Earlier today Dark Horizons‘ Garth Franklin reported that the release date of Oliver Stone‘s Snowden has been bumped again. It was initially shifted from late December (two months ago) to 5.13.16. Now Open Road has pushed it back to 9.16.16. Franklin has written that this puts it “back into awards contention”, but opening a movie in the middle of the 2016 Toronto Film Festival (which will run from 9.8 to 9.18) is not a good award-season strategy.

A mid-Toronto Film Festival opening is actually a telegraphed message to critics and award-season blogaroonies as follows: “Snowden is a first-rate Oliver Stone spy thriller but honestly? Thrillers are thrillers and we’re fine with it being a smart piece of adult entertainment. We don’t really see it as an awards contender. If we did we’d obviously open it sometime between mid October and early December. But we don’t want to open it in the summer either because the subject matter doesn’t fit the warm-weather paradigm so this is a reasonably good fit.”

Last December I complained about what I believed was an intention by Criterion to to present The Manchurian Candidate within a 1.85:1 aspect ratio. The info was wrong — the forthcoming Bluray is matted at 1.75:1. I didn’t imagine the 1.85 so I’m guessing it was posted on the Criterion website page and then changed. In any event, 1.75 is an acceptable format.

Hollywood Elsewhere to Matt Atchity of Rotten Tomatoes, Tim Gray of Variety, Nicole Sperling of Entertainment Weekly, Sasha Stone of Awards Daily and Glenn Whipp of the L.A. Times: Last night I caught my third viewing of The Big Short. I saw it with a first-timer (a lady who knows the markets) at the Landmark on Pico. Loved Ryan Gosling, still irritated by Christian Bale (Aspergers personality , odd teeth , bare feet). It’s a very smart, sometimes funny, engaging-as-far-as-it-goes tutorial and a total Bernie Sanders movie…great! Politics aside I liked it better than I did the first time and about as much as I did the second, but it doesn’t have that Best Picture schwing…it just doesn’t. I think it’s obvious that em>The Revenant will take the Best Picture Oscar. And yet you’re continuing to predict a Big Short win on Gold Derby.com. And that’s totally fine. I admire your fortitude. But could you share your reasons why? Above and beyond the statistical precedent factor or the PGA vote? Gut-wise, what tells you that it has a decent shot? Because the lady I saw it with last night was going “it’s too hard to follow…it’s not well-organized, Bale is too weird, I liked Spotlight much better,” etc.

The Path is a 10-episode Hulu series debuting on 3.30.16. Aaron Paul, Michelle Monaghan, Hugh Dancy, Stephanie Hsu, Rockmond Dunbar, Kyle Allen, Amy Forsyth, Kathleen Turner, Minka Kelly. Sorry but I’ve always found movies about cults (including the reasonably decent Split Image and the above-average Guayana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones) kind of toxic.

Click here to jump past HE Sink-In

Horror is viral, waiting in the blood. How to release it? Easy — deliver the shocks, summon the grotesque, bare the fangs, drool the saliva, screech the soundtrack…the usual bag of tricks. Delivering a half-decent fright flick is within the abilities of most marginally talented directors. But it takes an exceptional wizard to finesse things in a subliminal way…to instill something that creeps and crawls beyond the corner of your eye…a slightly demonic something-or-other that is elusive and yet deliberate and merciless as fuck.

Even more exceptional (and pretty close to unique) would be a period horror film that operates according to the myths of its day, that eschews the reliable Wes Craven devices in favor of resuscitating nightmares that terrified the hell out of modest, rational people three or four centuries ago…goats, crows, claws, beaks, witches and even the most fleeting thoughts of sex out of wedlock or even, you know, sexual notions about your own sister or daughter. Out, demon!

This is what Robert Eggers‘ The Witch (A24, 2.19) does and then some. Set on a small New England farm in the early 1600s, it delivers creeps and chills according to the myths and suppressions of its time. Which isn’t to imply it errs on the side of subtlety…far from it. It’s just playing a different game.

If your tastes run to the primitive, you’ll most likely say “Hey, where’s the usual scary-ass shit that I’m used to? C’mon..I paid for my ticket and my popcorn…lay it on me!” There’s no talking to people like this. It takes a sliver of sensitivity and a little bit of brain-cell percolation to get what The Witch is up to, and the fact is that animals like what they like, want what they want, and never the twain shall meet.

Here’s how I put it a month ago: “The Witch may be too good for some — too subterranean, too otherworldly, too scrupulous in its avoidance of cliches. And because it goes for chills and creeps rather than shock and gore.

Harper Lee didn’t quite make it to 90, but calendar years were barely of interest when it came to her legend, which became fixed and gleaming when “To Kill A Mockingbird” was published in 1960, and particularly after Robert Mulligan, Horton Foote, Gregory Peck and Alan Pakula released their film version on 12.25.62. Last year’s publication of “Go Set A Watchman,” which was sold as a “Mockingbird” sequel but which was basically an early “Mockingbird” draft when Lee first submitted it in 1957, was regrettable, but certain parties wanted the payday.

