Paramount has announced that Ava Duvernay‘s currently shooting Selma, a ’60s period drama about the historic efforts of Martin Luther King, Jr. (David Oyelowo) and the Civil Rights movements to secure voting rights for African-Americans, will open limited on Christmas Day. This almost automatically means that Selma is now a likely Best Picture contender as (a) it will probably deliver socially poignant uplift with a sweeping historic brush and a top-notch ensemble cast, and (b) it will mostly excite the same emotionality and allegiances that led to Precious and The Butler attracting Best Picture talk.

Selma has been shooting in Georgia (Atlanta) and is now looking at Alabama (Montgomery and Selma). I don’t know when Duvernay is going to finish principal but probably not until….what, sometime in mid-to-late July? August? (Selma shooting is beginning on or about 6.23.) After the limited Christmas Day opening Selma will open wide on 1.9.15.

Paramount wouldn’t have made this decision if they didn’t think the Best Picture field looks weak or at the very least hazy. Selma is now the only end-of-the-year movie that says “big social-historical statement” a la Gandhi or (this is a dispiriting example, I realize) Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. It will probably emerge as the default choice of those who like to vote for big-emotional-sweep movies about arduous struggles. In this light Selma‘s entrance is not great news for Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken, which is basically a WWII survival saga by way of an indominitable spirit.

Jean Marc Vallee‘s Wild, the Reese Witherspoon hiking drama, also fits in this realm.

Having Selma open on 12.25.14 is a pretty fast turnaround by today’s standards, although not by the big-studio system of yore. Films routinely opened within three or four months of completing principal photography in the old days, and sometimes even faster.

The viral Jeremy Meeks thing is obviously another one of those situations in which a guy on a downward crime spiral might be saved because he’s suddenly been recognized for some kind of talent and has become quite popular with the ladies. This is what happened to Elvis Presley‘s Vince Everett character in Jailhouse Rock after his soulful singing of “I Want To Be Free” was broadcast. Hip-hop millionaire T.I. (a.k.a., Clifford Joseph Harris) once spent a year in the slam for possession of illegal guns. 50 Cent did time as did Mark Wahlberg and Tim Allen. Life sometimes cuts people a break, and Meeks is obviously being offered a chance to straighten his life out. He’s been popped before and almost certainly has anti-social impulses that could manifest again, but you have to be optimistic in these situations. Meeks could be a super-model or an actor even.

You can see exactly where David Dobkin‘s The Judge (Warner Bros., 10.10) will be going within the first 30 seconds of this trailer, but I can’t work up any hostility for it. It might be half-watchable. Robert Downey, Jr. is great at playing blase emotionless yuppie pricks. An above-average costarring cast — Robert Duvall, Vera Farmiga, Vincent D’Onofrio (who looks like a bloated sea lion), Dax Shepard, Jeremy Strong, Sarah Lancaster and Billy Bob Thornton. Screenplay by Dobkin and Nick Schenk (Gran Torino). Dobkin directed The Wedding Crashers, for those who’ve forgotten.

The wrongly convicted and imprisoned Central Park Five — Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise and Yusef Salaam — have reportedly agreed to a settlement of close to $40 million. The five, railroaded into convictions for having sexually assaulted 28-year-old investment banker Trisha Meili while she jogged in Central Park, will each receive about $1 million for each year they were behind bars.

The settlement, reported yesterday by the N.Y. Times, was nudged along by Mayor Bill de Blasio, who had promised to reach a “swift settlement” once he took office.

On 10.30.12 I posted the following: “New York City needs to do more than simply admit error in case of the Central Park Five. Nine years ago the five filed a federal lawsuit against the city, seeking $50 million each in damages or $250 million total. If anyone deserves to be financially compensated for a perversion of justice, it’s these guys.

A few days ago I saw Karem Sanga‘s The Young Kieslowski, a wise and dry dramedy about stepping into parenthood at a very young age, at the L.A. Film Festival. It’s my kind of 20something relationship comedy, which is to say low-key and droll and never flagrantly “adolescent.” It has the tone or vibe of a Noah Baumbach or Wes Anderson thing. Sanga’s story half-reflects what his parents went through in having him and his twin brother at a fairly young age, which is interesting. But I was vaguely appalled, I must say, by a female character (Haley Lu Richardson) calling herself a Christian. Last weekend I conducted an audio interview with Sanga, Malgarini, Richardson and producer Danny Leiner, and I brought up these two topics. Richardson tried to laugh off the Christianity question but I wouldn’t join in. Here’s the mp3.

The Young Kieslowski director-writer Karem Sanga.

My last and final Tijuana dental appointment last Tuesday morning kept me from Monday night’s tribute to Sony Pictures Classics’ Michael Barker and Tom Bernard. They were handed the Spirit of Independence Award from the Los Angeles Film Festival and, as TheWrap‘s Steve Pond wrote two days ago, it’s hard to quibble with that. (32 Academy Awards, 12 Best Foreign Language Film Oscars, etc.) It’s also hard to quibble with the notion that talking about the present and the future is always more interesting than celebrating the past. Had I been there I would have wanted to hear more about SPC’s forthcoming Leviathan, Mr. Turner and Foxcatcher than anything else. I’m presuming, by the way, that all three will screen at the 2014 Telluride and Toronto gatherings. I’m especially keen on seeing Leviathan again.

