Alex Gibney‘s Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine (Magnolia, 9.4 in theatres/on demand) will, of course, be regarded as absolutely necessary viewing for anyone intending to see Danny Boyle, Aaron Sorkin and Scott Rudin‘s Steve Jobs the following month (i.e., 10.9), which of course would be everyone and everybody in the entire fucking world. Outside of certain Middle Eastern regions, that is. Everyone in the digitized, industrialized Western hemisphere.

For reasons best not explained most of the critical community is giving high-fives to Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation (Paramount, 7.31). Many of them are capitulating because they don’t want to seem like cranky, ivory-tower soreheads or because they genuinely don’t mind that big-scale Hollywood films have all but given up on the concept of serious action realism — that the action genre has devolved into the aesthetic of Grand Theft Auto cyborg cartoons, and that one of the last action thrillers to really re-set the realm was Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children of Men. That movie set a super-high action bar for the 21st Century, and 98% of the summer popcorn actioners made in its wake have rigorously avoided trying to match or top it.  

Yes, MI:5 is a much more complex and “likable” film than James Wan‘s Furious 7, and to be fair it has a wondrously thrilling beginning (the much-hyped, real-deal scene in which Tom Cruise‘s Ethan Hunt hangs on to the side of an ascending airplane) and an amusing, relatively satisfying final 25 minutes.  But most of it, directed and written by Chris McQuarrie, is, like Furious 7 and unfortunately unlike McQuarrie and Cruise’s smaller scale but much more believable Jack Reacher, a cyborg actioner — a running, chasing and confronting thriller made for people who despise genuine, real-deal action flicks and prefer, instead, the comfort of cranked-up digital delirium.

Call me stubborn but I want the real thing, and there are very few traces of that precious substance in MI:5. No sense of gravity or threat — no anchor, no limits, no rules, nothing but cold calculation. (Except for that wonderful hanging onto the plane thing — I could watch that scene over and over.) In a nod to Jacques Tati MI:5 could be retitled Tom Cruise’s Playtime, and for many people this is exactly what makes a good action film these days, which is to say a sense of totally slick escapist wankery from start to finish.

Italian Vanity Fair has reported that during a recent visit to the Giffoni Film Festival Mark Ruffalo said he’d be returning to Italy in a few weeks when Thomas McCarthy‘s Spotlight plays at the Venice Film Festival. I don’t know if Spotlight (Open Road, 11.6) will duck Telluride and go straight to Toronto but at least the Venice engagement seems solid. Spotlight is about the Boston Globe‘s reporting about Catholic priest sex abuse allegations in the Boston region 14 and 15 years ago. Ruffalo costars with Rachel McAdams, Brian d’Arcy James, Michael Keaton, Stanley Tucci and Liev Schreiber.

Posted on 7.21: “In fact, fully one-tenth of the list strikes me as bizarrely unpredictable, in that it’s hard to figure out how they made the cut when the likes of Unforgiven, Only Angels Have Wings, Zodiac, Sullivan’s Travels, Bonnie and Clyde, Make Way for Tomorrow, Blade Runner, Out of the Past, Fargo, King Kong, Boogie Nights, Anatomy of a Murder, L.A. Confidential and Trouble in Paradise, just for starters, did not.

“Hitchcock’s Marnie? Really, it’s the 47th greatest American film of all time, rating higher than Days of Heaven, Touch of Evil, The Wild Bunch, Sunset Boulevard as well as Hitchcock’s own Notorious, which is arguably his greatest film? I know critic Robin Wood made a highly personal case for this film nearly fifty years ago, but has the whole Tippi Hedren who-ha of the past few years contorted opinion so drastically in its favor? It’s far closer to Hitch’s worst than to his best.”

Based on Cynthia Wade’s 2007 documentary short of the same name, Peter Sollett‘s Freeheld (Lionsgate, 10.2) is about a cancer-afflicted cop, Laurel Hester (Julianne Moore), fighting establishment mindsets in order to pass along her pension benefits to her partner, Stacie (Ellen Page). History has dated it slightly but you tell this is a class act with top-tier performances. Screenplay by Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia, The Painted Veil). Wade’s film won the 2008 Best Short Documentary Oscar; it also won a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2007.

From Stephen Dalton‘s 2.7.15 Hollywood Reporter review: “Filmed in a single mobile shot lasting over two hours, actor-turned-director Sebastian Schipper‘s Victoria (Adopt, 1o.9) is a dazzling stylistic experiment which largely pays off. Rising Catalan star Laia Costa plays the eponymous heroine, a disillusioned young Spanish exile looking for thrills in Berlin. Inevitably, she soon finds herself out of her depth. Barely an hour after meeting on the street, a rowdy gang of amateur criminals enlist Victoria to help them commit an armed bank robbery in a chaotic haze of booze and drugs. What could possibly go wrong?

“Padding out a minimal 12-page script with heavily improvised dialogue, Victoria takes a while to emerge from its fuzzy-headed, freewheeling first act. But it repays our patience when it shifts gear from Richard Linklater-style talk-heavy Eurodrama to heart-racing, adrenaline-pumped heist thriller. With one foot in the indie margins and another in the multiplex mainstream, commercial prospects could be healthy if Schipper and his marketing team can generate buzz in both demographics.”

