Last night I saw a 70mm IMAX version of Christopher Nolan‘s Dunkirk. Staggering, breathtaking, HANDS DOWN BRILLIANT — not just a Best Picture contender for 2017 (obviously) and not just Nolan’s best (ditto) but easily among the greatest war films ever made in this or the 20th Century. Saving Private Ryan, step aside. The Longest Day, sorry. Full Metal Jacket, down half a peg. Gabriel’s trumpet is blaring from the heavens — this is a major, MAJOR 21st Century achievement.

Dunkirk is not just exceptional cinema but majestically its own thing in an arty, stand-alone, mad-paintbrush sort of way — emotional but immediate and breathtaking, but at the same time standing back a bit by eschewing the usual narrative and emotional engagement strategies that 100 other war films have used in the past (and will probably use again and again in the future).

Thank you, Chris, for not explaining who each character is or giving me their back story or supplying them with an emotional speech or two. Thank you for just plunking me down on that huge Dunkirk beach of 75 years ago and letting me fend for myself, for putting me right in the middle of 400,000 young British troops trying to get the hell out of there before the Germans come and rip them to shreds with bombs and hot lead.

Dunkirk is way above the usual-usual. It will tower, stand astride, fly, soar, float, bob and IMAX the shit out of you. A Colossus of Rhodes awaits at your nearest IMAX theatre. Just don’t see it on a regular-sized screen…please. Go as big and loud as you can. Beg, borrow, wait in line…whatever it takes.

Does everyone understand the exceptionalism here? The critics do but others don’t. People who like the usual massages and neck rubs (i.e., guys like Jeff Sneider) are expressing concerns. I’ve been told that a certain name-brand journalist found it a drag. Some (okay, a couple of women) feel it’s not personal or emotionally affecting enough in the usual theatrical-device ways.

Dunkirk is about Nolan saying, “Okay, look, of course…I know how to do that kind of film. Anybody can make that kind of proscenium-arch, emotional-bromide war film if they have the funding and know a little something about screenwriting and camera placement. Please understand I am not doing that kind of film out of choice. This is a giant-ass art film. This is a ‘less story and next-to-no-character-detail equals richer cinema’ thing. This is a highly selective, God’s-editing-machine take on a World War II tragedy that actually turned into a heartening thing in actuality.”

Tatyana says it’s really great in terms of visual splendor and the land-sea-air concept “but I didn’t see or feel any characters except for the guy on the boat [i.e., Mark Rylance]…it’s just about people struggling to survive, and it’s awful when people can do nothing or next to nothing to save themselves…so despairing, no content, no emotions or empathy, an empty movie…unlike The 9th Company or Stalingrad, which I quite liked….bombing, bombing, bombing….emotions and involvement are so much more important to me than the shape or size of a screen.”

Thank God for the great Tom Hardy, the Spitfire pilot who mostly performs from behind a pilot’s mask of some kind. It’s the best thing he’s done since Locke.

From Ben Travers’ SXSW review, posted on 3.13.17: “A lot of the responsibility to convince viewers of the film’s authenticity falls to Franco. As Tommy Wiseau, he is the strange, unknowable presence at the center of both The Disaster Artist (A24, 12.1) and The Room, and audiences need to believe this is a real person rather than a caricature.

“[Franco makes this freak] both captivating and alienating at once. No one understands him, not even Greg, and there’s no forced exposition or even implied background to help you believe such a person could really exist. (To be fair, Wiseau’s background is a mystery to this day, but Franco doesn’t even try to solve it.)

“And here is where the director makes a make-or-break choice for the movie: Rather than banish all familiar elements from his performance, he recognizes when Tommy can and can’t be relatable. Now, Tommy is never entirely understandable, but he is a real person. Franco is smart enough to recognize that most people came to know Tommy through The Room — and Johnny, his character in the movie, is not Tommy.

“As The Disaster Artist progresses, you notice the separation in his performance: Franco allows himself to play into the jokes when Tommy is off-camera, and he rejects all of his comedic instincts when filming scenes from The Room. That allows Tommy to be truly funny in order to serve the comedy written into The Disaster Artist. Franco can hit a joke as Tommy, even though Tommy can’t land a punchline on camera to save his life. As Seth Rogen’s character says in the movie, ‘It would be weird for Tommy to do something that’s not weird.'”

Variety‘s Kris Tapley has proclaimed that Christopher Nolan‘s Dunkirk is “the first slam-dunk Oscar contender of 2017.” It’s a Best Picture contender, you betcha, but Nolan’s masterpiece is the second 2017 film to be so honored. The first was Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, and I don’t want to hear any ifs, ands or buts about it. Okay, Nolan’s film is the first 2017 release to so qualify. I saw it tonight with my mouth open. I’m catching it again on a super-sized IMAX screen this weekend. IMAX is the only way to go in this instance.

