Yesterday’s Oscar Poker chat was enjoyable enough. The usual Phil Contrino box-office commentary, and then Sasha and I discussing The Help and Telluride and The Lone Ranger, etc. Here’s a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

The drift is basically Guillermo del Toro telling Josh Horowitz about Alfonso Cuaron & Co. having achieved the next Big Thing (which he declines to describe) in the 3D Gravity (Warner Bros, 11.20.12). Sidenote: The video embed codes provided by mtv.com are infuriating, second only to the N.Y. Times in terms of making me want to mail a plastic sandwich baggie filled with dogshit to their offices.

My Week With Marilyn Observation #1: “Good lord, when are people going to figure out that this show belongs to Michelle Williams and she alone? That is all anyone will be talking about once people actually see the movie. There is absolutely, positively no doubt that Williams is right alongside [Meryl] Streep and [Glenn] Close at the very front of the Best Actress race.”

My Week With Marilyn Observation #2: “It’s totally Michelle Williams’ film. She’s the only justification for making it and for watching it. She really captures Marilyn’s whispery allure, drifting attention span, lack of self-confidence and, most importantly, movie star charisma. I don’t go in for the all the Oscar speculation stuff, but she’s (a) the whole story, (b) a definite Oscar contender, and (c) a [provider of] a performance that older Hollywood people will respond to in a big way.”

For me the weekend’s best stand-out tweet came from Joseph Kahn.

The New York Film Festival’s closing-night film will be announced later this week, but for now the big announcement is that David Cronenberg‘s A Dangerous Method and Pedro Almodovar‘s The Skin That I Live In will both get the gala screening treatment. The voltage is entirely with the Cronenberg, a kind of Freudian-Jungian romantic-obsessive period piece that is said to be quite good. Almodovar’s film was seen last May in Cannes and was in large part tagged as a toney, intriguing but somewhat minor work.

The most promising aspect of the Cronenberg? From a distance, at least? The fact that Vincent Cassel‘s character is called “Otto Gross.”

I’m hearing that Tomas Alfredson‘s Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy won’t get the gala treatment because The Dark Knight Returns director Chris Nolan won’t let Tinker star Gary Oldman off the set, even for a night or two, and the NYFF won’t do a gala screening without stars so the film’s absence isn’t a quality but an attendance issue.

Gary Oldman‘s manager Douglas Urbanski wrote me the following about an hour ago: “Tinker was indeed offered the opening night slot for the New York Film Festival (something I also participated in last year, as it happens). However, the shooting schedule for The Dark Knight Rises could not be rearranged for Gary to be free and in New York that night. Gary would love to have gone, [but] even with enormous efforts from Chris Nolan, the schedule could not be adjusted.

“As for the other New York Film Festival slots mentioned, Gary was indeed available, but no one, neither the American distributor nor the Festival, asked Gary to attend.”

Fans of The Social Network will recall that Urbanski killed as Larry Summers in that scene with the Winklevii.

This scene in Juan Antonio Bayona‘s The Orphanage (’07) in which Belen Rueda summons the ghosts of several children by playing the game “Uno, Dos, Tres, Toca la Pared” (i.e., One, Two, Three, Knock on the Wall), is one of the most genuinely creepy and unnerving scenes in the annals of adult (i.e., subdued) horror cinema, and it was done without resorting to a single visual effect.

Somewhere between 98% and 99% of horror filmmakers wouldn’t be able to deliver a scene like this if their lives depended on it — the idea wouldn’t even occur to them — and that is what I despise about the horror genre.

I’m sorry that this clip is underlit, but you can make out what’s going on with the kids slowly making their way into the room. The sound of the creaky door suddenly being opened off-screen is brilliant.

I can’t reveal particulars, but another source is disagreeing with the hat-in-the-air praise for Kenneth Branagh‘s performance as Laurence Oliver in My Week With Marilyn that I passed along last April. This on top of a similar view posted yesterday by “Yahoo” has persuaded me to think, “Okay, let’s take it easy with the K. Branagh thing.” Particularly since the most recent opinion comes from a very perceptive fellow.

Every now and then an actor delivers a performance that is so odious and unpleasant to settle into that even sophisticated filmgoers find themselves resenting the actor on some level, despite the obvious. If the performance is off-putting enough, it can seriously harm or stall an actor’s career. For me Ezra Miller‘s inhabiting of an evil, acid-spewing fiend in We Need To Talk About Kevin is one of these. I instantly knew while watching Lynne Ramsay‘s film in Cannes that I’d be avoiding seeing this guy in anything else, if at all possible.

Unfair? A bit cruel? Yeah, it is. But that’s what a lacerating performance can sometimes achieve.

What other performances have been so instantly offensive that they all but stopped the career of the actor? All I can think of is Lorraine Braco‘s as a braying biochemist in Medicine Man (1992), which seemed to ruin her feature film work (at last in terms of choice roles) until she bounced back in ’99 with her psychiatrist role in The Sopranos. And, I suppose, Elizabeth Berridge performance as Mozart’s shrewish, low-rent wife in Milos Forman‘s Amadeus (’84). She pretty much went right into ’80s and ’90s TV after that grating turn. She played Annie Oakley in Hidalgo (’04).

It’s been 16 or 17 years since Gabrielle Anwar “disappeared” from features and moved over to television. The last thing she did that really mattered was that tango dance scene with Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman (’92). I’d very nearly forgotten her. Things fall away and you move on. And then wham…her face (perhaps even more stimulating at 41 than in her early 20s) popped up in a trailer for The Family Tree (Tuckman Media, 8.26).

There’s something about faint signs of age settling into the face of a strikingly beautiful woman that gets me. I don’t know why exactly. Even if she has what appear to be trout lips.

The film, an American Beauty-resembling dramedy about a mom with memory loss and a dad with a proverbial wandering eye, is a problem. I haven’t seen it, but the website’s 1996-era design style tells you everything. No, I don’t think Tuckman Media was trying to be hip by intentionally trying to make it look like a Clinton-era website. Anwar’s costars are Dermot Mulroney, Hope Davis, Chi McBride, Vhristina Hendricks, Selma Blair, Keith Carradine, Max Thierot, Rachel Leigh Cook, Jane Seymour and Britt Robertson. The director is Vivi Friedman.

Maybe not a great ending, but one that definitely works because it make a moral point in a tough, unflinching way. Plus that nice little Third Man homage. Start it around the 3:20 mark or thereabouts.

In his N.Y. Times profile of Stephen Lang, John Anderson describes the 50ish actor as having been “scarier than John Dillinger in Public Enemies.” No — Lang was snarlier, but while playing a flinty, straight-up lawman with a sense of honor and dignity about him. Lang was also the co-deliverer (with Marion Cotillard) of that film’s great emotional finale. It’s appalling that I can’t find a decent, unsqueezed clip of this scene.