As the season hums to life at the start of the fall festival circuit, it’s time to take a look at the Best Original Song race and figure out what we’re working with.

Just last week, the Academy announced new rules that will have a considerable impact on how things shake out. First and foremost, the screening event and points system has been done away with and a guaranteed slate of five nominees has been put back in place. Voters will still view songs within the context of their films, though on DVD, and they’ll be asked to rank their five favorites.

This should take some of the burden off. Songs won’t necessarily have to play well within the context of the narrative, though of course it will still help. Nevertheless, with a wider net from voting members, songs will likely get in on merit more than they did under the previous system.

I’ve been keeping a little list of possibilities, though I haven’t filled in the category’s Contender section yet. I hope to do that for the next update, but for now, here’s what I’ve got:

First and foremost we can probably save room for “Suddenly,” the newly written and orchestrated track from Tom Hooper’s “Les Misérables.” The musical’s original composers, Claude-Michel Schonberg, Alain Boublil and Herbert Kretzmer, composed the track, which Hugh Jackman will sing in the film. Sounds like a bona fide contender to me.

Next up is Willie Nelson’s “Midnight Run” from John Hillcoat’s “Lawless.” The Weinstein Company has already started the hype machine rolling on the track. There’s also “Fire in the Blood” and “Cosmonaut,” both written by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis and performed by The Bootleggers featuring Emmylou Harris.

There are a trio of songs from Pixar’s “Brave” to consider. “Into the Open Air” and “Touch the Sky” are both performed by Julie Fowlis and seem to me to have the best shot at recognition. “Learn Me Right,” meanwhile, is performed by Birdy and Mumford & Sons. (NOTE: I’ve been told Disney only plans to qualify “Touch the Sky” and “Learn Me Right.”)

Sticking with animation, there is “Love Always Comes as a Surprise” from “Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted” (which is used within the context of the story), as well as “Let it Grow (Celebrate the World)” from “The Lorax.” And though “The Secret of Arrietty” may be ineligible for the Best Animated Feature Film competition, it does sport an eligible tune: “Arrietty’s Song.”

How about The Arcade Fire? The new rules could help their closing credits track “Abraham’s Daughter” from “The Hunger Games” find some room to maneuver. Ditto Taylor Swift’s “Safe and Sound.” (Though not so fast — I’m reminded in the comments section that its being the second closing credits cue would render it ineligible.)

Going back to musicals, there is also Todd Graff’s “Joyful Noise,” which features a pair of contenders in “From Here to the Moon and Back” and “Not Enough,” both belted out by Dolly Parton (and the latter featuring Queen Latifah, too). Maybe there are others original to the film. I’m not sure.

Oh, and could Whitney Houston’s last recording, “Celebrate,” from “Sparkle,” be a big temptation? Maybe. And while it’s too bad none of the tunes from “Searching for Sugar Man” qualify, documentaries will be represented by “Paul Williams Still Alive” and the track “Still Alive.”

Katy Perry could even be in the mix with “Wide Awake” from “Katy Perry: Part of Me.” Okay, probably not, but it’s eligible regardless so chalk it up as a contender. And just for completist’s sake, I might as well mention Pitbull’s “Back in Time” from “Men in Black 3” and Soundgarden’s “Live to Rise” from “The Avengers.” I assume they were both written exclusively for their films, though who knows?

One final note: there are break-out-into-song moments in “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” but  I don’t know if “Goblin Town” and “Blunt the Knives,” among others, will qualify, given their lyrical origins in the novel. And “Over the Misty Mountains Cold” is probably in a similar situation. I don’t know if there is some Enya/Emiliana Torrini/Annie Lennox-esque closing credits tune to consider, though.

That’s 22 to throw at the wall and whatever else you might think I’m missing. So rattle off any other potential contenders in the comments section below and we’ll finally start to shape and handicap this category.

UPDATES: Adding contenders mentioned here and via email…

– Florence + the Machine’s “Breath of Life” from “Snow White and the Huntsman”

– Norah Jones’s “Everybody Needs a Friends” from “Ted”

– Karen O’s “Strange Love” from “Frankenweenie”

– Jon Bon Jovi’s “Not Running Anymore” from “Stand Up Guys”

– Jon Bon Jovi’s “Old Habits Die Hard” from “Stand Up Guys”

– Ryan Miller’s “Big Machine” from “Safety Not Guaranteed”

– Christina Aguilera’s “La Casa de mi Padre” from “Casa de mi Padre”

Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer are all set to blow Toronto audiences’ minds with the premiere of “Cloud Atlas” in a few short days. Everything I’ve heard about the ambitious ensemble project ends up pointing to “it’s not for everyone,” but each new nugget certainly makes me think it’ll be for me.

