Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis (CBS Films, 12.6) is about as perfectly composed as anything you’re ever going to see in a commercial plex. Perhaps the most significant characteristic is that it immerses the audience in character and atmosphere without “telling a story” per se. We all know that a good part of the popcorn crowd wants a story, generally speaking, and we might as well face the fact that they’re going to feel unsatisfied by this. But this is what high cinematic art does on occasion. By the time Llewyn Davis is over you’ve really gotten to know a bygone era and a consciousness that existed among West Village folk singers in the early days of the Kennedy administration (i.e., about two years before Dylan began to break out) and you know exactly where Oscar Isaac‘s Llewyn Davis character has been and where he’s going. It’s hundreds upon hundreds of bull’s-eye brush strokes that come together to make a really superb painting. Brevity, clarity, authority. I’ve seen it three times, and I could easily sit through another two or three viewings.

With this clip from Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity I’ve done another count of all the “aahh!” and “no!” sounds that Sandra Bullock makes during…well, this portion of the extended opening sequence. I attempted a rough count of the whole thing when I saw the film in IMAX 3D two nights ago at Universal CityWalk, but I was wrong to surmise there are only 25 or so. In fact Bullock lets go with between 25 and 30 distress sounds in this clip alone. Not to mention this other clip.

The Dodge Durango marketing guys are obviously attracting big awareness by participating in these put-on Ron Burgundy TV ads. Paramount is obviously getting the same for its 12.20 opening of Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues. But…well, I guess I don’t pay much attention to ads for big-penis, gas-guzzling SUVs and I don’t mean to sound like a kneejerk pantywaist liberal, but do people who buy these things care about climate change at all? These ads are basically saying that the buyers of Dodge Durangos are macho jerkwads whose mentalities and attitudes are stuck in the ’70s and ’80s…guys who just want to drive around in a big, bad Sherman tank…yeah!

It’s generally understood that Ralph Fiennes‘ The Invisible Woman (Sony Classics, 12.25) is the story of a secret affair between Charles Dickens (Fiennes) and Nelly Ternan (Felicity Jones). I shouldn’t comment as I wasn’t able to see more than 45 minutes worth in Toronto, but it has the mood and the tone of a properly constrained Victorian period piece. And there’s no denying that Fiennes’ voice is a beautiful instrument. One look at the fat woman playing Dickens’ wife and your heart goes out.

I wanted to see Gravity on a really huge IMAX 3D screen so I caught it last night at the AMC Universal CityWalk plex. It played just as well the second time. Not all that differently from my first viewing at Telluride’s Werner Herzog Cinema, but I was able to appreciate the expert crafting and shaping all the more. It’s a very, very high-end thing. I tried counting the number of times Sandra Bullock goes “aaahh!” It might be only 20 or 25 but it felt like 45 or 50. The only bad part of the show was sitting through one giant-sized IMAX trailer after another for a series of blunt, rib-thumping action-fantasy flicks — Ender’s Game (awful), Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, 47 Ronin (swords and robes), The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (same old crap). At least I didn’t have to sit through trailers for Thor: The Dark World and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.

I’ve always hated Universal CityWalk. Coarse, lowbrow, overwhelming, garish, fatiguing. Ground Zero for people who would flinch at the idea of watching All Is Lost or Blue Is The Warmest Color. It’s the ideal place for people who mainly want to watch primitive genre films. I was riding on a garage elevator with seven or eight kids and was telling myself, “Concentrate on the things you have in common with these guys…don’t get into a twist about how exotic they seem.” On top of which an IMAX ticket costs $20 bucks plus the lowest parking fee is $15. Plus I waited through 25 minutes of bumper-to-bumper traffic to just get to the booths where you have to pay. $35 for front-gate parking and $25 for preferred parking?

[Warning: spoilers contained herein] Ben Stiller‘s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (20th Century Fox, 12.25) is a smooth and supple dreamscape romance about a timid, do-little Manhattan daydreamer (Stiller in the title role) who suddenly morphs into a fearless adventurer at the drop of a hat, and in so doing gets the girl (Kirsten Wiig) at the end. To me it’s an odd duck fable — smart but soft, manipulative but emotionally plain-spoken for the most part — that’s aimed at the none-too-brights who went for Forrest Gump and/or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. In my book it tries too hard to soothe and mollify to rate as an Oscar contender. That’s not a putdown, just a qualifier. The fact that Mitty is playing the New York Film Festival almost three months before its Xmas day opening suggests that Fox and Stiller are expecting award-season traction. Well, at least it’ll make money. Watching it is like sitting in a warm bath. It’s comforting. Every frame says “steady as she goes.”

