Last night I caught my second viewing of John Curran‘s Stone (Overture, 10.8), and it played just as well as before. And then came the Peggy Siegal after-party at a corporate, high-ceilinged space on 41st Street near Fifth Ave. Curran and Ed Norton were milling around. The usual assortment of filmmakers, distributors, agents, actors, friends and journalists. Really excellent food — chicken, rissotto, vegetable salad, etc.

I wrote last August that the Stone trailer “makes it seem like a more-or-less conventional crime melodrama. In the midst of evaluating an apparently psychopathic convict (Norton) regarding an upcoming parole hearing, a retirement-age prison counselor (Robert De Niro) succumbs to sexual favors offered by the prisoner’s scheming wife (Milla Jovovich). We all know where this is likely to go. Exposure, revenge, moral ruin, chaos.

“Guess what? It goes somewhere else entirely. And I mean into a realm that, for me, is not far from the one that Robert Bresson mined in the ’50s and ’60s and early ’70s.”