As with many over-trailered films in the past, I feel as if I’ve almost seen Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (20th Century Fox, 7.11) start to finish. What surprises could possibly be left? And it doesn’t open for another three weeks. I’m hoping, really hoping, that something significant in the film hasn’t been revealed by the trailers. Do I believe this will turn out to be the case? No. Does anyone?

In early April I posted a moan-and-groan piece (“Blame Lester for A Hard Day’s Less“) about the decision by Criterion and director Richard Lester to crop the forthcoming Hard Day’s Night Bluray (streeting on 6.24) at 1.75:1 instead of the more common 1.66:1, which has been the default aspect ratio for decades. (The one time it wasn’t used was when Criterion issued a Hard Day’s Night laser disc at 1.37:1.) Then on May 2nd I passed along a view from Chris Willman that the digitally remastered Night looked grainier than expected during the TCM Classic Film Festival screening at the Chinese. Well, I’ve now watched the Criterion Bluray and it’s beautiful. Much more of a knockout than expected. It makes the film feel so fresh and robust and the soundtrack sound so twangy and thrompy that it’s almost like watching it new again. Scratch that — is is like watching it new again.

Do I still wish that Criterion had cropped it at 1.66? Yes, I do. Every now and then a shot seems to lack breathing room and doesn’t look “right,” but the truth is that I got used to the 1.75:1 cropping fairly quickly. And I never once saw what Willman was talking about. Maybe the Chinese projection had an issue or two but there are no grainstorms here — trust me. This is the best-looking version of A Hard Day’s Night I’ve ever seen or heard anywhere. If only Criterion’s Peter Becker had politely ignored Lester’s request to crop it at 1.75:1. If Criterion had simply followed HE’s “more height is always right” dictum I would give this disc a 100% AAA grade. As is, it gets a 90%. (It seems, incidentally, that Criterion used four moving captures from the 1.37:1 version in their title page — see above.)

Believe it or not, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is honoring ’60s and ’70s softcore maestro Radley Metzger (now 85 years old) with a seven-day tribute called “This Is Softcore: The Art Cinema Erotica of Radley Metzger” (8.7 thru 8.13). This is yet another expression of the high-falutin’ dweeb-critic tendency to find artistic merit in once-denigrated (or at least looked down upon) exploitation films. But anyone who says Metzger was a respectable auteur is delusional. The below trailer for Carmen Baby tells you he wasn’t very talented. Metzger was certainly into terrible acting, swanky production design, way-too-bright lighting and horrible music choices. None of the actors ever seemed to actually “do it” in a Metzger film — they just kind of rolled around and gasped and moaned without getting too gymnastic or creative. I don’t recall ever seeing genitalia or pubic hair even, but I could be wrong. Next to no oral action. Nobody ever fingered anyone or gave anyone a handjob. And the actors never heard of Hershey bars. Metzger’s was a very weird world. Metzger films are cool for their sets and outdoor locations — I’ll give them that. He obviously tried hard to class up the softporn genre, but it was still the softporn genre.

The reactions to Clint Eastwood‘s Jersey Boys started out with critics calling it very Clinty and a little less Broadway-flashy than it could be, but an interesting, respectable ride. Then everything started to go downhill. The critical word of mouth has been so mixed-dismissive (60% on Rotten Tomatoes, 54% on Metacritic) that I’ve been half-regarding tonight’s Los Angeles Film Festival screening as the final word-of-mouth nail in the coffin. And then along comes N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick calling it “one of the year’s best.” What?

My first reaction was “Okay, I get it…Lumenick is a tri-state area kind of guy — born in Queens, formerly a critic for NJ’s Bergen Record — and he’s basically saluting the Manhattan-New Jersey cultural aspects as much as the film.” Which makes me wonder if other critics with Soprano-land ties are going dippy also. I wonder what former New Jersey guy Glenn Kenny will say? I wonder what I’ll think, for that matter, as I grew up in a mellow little Wonderbread town called Westfield, which nonethless had its share of guineas who wore pegged pants and black pointed lace-ups with metal taps on the heels.

I’ve been game to see Hossein Amimi‘s The Two Faces of January (Magnolia, 10.3) since the premiere at last February’s Berlinale, which I missed due to being in Berlin for only four days and change. I finally saw it the night before last at the Los Angeles Film Festival, and I’m definitely filing it under “reasonably decent, moderately engrossing Patricia Highsmith adaptations.” Set in 1962 Athens, Crete and Istanbul, it’s basically about two guys who reflect or echo their respective darker impulses (not unlike Highsmith’s Guy Haines and Bruno Antony in Strangers On A Train) becoming involved in a downswirl of mutual conning, killing, running from the law and fate closing in from all sides. The tension and suspense start early and build steadily, and right away you’re going away “okay, I get it…these guys are marked for doom.” And the ride is enjoyably diverting as far as it goes.

The whacking of Joe Pesci‘s Tommy in Martin Scorsese‘s Goodfellas (’90) left a huge impression on my psyche. For the last 24 years every time I’ve heard about somebody losing a job I’ve flashed on this scene. I’ve literally imagined the newly-unemployed publicist or studio exec or whomever being led into a basement den in some suburban home, looking around at the Sears & Roebuck furniture, going “oh, no” and then bam!…spurt, splat, flop on the floor.