A few weeks ago Warner Bros. tossed out a six-minute initial trailer for the film, an “extended first look,” which did a great job of pre-immersing the audience in the world of the narrative (which is taken from David Mitchell’s novel of the same name). And now, with the film getting ready for its close-up in Canada, things have been whittled down for an official trailer.

I’d have to think cutting trailers for this film is almost as difficult as seeing the whole production through. How do you find a throughline and steer away from confusing audiences while being inclusive enough to represent the entirety of the ensemble and the various settings they inhabit over the course of the film? Madness.

But kudos on including the “deja vu” line. I got a chuckle out of that. Must have been a glitch in The Matrix, Mr. Broadbent.

Check out the new trailer, courtesy of Apple, below, and give us your thoughts in the comments section.

“Cloud Atlas” premieres at the Toronto Film Festival on September 8. It opens nationwide on October 26.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BKSU9TWezk&w=640&h=360]

VENICE — For one of the more sedate festivals on the circuit, there”s been a curious running theme of restless youth at Venice this year that can hardly be accidental. In Competition, Harmony Korine”s manic, fluorescent “Spring Breakers” – which I reviewed for Variety – observed (it”d be a stretch to say critiqued) the directionless nihilism of today”s college-going generation. Its opposite number, Olivier Assayas”s “Something in the Air” (reviewed here), mused on the ambitious social ideals of kids 40 years ago – but steered clear of suggesting that their activism was any more effective than 21st-century irony.

Indirectly triangulating with Korine and Assayas, only out of competition, is “The Company You Keep,” Robert Redford”s absorbing, undemanding and agreeably old-fashioned political thriller about where Vietnam-era radicals go when the flowers really are all gone. It”s more romantically liberal than both the aforementioned films, painting its 1970s rebels as more nobly consistent and influential than Assayas”s floaty political dilettantes and suggesting, in the doggedly principled form of Shia LaBeouf”s lone-wolf reporter and Brit Marling”s whip-smart law student, that there are youngsters more willing to continue their cause than Korine”s junked-up party posse. 

Indeed, everyone is given something of a moral leg to stand on in Redford”s film, a rare example of a Hollywood thriller without any real bad guy. As washed-out, variously retired members of the Weather Underground, a terrorist network that carried out overly extreme acts of protest against the U.S. Government”s military policy in the late 1960s and 70s, Redford, Susan Sarandon and Julie Christie all project a kind of burning righteousness beneath a coat of autumnal regret. (Sarandon gets one of the pithier lines in Lem “The Limey” Dobbs”s script, adapted from Neil Gordon”s novel, when she tells a skeptical LaBeouf, “We made mistakes, but we were right.”) 

We don”t really want to see these burnished fighters-in-exile go down – not least because they”re Redford, Sarandon and Christie, and so uniformly well-preserved it seems a shame to lock them away. Still, Dobbs hardly makes enemies of Terrence Howard and Anna Kendrick”s wearily officious FBI hounds seeking to round up the long-elusive fugitives after Sarandon”s ringleader decides, after 30 years, to turn herself in. It”s not hard to see why LaBeouf”s callow but growingly conscientious two-bit journo finds his own alliances see-sawing. He improbably sets the nationwide chase in motion after stumbling upon the true identity of Redford, who has been masquerading as an upstanding attorney and single dad in upstate New York, but the more people he talks to, the clearer it becomes that not all parties are equally complicit in the Underground”s volatile history. 

That”s not to make the film”s moral compass sound any more courageously ambiguous than it needs to be; lacquered Hollywood production that it is, it cops out by ultimately making LaBeouf”s crusade a romantic one, as it somehow becomes clear that the future of spiky blonde love interest Marling is at stake in this otherwise graying firebrand fiesta. Still, she”s an easier crossfire victim to root for than Redford”s menacingly plucky 11 year-old daughter, harbored by Redford”s unaffiliated brother (Chris Cooper) when things heat up. (She”s played by Jacqueline Evancho, a young singer-turned-actress who looks ready to fill Chloe Grace Moretz”s shoes. With cement.) 

This even-handedness does, however, come at the expense of some tension: with audiences given the option of investing in everyone, the final third rather runs out of gas as Redford and Dobbs try to bring every principal”s story to an amenable point of closure. “I grew up,” admits Redford”s character when asked about his loosened loyalty to the Underground cause; so do many characters in this diplomatically grown-up film. 

Such concerns, however, are secondary to our sustained enjoyment of “The Company You Keep” as a kind of runway for several generations of plum stars and character talents, the rich ensemble rather ostentatiously showing off Redford”s continued pulling power even in the wake of far drearier films like “The Conspirator” and “Lions for Lambs.” (I realize a fashion-show metaphor may not be the most apt for a film as comforting and occasional threadbare as a flannel dressing gown.) 

Indeed, it may be the most absurdly over-cast film in recent memory: those, like me, who haven”t bothered to peruse its specifics will be surprised to see one great face after another – Richard Jenkins here, Brendan Gleeson there – pop up in perfunctory roles that could be well-served by any jobbing actor. Susan Sarandon makes the most lasting of these fleeting impressions, virtually seducing LaBeouf with a defiant monologue about Underground values, though it”s a never-grizzlier Nick Nolte who makes the most jolting one: as a dissolute revolutionary who briefly comes to Redford”s aid, he doesn”t so much deliver his lines as cough them up. 

Everyone”s on the best form they can muster without pulling a muscle; the same goes for Redford”s direction, sprightlier than the flatline of his last few works, but still a long way off the levels of care and craft he hit in the early 1990s with “A River Runs Through It” and “Quiz Show.” Actually, the only formal note I jotted down about this proficiently made film was a commendation to the costume designer for selecting LaBeouf”s natty blonde-tortoiseshell glasses, with a reminder to look up the brand and where I might purchase them. Perhaps my own ideals are a bit lacking.

The release was later than anticipated but a decision was finally made by the Academy’s Board of Governors on this year’s Honorary Oscar recipients. And names long considered due for the recognition, actresses Doris Day and Angela Lansbury among them, will have to wait a little longer.

The organization has announced that stunt man Hal Needham, documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker and multi-hyphenate George Stevens Jr. will receive recognition at this year’s Governors Awards ceremony. DreamWorks co-founder and philanthropist Jeffrey Katzenberg has been tapped to receive the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.

Needham’s work has been seen on more than 300 feature films, including “Blazing Saddles,” “Chinatown,” “How the West Was Won,” “Little Big Man” and “The Spirit of St. Louis.” In 1986, the Academy presented him with a Scientific and Engineering Award for the design and development of the Shotmaker Elite camera car and crane, which allows filmmakers greater versatility in shooting action sequences. He also went onto a career as a director, from “Smokey and the Bandit” to “Canonball Run.”

Pennebaker is a pioneer of modern non-fiction filmmaking, having directed more than 20 feature documentaries. Highlights include “Don’t Look Back,” “Monterey Pop,” “The War Room” and “Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.”

Stevens Jr., son of the legendary director, has spent a lifetime celebrating and preserving the heritage of motion pictures. He championed the work of young documentary filmmakers early in his career and went on to become a founding director of the AFI. In 1977, he co-founded the Kennedy Center Honors, which he has produced for the past 34 years.

Finally, Katzenberg has been instrumental in raising money for education, art and health-related causes. He helped raise $200 million during his tenure as chairman of the Motion Picture and Television Fund and also serves on the boards of organizations such as the California Institute of the Arts, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. He is also, of course, the current CEO of DreamWorks Animation.

The Governors Awards will be held on December 1 in the Ray Dolby Ballroom at the Hollywood & Highland Center and will be produced by marketing executive and Board of Governors member Cheryl Boone Isaacs and Don Mischer Productions.

When I sat down last season to cook up a list of Steven Spielberg’s best work as a director, I had some hard thinking to do. I had always held “Jaws” in higher esteem than the rest of his filmography for a variety of reasons, but as I dug in on all of his movies one more time, I found myself leaning to “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial” for the first time, and it kind of shocked me.

“While they are both masterpieces, I settled on the willful masterpiece for the top spot and the accidental one [in second],” I wrote at the time. “‘Jaws’ was a runaway train that somehow, miraculously, became the sterling piece of cinema it is today…but ‘E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial’ is a perfect film, plain and simple. Every single thing is in its right place, and this, the turning point of Spielberg’s career — igniting his desire to start a family, swinging his thematic pendulum in another direction — marks the end of his early era.”

Spielberg’s work has been slowly getting the Blu-ray treatment and most recently, “Jaws” made the transition on the occasion of the film’s 37th anniversary. I have it sitting on my shelf waiting to finally dig in. And “E.T.” will finally land on Blu in October, but not before the Academy takes a moment to celebrate its 30th anniversary.

Teaming up with the Palo Alto International Film Festival, the Academy will present an anniversary screening of the film on Friday, September 28, at 7:30 pm at the Outdoor Festival Village Stage in Palo Alto, CA. Hosted by Variety tech columnist David S. Cohen, the evening features an onstage discussion with members of the film’s crew. Admission is free.

