Okay, I am judging somewhat. I’m sharing a certain observational concern about the ahistorical S&M (B&D?) lipstick labeling on Vanessa Kirby’s neck.

This just-released teaser poster for Ridley Scott’s Napoleon (Apple/Sony, 11.22) is obviously aimed at the you-go-girl crowd. Oh, to have been an irreverent queen of France, guided by whim and smothered in early 19th Century luxury!, etc.

But the lipstick also tells me that Scott’s film may be tilting a bit more toward the aesthetic styling of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and less in the highly scrupulous manner of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.

Or maybe the marketing has nothing to do with the film at all. Who knows?

The Duellists-era Ridley was a classicist, but maybe he’s decided to adapt to new ways of thinking?

What was the Anti-Defamation League doing when Schnozzgate first broke…sleeping? On vacation?

Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple/Paramount, 10.6) isn’t going to the Telluride Film Festival. A 100% reliable source has just informed me of this. So that’s it — no prestige fall festival play at all. No Telluride, Toronto or New York.

Earlier today: If Killers of the Flower Moon doesn’t play the Telluride Film Festival, it’ll feel like a bit of a letdown, certainly among some of us. It’ll be like “so last May’s big Killers of the Flower Moon Cannes debut was it?”

This keenly anticipated, hugely expensive, epic-length Martin Scorsese film should benefit from at least one high-profile domestic festival screening between now and 10.6 (i.e., Telluride). If Killers sidesteps Julie Huntsinger’s Rocky Mountain gathering, it’s going to just…what, quietly slip into its two-week October theatrical run? No big domestic festival push for poor Lily Gladstone, the heir apparent for Best Supporting Actress?

Killers is a highly commendable period drama. Emotional impact-wise it may be a somewhat modest, middle-range effort at the end of the day, but the chops top to bottom — acting, production design, cinematography, musical score — are first-rate. I for one believed every minute of it…every last frame. It certainly deserves a big stateside festival push before the 10.6 theatrical opening.

Laurence Olivier’s Marcus Licinius Crassus to John Dall’s Marcus Glabrus, leader of the garrison of Rome, in Spartacus:

“But the public tribute is impossible. Leave tonight by unfrequented streets…without fanfare, without even a drum…sneak out.”

Go to 2:40 mark

No, not his treatment of Tippi Hedren. His failure, I mean, to respect the Lakota Sioux’s sacred Paha Sapa (Black Hills) in South Dakota. He did so by callously and obliviously staging the thrilling climax of North by Northwest atop the shamefully chiselled and misappropriated Mount Rushmore. Never forget that the British-born Alfred Hitchcock couldn’t have cared less. Sic semper auteurists!

The people who brought the Bullet Train pollution — director David Leitch, screenwriter Zak Olkewicz, producers Kelly McCormick, Antoine Fuqua and Leitch again — are walking cancer cells…pure poison. Motive-wise I’m excusing the cast (a paycheck is a paycheck) but they were all reprehensible regardless.

From HE’s 8.22 Bullet Train review:

Sex (especially great sex) can make strong men feel weaker or less driven, or at least persuade them to ease up to some degree. Among creative types post-coital drainage always slows your rivers down to a trickle. Okay, I don’t know how true this actually is, but it’s a well-established myth — i.e., “There goes another novel.”

From Jake Malooley’s “After Hours: The Oral History of a Cult Classic” — Air Mail, 8.22.23: