The Hollywood Reporter‘s Gregg Goldstein reported two or three hours ago that Helen Hunt‘s Then She Found Me, which she’s both directed and starred in, has been acquired by ThinkFilm and Equinoxe Films (the latter being a Canadian distrib) sometime this morning for a fee in the region of $2.5 to $3 million.

A romantic comedy, And Then She Found Me is about a teacher (Hunt) who is tracked down by her biological mom (Bette Midler) just as her adoptive mother has died, her husband (Matthew Broderick) has left her and as a relationship with a new guy (Colin Firth) is starting to happen. Honestly…doesn’t a movie directed by a woman called And Then She Found Me sound like it could be about something else?

And buyers are also sniffing around Tom McCarthy‘s drama The Visitor, the Saturday morning press screening for which I didn’t attend because I was seeing David Cronenberg‘s Eastern Promises. There was a furtive screening of it last night, apparently.

Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason is predicting a $15 million-plus tally for 3:10 to Yuma this weekend, but I’m hearing it’ll make closer to $13 or $14 million.

Yuma could have crested $20 million but “the perception of Russell Crowe ever since he threw that phone is that he’s a thug,” a marketing guy contended this morning. “Women don’t want to see him anymore.” Maybe, but he’s a quality-minded thug, I replied, and people trust in the fact that he doesn’t do crap. (A Good Year, I felt, was a nicely made, reasonably decent change-of-life film.)

The second-place Halloween is off 65% and looking at $9,417,000. Superbad will come in third with $7,611,00, which will put it over the $100 million mark. And poor, insufficiently-loved Shoot ‘Em Up — a better ride movie and a more complete film according to its own terms than Yuma is — will come in fourth with a piddly-ass $5.7 million, or about $2700 a print. (I’m sorry to be the bearer but that’s all she wrote — it’s finished — everyone raise a glass to Russell Schwartz‘s final marketing failure for New Line — it shouldn’t have gone up against Yuma.)

The Bourne Ultimatum will come in fifth with $5,553,000. Balls of Fury will be sixth with $5,500,000. Rush Hour 3 will be seventh with $4,050,000, The Nanny Diaries will be eighth with $3,092,000, Mr. Bean’s Holiday will come in ninth with $2,900,000 and Stardust will be tenth with $1,700,000.

I’ve had a copy of Aaron Sorkin‘s Charlie Wilson’s War screenplay on my desktop for months, but I wasn’t going to run any portions (if at all) until later in the year. It’s a good script — good enough to make me feel optimistic about this Mike Nichols-Tom Hanks-Phillip Seymour Hoffman-Julia Roberts political dramedy, which doesn’t open until 12.25.07 — but there’s plenty of time to run anticipatory warm-up pieces.

Now comes an AICN review/reaction of a Charlie Wilson’s War research screening by a guy named “PENNENINK.” It’s a 90% positive piece with three samples of Sorkin’s dialogue. Sample #1 (spoken by Hoffman’s character: “I’d like to hold a meeting to review the ten different ways in which you’re a douchebag.” Sample #2: asked why Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson (Hanks) only uses big-breasted women as his secretaries, a woman in his office answers: “Mr. Wilson has a saying — you can teach a girl to type but you can’t teach her to grow tits.” Sample #3: Wilson, reflecting on U.S policies in the Middle East and elsewhere, says at the end that “as usual, we come in [to a country], change the politics and leave. But you know what? That ball? It keeps bouncing…even after we’ve left.”

Hey, how come an early Charlie Wilson’s War teaser-trailer hasn’t made the rounds? The movie opens 14 weeks from now — a flick of an eyelash — and there’s not even a bare-bones website up yet. Universal’s strategy seems to be to just stretch out in the hayloft and wait it out — i.e., create anticipation by doing nothing — and then blast ouf of the barn and throttle up the engine starting in (I’m guessing) mid to late November.

The big question, of course, isn’t whether or not the public will take to this movie, but what will Variety‘s Robert Koehler have to say? As Koehler goes, so goes the too-hip-for-words, inbred-cineaste clique…and if this crowd is against you, they can interrupt or at least interfere with awards-talk momentum. Just a thought.

HE reader Dan Gaertner grabbed some Tim Burton/Sweeney Todd music off the official website when they tested it for about three minutes this morning. The clip, he says, is missing a “huge bell “in the beginning, which I presume means some kind of big Notre Dame-like Sunday morning goohhhnng.

There’s a fairly legit-looking full trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood (Paramount Vantage, 12.26) on MySpace.com. They’re calling it an exclusive. If it’s not an official trailer, it’s a pretty good rip-off of one by somebody with talent and access to the materials. Love watching Daniel Day Lewis in every clip…an endlessly fascinating actor. You can tell Paul Dano, portraying a religious wackjob type, is going to be intense, but then he always is.