Written by Gregory Peck for the paperback edition of “Mockingbird”: “The Southern town of Maycomb, Alabama, reminds me of the California town [i.e., La Jolla] I grew up in. The characters of the novel are like people I knew as a boy. I think perhaps the great appeal of the novel is that it reminds readers everywhere of a person or a town they have known. It is to me a universal story — moving, passionate and told with great humor and tenderness.”

From a 2.18 Anne Thompson/Indiewire piece, “Why Iñárritu’s The Revenant Will Likely Win Best Picture”: “Why, if The Revenant, is such an arduous, demanding, rigorous and large-scale period piece, did it not win the PGA award that went to The Big Short?

“One answer may be that the producers saw a movie that wasn’t, in the conventional sense of the word, well-produced. Coming in over-budget at $135 million, The Revenant broke the rules, forcing all its departments to service, in effect, the needs and demands of the cinematographer in the last hour and a half of natural magic-hour light every day, to make any shot possible in a 360-degree world, to chase locations, mostly without backup from any cover sets.

“No producer ever wants to make a movie under those conditions. And it’s unlikely that Iñárritu himself would repeat the experience. He had never made a big-budget studio film before.

A copy of Owen Gleiberman‘s “Movie Freak: My Life Watching Movies” (Hachette, 2.23) arrived today. I’ve known Gleiberman, one of the most eloquent and engaging critics on the planet, since my early-to-mid-’90s freelancing period with Entertainment Weekly. Gleiberman was a senior critic at that once-dynamic publication from the launch in 1990 until April 2014, when he was cut loose. OG’s smooth prose and perceptive views didn’t appeal to the lightweight giggly girls who had gradually become EW‘s reader base.

I went right to the second-to-last chapter, “The Book of Eli”, to read about Gleiberman’s last days there.

The chilly axe-man was Jess Cagle, who had been named EW and People‘s editorial director in January 2014. Cagle “was someone I’d always liked a great deal,” Gleiberman writes. “I had respect for Jess’ editing chops and enjoyed his airy corporate version of shade-throwing wit, and I felt that he might be the perfect person to recharge EW‘s pleasure centers. I told a lot of my colleagues, ‘He’s exactly what we need.’

“Be careful what you think you’re glad for.

“Let’s be clear about something: In his first two years at the helm, Jess Cagle saved Entertainment Weekly. Her whisked it back from the dead and made it crackle again. At the same time he didn’t like ‘negative’ stories. And there was a trio of movie stars — Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, Will Ferrell — whom Cagle appeared to have placed on a special perch where little seen as hurtful to their careers could be published in EW or on ew.com.

Remember the classic motorcade ambush scene in Phillip Noyce‘s Clear and Present Danger (’94) when an army of drug-cartel mercenaries killed several U.S. government guys in their SUVs? Remember when that scene was a hot new turn of the screw and action fans everywhere were talking about it? Babak Najafi‘s London Has Fallen (Gramercy, 3.14) is the same old idea, trying for the same old juice. Except recent events have killed the fantasy element. A couple of weeks ago CNN.com’s Lewis Beale noted that there’s something “profoundly irresponsible” about such a film being released in the wake of San Bernardino, Paris and Burkina Faso. “You have to wonder why a Hollywood studio would put out a film such as this one, which is practically guaranteed to ratchet up the paranoia factor,” Beale wrote. “It is, after all, hitting theaters at a time when fear of terrorist attacks is at an all-time high.” It’s pornography, all right. I would have a film as good as Clear and Present Danger again.

For whatever reason, Woody Allen‘s distribution relationship with Sony Pictures Classics, which began a few years ago, has been interrupted by Amazon Studios. All North American rights, including theatrical and streaming, to Allen’s latest film, an untitled 1930s romantic dramedy with Steve Carell, Jesse Eisenberg, Blake Lively, Jeannie Berlin, Parker Posey, Kristen Stewart, Corey Stoll and Ken Stott, has been acquired by Amazon. Amazon will open the film theatrically sometime this summer, followed by a streaming debut several weeks later. Amazon isn’t fooling around. They’ve also acquired Kenneth Lonergan‘s Oscar-bound Manchester-By-The-Sea during the recently-concluded Sundance Film Festival. “Like all beginning relationships, there is much hope, mutual affection, and genuine goodwill — the lawsuits come later,” Allen said in a statement. Allen is also writing and directing an untitled six-episode television series for Amazon starring himself, Elaine May and Miley Cyrus. It begins shooting next month.

I only saw 40 minutes worth of Deadpool last Tuesday, and since then I’ve managed to flush most of it out of my head. It’s a glib, porno-violent Daffy Duck cartoon that deserved a quick box-office death. Instead it’s become one of the most successful Marvel flicks ever released — $172 million and change since opening six days ago. And now over 35,000 ass-hats have signed a Change.org petition to urge Saturday Night Live producers to get Deadpool (i.e., Ryan Reynolds in costume) to host the show. The petition was started by Andrew Stege of Matteson, Illinois. Words fail.