earn by Sunday night but also the representation factor — an almost-all-black cast (two middle-aged male white guys are included), power-punch superhero flick that screams “now,” empowerment, authority, 21st Century change and tribal fervor like no Hollywood film ever before.

Just keep in mind what I said a couple of weeks ago, which is that Black Panther feels a little directionless at first — the term is “less than fully satisfying” — and that it doesn’t really kick into gear until the final 60 minutes.

Keep in mind that the Rotten Tomatoes score is 98%, due to five negative reviews — #1, #2, #3, #4 and #5 — and a few mixed reactions.

Keep in mind whqt the Boston Globe‘s Ty Burr said, which is that Black Panther “isn’t the greatest movie ever made, [and] probably not even the greatest superhero movie ever made, but it’s very, very good.”

And keep in mind what Movie Nation‘s Roger Moore said the other day:

“Marvel marvels aren’t so much scripted and directed as focus-grouped and engineered. The story beats, hero or heroine hurdles and fights and effects are so familiar as to be budgeted down to the penny. Broadening the appeal of your franchise ethnically is just smart business. In story terms, in character inclusions, in casting, pandering pays. You’d expect no less from Disney.

“So you’ve got another cool costumed hero tested with dead daddy issues, another ‘sibling’ (or close relative) rivalry, another hidden world where superhuman heroes lay low.

“[Black Panther] has the attempted gravitas of Logan, the myth-building of Wonder Woman and the same pacing problems as those two consequential, worthwhile and only occasionally fun additions to the genre.

“This Panther is awfully slow on the prowl. The two hours and fourteen minutes just amble by. There’s little urgency to any of this, even the finale. It’s just passable entertainment, a noble attempt at waxing mythical that never, for one second, delivers that out-of-body giddiness that makes popcorn pictures of its ilk burst to life.”

Variety‘s Guy Lodge wouldn’t dare write a regular-guy, straight-from-the-shoulder, Hollywood Elsewhere-style review of Wes Anderson‘s Isle of Dogs. He’s too invested in presenting himself as elite, effete and eternally cutting-edge, and that means maintaining a constantly accommodating attitude toward cool-cat cinema, which of course includes all forms of animation.

Nonetheless, even with Lodge’s bending-over-backwards approach, the best he can offer in the way of an Isle of Dogs back-scratch is that it’s “puppy-treat cinema” with a “slender, precarious narrative…small, salty, perhaps not an entire meal, but rewarding nonetheless.”

So this is why Fox Searchlight and IDPR’s Bebe Lerner decided to completely ignore my request to participate in a Berlinale junket for Isle of Dogs. (They had previously invited me to the 2014 Berlinale junket for Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel, and before that the London junket for Fantastic Mr. Fox.) They knew I was no fan of animation, fair enough, and that I’m not a fan of Japanese culture in general. They also knew they had a marginal film on their hands, and that they had to restrict themselves this time to hardcore animation devotees.

Lodge will forgive me, I’m sure, but he seems to be saying that Isle of Dogs is “rewarding” mainly for animation hipsters, for people who are inclined to feel rewarded going in. But that it’s a dicey proposition, perhaps, for Joe and Jane Popcorn.

I for one have always had a problem with the basic concept of Isle of Dogs because of the garbage. Who wants to hang with a bunch of dirty dogs who eat rotting garbage covered with white worms?

“Isle of Dogs is really a film about its own enthusiasms: for four-legged fleabags of all shapes and sizes, of course, but also for the culture and cinema of Japan, which is woven with typical fastidiousness into Anderson’s magpie aesthetic,” Lodge writes. “That makes it a markedly more eccentric proposition than Anderson’s first feature-length foray into stop-motion, 2009’s Fantastic Mr. Fox — and with a PG-13 rating for its dry adult comedy, mostly played in a limbo-low key, a niche commercial prospect too.

Most of the Gold Derby know-it-alls are picking Sebastian Lelio‘s A Fantastic Woman to win the Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar. Because it’s (a) good and (b) transgender. But a passionate minority (including Hollywood Elsewhere) has a special place in their hearts for Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square

Just for the record, Hollywood Elsewhere is calling President Donald Trump a repulsive, sentiment-exploiting, NRA-embracing, side-stepping piece of slime…no offense. Trump: “We are here for you….whatever we can do”? “Let us pray for healing and for peace…God’s word…I have heard your prayers, I have seen your tears, I will heal you”…you make me want to vomit. “Family, faith, community and country…a culture in our country that embrqces the dignity of life”? “Assist in any way we can”?

