From HE pally Bill McCuddy: “Speaking of movies that will break up couples nationwide or at least have them chatting afterwards, one of the best movies of the year is The One I Love with Elizabeth Moss and Mark Duplass. Have you seen it? Completely original and a better version of something Woody Allen might have done. The cast is perfect. Peggy looks a lot better in 2014 than she does in the ’60s, I can tell you.

“Every romcom star in Hollywood is going to call their agent and say ‘get me a script like this!’ Except for one thing that happens late in the second act it’s absolutely perfect.

“It’s coming to VOD next week and we’re reviewing it on Talking Pictures On Demand for Time Warner subscribers.” (Except Talking Pictures on Demand refuses to provide embed codes for guys like me to occasionally post….brilliant!)

Wells to McCuddy: Yup — here’s my Sundance review and a more recent post. Very high on this except for the ending.

Six years ago I wrote about having paid $87 and change for a first-rate scan of a 41″ x 18″ poster of The Presbyterian Church Wager, the 1971 Robert Altman film that was renamed McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Are there any other choice posters to be found along these lines? Does anyone know of any half-reputable film that (a) was called something else before the final title was decided upon, but more importantly (b) had a poster made with the earlier title?

I should have written something by now about Anton Corbijn‘s A Most Wanted Man (Lionsgate/Roadside, 7.25), but…you know. Friday jam-ups, fatigue, distractions. I know Corbin’s film is paydirt for anyone starved for the kind of somber, moody, highly intelligent espionage drama that has all but disappeared from theatres. Paydirt and pretty damn essential. Phillip Seymour Hoffman‘s final performance, it turns out, is among his all-time best — a moody, eccentric, super-brilliant German spy who’s constantly medicating with alcohol, tobacco and coffee (an unavoidable echo or allusion to the addiction that took Hoffman down earlier this year). A Most Wanted Man also contains one of the more on-target performances from Rachel McAdams ever, as well as a tremendous “performance” from the city of Hamburg itself, which hasn’t seemed quite this noirish or all-enveloping since Wim Wenders‘ The American Friend.

A Most Wanted Man is so darkly alluring and densely fascinating that I’m going back to see it a second time this weekend. It’s one of those films that you want to see twice to scan it for whatever clues may have been revealed early on but which you, the all-but-clueless or perhaps not-smart-enough viewer, missed the first time.

It’s based on the 2008 John Le Carre novel, of course, and bearing all the atmospheric and psychological hallmarks of that author’s work for the last 49 years, which is when The Spy Who Came In From The Cold made him a literary superstar. The plot is all about a weird-behaving, possibly fanatical young Russian-Chechen guy named Issa (Grigoriy Dobrygin), sullen and dirty and looking like a bearded rat, who slips into Hamburg to claim his Russian father’s ill-gotten millions. He soon attracts the interest and gradual suspicion of Hoffman’s German spy chief, who runs a tight little team composed of Nina Hoss and Daniel Brugh, among others. Willem Dafoe‘s local banker and Robin Wright‘s CIA operative are also part of the demimonde, but there’s no real clue what the shot is for the longest time.

A Most Wanted Man director Anton Corbijn told me this morning during a phone interview that he recently spent time in Berlin with Wim Wenders during a “regrading” (i.e., color readjustment) of The American Friend (’77). That told me Wenders is probably preparing his classic noir for Bluray release. I fell deeply in love with The American Friend when I first saw it at the 1977 New York Film Festival. Seriously — I was doing cartwheels in the lobby of Alice Tully Hall. It’s one of those films that I wanted to literally move into. The gloomy Hamburg realm of The American Friend was, at the time, a reflection of my own personal weltschmerz and vice versa. It inspired me to pitch a column to a couple of publications called “Hollywood Weltschmerz.” I was (and perhaps on level I still am) Dennis Hopper taking polaroid photos of himself while lying on a pool table. In late ’77 or early ’78 I tried to figure a way to paste my face onto Bruno Ganz‘s in that famous poster, but I couldn’t get it right.

It doesn’t exactly “hurt” to be chosen as an opening-night film at a major festival, but it doesn’t necessarily help either. Opening-night films aren’t exclusively chosen for their broad-based appeal or crowd-pleasing congeniality or…whatever, a certain lack of intrigue or flintiness. But they often are selected for these reasons. (Consider Wes Anderson’s comment about Moonrise Kingdom being selected as the opening-night attraction at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival.) I only know that when I read about a film opening a festival, I say to myself, “Okay, got it, right…it’s one of those.” This is the context behind the Toronto Film Festival choosing David Dobkin’s The Judge as its opening-night (i.e., Thursday, 9.4) attraction. No harm or foul, but…well, I’ve said it. Tart dialogue, father-son antagonism, charges filed, stakes rise, buried feelings surface, etc. Right out of the hack-formula handbook. Robert Downey Jr., Robert Duvall, Vera Farmiga, Vincent D’Onofrio, Jeremy Strong, Dax Shepard and Billy Bob Thornton.