My second viewing this evening of Anton Corbijn‘s Control (Weinstein Co., 10.10) resulted in even greater elation than I got from last May’s Cannes screening.

What I failed to say adequately in my previous raves is how wonderfully still and centered and untricky it is, and yet how sublimely satisfying it looks (with widescreen black-and-white photography so good it looks like monochromatic ice cream) and how authentic it all feels.

This, you’re left thinking (and even more so than Michael Winterbottom‘s 24 Hour Party People, which went for a slightly absurdist tone there and there), is how the souls of young despairing people in ’70s England truly resonated and registered, and more particularly how the Manchester scene really was or at least seemed to those who were there. (As Corbijn briefly was.)

The only thing about the film that doesn’t exactly turn me on is the gloomy story line. But I believed every line of it, every shot, every performance…all of it. It’s an absolute classic of its kind, and Sam Riley, who plays doomed Joy Division Ian Curtis, is — agree or not, believe it or not — an absolute candidate for Best Actor. Emphatically. No question. He’s dead perfect. (And I don’t mean that as a pun.)

Fox 411‘s Roger Friedman is reporting that Larry-into-Lana Wachowski sex-change story isn’t true. Stories about Larry having made the choice to reassign gender started four years ago without any disputation until now. “Disappointed?,” Friedman asks. “I know. I am too.”

You can’t say that a one-sheet using the suggestion of an old, dog-eared Bible to spread awareness of an allegedly violent period film about the oil business that’s based on an anti-capitalism book isn’t, at the very least, striking. It’s saying, obviously, that Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will be Blood (Paramount Vantage, 12.26) will address bedrock moral issues. Of course, all that blackness suggests somberness, bitterness and severity as well. But this is just a teaser poster (surfacing over three and a half months from release). Other themes and designs will surely follow.

Only fifteen minutes before the 5:30 pm press screening of Anton Corbijn‘s Control (which I’m seeing again for the sheer selfish enjoyment of it). I’ve just come out of Ang Lee‘s Lust, Caution, which started at 2:05 and ran 160 minutes, and my basic feeling (and the general consensus I’ve picked up in three or four conversations so far, two of them in the Cineplex Odeon men’s room) is that Derek Elley‘s Variety pan out of the Venice Film Festival was harsh and unwarranted.

Lust, Caution is what it is — a well-assembled, carefully honed period piece that tells a very twisted love story with some excellent (as in arousing, emotionally defining, envelope-pushing) sex scenes. I was irked at first with the pace but then I began to go with the graduality. The ending pays off, although there was laughter in the house right after a climactic bit of action. (I don’t know how to interpret the guffaws exactly, but third-act laughter in the third act of a heavy drama isn’t a desired reaction.) I wasn’t wowed down to my toes, but Lust, Caution has integrity and conviction, and I respected Lee’s decision to tell the story in the way that he did.

It is axiomatic that one must must approach all Canadian-produced films chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival with extreme caution. Jeremy Podeswa‘s Fugitive Pieces, which I just walked out of, conveys this tendency in spades. I was out the door after 30 minutes, but I was looking at my watch after the first 15 minutes. I don’t care if it kicks in at the one-hour mark or whatever — I won’t sit through films like this.

Expelled for the duration of the festival, and perhaps beyond. We will have no more to do with thee..be gone! Snapped in a Cineplex Odeon hallway after excusing myself from Jeremy Podeswa‘s Fugitive Pieces — Thursday, 9.6.07, 9:35 am

I guess this means I’m dead meat as far as the film’s producer, Robert Lantos, is concerned. If I run into him at at a party I’ll say I’m somebody else.

Pieces is a doleful past-and-present drama about a 40ish Holocaust survivor (Stephen Dillane) who finds it difficult coping with the present with so many World War II ghosts swirling around in his head. I can’t personally cope with Dillane — he kills each and every film and play that he’s in with his withered, crinkly-faced dweeby-ness. And I didn’t believe for a second that a 51 year-old pill like Dillane would entice a 28 year-old blonde hottie (Rosamund Pike, last in Fracture) to hop into bed with him and then propose marriage in fairly short order.

I’m going to catch the last half-hour of Juan Antonio Bayona‘s The Orphanage. Saw it twice in Cannes, and that wasn’t quite enough.

Proving once again that any youngish woman can get into hot-bod shape after having a kid if she sets her mind to it, Maggie Gyllenhaal is the new visual spokesperson for a just-launched promotional campaign Agent Provocateur, the London-based lingerie firm. It’s a semi-legit item (MCN is running it), but the things this column will do to attract readers. The first TIFF press screening starts 85 minutes from now…

Maggie Gyllenhaal