I was all over Amy Berg‘s West of Memphis (Sony Classics, 12.25) during the Sundance and Santa Barbara Film Festivals ten months ago. And now I have to get my energy up again, starting, I suppose, with a visit to this evening’s 7:15 pm screening at the AFI Fest. Easily one of the year’s best docs.

Industry Friend: “Why aren’t the pundits considering Javier Bardem for a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his Skyfall villain? Silva is the most exciting baddie in any movie in a long time. Javier is one of the world’s greatest and his performance here is alchemy.” Wells response: He’s superb, agreed, but his Bond baddie isn’t as meaty a role as his Oscar-winning performance as Anton Chigur in No Country For Old Men. People see it as a vivid but lesser effort.

A rousing screening of Silver Linings Playbook (Weinstein Co., 11.16) happened last night at the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian theatre with director David O. Russell, star and Best Actor contender Bradley Cooper (giving his career-best performance) and costar John Ortiz posing for photos, etc. I went because I wanted to take a couple of friends, and because I wanted to feel a positive reaction after that awful Aidikoff Screening Room experience and that raging argument in the downstairs garage.

Backstory.net‘s Jeff Goldsmith, who sat just to my right, called it “great.” David Ehrenstein sat to my left. Devin Faraci sat three or four rows in front of me, and a post-screening tweet indicated he’s the latest arrival on Silver Linings Sourpuss Island.

I can spot a cerebral dweeb frowner from 100 yards off, and there’s something about the last 25 minutes of this film (which are formulaic but satisfying because so much emotional and mental fervor and skillful spadework has led up to it) that irritates the pissheads to no end. I’m speaking (and I mean no offense) of a microscopic critical sub-culture here. It’s not a crime that they can’t feel the cumulative effect of this film. But it is short-sighted if they try and dismiss how expertly fused and feverishly acted and directed this thing is…crackling, hilarious, and yet sometimes dark and unstable and despairing. And then not.

I’m fully convinced that SLP is going to ride into theatres on a tsunami when it opens two and a half weeks hence. It really, really works, and is the only film of the season (besides Anna Karenina) that has truly lifted me up and over.

There was an Academy-members-only screening Thursday night at the Laurel Canyon home of sound editors Michael and Nancy Ross (who also hosted that Not Fade Away screening & after-party that I attended a few weeks back), and I’m told that someone called it Capra-esque. Maybe, yeah…but Capra Redefined for the 21st Century and a Culture of Edge and Anxiety. I hate Capra myself. I think people who fall for It’s A Wonderful Life are easy lays and overly susceptible. But if you want a fairly good explanation how and why SLP comes together, read Brian Ondorf’s 10.24 review on Bluray.com.

Favorite Ondorf line: “When Russell calls on cliche to dig out an ending, he does so with extraordinary skill and euphoric cinematic energy.”

Before the showing Russell told the crowd how Matthew Quick‘s book first came to him from Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack, who of course are both gone now. But still with us through this film.

A veteran director friend who attended the Ross screening texted as follows this morning: “Silver Linings Playbook was terrific…has to be the front-runner [now]. Jennifer Lawrence must be favorite for Best Actress Oscar…she hits it out of the park…movie comes doubly alive when she’s on-screen. Bradley for a Best Actor nomination but no win. De Niro probably. Lawrence dead certain. Stand-room-only with Academy voters fighting each other for seats. Cheers at the end.”

The Ross screening was co-hosted by Colleen Camp, Nancy Meyers and Lisa Tomei, I’m told. and was presided over by Oscar strategist Lisa Taback.

I didn’t know French TV actress Berenice Marlohe before catching her relatively brief but quite striking performance in Skyfall (Sony, 11.8). Dark hair, 5′ 9″, fierce and passionate eyes, a faint glint of Eurasian heritage…wham. Which is why Terrence Wackadoodle has reportedly added her to the cast of “his latest film,” whatever that might be.

It could be Knight of Cups, which, given Malick’s tendency to dither endlessly in post-production, might not be ready for viewing sometime (I’m not joking) in 2014.