The event is presented as part of the Science and Technology Council’s “Prime Tech” screening series, which showcases Oscar-nominated and winning films that have been recognized in at least one technical category. “E.T.” has that covered in spades, having been nominated for Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Sound, Best Sound Effects Editing and Best Visual Effects as part of its nine-nod haul. It also, of course, received notices for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.

The “Prime Tech”  series “features panel discussions that illuminate the art of filmmaking from a science and technology perspective,” the press release notes, “examining how technical elements can augment a film’s narrative capabilities and enrich the overall viewing experience.”

The Palo Alto International Film Festival runs from September 27– 30. “E.T. The Extra Terrestrial” is a non-ticketed, free event. Seats will be available on a first-come, first-served basis. For more information, visit paiff.net or call (650) 641-8947. The film hits Blu-ray on October 9.

When you’ve written a hit novel that has taken on a life of its own and become a beloved modern classic, translating it to film might render a bit of nervousness — particularly if you’re taking on the task yourself.

Author Stephen Chbosky’s “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” published in 1999 and one of the American Library Association’s top 10 most frequently challenged books (it has been banned from its share of high schools), took on such a life over the last decade. But for the writer, it was less nervousness than a bit of anxiety and eagerness to actually see the film version through.

“I always wanted to do this one,” Chbosky says. “This was the life-long dream, and everything I did, whether it was making my first movie or writing ‘Rent’ or doing ‘Jericho,’ it was always pointing to this moment. There was no way I was going to die without making this movie.”

And naturally, he always had the film version in his head, to an extent. The novel is epistolary, so the visual storytelling isn’t necessarily readily apparent, but Chbosky says he embraced the time away from it to be objective and to do a real adaptation in another medium. “I had to find the way to tap into the same emotion, the same characters, the same spirit and tone, but from a completely different point of view,” he says. “And that was challenging, but it was incredibly rewarding to do.”

What stuck out the most for him in translating his own work was the freedom and excitement of juxtaposition. It’s something you can’t really do in a book, or at least certainly not with any real ease. For example, there’s a moment in the film when the taking of a communion wafer cuts to the dropping of a tab of LSD. That kind of thing was exciting for the author-as-screenwriter, as well as other editorial choices that, ultimately, serve to present memories and senses of place in the main character, Charlie’s, mind, fully carving him out as a individual with depth. And that kind of thing is done with increasing confidence in the film, so much so that it’s no wonder the film version of “Perks” was always simmering in Chbosky’s mind.

Of course, other elements didn’t present such obvious answers. “The more difficult and challenging thing,” Chbosky says, “was trying to write Sam [played by Emma Watson] and Patrick [Ezra Miller] and Mary Elizabeth [Mae Whitman] in an objective way to make the audience fall in love with them the way that Charlie could simply say how much he loved them in the book. It”s really easy to have a character, a book, say, ‘Oh, Patrick was so hilarious.’ Well, when you actually have to write Patrick you better come up with some funny lines and cast the right person. And luckily with Ezra we did.”

Indeed, Miller was a big fan of the novel and sought out the role, which he commands with assured ease in the film. Similarly, Logan Lerman is a revelation as Charlie. But Chbosky says he was never writing with actors in mind as he was adapting the story. It was only the novel he had in his head, the characters he had already created, and finding the best way to tell their story in a new medium. Nevertheless, the casting of the film is just right.

When Chbosky first met with Lerman, he was actually considering him for the part of Patrick. But the young star of films like “3:10 to Yuma” and TV’s “Jack & Bobby” begged to audition for the lead. So he read two scenes to give an idea of range: a humorous, marijuana-induced rant and a much more sincere hospital scene later in the film.

“I always want to encourage the actor that if that”s what he was feeling passionate about, that”s what I wanted him to go for,” Chbosky says. “He was the second person who auditioned for Charlie and after him there were no other auditions. There was no need; he was perfect. Within five seconds of his audition, what you saw in the movie, that was it. He had come up with this character. It got richer over time and he got more comfortable over time with the words and the place where we were shooting, but he had it. It was right.”

Chbosky first really sparked to Watson after a moving scene with Daniel Radcliffe in “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” He knew she was serious about acting beyond that franchise and that moment proved it to him. “She was so beautiful and vulnerable and true to life in that moment, and I just thought that she had it,” he says. “I met her in New York City and she”s such a nice person and legitimately generous, and I felt that she had a touch of being lonely, being in the eye of that hurricane. I just knew that she was the perfect misfit. I mean, she”s beautiful, but at the same time she always feels that she has something to prove to herself.”

