The New York Film Festival’s closing-night film will be announced later this week, but for now the big announcement is that David Cronenberg‘s A Dangerous Method and Pedro Almodovar‘s The Skin That I Live In will both get the gala screening treatment. The voltage is entirely with the Cronenberg, a kind of Freudian-Jungian romantic-obsessive period piece that is said to be quite good. Almodovar’s film was seen last May in Cannes and was in large part tagged as a toney, intriguing but somewhat minor work.

The most promising aspect of the Cronenberg? From a distance, at least? The fact that Vincent Cassel‘s character is called “Otto Gross.”

I’m hearing that Tomas Alfredson‘s Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy won’t get the gala treatment because The Dark Knight Returns director Chris Nolan won’t let Tinker star Gary Oldman off the set, even for a night or two, and the NYFF won’t do a gala screening without stars so the film’s absence isn’t a quality but an attendance issue.

Gary Oldman‘s manager Douglas Urbanski wrote me the following about an hour ago: “Tinker was indeed offered the opening night slot for the New York Film Festival (something I also participated in last year, as it happens). However, the shooting schedule for The Dark Knight Rises could not be rearranged for Gary to be free and in New York that night. Gary would love to have gone, [but] even with enormous efforts from Chris Nolan, the schedule could not be adjusted.

“As for the other New York Film Festival slots mentioned, Gary was indeed available, but no one, neither the American distributor nor the Festival, asked Gary to attend.”

Fans of The Social Network will recall that Urbanski killed as Larry Summers in that scene with the Winklevii.