In 1979, or a bit less than halfway through her highly inflential 25 year career as a New Yorker film critic and book author, Pauline Kael accepted an offer from Warren Beatty to work as a creative consultant at Paramount Pictures, but she left that job and was back in New York after only a few months. Let’s presume that Scott Foundas‘s decision to leave his gig as top Variety critic to serve as acquisitions and development executive at Amazon Studios under Ted Hope will last for a longer period. I admire Foundas’s sand — his willingness to try something new and expand his horizons and make the best of a challenge. If I were Scott I would have insisted on a “vp creative affairs” title rather than “development executive”, which I don’t feel is equal to his stature as a top film critic. I’m sure he’s getting a pay upgrade from Amazon but it’s probably a little too soon to call him Scott “paycheck” Foundas.

Soon-to-be-former Variety critic, future Amazon Studios hotshot Scott Foundas

“Sometimes of course I have failed. Tippi Hedren did not have the volcano”. — Alfred Hitchcock quoted on 5.28.66 by the El Paso Herald-Post, and re-quoted on page 649 of Patrick McGilligan‘s “Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light.”

There’s an old saying that goes “never trust the artist — trust the tale.” I can imagine Marnie defenders using this to justify their belief that Hitchcock made a better film than even he himself realized. But that’s a stretch, I think. When an esteemed director who was entirely candid with Francois Truffaut about every film in his storied career turns around and says “this movie didn’t work because the lead actress wasn’t sexy enough,” it’s hard to call him deluded. Failure is never easy to admit to but Hitchcock, to his credit, did so.

The quote is even more fascinating when you consider that it was Hitchcock and not Hedren who “had the volcano” (i.e., was burning with sexual current) during the filming of Marnie and, I’m sure, during the filming of The Birds. This feeds into my theory (posted in a piece that appeared on 4.16.15) about why Marnie feels fake, flat and strained. It was, I supposed, because Hitchcock “was emotionally off-balance, torn between his secretive lust and his often dazzling directorial technique, when he shot it. I’m sure he thought he knew what he was doing when he made Marnie, but deep down I don’t think he knew which end was up. The much-written-about fact that he was invested with ‘having’ Hedren means that he must have felt enraged and probably disoriented when he realized his efforts wouldn’t come to anything.”

Rushing to catch an 11 am screening of Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation. Back on the stick a few hours hence.

Three days ago BBC Culture posted the results of a poll of 62 international film critics who’d been asked to name the 100 Greatest American Films of all time. The BBC’s description of this group (a) doesn’t mention online voices and (b) explains that “some of the critics we invited to participate are film reviewers at newspapers or magazines, others are broadcasters and some write books.” Esteemed, knowledgable fuddy-duds, in other words. Scholastically correct fashionistas and a smattering of old-schoolers who know their stuff but — important trait to keep in mind — are also careful to limit their favorites to films that are currently approved of by the fine and fanciful “they.”

The BBC could have mentioned that this group, not atypically, is basically bending and blowing with the current cultural winds. Hence Gone With The Wind has barely made the cut at #$97 (a satisfying moment for GWTW basher Lou Lumenick) and — this pisses me off — Rio Bravo is listed at #41 but no High Noon at all. And Marnie at #47? Mainly because a small, tightly-knit fraternity of hardcore Marnie dweebs (Richard Brody, Glenn Kenny, Dave Kehr, et. al.) have been beating the drum for years. Last April I voiced strong disgreement with the Marnie cult and yet here it is, sitting on a Greatest American Films list…my spirit wilts. And where’s One-Eyed Jacks? And where’s Shane?

Last night Nightly Show contributor Mike Yard delivered a riff about Donald Trump‘s ’90s gangsta vibe, but like all good jokes it had a ring of truth. Trump fans like his nerve, his brass, his impudence. “He’s ’90s hip-hop all day, Larry…jackin’ beats…the 50 Cent of the Republican Party…gave out a United States Senator’s private cell phone!” But Baby Tupac can’t beat Hillary’s Suge Knight. Which reminds me: Straight Outta Compton screenings are just around the corner although screenings for non-critics (i.e., “interview” press) are happening this week.

Don Cheadle‘s Miles Ahead will close the 53rd New York Film Festival on 10.11.15. I don’t know why this film hasn’t been on my down-low list, but it hasn’t been…sorry. I guess it’s because I get a little cautious when an actor directs for the first time. Maybe because I’m sensing an aura of worship. Cheadle stars as the legendary, ass-kicking, Michael Mann-inspiring jazz trumpeter, and co-wrote the script with Steven Baigelman and the legendary, ass-kicking screenwriting team of Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson. And it’s heartening, by the way, to see Middle of Nowhere‘s Emayatzy Corinealdi back in the swing of things. Also costarring Ewan McGregor (as Dave Brill), Michael Stuhlbarg, Keith Stanfield, Austin Lyon.