Hollywood Elsewhere will be catching Chris Nolan‘s Dunkirk early this evening, or exactly five hours after this afternoon’s Detroit screening. I’ll post reactions to the former late this evening or tomorrow morning, but in the meantime: “Steven Spielberg laid claim to the Normandy beach landing, Clint Eastwood owns Iwo Jima, and now, Christopher Nolan has authored the definitive cinematic version of Dunkirk,” writes Variety‘s Peter Debruge.

“Unlike those other battles, however, Dunkirk was…a salvaged retreat, as the German offensive forced a massive evacuation of English troops early in World War II. And unlike those other two directors, Nolan is only nominally interested in the human side of the story as he puts his stamp on the heroic rescue operation, offering a bravura virtual-eyewitness account from multiple perspectives — one that fragments and then craftily interweaves events as seen from land, sea and air.

“Take away the film’s prismatic structure and this could be a classic war picture for the likes of Lee Marvin or John Wayne. And yet there’s no question that the star here is Nolan himself, whose attention-grabbing approach alternates among three strands, chronological but not concurrent, while withholding until quite late the intricate way they all fit together.

“Though the subject matter is leagues (and decades) removed from the likes of Inception and The Dark Knight, the result is so clearly ‘a Christopher Nolan film’ — from its immersive, full-body suspense to the sophisticated way he manipulates time and space — that his fans will eagerly follow en masse to witness the achievement. And what an achievement it is!”

The new Studio Canal Bluray of Federico Fellini‘s La Strada “doesn’t have the grain I was anticipating”….sold! DVD Beaver‘s Gary W. Tooze writing that a remastered Bluray looks too smooth or overly DNR-ed is, I feel, cause for celebration. Plus he adds that this new 1080p version “is much brighter [with] more detail on the bottom, right and left edges…the best I have ever seen the film presented…a must-own Blu-ray, for the film if nothing more.” I just bought thus sucker –$20 and change.

Matt Ruskin‘s Crown Heights (Amazon/IFC, 8.25), a true-life ’80s and ’90s saga of wrongful conviction and incarceration, won the Audience Award for Best Dramatic Features at last January’s Sundance Film Festival. And it stars the very cool Lakeith Stanfield. I tried to call him “Keith” Stanfield in my review of War Machine, in part because his Wikipedia page says so. What if I called myself Lejeff Wells? I’ll tell you what would happen. I’d be called a pathetic copycat.

From Andrew Barker’s 1.23.17 Variety review: “Essentially structured like a reverse Law & Order episode, Crown Heights sketches an effective, if ultimately somewhat schematic, picture of the legal system’s countless crevasses and sinkholes into which a blameless person can easily be shoved.

“It doesn’t break much new ground and it takes a while to find its footing, but thanks to strong, unshowy performances from Lakeith Stanfield and Nnamdi Asomugha, the film does project the feelings of helplessness and frustration that come from fighting against such an immovable object.

“Adapted from a This American Life episode that detailed the case of Colin Warner (Stanfield), who spent 20 years behind bars for murder before being freed in 2001, the movie offers an interesting companion piece to Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th, and ought to receive a look from festivals going forward.”

Cheers to Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, Netflix and director Ritesh Batra on their upcoming film, Our Souls At Night, being selected for a special Venice Film Festival gala. The septugenarian romance will premiere on Friday, 9.1. Could this mean that Redford and Fonda will hit Telluride a day or two later? Souls is their third romantic pairing after Barefoot in the Park (’67) and Electric Horseman (’79). (Nobody counts The Chase, in which they were merely part of a hothouse ensemble.) The sentimental “together again” factor plus the decision to screen Souls out-of-competition amounts to a coded message for Venice critics to tred gently. The Colorado-set film begins on a note of platonic companionship with Fonda’s Addie Moore initiating a no-nookie relationship with Redford’s Louis Waters. The fact that Souls was briefly shot in Florence suggests that things ripen.

Robert Redford, Jane Fonda in Ritesh Batra’s Our Souls At Night (Netflix, sometime in late November)

Sometimes the Aero guys seem to be very attuned, very much in the momentary spiritual swim of things. We’re here and then we’re not here. We’re somewhere else. Maybe. Blink of an eye.

Hugs and condolences for the friends, colleagues and fans of Martin Landau, who’s suddenly gone at age 89. He was a bit of a testy guy in person, I must say. He didn’t suffer fools, or at least didn’t seem all that delighted with journalistic inquiries the two or three times I ran into him during the ’90s. But that goes with being a ferociously committed but somewhat frustrated actor, I guess.