It’s also a little funny that Toronto announced The Judge yesterday as one of many films chosen among the first batch, and then the following day it goes, “Oh, by the way, we’re selecting The Judge as the opener.”

“My fondest dream is that it will be the date movie that breaks up couples nationwide. Maybe people will walk out of there and think, ‘Maybe not…I don’t know if I know you well enough.’ The movie is about how well you can possibly know one another. We’re so steeped in pop culture and so steeped in different roles. How can you possibly combine with another person and have that truth exist in a relationship. The [story] definitely plays off of that idea.” — Gone Girl author & screenplay adapter Gillian Flynn, speaking about David Fincher‘s upcoming film in a 7.21 interview by Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Brian Brooks.

Apart from the somewhat smaller, Adam Westy bat-ears (check out the size of George Clooney’s bat-ears after the jump), the most significant feature of Ben Affleck‘s Batman are the worry furrows. Or…whatever, stress lines. When’s the last time a facsimile of a facial feature normally caused by middle-aged, weight-of-the-world anxiety was incorporated into a superhero mask? Also: If I’m not mistaken all the Batmans have been clean-shaven up until now. (Variety‘s Marc Graser reports that the Batfleck image is “part of a 75th anniversary montage of Batman images created for Comic-Con…the photo can be seen at D.C.’s booth on the show floor of the San Diego Convention Center.”)

In English-speaking territories Francois Truffaut‘s Shoot The Piano Player (’62) has always been called Shoot The Piano Player. No longer! At least as far as the folks at England’s Artificial Eye are concerned. They have a Bluray version of Truffaut’s classic coming out on 7.28, and it’s called…

From my 1.17.14 review: “Damien Chazelle‘s Whiplash (Sony Pictures Classics, 10.14) is a raging two-hander about a gifted drummer named Andrew (Miles Teller). Enrolled at an elite Manhattan music school and determined to be not just proficient or admired but Buddy Rich-great, Andrew is a Bunsen burner. We can see from the get-go he’s going to be increasingly possessed and manic and single-minded about the skins. (All great musicians are like this to varying degrees.) On top of which he really doesn’t want to be like his kindly, failed-writer dad (Paul Reiser), and he can’t find peace with a pretty girl (Melissa Benoist) because she isn’t as consumed as he is — too uncertain and unexceptional.

A journalist friend just asked me for some thoughts about the ongoing popularity of religious, Bible-based faith movies. So I sent him six or seven graphs, of which he might use a line or two. Here’s the whole outpouring in one great gush:

Christian movies are principally made for people in the conservative hinterland regions who do not, shall we say, have a circumspect view of the scriptures. They believe in literal interpretations of the Bible, start to finish and top to bottom. Christian movies are therefore not about realism — they’re fantasy projections of what people would like the world to be governed or ordered by. Or at least projections of what they think will happen when they die. Or what happened to a certain Judean rabbi when he died at age 33.

There are a lot of simpletons out there who believe, for instance, that the Noah’s Ark saga actually happened, chapter and verse. And who believe that, like in Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth was more or less a WASP, and that he resembled a handsome, European-descended quarterback with broad shoulders and freshly shampooed honey-brown hair.

The operative terms are fantasy or fanciful visions, which is what a belief in a non-provable, non-tangible vision or philosophy boils down to. Christianity is a form of optimistic denial, and that’s what these movies offer — a reflection or a dramatic fortification of that fantasy. Which a lot of people want to swim in.

I haven’t seen Alan Pakula‘s Klute (’71) since…well, I might have watched it on laser disc in the ’90s or at a repertory cinema in the early ’80s…maybe. But I haven’t seen it on a big screen in eons. I might just catch it tomorrow night at the Aero. Slow burn whodunit + ’70s Manhattan noir + richly-drawn characters + wide-open emotional exposure + simmering sexuality. The following tribute video was put together by the San Francisco-based La Belle Aurore Films. They claim on their page that “cinema is our mistress.” Then why don’t they un-distort the images in this montage, which are obviously horizontally squeezed?

Alan Pakula (speaking to friend in 1970): “You know, I’ve been sensing this vibe lately, this odd paranoid vibe, especially in New York and other towns. Things aren’t working out, people are perturbed, they hate the war, they hate Nixon and they feel alienated by straight society.”

Friend: “Yeah?”

Alan Pakula: “And I’m thinking I’d like to make a film about this. Or better yet, maybe three.”