“How could a movie called Dunkirk, in this day and age, draw so many people to movie theaters across the country? It’s something of a miracle, a giant middle finger to all the claims that there’s no place for big risks on the big screen anymore.

“This is a work of pure cinema, speaking the same language as the cut from flame to desert in Lawrence of Arabia or bone to spaceship in 2001. It’s also remarkably specific. It captures something that feels uniquely British — the exchanges near the end of the film for example, as the weary soldiers return, bottling up a tremendous reserve of feeling within just a few words. There’s a real poetry in their stoicism; for all the bombs and shrieks of gunfire, this is a quiet film.

“In that combination of scope and subtlety, the enormous canvas and the tiny, telling detail, Dunkirk feels closer to the best work of David Lean than any recent movie I can recall.” — Damien Chazelle writing about Dunkirk for Variety.

From “The Colossus of Nolan,” posted on 7.18.17: “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).

Another salacious Bryan Singer floodgate was opened a couple of hours ago when Deadline‘s Dawn C. Chmielewski and Dominic Patten posted a tell-all from an ex-boyfriend, Bret Tyer Skopek, who roamed around Singer’s glam orbit from ’13 until…oh, roughly two years ago. It reads like those Singer stories that surfaced during April and May of 2014. (I posted four — 4.17.14, 4.18.14, 4.19.14, 5.5.14 — and then a closer (8.27.14).

I guess I was too hesitant yesterday in acknowledging that Singer’s explosive temper wasn’t the only reason he left the Bohemian Rhapsody set three weeks before the end of filming. Temper was part of it. He’d gone AWOL on at least one previous film, The Usual Suspects, and allegedly one or two others. But this fresh wave of twink bacchanalia stories can’t be coincidental.

Publicists Liz Mahoney and Megan Pachon have departed IDPR, where they’ve both worked for over a decade and repped clients like Jennifer Lawrence, Greta Gerwig, Amy Adams and Chris Evans. They’re presumably planning to start their own p.r. outfit. This happens in Hollywood; younger operators break off from the big agency and start their own shops. IDPR founders Kelly Bush-Novak and Mara Baxbaum told Variety that Mahoney and Pachon “have grown up at ID, beginning as assistants and becoming formidable publicists…we wish them all the best in their future endeavors.”

According to comments from Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson during the latest “Screen Talk” podcast, the Academy steak-eaters (i.e., older straight dudes with spreading midsections) have shared some eye-rolling opinions, at least in Thompson’s view.

One guy, she says, told her he “didn’t like seeing Sally Hawkins naked” in The Shape of Water, “and I was like ‘oh my God!'” And a lot of men, Thompson says, don’t identify with the young girl protagonist in Angelina Jolie‘s First They Killed My Father.

And one thing that especially concerns Thompson, she says, is that “some of the [Academy] men are not necessarily fond of the feminist message” in Steven Spielberg‘s The Post (Sony, 12.22), and the fact that “it’s not really about journalists chasing down the story and doing the reporting,” as in Spotlight or All The President’s Men.

Group photo used for recent Hollywood Reporter cover story: (l. to r.) The Post producer Amy Pascal, producer Kristie Macosko Krieger, Meryl Streep, director Steven Spielberg, screenwriter Liz Hannah.

The Post is essentially a story about Post publisher Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep), and about whether or not she’ll find the conviction to risk the Post‘s financial solvency and political security by supporting a fervent desire on the part of Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) to publish excerpts from the Pentagon Papers and thereby go up against the Nixon administration.

But it’s also, says Thompson, “about how women were treated at that time. And what worries me is that [Sony award-season strategists] are making a campaign about a woman.”

Thompson is referring to that recent Hollywood Reporter cover showing Spielberg surrounded by all of his female Post colleagues — Streep, Post producer Amy Pascal, screenwriter Liz Hannah (but not Josh Singer), and longtime Spielberg-affiliated producer Kristie Macosko Krieger.

“And I keep forgetting that in the Academy there are a lot of older guys and a lot of men who are really threatened and freaked out by this sexual harassment stuff…they are really scared of it…it affects the order that they’re accustomed to.”

Everyone recognizes (or will soon recognize) that The Post is a very good film, but, Thompson warns, this doesn’t mean these older, freaked-out guys “are necessarily going to vote for women in the Academy Awards.”

When Allison Janney worked as a record company assistant (presumably sometime in the early to mid ’80s), she was sometimes asked to deliver plain-wrapper packages to this or that musician. Someone eventually confided that she was in fact delivering drugs of whatever kind. No biggie and no foul, but that didn’t make Janney “an unwitting drug dealer,” as she puts it in this Variety chat with Sam Rockwell. Dealers are always in on the scheme. If I’d been part of the conversation, I would have delicately opined that Janney, no offense, was an unwitting mule.

Needless to add, Janney and Rockwell are all but locked as Best Supporting Actress and Actor Oscar nominees for their respective performances in I, Tonya and Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri.

Straight from Gold Derby:

A trailer for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (Universal, 6.22.18) has just dropped. Among other things it tells us that Bryce Dallas Howard‘s Claire Dearing, the former park manager for Jurassic World who has founded the Dinosaur Protection Group in order to evacuate the surviving dinosaurs from Isla Nublar, will not be wearing heels. Or at least she isn’t in the trailer’s opening shot.