Nikolas Cruz legally bought an AR-15 assault weapon when he was 18, but he wasn’t able to buy a handgun because he wasn’t 21 — that’s the law.

Yes, we know — winning an Oscar is about class, honor, pride, accomplishment. Or at least the illusion of same. About notching a moment in history and saying “Yes, I did that” or “I was a part of that, and therefore my life has a measure of value and meaning.” This kind of thing means more to serious filmmakers than, say, costarring in the latest Dwayne Johnson movie and saying “whoa, people really paid a lot of money to see this piece of shit!” Because one day they’ll be dead, and they can’t take it with them.

In David Lean‘s Lawrence of Arabia, Jose Ferrer portrays a Turkish Bey who feels alone and isolated in the remote city of Daraa. At one point Ferrer looks sadly at the stupid Turkish solders under his command and sighs to Peter O’Toole‘s Lawrence, “I am surrounded by cattle.”

Peter O’Toole and Jose Ferrer during the Daraa garrison scene in Lawrence of Arabia.

Today Hollywood Elsewhere readers can say the same thing with even greater conviction and melancholy. Who among them would argue that they’re not surrounded by tens of millions of primitives whose ADD appetites are incapable of processing anything outside the fantasy escapist woo-woo realm, at least as far as theatrical viewings are concerned?

Chris Nolan‘s Dunkirk, a Best Picture nominee, was the best-reviewed, the artiest, the most visually distinguished and thoroughly believable action-driven film of 2017. So far Dunkirk has made a fair amount of coin — $188,045,546, which is $12 million more than the $176 million earned domestically by Get Out, another Best Picture nominee.

But the megaplex morons paid much more to see Star Wars: The Last Jedi ($617,116,708), Beauty and the Beast ($504,014,165), Wonder Woman ($412,563,408), Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 ($389,813,101), Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle ($367,410,756), Spider-Man: Homecoming ($334,201,140), It ($327,481,748), Thor: Ragnarok ($314,352,974), Despicable Me 3 ($264,624,300), Justice League($228,585,922), Logan ($226,277,068), The Fate of the Furious ($226,008,385) and Coco ($206,323,103).

Multiple fatalities have been reported following a shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida — about an hour northwest of Miami. Broward County sheriff’s office has written on Twitter that the shooter is now in custody.

Senator Chris Murphy (paraphrased): “This is 2018’s 18th school shooting, and we haven’t even hit March. This happens nowhere else except in the U.S. of A. This epidemic of mass slaughter, this scourge of school shooting after school shooting…we are responsible for a level of mass atrocity that happens in this country with zero parallel anywhere else.”

Joseph Mankiewicz‘s Suddenly Last Summer is good for one thing — the stills of 27 year-old Elizabeth Taylor that were taken during filming. She was still slender back then, or a couple of years away from that Cleopatra-era plumpness (heavy drinking + pasta) that began to overtake her features in ’61. Taylor was always a well-respected actress (Giant, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Butterfield 8), but she always seemed to be conspicuously “acting.” I always found her voice shrill and grating on some level, especially when called upon to show anger or outrage and emotional distress. But from the early to late ’50s she was quite the visual package.

Suddenly Last Summer ends with a shocking revelation about Taylor’s mentally unstable character having witnessed her gay cousin, Sebastian Venable, being eaten alive — cannibalized — by a pack of feral young boys.

The bizarre finale was obviously intended as some kind of metaphorical condemnation of gay sexuality. Sebastian’s rich mother (Katharine Hepburn) is so appalled and disgusted by suspicions of Sebastian’s lifestyle that she wants Taylor lobotomized in order to suppress any notion that the cannibal incident happened. It’s quite ugly and joyless, this film. Rage, repression, self-loathing.

From Wikipage: “Following A Streetcar Named Desire (’51) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (’58), Suddenly, Last Summer was the third Williams film that dealt with the subject of homosexuality, although it was far more explicit in its treatment than either of the previous films were allowed to be under the Motion Picture Production Code. Working in conjunction with the National Legion of Decency, the Production Code Administration gave the filmmakers special dispensation to depict Sebastian Venable, declaring, ‘Since the film illustrates the horrors of such a lifestyle, it can be considered moral in theme even though it deals with sexual perversion.”