And it’s that way throughout the ensemble for Chbosky. “It was the right cast,” he says. “You know, it”s funny. Over the years, there were times that I was asking myself like, ‘Why don”t I just do the movie already? What are you waiting for?’ And once I had all those kids on set I knew that I was waiting for this group. If I had done it three years ago, they would have been too young. Three years from now, they would have been too old. It had to be that group, that summer. I”m so happy it was.”

The setting was equally important when envisioning the film. There was no way the story of “Perks” was going to be filmed in anywhere other than Chbosky’s native Pittsburgh. It’s somewhat serendipitous that with recent productions like “The Dark Knight Rises” and “Out of the Furnace,” the area of southwest Pennsylvania is seeing more and more production these days, but regardless, that had to be the place.

“When I was writing the book I was picturing the Hollywood Theatre when they were doing ‘Rocky Horror,'” Chbosky recalls. “I was picturing my street when it was luminaria. I remembered the texture of what it felt like to go to Friday night football games in my hometown and so just from my own sense of authenticity and my own personal connection, I had to do it there.”

But of course, the setting informs the story thematically as much as those personal touches of detail carve it out as a living, breathing environment. And that was as important to Chbosky in the adaptation process as it was in the writing of the novel.

“Pittsburgh is a tough city and so in making ‘Perks,’ to get the tone right, I knew that it could not be sentimental,” he says. “Even when it talked about tough issues, there had to be humor. I did not want to make a treacly movie. I wanted to make a true-to-life, celebratory look at all aspects of being a young person, from the most exciting to the most difficult. Pittsburgh is a beautiful city and I”m proud to be one of its sons, but it”s not a sentimental place and Pittsburgh toughness helped us a great deal.

“I”ll never forget the first week of shooting — John Malkovich is one of the producers — we were at dinner and he took me aside and he said, ‘You know, your script has real heart, so you don”t need sentiment. Direct this like a guy from Pittsburgh; always get the tough take.’ I took that to heart and it really served us well.”

And if everything in Chbosky’s career was pointing to this moment, then it’s fair to say everything he’s picked up along the way served him here as well. He’s worked with Spike Lee, Chris Columbus, Jon Turteltaub “and all the journeymen on ‘Jericho,'” as he calls his collaborators on the TV series. He’s observed a lot but, he says, until you get there, until someone says, “Hey, we’re running out of time and we’re losing the light,” you don’t really know how you’re going to respond. And the experience has shed more light on what filmmaking is for him.

“All of that showed me that making movies is a lot more blue-collar than it is white-collar,” he says. “It”s hours on set, in the trenches, doing the work, and once I understood that, once I observed that with all these terrific directors that I worked for and worked with, I don”t know, it wasn”t a magic trick anymore. It was just about the work. And once it was just about the work, it was really easy, because I can be shy at times and some of the more glamorous parts of making movies makes me a little nervous, but hard work doesn”t make me nervous. So I”m grateful to them that they showed me that.”

“The Perks of Being a Wallflower” premieres at the Toronto Film Festival on September 8. It opens nationwide on September 21.

It’s been a great week for Michael Haneke’s “Amour.” Not only was it confirmed yesterday as Austria’s official entry in the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race, but it played to predictably rapturous responses at Telluride — reheating the Cannes buzz enough for us to place it in our Best Picture predictions on the sidebar. (We’ve had it listed in Best Director for a few months now.)

Now comes further good news. Sealing its status as the de facto critics’ darling of 2012 so far, it was also just emerged as the winner of the FIPRESCI Grand Prix — an annual award voted on by the 200-plus members of the international critics’ federation, given to the best film premiered in the last 12 months. Haneke now joins Pedro Almodovar and Paul Thomas Anderson as the only two-time winners of the Grand Prix, which has been awarded since 1999. The award is presented every year at Spain’s San Sebastian Film Festival in late September — which is why it isn’t detemined on a calendar-year basis.

It’s the most global of all critics’awards, and a mighty prestigious one at that. (Check out the list of previous winners below to see what formidable company Haneke’s latest is in — including his own 2009 winner “The White Ribbon.”) That said, thanks in part to its large votership, it’s not the most imaginative of prizes: “Amour” is the fourth Cannes Palme d’Or winner to take the honor in six years. (The FIPRESCI prize also flags up the likelihood of “Amour” sweeping the European Film Awards; the last four European winners of the award have all done so.)

More significant than the award itself, perhaps, is how it underlines “Amour”‘s status as a consensus title; it might not be everyone’s favorite film of the year, but there’s scarcely a breathing soul who has seen and failed to admire it. That could make it a formidable player in the year-end US critics’ voting: I wouldn’t be surprised to see the New York or Los Angeles circles handing it some of their top hardware. (Mind you, history is not on its side: the New Yorkers haven’t handed their top prize to a foreign-language film since 1975.)

