This is strictly second-hand, but last weekend one of the producers of Clint Eastwood‘s American Sniper (Warner Bros., 12.25) boasted to a journalist friend that it’s “Clint’s best film in 15 years.” It may be that (an impressive Sniper scene was shown a little before the chat) but the claim is imprecise and therefore suspicious. If you want to make an impression along these lines you have to (a) do your Wikipedia homework and (b) know your dates. 15 years ago Eastwood’s True Crime (a decent genre thriller but nothing stupendous) was released, and after that Space Cowboys (an amiable old-guys-in-space movie). What the producer probably meant to say was that American Sniper is Clint’s best film in ten years, or his best since Million Dollar Baby (’04). That makes sense.

No Oscar-handicapping website or columnist wants to say this for fear of Paramount pulling ads, but Christopher Nolan‘s Interstellar (11.5) is clearly the first big bust of the season, esteem-wise. I’m not any different than the others. I’d like a piece of that Paramount award-season revenue. But this is reality, Greg. Nolan’s apocalyptic space voyage epic will make bales of money, I presume, and the geek chorus (led by guys like First Showing‘s Alex Billington) will chime in and a pro forma Best Picture nomination may happen, as indicated by some positive industry reaction. But it’s too much of a frustrating mixed bag to be called wholly successful (an observer at Saturday night’s Academy screening has described the post-screening reaction as “pretty quiet…not a lot of buzz“), and the mixed critical pushback so far makes the likelihood of serious Best Picture contention seem…well, unlikely.

“Eddie Redmayne’s performance [as Stephen Hawking] is astonishing, as eloquent, though in a different way, as Daniel Day-Lewis’s work in . Day-Lewis, playing the Irish artist Christy Brown, a man whose mobility is reduced to a single limb, deployed his left foot, a bushy black beard, and minimal, mangled speech to create a ferociously willful and sexually miserable man. Redmayne is a gentler actor; he was the noble youth in Les Misérables who sang, in a fine light tenor, the tear-stained but upbeat ‘Empty Chairs at Empty Tables.’ Tall and slender, with freckles and a flattened upper lip, he wears his brown hair in a heavy mop that in this film falls across his forehead to meet enormous black-framed glasses. With his narrow shoulders, he initially looks like an abashed scarecrow. Redmayne uses his eyebrows, his mouth, a few facial muscles, and the fingers of one hand to suggest not only Hawking’s intellect and his humor but also the calculating vanity of a great man entirely conscious of his effect on the world.” — from David Denby‘s New Yorker review of The Theory of Everything.

This frame-capture from Orson Welles’ visit to the Dick Cavett Show on July 27, 1970 is misleading. It makes it look like Welles was the Colossus of Rhodes, like he could stop trucks in the street with one arm. But all the sites say he was only around six-foot-one. Cavett was only seven inches shorter but you’d never know it from this shot. One thing is clear, and that’s that Welles had a bison-sized head.

Tonight author and film essayist Karina Longworth will sign copies of her coffee-table book, “Hollywood Frame by Frame: The Unseen Silver Screen in Contact Sheets, 1951-1997” at Santa Monica’s Aero prior to a 7:30 pm screening of Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Blow-Up (’66). I naturally assumed that a few choice Blow-Up stills are contained in her book, but Longworth informed me otherwise. She was just invited to show up and sign, and is not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. So I dug around yesterday and found a few pics online. I’ll be attending the Aero screening but I’m very, very afraid of how this exquisitely captured film will look on the Aero screen. If it’s a DCP, fine, but if they’re showing a 35mm print it’ll probably look dicey. I’ve almost gotten to the point where I hate 35mm these days. Either way I’ll be flabbergasted if the Aero version looks anywhere near as good as the immaculate HDX high-def version I own on Vudu.

David Hemmings in Blow-Up‘s key scene.

Michelangelo Antonioni, Vanessa Redgrave.

Hemmings, Redgrave, Antonioni.

