This is how I live my life, 1/8 of a mile at a time. Before I know it I’ve gone a whole mile without a blowout or running out of gas or being sideswiped by another vehicle. And then another mile. And then it’s time to crash. Pull over, I mean, and get some shut-eye. The sun comes up the next day and I submit to the same drill. Eyes on the road, sensible speeds, both hands on the wheel, etc.

I’ve watched the five-year-old MGM Bluray of Billy Wilder‘s The Apartment a couple of times and I’ve never said to myself, “This is nice but it could look better.” Well, I suppose the 2012 disc could do with a little less DNR heightening, but to my plebian eyes it’s always looked great — extra-sharp detail, rich array of monochrome tones, mine-shaft blacks.

Why then did I pop for the new 4K restored Arrow Bluray version, which will arrive at the end of the week? Because Arrow techs rolled up their sleeves and worked with the original camera negative to restore this 1960 film. They applied standard restoration techniques (dirt and scratch removal, image stabilization, etc.) and presumably delivered a more film-like final product.

But mainly I fell for the Arrow sell. I wanted to believe that I’d notice significant improvements over the 2012 Bluray (i.e., a “bump”), and so I invested in that dream, however likely that may be.

David Brook of blueprintrreview says “the remastered print looks fantastic — clean, detailed and featuring a beautiful dynamic contrast range.”

A critic with fanboydestroy reviewed the Arrow disc about ten days ago: “As I haven’t seen the MGM Bluray version, the new Arrow Academy restoration is probably going to be the go-to version for a while. Using a combination of digital and standard restoration techniques, the film looks phenomenal…all cleaned up for higher resolution 4K sets.”

I’ve been saying all along that Fatih Akin‘s In The Fade (Magnolia, 12.27) is a gripping, must-see melodrama, and that Diane Kruger‘s fierce, emotionally raw performance — she plays a widow seeking vengeance against neo-Nazi terrorists who’ve murdered her son and Turkish-born husband — absolutely warrants a Best Actress Oscar nomination.

This grim but compelling German-lanugage drama, which has been shortlisted for the 2017 Best Foreign-Language Feature Oscar, finally opens tomorrow in Los Angeles (West L.A.’s Royal) and New York (IFC Center, Landmark at 57 West).

In The Fade is much better film than the aggregate critic scores — 60% from Metacritic, 63% from Rotten Tomatoes — would have you think. I know when a film is nailing it true and straight, and there’s no question that Akin’s film is worth seeing at a theatre, paying for parking. buying the popcorn, etc.

In The Fade director, producer and screenwriter Fatih Akin during a recent chat the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills.

From my 10.4.17 review: “Set mostly in Hamburg, Fade starts with Katja (Kruger), her clean-living Kurdish/Turkish husband Nuri (Numan Acar) with a drug-dealing past, and their young son Rocco in happy-family mode. That lasts less than ten minutes. A home-made nail bomb outside Nuri’s office explodes, and Katja is suddenly a child-less widow. She wilts under agonizing pain and a near-total emotional meltdown, and understandably decides to temporarily medicate with drugs, and then nearly ends it all by slitting her wrists.

“But then a suspicion she’d shared with her attorney, Danilo (Denis Moschitto), about anti-immigrant Nazis having planted the bomb turns out to be accurate. Katja learns that evidence she had given the police has led to the arrest of Andre and Edda Moller (Ulrich Brandhoff, Hanna Hilsdorf), a pair of young neo-Nazis with international connections. There’s no doubt these two are the culprits — Katja had seen Edda leave a bicycle near her husband’s office two or three hours before the blast.

“Then comes a second-act portion dealing with a trial of the accused that doesn’t end satisfactorily, and finally a third act in which the acutely frustrated Katja travels to Greece to carry out her own form of revenge-justice.

During my first viewing of Dunkirk I kept thinking back to this Atonement tracking shot. Why the hell were they shooting those horses? The image of that far-off rotating ferris wheel is brilliant. Technical bravura for technical bravura’s sake? Not for me — Wright didn’t just capture the entire Dunkirk sprawl but told several little “stories” as the camera floated along. Director Joe Wright was the king of the world when this shot was captured 11 years ago; Darkest Hour is full of vigor and rich compositions, but no one scene rivals this. Hats off to cinematographer Seamus McGarvey.

Variety has asked a few critics to riff on some 2018 films they’re especially looking forward to. The list contains two forehead-slappers — Steven Spielberg‘s Ready Player One and Ava DuVernay‘s A Wrinkle in Time. (If you can’t tell what the latter has in store by way of last month’s trailer, you need to watch it again.) Leave it to Peter Debruge to speak excitedly of these.