Meanwhile, expect it to pick up secondary Best Foreign Language Film awards like fleas — it could just gather enough momentum for many members to feel obliged to vote for it, as was the case with the unanimously venerated “A Separation” last year. Could the unthinkable happen, and that troublesome award actually go to the critical favorite two years running? We’re a long way from that yet.

For context, here’s the full list of previous FIPRESCI Grand Prix winners:

1999 “All About My Mother,” Pedro Almodóvar

2000 “Magnolia,” Paul Thomas Anderson

2001 “The Circle,” Jafar Panahi

2002 “The Man Without a Past,” Aki Kaurismäki

2003 “Uzak,” Nuri Bilge Ceylan

2004 “Notre Musique,” Jean-Luc Godard

2005 “3-Iron,” Kim Ki-duk

2006 “Volver,” Pedro Almodóvar

2007 “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” Cristian Mungiu

2008 “There Will Be Blood,” Paul Thomas Anderson

2009 “The White Ribbon,” Michael Haneke

2010 “The Ghost Writer,” Roman Polanski

2011 “The Tree of Life,” Terrence Malick

2012 “Amour,” Michael Haneke

Trailer for trailers and press releases for trailers. What a world. Though I guess Disney’s big brou-ha-ha around the trailer for Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” is a little more understandable given the robust pomp and circumstance they’re bringing to its debut.

According to a press release this afternoon, plans have been set to — stay with me — launch a Google+ Hangout (for those who didn’t abandon the social networking attempt two days in) and premiere the trailer there on September 13. A live conversation with Spielberg and “Lincoln” star Joseph Gordon-Levitt will also be featured. The event will also be broadcast on the ABC SuperSign in the heart of New York’s Times Square, and somewhere in there, my head just exploded.

Fans interested in participating are asked to upload a short video to their own YouTube channel with the #LincolnHangout tag explaining who they are, why they are interested in the film and what they would like to ask Spielberg and Gordon-Levitt about the film. And oh, here’s the website: www.lincolnhangout.com.

Wow.

As I mentioned in a recent Off the Carpet column, “Lincoln” is the film, on paper, that looks like one to beat in this year’s Oscar race. It has all the potential to be relevant and “important” enough to register, and as of now, it’s the only film that hasn’t debuted any footage. So the September 13 event will certainly be anticipated, but it feels like overkill to me. But hey, God bless ’em.

“Lincoln” opens nationwide on November 9.

I’ll make this relatively quick, partly because I have a screening to run to, and partly because we’ve covered this ground in a previous post. But thanks to Austrian reader Norman Shetler for informing us that his country has selected their entry for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race — and, as we suspected, it’s Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or winner “Amour.” 

“But it’s a French film!” I hear some of you cry. Well, no: this is a global industry, after all, and a film isn’t defined by the country it’s set in or the language it speaks. As a French-Austrian-German co-production, any one of those three countries would have been entitled to submit it. Tidily enough, it’s the director’s home country that gets the privilege this time.

France was never in the running to submit it anyway. Haneke’s film is only released there next month, thus missing the eligibility window: to qualify, a film must have been released in the submitting country at some point in the 12 months preceding the October 1 submission deadline. This frees them up to submit something by one of their own. If, as I suspect they might, the French enter the feelgood, Weinstein-backed crossover smash “The Intouchables,” they could ironically be one of “Amour”‘s most formidable obstacles to the win.

Meanwhile, selecting “Amour” is a vindicating move for Austria in two respects. First, it should soothe any lingering animosity over the 2009 race, when Austria and Germany tussled over who got to submit Haneke’s previous Palme champ, “The White Ribbon.” Germany won, and was duly nominated; Austria’s second choice, “For a Moment, Freedom,” didn’t crack the shortlist.

Secondly, the selection of “Amour” is a subtly pointed rejoinder to the Academy. The last time Austria submitted a Haneke film (they’ve done so four times, not once netting a nomination) was in 2005, when they entered the acclaimed “Hidden” — which, like “Amour,” is set in Paris with a French cast. The Academy controversially disqualified the film, claiming it was insufficiently Austrian to compete — as good a demonstration as any of the flaws of the Academy’s outmoded construction of this category. They effectively admitted their error the next year, changing the rules to permit films in non-native languages to compete. So by entering “Amour” — which would also have been disqualified in 2005 — Austria is effectively inviting the Academy to prove their changed ways.

Anyway, though we often say nothing is certain in this ever-perverse category, this news all but guarantees “Amour” a spot on the nine-film Oscar shortlist in January. Its blunt emotional impact, pristine craft and thematic resonance to older voters already stands it in good stead in this category, but even if it turns out to be overly tough medicine for lightweight voters, there is no imaginable way the executive committee will let it slip through the cracks.