Marlohe, 33, has a settled, sophisticated vibe and a deepish, cigarette-smoke voice. And beyond-intense cheekbones. She appears in the Hong Kong and Macau sequences in Skyfall. She’s one reason why I’ll be returning for a second screening of Skyfall on November 5h.

Will Marlohe survive Malick’s whimsical approach to keeping or discarding characters in his films? The 60ish Malick clearly likes the ladies and especially exotic, eccentric, foreign-born ones (hence his focus on not just Olga Kurylenko but Romina Mondello in To The Wonder) so probably. And you have to assume that Christian Bale and Natalie Portman are safe. But Cups costars Michael Fassbender, Ryan Gosling and Rooney Mara….who knows?

The first thing I liked about Hitchcock (Fox Searchlight, 11.23) was the way director Sacha Gervasi and screenwriter John J. McLaughlin embraced the dry, droll attitude that Alfred Hitchcock adopted and exploited while hosting his anthology TV show in the ’50s and early ’60s…that jaunty, slightly perverse commentary thing. Perfect. Just right.

The second was the mixing of occasional dark Ed Gein fantasies within the narrative, which didn’t add up but provided a slight air of macabre. The third was a sense of general intrigue — you knew right away that Hitchcock was up to something more than just rote storytelling. And I loved the ending.

The main problem, I feel, was the curious but interesting decision to focus only partly on the making of the legendary Psycho, which everyone on the planet assumed would be the thing since the film is based on Stephen Rebello‘s “Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho.”

Fort a good half of the emphasis (and this is where things get dicey) is on the strained relations that arise between Mr. Hitchcock (Anthony Hopkins) and his wife-partner Alma Reville (Helen Mirren) when she decides to work on a writing project with the younger, somewhat libertine-ish Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston), who’d co-written the scripts of Hitchcock’s Stage Fright and Strangers on a Train. Alma has been Hitch’s devoted partner, supporter and artistic collaborator for decades and she wants a vacation — a little writing excitement on her own. It’s not sexual infidelity at all — it’s creative infidelity. And it really gets Hitch’s goat.

It’s odd that Alma would decide to “cheat” with Cook, as it were, just as her husband is beginning work on what they both believe is the most financially risky project of his career — a grisly black-and-white murder drama that Hitchcock is largely financing through his own Shamley Productions, but more precisely from the mortgaging of his Bel Air home. But Alma does it anyway. Her rallying cry could be “now is the time to go off and stretch my independent creative legs! When my husband’s back is against the wall!” But as I sat and watched and kicked it around I started to say to myself, “Why is Alma’s little writing project on the side and Alfred’s consternation…why is the movie spending time on a little domestic issue that nobody in this theatre gives a damn about?

I sure didn’t. It was fairly well-handled for what it was, okay, but it was a mistake. I could feel the vibe around me — people weren’t engaged. I was there to re-experience the ups and downs of making a great film and to have fun watching the acting-out of all the stories I’ve read and heard about for years. I’m the kind of guy the filmmakers are looking to please, no? A knowledgable film buff looking for a good geeky time. But no — we’re basically given a kind of truncated Cliff Notes version of the making of Psycho. A scene here, a bit there, a familiar backdrop or prop or costume, several Hitchcock quips and bon mots about this scene or that actor. And a lot of dialogue about financing. And three or four discussions with obstinate people who don’t get it.

As far as I can discern there were two reasons why a film everyone thought would be about the making of Psycho is only partly about that. The first, I’m guessing, is that Gervasi, Laughlin and their producers, Montecito’s Tom Pollock and Ivan Reitman, decided that they had to deliver more than just a historical procedural. They had to create something with an emotional core or flow to it, and therefore something different and unexpected. I said before that I respect the attempt — I just didn’t care about Alma and Alfred’s relationship issues that much. Except, that is, for that one great scene when Alma tells Hitch off — Mirren’s big stand-out.