“Have you seen the Mortdecai trailer?,” a critic friend wrote this morning. “I’ve seen it in theaters twice recently, and each time I thought ‘who would find this crap funny?’ The answer: the people sitting around me, guffawing at every lame riff.” In other words, it’s going to do pretty well with the none-too-clevers. Congrats to Johnny Depp, director David Koepp and everyone else who was significantly involved.

Last night I watched a high-def feed of Sam Raimi‘s A Simple Plan (’98), which still seems like his finest film ever — the best written (by Scott Smith), the best acted (particularly by Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton and Bridget Fonda), the most thrillingly plotted, and certainly the most morally complex. I hadn’t seen it for 15 or 16 years. It holds up and then some. A filthy lucre film on the level of Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Fargo, Macbeth (particularly when you think of Fonda’s Lady Macbeth-like wife), Of Mice and Men, etc. But it got me to wondering why Raimi never again came close to making anything like it. For The Love Of The Game followed, and then The Gift. And then, for the last 12 years, web-casting and fantasy — Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 3, Drag Me to Hell and Oz the Great and Powerful. Raimi mades his bones in cult horror (Evil Dead flicks, Darkman, Army of Darkness), and then seemed to step into the world-class, award-calibre league with A Simple Plan, and then…you tell me.

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.

My idea of a cool and studly fast car movie is Drive. My idea of a complete waste of time is James Wan‘s Furious 7 (Universal, 4.3.15). I have the same amount of belief in the real-world versimilitude in this trailer as I do in a Road Runner cartoon. Sky-diving cars with special chutes that open and close at just the right time? Sure thing. The bit with the late Paul Walker running along the top of a bus teetering on a cliff isn’t bad conceptually, but Wan waits too long and expects us to believe that a guy could leap…what, 40 or 50 feet and fall into a car and not crack his ribs and elbows and forearms? If anyone had the courage and the character to make a real car movie (i.e., something that restores the aesthetic of the car chase in Bullitt) I would pay to see it repeatedly. The people who made Furious 7 are, no offense, corporate-fellating scum.

On 10.28 a N.Y. Times story by Maureen Carvajal announced that a full-length version of Orson Welles‘ never-completed The Other Side of The Wind, which was shot in fits and starts from the early to mid ’70s, will be assembled and screened next year, possibly at next May’s Cannes Film Festival. Carvajal reported that Royal Road Entertainment’s Filip Jan Rymsza and Frank Marshall have reached an agreement with the sometimes-warring parties (including, significantly, Welles’ daughter Beatrice) to buy the rights. The producers intend to have it ready for a screening in time for May 6, the 100th anniversary of Welles’s birth, Caraval wrote. The day after the announcement I spoke with Berkeley film professor and ex-Variety guy Joe McBride, the author of three Welles books as well as a former producer and supporting player in Wind. Again, the mp3.

On the first day of filming The Other Side of the Wind on 8.23.70 (l. to r.): Orson Welles (seated, left), costar Peter Bogdanovich and producer and bit player Joe (a.k.a. Joseph) McBride.

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.

It’s almost a slur to call Jennifer Kent‘s The Babadook (IFC Midnight, 11.28, theatrical/VOD) a “midnight movie” by virtue of it being an IFC Midnight release. It’s much better than that. It’s not just about a widowed mom (Essie Davis) and a young son (Noah Wiseman) being spooked by a gothy, top-hat-wearing, needle-fingered goblin but the emotional and psychological roots of this haunting and a gradual, careful accumulation of believability, chills and force. It’s one of those restrained, character-driven, less-is-much-much-more horror films that pop up once in a blue moon — a mix of Polanski’s Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby plus Juan Antonio Bayona‘s The Orphanage plus a dab or two of F.W. Murnau‘s Nosferatu. Almost everything in-camera, super-meticulous design, no cheap jolts, no conventional gore to speak of…but scary as hell. As I said last week, it’s significantly more effective than Stanley Kubrick‘s The Shining in telling a story of dark spirits overtaking the mind and soul of a parent and leading to evil impulses. Is Kent the first woman director to really score big-time in this realm? The Babadook opened in England on 10.24 with a 96% RT rating. Here’s an interview with Kent in a recent issue of Film Comment.