Less certain is what this means for the film’s chances in other categories. As you saw in this this week’s chart update accompanying Kris’ Off the Carpet column, we’re currently predicting Sony Picture Classics, given little else to work with, will give “Amour” the full weight of their campaign energy, securing nominations for Best Picture, Director and Original Screenplay, as well as for its two impeccable leads. It would make it the first foreign-language film in history to score that haul of nominations (and the first to crack the top category in six years), but it’s well within the realm of possibility.

Funnily enough, however, it would be even likelier if the film had somehow failed to be entered in the foreign-language race, meaning Haneke supporters would have no choice but to vote for it in the general field. Will the film’s fans — and there will be a number of them — be content to recognize it in the ghetto race, or will they think it sufficiently special to honor across the board? We’ll see.

VENICE – Almost a week into the Venice Film Festival, the Lido has fallen rather quiet. After a cinephile’s superbowl of a weekend that saw the fest’s two most generally anticipated films, Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master” and Terrence Malick’s “To the Wonder,” premiere on consecutive days, many journalists are already either heading home or preparing for the exodus to Toronto — where they’ll be able to catch “Passion” and “The Company You Keep,” the two high-profile commercial films left in the lineup.

What surprise gems and potential Golden Lion winners lie ahead, of course, is anyone’s guess. The smart money right now is on “The Master,” still the dominant topic of conversation around the Venice grounds, appealing to jury president Michael Mann’s robust sensibilities and taking home the big one. Others think Marco “Vincere” Bellocchio’s latest (which premieres later this week) is, on paper, the one to beat. I, meanwhile, wouldn’t be surprised to see Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov’s dazzling romantic puzzler “Betrayal” (more on that in a later post) take home some major hardware — nor either of the films reviewed below, though one is from a celebrated French major and the other from an Israeli novice.

I realize, with apologies, that my coverage thus far has been overly weighted in favor of English-language fare. That’s simply how the schedule panned out, as the Wonders and Masters of this world have demanded the swiftest treatment. (It’s thanks to being programmed opposite “To the Wonder,” for example, that I’ve missed Susanne Bier’s potential Oscar submission “Love Is All You Need.” Given that I’ve now heard three colleagues separately describe it as “Mamma Mia!” minus the songs — which is to say, minus that film’s only source of rhythm or craftsmanship — I have made my peace with this.)

Still, now that the big guns have mostly gone off, there’s room to travel a little further afield. We’ll begin, however, with the relatively known turf of the competition, and the two non-English films that have prompted the most chatter so far. One of them, unsurprisingly, is by by Olivier Assayas; the other, however, is by a debut director (and a woman at that, making it unlike anything in this year’s Cannes contest on two counts), Rama Burshtein.

“Something in the Air” (B)

“Shouldn’t revolutionary cinema use a revolutionary syntax?” So asks a headstrong would-be firebrand in Olivier Assayas’s autobiography-infused reflection on the post-1968 countercultural youth movement — which is not so much a fists-raised celebration of left-wing defiance as a detached, even bemused, questioning of the changes it really wrought. Following a group of willow-haired teenage activists from suburban Paris as they flee the authorities’ response to their ill-thought acts of rebellion, hunkering down around the Continent for a gauzy summer of sex and self-realization, “Something in the Air” is the latest manifestation of an ongoing European auteur fixation with that romantically mobilized generation — kids who at once seem old souls and naive sprites compared to their more selfishly fatalistic 21st-century offspring.

Assayas’s film will put many in mind of Bertolucci’s “The Dreamers,” compared to which it’s both springier and less insipid. Still, if the two films’ young semi-heroes are similarly glassy and irritating in their idealism — a debit to which Assayas seems more cheerfully willing to admit than most — that could say as much about the revisionist nature of contemporary liberalism as anything else. Assayas might well believe that revolutionary cinema should be revolutionary in its construction: his restless, throbbing “Carlos,” a study in 1970s anarchism that stands as the stylistic and political negative to this more fetchingly wispy panorama, may fall short of that imposing “r” word, but it’s the more inspired, agitated film. The more pertinent question he seems to be asking is whether the figures at the heart of his story, a version of himself among them, merit revolutionary cinema at all.

The most direct sibling to “Something” in the Assayas oeuvre, however, isn’t “Carlos,” but his 1994 feature “Cold Water” — which was set one year later in the same band of purgatorial Paris, and followed a young couple’s absorption into radical commune culture. Their names, Gilles and Christine, also grace a pair of lovers in the new film, with painter and aspiring filmmaker Gilles again the proto-Assayas figure. There’s too little ideological continuity between both the films and the characters’ paths to suggest Assayas has belatedly found his Antoine Doinel, but the differences seem to mark his own coming of (middle) age.