But the real reason, I suspect, is that Hitchcock pretty much had to focus on the Alfred-and-Alma stuff because they were legally boxed in by the Hitchcock estate. (Which is controlled, I gather, by Hitchcock’s 84 year-old daughter Pat and perhaps others in the family). I was told at the Hitchcock after-party that the Hitchcock estate didn’t want what they believed were negative portrayals of Mr. Hitchcock’s manner or nature, and so they legally prevented the filmmakers from (a) shooting recreations of any shots in the original Psycho, (b) using footage from the original film, and (c) using the still-standing Psycho house and Bates Motel set on the Universal lot.

What this boils down to is that Hitchcock in effect has an invisible antagonist. Unseen, off-screen, never alluded to and not visually suggested in any way, but an antagonist all the same. I don’t know but I strongly suspect that without the roadblocks thrown down by the Hitchcock family, more of Hitchcock would have been about challenges and thrills of creating Psycho and probably, I’m guessing, a better film overall.

I was bothered, by the way, that Gervasi didn’t try harder to duplicate the marquee design of Manhattan’s DeMille theatre when Psycho opened. Special logo art was created for the DeMille marquee; in Gervasi’s film the marquee is a traditional one with red and black letters hanging on metal frames.

I tapped out a beginning of a Hitchcock review late last night and then crashed. The plan this morning was to jump right back in, bang out a thousand words or so and move on. Instead I got caught up in a swirl of research and links and photo searches (and maybe denial on some level), and I was soon sinking into quicksand along with Daud from Lawrence of Arabia. And now I have to do a Cristian Mungiu interview so I’ll give it another shot when I return.

In the meantime, Hitchcock has received praise from Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, mild approval from Hollywood Reporter critic Todd MCCarthy and a pan from Variety‘s Justin Chang.

For those who can’t scale the paywall, a Chang excerpt that I mostly agree with: “Loosely based on Stephen Rebello‘s terrifically exhaustive 1990 book ‘Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho,’ the screenplay by John J. Laughlin (a co-writer on Black Swan) is understandably hard-pressed to accommodate every fascinating aspect of the pic’s production history.

“Still, it’s disappointing that the film never gets beyond a superficial re-creation [and] that essentially contradicts the reality that Psycho‘s limited means, far from exposing the director’s incompetence, in fact revealed the extent of his mastery. As such, Hitchcock offers almost zero insight into the peculiar workings of creative genius, or of the rich, taboo-shattering legacy of the film whose making it documents.”

It’s not so much that Laughlin and director Sacha Gervasi “never get beyond” a superficial recreation as they’ve clearly chosen to go with a series of spotty, glancing reenactments of the making of Psycho in order to make room for the jealousy-and-love story between Alfred(Anthony Hopkins) and his wife Alma Reville (Helen Mirren). As I started to say last night, I respect their decision to try and deliver a fresh take on an oft-told story. The question is whether or not viewers will find this angle sufficiently interesting.

“Nothing quite rivals the election…[it’s] the season finale of the biggest primetime reality show…I’m not trivializing it, but there’s nothing in pop culture…there’s no song, no TV show, no blockbuster movie that quite rivals it for suspense and saturation…it’s a buddy movie with a twist…the uptight white guy and the cool black guy [who], whatever you think of them ideologically or politically, are pretty interesting characters.” — N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott speaking during 11.2 “Sweet Spot.”

Sweet Spot guys David Carr, A.O. Scott.

One thing’s for sure when you watch Cristian Miungiu‘s Beyond The Hills, a grim, lean and severely disciplined drama about suppressed longing in a remote Romanian monastery: you don’t want to live in it. (Certainly not in the sense that critic Jim Hoberman wanted on a certain fanciful level to literally reside within Francois Truffaut‘s Shoot The Piano Player.) But you’re not looking to escape it either.

When I saw it last May my feeling, more or less, was “this is obviously the opposite of lightweight escapism and while I’m glad to be absorbing a new film from the esteemed maker of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, it’s nice knowing that it’ll be over in a couple of hours because this is Diary of a Country Priest plus libidinal longing plus harsh weather plus screaming fits, repression, torture and tragedy.”

