It’s entirely possible that Marc Abraham‘s I Saw The Light (Sony Pictures Classics, 11.27), the Hank Williams biopic costarring Tom Hiddleston and Elizabeth Olsen, will have its first peek-out at the 2015 Telluride Film Festival (9.4 through 9.7). SPC and Telluride have longstanding ties, and it’s already understood the SPC’s Truth and Son of Saul (which world-preemed at Last May’s Cannes Film Festival) will screen at that Colorado gathering. Or…whatever, it could also debut at the Toronto Film Festival. We’ll know on Tuesday when Toronto announces some of the bigger films on its slate.

I Saw The Light costars (and the off-screen entwined) Tom Hiddleston and Elizabeth Olsen.

Andrey and Hank Williams with their two kids sometime in the late 1940s.

I’ve heard from a research-screening source about I Saw The Light, which apparently runs in the vicinity of two hours. Hiddleston is said to be strongly invested as Williams but Olsen’s performance as his wife and musical partner Audrey is said to be the real-stand-out. The second-hand source passed along adjectives like “unreal” and “scene-stealing,” and said Olsen could wind up as a Best Actress or Best Supporting Actress contender, as her performance is right on the edge between lead or supporting. Hiddleston and Olsen have been in a relationship since the film shot last year, but if she does indeed steal the film acting-wise (and again, this is just one guy talking so take it with a grain)…well, do the math. Hiddleston is no doubt expecting Light to be a major career-booster.

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Like many others I’ve been inspired by that much-derided BBC list of the 100 Greatest American Films to assemble my own roster. Except I can’t pare it down to 100 — the best I can do is 160, and even with this number I’ve had to cut dozens and dozens. It’s not a fun thing to do because over and over again you’re saying “no, no, naaah, hasn’t aged well, no longer, naaah, don’t think so.” And every one of the films that’s been “naahed” was pretty good if not great to start with. On its own terms, I mean.

I’ve broken my list into groups of ten. There are several great films I’ve left out because I’ve never liked watching them very much so there. If a film bothers me on some level, it gets tossed — I don’t care how “great” everyone else says it is. I’m not saying there aren’t 200 or 300 more films that could easily be on someone else’s list. I’m saying these are my choices, and it wasn’t easy.

The most daunting part was choosing The Best American Film Of All Time, which it not a rock or a boulder but a dream, a passing fancy, a thought bubble in the mind of God. Or whatever…a film that expresses something vital and enduring about the American experience or character or attitude. But that sounds pretentious and tedious. Every and every greatest film choice on this list is a keeper, but the very best is…oh, the hell with it. I’m choosing The Treasure of The Sierra Madre (’48) but tomorrow I might select Dr. Strangelove or Zero Dark Thirty or 12 Angry Men or Tender Mercies. No guarantees, nothing rock solid. The top tier of any list is always debatable.

The definition of an “American” film is one principally funded by an American company.

HE’s Top Ten Greatest American Films: (1) The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, (2) Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, (3 & 4) The Godfather & The Godfather, Part II (5) The Graduate, (6) Election, (7) Zodiac, (8) Rushmore, (9) Pulp Fiction, (10) Some Like It Hot.

Greatest American Films (11 to 20): (11) North By Northwest, (12) Notorious, (13) On The Waterfront, (14) Groundhog Day, (15) Goodfellas, (16) Out Of The Past, (17) Paths of Glory, (18) Psycho, (19) Raging Bull, (20) 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Greatest American Films (21 to 30): (21) Annie Hall, (22) Apocalypse Now, (23) Strangers on a Train, (24) East of Eden, (25) Bringing Up Baby, (26) The African Queen, (27) All About Eve, (28) The Wizard of Oz, (29) Zero Dark Thirty, (30) Only Angels Have Wings.

Greatest American Films (31 to 40): (31) Repo Man, (32) Heat, (33) Red River, (34) Drums Along the Mohawk, (35) Gone With The Wind, (36) Rebel Without a Cause, (37) Ben-Hur (38) The Best Years of Our Lives, (39) The Big Sleep, (40) Shane.

Greatest American Films (41 to 50): (41) Rear Window, (42) Bonnie And Clyde, (43) The Bridge On The River Kwai, (44) Casablanca, (45) Chinatown, (46) Citizen Kane (47) Marnie…kidding! I really mean Duck Soup, (48) King Kong, (49) 12 Angry Men (50) The Informer.

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“A new Vacation movie is scheduled to be released — or allowed to escape — on July 29. To judge by the obvious, pitiful, frenetic, stupid raunchiness of its trailer, it belongs to the genre known as ‘post-humoristic.’ The movie declares itself to be a remake of National Lampoon’s Vacation, the 1983 classic of obvious, pitiful, frenetic, stupid innocence. But the words ‘National Lampoon’ are never mentioned in the trailer. National Lampoon now seems damned to the point that its name isn’t even worthy of being attached to a summer cineplex dump-fill featuring the Hangover wimp dentist as leading man and a Chevy Chase cameo.” — from a 7.23 Hollywood Reporter piece by former author, satirist, Republican Party reptile and former National Lampoon editor P.J. O’Rourke.

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My first reaction when I heard about last night’s Lafeyette theatre shooting was…I was going to say I almost shrugged but that’s not quite true. I felt horrible about the two women killed (particularly for 33 year-old Jillian Johnson, who could have been Sasha Stone‘s younger sister) and those who were shot but thankfully survived, but I wasn’t shocked or surprised. Nobody was. And nobody will be the next time this happens and the time after that. There have been 204 mass shootings so far in the U.S. this year. Two effing hundred and four. Society will always have to cope with pathetic loons like John Russell Houser, but how did he get hold of a gun? Easy — this is America, son, and we don’t block the sale of guns to anyone if we can help it. Because people have a right to protect themselves from home invaders and attacking Apaches and…hell, the government itself! Over 90% of Americans strongly favor in-depth background checks. May the D.C. legislators who’ve voted against this time and again suffer long and painfully — may their karma catch up with them.

(l.) Sasha Stone look-alike Jillian Johnson, 33, and (r.0 Mayci Breaux, 21 — both killed last night during the Lafayette theatre shooting.

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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.

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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.”

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