“Who would have guessed, after a year of headlines about the N.S.A. and about the porousness of life online, that our worries on that score — not so much the political unease as a basic ontological fear that our inmost self is possibly up for grabs — would be best enshrined in a weird little romance by the man who made Being John Malkovich and Where the Wild Things Are? And it is romantic: Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) and Samantha (Scarlett Johansson) click together as twin souls, not caring that one soul is no more than a digital swarm.

New Yorker illustration by Owen Freeman.

“Sad, kooky, and daunting in equal measure, Her is the right film at the right time. It brings to full bloom what was only hinted at in the polite exchanges between the astronaut and hal, in 2001: A Space Odyssey and, toward the end, as Samantha joins forces with like minds in cyberspace, it offers a seductive, nonviolent answer to Skynet, the system in the Terminator films that attacked its mortal masters. We are easy prey, not least when we fall in love. The human heart is where the tame things are.” — from Anthony Lane‘s New Yorker review (dated 12.23).

“Like Dylan, Jagger or the Band, Leonardo DiCaprio is working himself into a sweat to seduce us — on one level because that’s just what Belfort did to his cronies and victims; on another because he wants our respect and awe, if not our love or affection,” writes Film Comment‘s Max Nelson in a Wolf of Wall Street piece.

“In this respect, the key scene is Belfort’s extended motivational speech to the office near the film’s halfway point. It’s a masterful piece of rhetoric, with DiCaprio assuming a role somewhere between a hellfire Baptist preacher and a general gearing his troops up for battle. By the end, he has his listeners standing on desks thumping their chests and chanting rhythmically, like the crowd at a rock concert or the new converts at a camp meeting.”

“When I got the material, I didn’t like the character. But by the time we got to shooting, I loved her. She’s a badass who’s making lemonade with no fucking lemons.” — Australian actress Margot Robbie, 23, speaking to Elle about her Wolf of Wall Street character, Nadine. What does that lemonade quote even mean?

Presumably Robbie understands that just being (a) hot and (b) really electric and standout-ish as Leonardo DiCaprio‘s tough, gold-digging wife isn’t enough. She needs to figure out the next thing (whatever that might be), and she has maybe 18 months to do that. Pic taken on the red carpet before last night’s Wolf premiere screening at the Ziegfeld. I’m really sorry I’m not at the WoWS luncheon now underway at the Four Seasons.

It’s thrilling that the Ape prequels, based on a mostly low-rent franchise that ran from the late ’60s through the mid ’70s, are turning out to be visionary grade-A entertainments in the classic mold. The reason that Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is going to turn out well, I suspect, is because of director Matt Reeves, who did a bang-up job with 2010’s Let Me In, a remake of Let The Right One In.

As a way of promoting and honoring the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s now-launching George Cukor series, I was just asked to name my favorite Cukor film. I know what I’m supposed to select. Pat and Mike. A Star Is Born. Holiday. The Philadelphia Story. Definitely not Let’s Make Love or My Fair Lady. But I have a soft spot for Cukor’s last film, Rich and Famous (’81). Not because it’s his “best” work, but because it contains the most openly gay scene he ever shot (i.e., Jackie Bissett doing the hunky Matt Lattanzi, whom she’s only met a couple of hours earlier, in her hotel room). By all reports Cukor was more or less pleasantly closeted all his life, but of course this had to be unpleasant. So two years before he died he “came out,” in a sense, with this scene. I remember discussing this with a gay journalist friend after we saw Rich and Famous at Magno Screening 30 years ago.