Early last February I wrote that the August 7th release date of Ricki and the Flash seemed to indicate caution on the part of TriStar, the distributor. A drama directed by the widely respected Jonathan Demme, written by Diablo Cody and starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline? I don’t know a  thing but Ricki looks — emphasis on that word — like “the first high-pedigree, seemingly interesting 2015 film to be…I don’t want to say dumped but that release date has certainly lowered expectations all around.”

I somehow can’t imagine Alfred Hitchcock behind a wheel and making his way through Los Angeles traffic and getting frustrated by rush-hour annoyances. I just can’t see it. In my mind he was this sedate, settled old-school guy who rode in the backs of limousines. Or sat in a director’s chair or at the dinner table or in his den. I can’t even imagine him walking any kind of distance. Even when he was young. One of those guys who seemed born in a suit. A guy I know ran into Hitchcock once at a hotel and said that he looked shortish — the current consensus seems to be that he was 5′ 7″. I just remembered I was supposed to call Kent Jones in Paris to discuss his Hitchcock/Truffaut doc. Maybe we can chat in Paris on Friday or this weekend. Update: Seeing Jones’ film (and presumably Jones himself) on Monday morning in Paris.

A new 4K restoration of Sir Carol Reed‘s The Third Man (’49) will screen at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival as part of a celebration of Orson Welles’ 100th birthday (which is today). Pic is being theatrically re-released in British cinemas on 6.26; one presumes that a subsequent Bluray will be issued down the road. Remember that horribly grainstormed Criterion Bluray of The Third Man that popped in February 2009? Glenn Kenny and the loyal order of grain monks accused me of having plebian tastes when I panned it, but if I never see that awful disc again it’ll be too soon. I was told at the time by a restoration specialist that The Third Man could never look as immaculate as Casablanca or Citizen Kane because it was shot on location in Vienna under less-than-optimum conditions. I’ll check out the 4K showing in Cannes, but I’m not expecting very much.

Whatever progress he may or may not have made with creating custom-made furniture, Mike Lane (Channing Tatum) is back to stripping. At least to the extent of participating in a big male stripper’s convention in South Carolina. So he can…what, earn seed money for his business? Magic Mike XXL (Warner Bros., 71) costars Matt Bomer (destined to inhabit the soul of Montgomery Clift in an HBO biopic), Joe Manganiello, Kevin Nash, et. al. Along with Andie Macdowell, Amber Heard, Jada Pinkett Smith and Elizabeth Banks. Directed by Gregory Jacobs but (this is significant) shot and edited by Steven Soderbergh.

A little more than 33 years ago (i.e., March or April of ’82) I attended a small press screening of George Miller‘s The Road Warrior. Ten or twelve journos, if that. At the old Warner Bros. screening room on 51st near 6th, a block from Rockefeller Center. My reaction was basically “holy shit.” Not just rousing and crafty, I told myself, but phenomenal, epochal. The first classy, clever, nonexploitational post-apocalyptic action flick I’d ever seen (the original Mad Max wouldn’t open until later), and certainly the first with a pitch-black, fuck-all sense of humor about itself, “the wasteland”, the gas crises of the ’70s…everything. And certainly the first to feature a gang of gay, leather-wearing, motorcycle-riding marauders. Something new, amazing…”Apocalypse Pow!,” as Richard Corliss wrote. And what a shot of adrenaline for Mel Gibson — a rising light in the spring of ’82 (costar of Peter Weir‘s Gallipoli, star of Weir’s then-upcoming The Year of Living Dangerously) but now, suddenly, a major action star.

I’ve been thinking about that ’82 screening because earlier today I saw Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, this time at the current Warner Bros. screening room on West 53rd near 7th Avenue. In glorious 2D. I can’t say anything until next Tuesday afternoon (specifically noontime Pacific) but I can at least say that I plan on seeing it again in Cannes. I hope that legendary dp Vittorio Storaro intends to see it soon also, as I haven’t seen a major film with such beautiful, oddly glowing desert hues since Storaro’s The Sheltering Sky (’90).

I’ve now watched “Lost Horizon,” the latest Mad Men episode, twice, and I can’t get this iconic image of Peggy Olson (Elizabeth Moss) out of my head. This plus the drunken roller-skating moment with Roger Sterling (John Slattery), I mean. Even if nothing else happens in Peggy’s life between now and the last episode, it’ll be okay. A dangling lit cigarette hasn’t seemed this sexy or cool since the noir heyday of Robert Mitchum.