Amy Nicholson has singled out Alex Garland‘s Annihilation, but you know that Paramount’s decision to preview it at last March’s Cinemacon and then push it into an early ’18 release indicates some kind of droop factor.

I was confused by Richard Kuipers‘ mention of Anthony Maras‘ The Palace, a thriller about the 2008 Mumbai attacks, as it’s been referred to as Hotel Mumbai for the last year or so.

Roma director Alfonso Cuaron during a March 2017 press conference about the end of filming.

I completely share Owen Gleiberman‘s excitement about Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma, Bryan Singer‘s Bohemian Rhapsody, Asghar Farhadi‘s Everybody Knows and Damien Chazelle‘s First Man.

HE’s leading ’18 hotties (apart from the Cuaron, Chazelle, Farhadi and Singer): Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman, Luca Guadagnino‘s Suspiria, Adam McKay‘s Backseat, Steve McQueen‘s Widows, Terrence Malick‘s Radegund, Barry Jenkins‘ If Beale Street Could Talk, Bjorn Runge‘s The Wife, Felix von Groeningen‘s Beautiful Boy, Spike Lee‘s Black Klansman, Jennifer Kent‘s The Nightingale, Paolo Sorrentino‘s Loro (life of Silvio Berlusconi), Paul Verhoeven‘s Blessed Virgin and Laszlo Nemes‘ Sunset, a drama set in pre-WWI Budapest. (14)

This Jay Thomas story is decades old, but eight years by Late Night with David Letterman. I had honestly never heard it until this morning. It loses something if you don’t have an image of Clayton Moore’s Lone Ranger. Best line: “…that pause the stoned people have before they react.” Sorry to read that Thomas died last August.

Loony-right spokespersons are always in lockstep when it comes to news-show interviews. The current unified, Trump-mandated message is “the justice department is harboring a corrupt, agenda-driven, deep-state cabal,” etc. The troops, in short, appear to be fluffing up the bed for either (a) Trump’s dismissal of special prosecutor Robert Mueller or (b) his replacing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein with a pro-Trump overseer who will hinder or restrict Mueller’s investigation. When and if this happens, an immediate and widespread response is essential.

WATCH: GOP Rep. Francis Rooney calls for 'purge' of FBI, accuses some in the agency of being a part of the 'deep state' pic.twitter.com/kkJTBPFeui

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) December 26, 2017

It feels funny to be agreeing with Tucker Carlson’s essay about Matt Damon. As everyone knows Damon was recently all but lynched for remarks he shared with Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers ten days ago. “There’s not a single sentiment in [what Damon said to Travers] that’s not defensible or that 90 percent of the American population would find over the top or outrageous,” Carlson said. “It’s all within bounds or it would have been last year. [But] because a handful of Twitter users don’t like it, the rest of us have to pretend that Matt Damon is somehow guilty of something awful, and if we don’t pretend, we may ourselves be seen as collaborators in whatever crimes he supposedly committed and forced to share his punishment.”

There’s a contingent that feels Call Me By Your Name isn’t queer enough. It’s too chaste, too subtle, too geared to “str8” guys like myself. Maybe they’re right. Maybe the thing keeping Call Me By Your Name from true greatness is the absence of a nice splooge shot.

A 2nd annual Park City Women’s March will happen on Saturday, 1.20, at 9 am. Barring some unexpected hazard and exactly like last year, Hollywood Elsewhere will be there with bells on. Passions were running high 11 months ago, but with the building of the #MeToo movement over the last ten weeks plus the 16 (or is it 19?) Trump assaults plus the generally deranged mindset of his administration since 1.20.17, the fervor should be even stronger next month. Here’s a tee-shirt link.

31 years ago and four months after a calamitous U.S. debut, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz‘s Howard The Duck opened in England with a new title — Howard…A New Breed of Hero — and without any indications (at least in the print ads) that the hero was white and feathered. I don’t know if this approach was used in other European territories, but it would’ve made sense, given what happened with the straightforward U.S. sell. If IMDB figures are correct (total U.S. haul was $16,295,774, worldwide gross was $21,667,000), the European marketing didn’t help. Honest admission: I’ve never watched Howard The Duck start to finish — I’ve only seen a third of it on DVD.

I realize this photo was taken last August, but it’s an American classic. It belongs in the same gallery with that shot of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J day, that woman wailing over a guy killed at Kent State University, Barack Obama hugging the grieving parents of Newtown, etc.