Landau spent much of his career making swill, but he was gifted and lucky enough to hit grandslam homers with two great roles — Judah Rosenthal in Woody Allen‘s Crimes and Misdemeanors (’89 — that scene when he goes back to his old home and speaks to his family during dinner, and especially the one with Jerry Orbach in the pool house) and Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton‘s Ed Wood (’94 — Lugosi tangling with the fake octopus in the pond).

My Landau favorites after these two, and in this order: Rollin Hand in Mission: Impossible (’66 to ’69), sleek and effete Leonard with the “woman’s intuition” in Alfred Hitchcock‘s North by Northwest (’59), Rex Harrison‘s loyal Rufio in Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s Cleopatra (’63), and Lieutenant Marshall in Lewis Milestone‘s Pork Chop Hill (’59). These are the only ones that have stuck in my mind.

George Romero, director of Night of the Living Dead (’68) and creator of the walking-dead zombie apocalypse genre that still plagues us today, has left the earth at age 77. Hugs and condolences. I own a Bluray of Night of the Living Dead but my all-time favorite Romero flick is Dawn of the Dead, which was largely shot at the Monroeville mall, which locals referred to as “mall of the dead.” In ’81 Romero directed Creepshow in the Monroeville area, and I visited the set to do a New York Post interview with Stephen King. (The best-selling author was playing an overall-wearing farmer.) Romero’s other films included Day of the Dead, The Crazies, Knightriders, Martin, Monkey Shines and The Dark Half. I always enjoyed that Romero was in The Silence of the Lambs for about 35 or 40 seconds. “They’re coming to get you, Barbara!”

From Variety critic Joe Leydon: “While attending Loyola University in New Orleans back in the 1970s, I attended an evening screening of Night of the Living Dead in a large campus auditorium. The crowd (including me) was impressed and attentive. Indeed, at least one of my fellow students may have been a little too impressed and attentive.

“The first time a group of the shambling undead appeared, a shriek rang out from the darkness: ‘Don’t let them get me! Don’t let them get me!’ I figured someone was goofing off, or encouraging some kind of audience participation. (Only a couple years later such behavior would become commonplace at midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.) But then it happened a second time. Louder. And a third time. Louder still. By that point, it was quite obvious that whoever was screaming was totally, unabashedly, nearly-scared-to-death terrified.

“After the third outburst, two people — friends? faculty? security personnel? — more or less lifted this frightened fellow from his seat and carried him (gently, as far as I could tell) out of the auditorium. But not before the guy had managed to make some of us (again, including me) even more uneasy while watching Romero’s masterwork.

“Maybe his fear was a natural reaction, maybe it was, ahem, chemically enhanced. But, either way, that fear obviously was contagious. And how do I know this? Well, here’s the thing: None of the other people in the audience laughed when he screamed the second and third times. Come to think of it, as I recall, no one told him to shut the hell up, either.”

Wells reaction: The “don’t let them get me!” guy was either an asshole, a wimp or mentally challenged.

Remember the Cool Hand Luke sand-shovelling scene on that hot country road? When Paul Newman inspires his chain-gang homies to cover the tar with sand as fast as they can, and they all get into it and shovel so quickly that the tar truck runs out and drives off, and the prisoners have nothing to do but relax for a couple of hours?

In the mid ’70s I worked as a tree-trimmer in Connecticut (ropes, saddles, chains saw, pole saws), and a couple of times I tried to apply the Cool Hand Luke approach to some jobs. The salesman (always an easy-going smoothie in a nice car) would point to a couple of trees and explain what we had to do, and then he’d say “I’ll be happy if not surprised if you can finish by the end of the day.” Then he’d take off, telling us he’d return by 3:30 or 4 pm.

As soon as he left we’d say to each other (me and the other climber and the clean-up crew), “Hey, let’s get this done fast so we can relax the rest of the day.” So we’d all double down and get the job done ahead of schedule, sometimes even shaving an hour by skipping lunch. We can do this!

The salesman would return at 3:30 pm and say, “Whoa…you’re done already? You guys are amazing!” And then he’d think it over and say, “Jesus, we’ve got another couple of hours. Let’s load up and head over to the next job!” Me: “Wait, whoa…the next job? You said if we finished this job here we’d be good for the day.” Salesman: “Yeah, but we can’t just sit around so c’mon, put the stuff on the truck and follow me.”

So after this happens a couple of times you learn. Never work fast, never exceed expectations, don’t drag ass but always work at an even keel.

I knew where Newman’s house was located in Westport back then, and I occasionally imagined that I’d run into him and tell him this story and he’d laugh and say, “Yeah, if only life was like the movies.”