There’s no right or wrong in film criticism, particularly when it comes to the often curious and sometimes perverse business of comedy, but given the withering dismissals of Anne Fletcher‘s Hot Pursuit by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy and Variety‘s Andrew Barker, I’m wondering how to process Stephanie Zacharek’s thumbs-up review. Even allowing for the maxim that what is screamingly funny to women can sometimes leave men cold and vice vera, it seems odd that Zacharek’s disagreement with McCarthy/Barker is not just about sensibility and tone but the levels of basic craft.

“With Reese Witherspoon producing and Sofia Vergara credited as an exec producer, the film represents an all-too-rare example of a studio comedy featuring women in charge on both sides of the camera,” Barker notes. “But it’s hard to cheer too loudly for a film that often misfires with near-Happy Madison levels of imprecision.”

“Isn’t this the sort of nitwit comedy Reese Witherspoon wasn’t going to have to make anymore after becoming a producer on the likes of Wild and Gone Girl?,” McCarthy writes. “A jaw-droppingly klutzy law enforcement farce in the vein of The Heat, albeit deprived of the R-rated raunch and out-there gags, this is a down-home comedy that should have stayed there, as it does no favors to the appealing but ill-served (and poorly photographed) co-stars Witherspoon and Vergara.

It hit me yesterday as I was walking down Eighth Avenue in the 20s that during rush hour Manhattan is a kind of huge sprawling block party — a great communal happening with people talking and sharing about everything in twos, threes and groups on every block, everywhere you turn.  It’s a special current, and even if you’re alone you can’t help but feed off the energy, which hits you in successive waves. Then again I’m probably more receptive to this because of my out-of-town perspective. I think I like coming in for short visits more than living here. On top of which I really hate the weather here in July, August and half of September. I’m not entirely in synch with Werner Herzog’s views about Los Angeles but I’ve come to like it a bit more in recent years. If I had unlimited funds I’d live 25% of my life in L.A., 25% in New York, 25% in Italy and 25% in Belize. Or something like that. Actually, make that 33% in the first three and confine Belize to just three or four weeks.

“Terrence Malick is an enigmatic filmmaker. He’s a brilliant photographer. He’s a brilliant cinematographer. In a way, though, he doesn’t know how to coalesce a story from beginning to end. When I first saw [The New World] it was an early edit. There was no reason this movie couldn’t have been as successful as Titanic. It was cut that way. It was a story of this Native American girl meeting this guy and it was really romantic.

“[But in the] editing, Terry, as he does in his filmmaking, made much more of a dreamworld and he disassociated the scenes. There was no through-line any more. He lost the love story. He wasn’t interested in that. He started telling a story about images and it didn’t hold together. The movie didn’t hold together for me, or for an audience.

Even by the hokey, intentionally vulgar standards of ’50s movie posters this is a howler for two reasons. One, Victor Mature‘s Samson wasn’t loaned out by Cecil B. DeMille to perform a cameo in which he brings down the temple by pushing the pillars apart. And two, the copy is beyond purple and out of control. The “buried alive” thing is a finale spoiler even if it’s mostly inaccurate. British Pharoah Jack Hawkins‘ “wives” aren’t buried alive at the end (just one wife), and the court and slaves aren’t forced to accept this fate due to Hawkins’ cruelty, etc. And Joan Collins doesn’t cause anyone’s blood to be spilt except for Sidney Chaplin‘s (with whom she was having an affair when the film was being shot in Rome), much less enough blood to anoint hundreds of pyramid stones.

I’ve got a conflict between tomorrow night’s all-media screening of Anne Fletcher‘s Hot Pursuit (Warner Bros., 5.8) and an 8 pm performance of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time tomorrow night. The play wins, of course, but that means not seeing the film until late May because (a) I leave Thursday night for Paris, (b) for some reason the film isn’t opening in France until September 9th (“openings of American comedies tend to lag by months [here],” says a Paris-based critic friend) and (c) it won’t open in Prague until May 28th.

Sofia Vergara, Reese Witherspoon in Anne Fletcher’s Hot Pursuit.

Here, in any event, is a portion of one of the first reviews, posted yesterday by Westword‘s Stephanie Zacharek: “The flagrant silliness of Hot Pursuit is a plus, not a liability. Directed by Anne Fletcher, [it’s] a quiet triumph of tone and timing. Nearly every scene is cut at just the right point, often topped off with a fantastic kicker of dialogue. While self-deprecation is integral to humor, self-humiliation is a trickier, more delicate business, particularly when it comes to comic roles for women. Thankfully, Hot Pursuit — with its script by David Feeney and John Quaintance, both of whom have thus far been writing mostly for TV — avoids gags of the ‘Darn! I broke my heel!’ variety.”