Sundance Selects won’t be making Mungiu’s film viewable until March 2013, but it’s currently being screened and promoted for awards-season consideration as a Best Foreign Language Feature contender.

Here’s part of what I wrote from Cannes on 5.18.12: “[This is] an intensely austere, moralistic, monastic and harsh-atmosphere thing with repressed Sapphic undertones and all kinds of authoritarian foulness and constipation. The slowly building film observes the tyranny of religion and considers the inevitable result of trying to keep long-building steam from escaping the pot.

“Mungiu’s screenplay is based upon a 2006 book called “Deadly Confession” by Tatiana Niculescu Bran, which is based on true events.

“Boiled down, it’s about love denied and an improvised exorcism gone wrong. It’s about two female friends, Voiochita and Alina (Cosmina Stratan, Cristina Flutur), who grew up together and became lovers in an abusive state orphanage, and who are reunited when Alina comes to visit Voichita, who has become a nun at a remote and highly primitive convent in rural Romania.

“It’s basically about Alina wanting Voichita to be her lover again and perhaps even get her to abandon the convent and leave with her, and when Voichita refuses it’s about Alina deciding she wants also to submit to the discipline and denial of a monastic life but not really — she just wants to cling to Voichita under any circumstance. These currents are soon decipherable, of course, and the priest and the nuns to what they can to head them off at the pass if not squelch the emotions, and eventually things turn manic and loony and then violent. It all turns out very badly.

I also tweeted that it’s “a long, somewhat downerish Bresson film about faith, blockage, monastic ritual and denial, love, insanity, eroticsim, exorcism & the evil one. Very austere, muffled and forbidding. Vaguely creepy, chilly, very slow and deliberate. Disturbing but it doesn’t really pay off. And yet it sort of does. Could or would the ascetic Bresson have made Beyond The Hills? And if he had, would his God have been pleased, angry or non-plussed?”

For the most part Sacha Gervasi‘s Hitchcock, which opened the 2012 AFI Fest tonight, exudes a dry, whimsical tone that echoes Alfred Hitchcock‘s droll TV-host personality. And a feeling of scrupulous composition. But this is not about the making of Psycho as much as a love story about Hitch (Anthony Hopkins) and his wife and creative partner of 40 years, Alma Reville (Helen Mirren) and a crisis of fidelity that arose, the film says, during filming. The Hitchcock team decided, in short, to go for emotion, obsession and the facing of demons.

Hitchcock director Sacha Gervasi during Roosevelt Hotel after-party.

I respect and admire the decision to not make this a nuts-and-bolts “how it was made” film — it’s ballsy and depthy. And talky and often indoorsy and shadowy and MCU-ish. Which also fits the pre-Kennedy period and the climate and the older-marrieds-going-through-a-rough-patch narrative. It’s all of a piece.

Except it’s 1:30 am and I just feel too whipped to write a review, but I’ll expand tomorrow morning. In the meantime here are some post-screening tweets.

The most likely Best Actor nominees as we speak (in this order): Daniel Day Lewis, Lincoln; Joaquin Phoenix, The Master; Denzel Washington, Flight; John Hawkes, The Sessions; Jack Black, Bernie; Bradley Cooper, Silver Linings Playbook; Jean-Louis Trintignant, Amour; Richard Gere, Arbitrage. Only five nominees. Who gets the axe?

Bernie costars Jack Black, Shirley MacLaine at Soho House party the day before yesterday.

If I were a dictatorial Emperor of Hollywood I would give the five nominations to DDL, Denzel, Jack, Hawkes and Bradley Cooper. To hell with Pheonix and his creepy, whiskey-sipping, head-tilt, serpent-tongue routine…”neeeeeeee!!!” Trintignant is very good as the aging husband coping with the end, but somebody has to get chopped. Gere delivers his best performance since Primal Fear but…this doesn’t feel good. I don’t like cutting people. Nominate all eight. I don’t care.