Mitty is a first-rate thing in terms of Stiller and Wiig’s performances and in several below-the-line ways. (The subtle CG is excellent and often elegant.) But the second half is really quite silly or at least willfully bizarre, and I’m sorry for that. As a longtime Stiller fan I was really hoping to be stirred or even mesmerized. Nope.

Simultaneous New York and Los Angeles press screenings for Ben Stiller‘s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (20th Century Fox, 12.25) are happening this morning. Reviews will be fair game when the film shows at the New York Film Festival a short time hence. My Fox lot screening will begin exactly 59 minutes from now and I haven’t yet showered. The obviously intelligent, smoothly intriguing trailer suggests that Stiller’s film has resonance and finesse way beyond the level of the 1947 Danny Kaye version. Costars include Kristen Wiig, Paton Oswalt, Adam Scott, Sean Penn and Shirley MacLaine.

A healthy percentage of HE regulars surely caught Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity last night, so what’s the verdict? My basic Telluride response was that Gravity is technically dazzling and audacious as hell and absolutely unmissable for that, but (a) it lacks the meditative depth and resonance of J.C. Chandor‘s All Is Lost, which is roughly the same film (a solo traveller struggles to survive when catastrophe strikes) on a smaller scale and (b) that Robert Redford‘s stoic performance is much more satisfying than Sandra Bullock‘s, which struck me as too on-the-nose emotional. Here again is my Telluride review:

Gravity “is the most visually sophisticated, super-immersive weightless thrill-ride flick I’ve ever seen. If Stanley Kubrick were around he would freely admit that 2001: A Space Odyssey is no longer the ultimate, adult-angled, real-tech depiction of what it looks and feels like to orbit the earth. Nifty and super-cool from a pure-eyeball perspective, Gravity is certainly the most essential theatrical experience since Avatar. You can’t watch a top-dollar 3D super-flick of this type on anything other than a monster-sized IMAX screen.

How could any serious film lover not prefer to see Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity in IMAX 3D? The bloom is off 3D these days, of course, but if any film has been tailor-made for this format it’s this one. And yet less than 10% of viewers even have this option, give or take. Of the 3,575 screens that Gravity opened on yesterday, a mere 323 are IMAX. (425 screens are showing it in 2D.) I myself haven’t seen an IMAX-3D presentation — my Telluride viewing early last month was in straight 3D. So I intend to catch an IMAX 3-D showing at Universal Citywalk around 8 pm this evening. I wonder how many of the 323 are genuine vs. ersatz IMAX? Probably a small percentage. (The AMC Century City plex is definitely offering “fake” IMAX.)

Gravity “is a brilliant, visionary and groundbreaking film, and a great gift to exhibitors because it makes the theatrical experience an absolutely necessary component,” I wrote on 9.11.13. Deadline‘s Nikki Finke is projecting $48 million for the The Warner Bros. release by Sunday night.

An actual obit that some Breaking Bad fans put into the Albuquerque Journal. Everyone’s already reported this today but I figured I might as well join in as Hollywood Elsewhere has become a kind of emotional Ground Zero for fans of this now-mercifully-concluded AMC series. Bonus points for those who can remember which “deceased” actor in which film was referred to as a “tough monkey” after his demise?

With the post-apocalyptic dystopian thing completely spent and in the wake of Cloverfield and Pacific Rim, who outside of 14-and-unders wants to watch more of this?

Directed, written and produced by Linda Bloodworth Thomason, Bridegroon (Virgil Films, 10.4 in NYC/10.18 in Los Angeles) is about how tragedy separated a committed gay couple, Shane and Tom, and then how Shane Bitney Crone, the survivor, was stunned and angered when faced with familial and “legal” anti-gay prejudice. Shane posted a video tribute to his partner called “It Could Happen to You.” The video went viral and garnered over four million views. A release states that Shane “wanted it to serve as a warning to other LGBT couples, and show the world what can happen when two people are legally barred from having equal rights and equal protections under the law to marry.” I’m attending a screening of Bridegroom on Tuesday, 10.15, at the Academy theatre.