Three days after being fired off Bohemian Rhapsody, it’s been announced that Bryan Singer is being sued for allegedly raping a 17-year-old boy, Cesar Sanchez-Guzman, on a yacht moored near Seattle in 2003. The details are in this Variety story, posted today at 5:15 pm by Gene Maddaus and Ricardo Lopez. Is there a connection between this lawsuit and Singer’s recent dismissal? Whatever the real story, it can’t be known at this stage. Sanchez-Guzman is represented by Miami attorney Jeffrey Herman, who represented Michael Egan in his 2014 lawsuit against Singer, television producer Garth Ancier and former Disney executive David Neuman, according to Variety.

The basic thrust of my initial 9.12.17 review of I, Tonya (“An Ugly Stick Movie That Will Leave Welts”) was that director Craig Gillespie‘s decision to paint the Tonya Harding story with a dark satirical brush was…well, not pleasing. I found it vulgar, abusive and unfunny, mainly because the story itself is inescapably gross and oppressive. It seems as if N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis feels roughly the same way. “As I, Tonya skips here and there and thickens the plot, it becomes increasingly baffling why the filmmakers decided to put a comic spin on this pathetic, dispiriting story,” she writes. “No matter how hard the movie tries to coax out laughs, there’s little about Ms. Harding, her circumstances or her choices that skews as funny.”

That Quentin Tarantino-J.J. Abrams plan to make an R-rated Star Trek is a left-handed admission, of course, that the Trek franchise has run dry and has nowhere else to go. R-rated will mean what exactly? Random profanity, I’m guessing. Which will make the Enterprise crew seem more casually relatable, I suppose, to Millenials. But it will only amount to a cosmetic change. Deadline‘s Mike Fleming reports that the Dirty Star Trek project “is moving at warp speed” with Mark L. Smith (The Revenant) will probably write the script. “Take her into fucking warp speed, Mr. Scott.”

via GIPHY

I’ve just watched a three-year-old Trailers From Hell by Guillermo del Toro about Alfred Hitchcock‘s I Confess. GDT, a chubby Catholic boy when he first saw it on a black-and-white TV in Guadalajara, focuses on (a) his special susceptibility to a tale of guilt, hidden motives and absolution, and (b) the on-set conflict between Hitchcock and the method-minded Montgomery Clift. But he doesn’t mention the strongest aspect of this 1953 release, which is Hitchcock’s sublime editing and especially his use of montage. The way the guilt-ridden Mrs. Keller avoids Clift in the very beginning of clip #1, for example, and how she can’t stop staring at the back of his head later on. The shooting-in-the-crowd montage toward the finale [after the TFH GDT essay] is brilliant.

[WARNING TO SPOILER WHINERS: I decided not to bypass a certain fascinating plot point in Phantom Thread, and so at the very end of this review there are SPOILERISH observations. If you want to steer clear of the spoiler stuff, read the first 20 graphs and let it go at that. Don’t read the six-paragraph section titled THERE WILL BE SPOILERS. Do the first 20 and you’ll be fine.]

Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Phantom Thread (Focus Features, 12.25) is a first-rate parlor drama about some very exacting and demanding Type-A people — three, to be exact — going to war in mid 1950s England. Indoors, I mean. And very methodically.

It’s an absorbing, brilliantly refined drama about a bad marriage, which is to say a marriage made in hell, which is to say a marriage that should never have happened save for the influence of Satan. As with all marriages, it leads to a ghastly struggle of wills and finally, after the last futile drops of resistance are spent, to surrender on the part of the husband.

This hellish union happens because Daniel Day Lewis‘s Reynolds Woodcock, an elite London couturier (i.e., a fashion designer who makes and sells elegant clothing to rich clients), doesn’t know himself, and so he attracts and then entices Alma (Vicky Krieps), a young, off-pretty waitress, to be his lover and collaborator and eventually his wife. Woodcock thinks he’s “in love” but he really wants his dead mother to come back to life and take care of him.

The problem is that Woodcock, aided and abetted by Cyril (Lesley Manville), his Mrs. Danvers-like sister and business manager, is a control freak who doesn’t want anyone interrupting his work regimen, which is very strict and exacting. The other problem is that the willful and opinionated Alma wants what she wants. The final solution to this horrific power struggle is, of course, capitulation.

Phantom Thread is, no question, a very well-made PTA film, adult and dry and precisely measured. And decisive. I liked it enough to see it twice, and I enjoyed it a lot more than Anderson’s relentlessly hateful Inherent Vice, and I came to understand it better than The Master, which I loved for the eccentric chops but which finally left me with “what the hell was that all about besides a Scientology tale?”

And yet Phantom Thread is rather modest in scale. Two sets — a London townhouse and a country house — and three characters, and all of it about whether Alma will do Reynolds’ bidding or vice versa.

It’s very well composed, in short, and perfectly acted. But slow as molasses. Not a “date movie.” Not a thriller. Basically a perverse film about who gets to run the marriage. It’s an allegory about that. A little bit like Darren Aronofsky‘s mother! in a way, although in this scenario the wife isn’t roasted alive and an infant child isn’t passed around and devoured by a mob.