“Something in the Air” begins with a propulsive, unified bang as one riveting sequence after another fights the power: a harrowing depiction of police brutality at a street student riot is straight from the “Carlos” school, aligning our sympathies with the students at its center even as they carry out misguided, poxy acts of defiance against their school and local security guards. But Assayas wearies of their behavior over the film’s blissed-out summer — realized with exquisite sun-saturated shimmer by cinematographer Eric Gautier. Gilles’s mopy artistic noodlings seem no more or less indulgent than his more redly politicized friends’ self-aggrandizing protests: “We do agit-prop; we don’t usually lend for fiction,” one of them sneers when he asks to borrow a camera. Meanwhile, the unbearable American girlfriend of one group member, a rigidly humorless hippy dedicated to studying “the mystic origins of secret dance,” inspires active audience contempt for their unmoored lifestyle.

Perhaps Assayas wants to catch us in the act of wondering why these kids don’t all just get a job; by the end, as many of them abandon the fight for more practical pursuits, he’s caught them too. As beautifully directed as you’d expect, “Something in the Air” is a film rich in such wry reversals, though I rather wish he (and his mostly inexperienced, mostly wan ensemble) had given us at least one character to hold onto. As it is, cinema itself wins out in the film’s delicious coda, which finds Gilles taking an internship (as did Assayas) at London’s famous Pinewood Studios, working on a B-picture that appears to combine Nazis, Godzilla and go-go girls in leopard-print bikinis. Now that’s some revolutionary syntax. 

“Fill the Void” (B)

Proving that you needn’t be on the side of the liberals to be quietly revolutionary, Israeli director Rama Burshtein’s highly promising debut feature “Fill the Void” — one of five films competing to represent the country in this year’s foreign-language Oscar race — is perhaps the most improbably booed film so far at a festival marred this year by an unusually jeer-happy audience. A thoughtful, deeply felt romantic comedy — yes, those words can co-exist — about arranged marriage within the Orthodox Jewish community to which its female first-time helmer belongs, “Void” seems a strange target for such festival crowd bullying. Terrence Malick is one thing, but the words “pick on someone your own size” come to mind in this instance.   

That, however, would be to underestimate the considerable fortitude and resolve beneath the peach-skin surface of this film, a rare female-focused project from a national industry that lately seems to have been churning out studies in male (and, in particular, military) crisis by the dozen. It’s a film that won’t be done many favors by a nuance-free logline: a virginal 18 year-old girl is pressured by her mother to marry her brother-in-law when her older sister dies in childbirth.

Ew, you might say, as you wait for Jerry Springer to bound onto screen to interview the principals. It seems a suitably extreme premise on which to build a progressive protest drama against an archaic faith, so audiences might be disquieted to find that Burshtein, herself a happy bride of arranged marriage, comes not to bury this conservative cultural institution, but to praise it — albeit with certain conditions. That would explain the raspberries directed at a film that will surely remain a provocative conversation piece even at friendlier screenings, but those booing were also missing (or wilfully ignoring) its socio-political subtleties: Burshtein’s film is pro on assisted unions, yes, but it also speaks passionately in favor of consent and personal discovery.

Crucially, our heroine Shira (the wonderful, open-faced Hadas Yaron) isn’t alone in her reservations about marrying the kind but slightly brusque Yochay (Yiftach Klein). Relatives and rabbi alike are unsold on the idea, and the film emerges from these conflicting perspectives as a funny, compassionate narrative of conversation, persuasion and patient, old-fashioned courtship — one that does Jane Austen, whom Burshtein has listed as her chief inspiration, proud. 

That “Fill the Void” emerges as a trickily qualified feminist work is testament to the writer-director’s light touch as a rhetorical conductor. All that, and she can really shoot, working out a fascinating scheme of shifting focus and dollhouse light with DP Asaf Sudry that seems disorientingly mannered at first, before emerging as a creative compass to Burshtein’s controlled but shimmying perspective. 

The season is here. “Argo” has sounded the starting gun in the mountains of Telluride while “The Master” has made a strong case on the Lido of Venice. Where will we go from here?

The upcoming Toronto Film Festival will bring a number of possibilities. The Weinstein Company has a few threads dangling, and in typical fashion, will see what sticks to the wall.

“The Sapphires” played well at Telluride after having already pleased crowds in Cannes, but it’s likely to move to next year. “Silver Linings Playbook” will get its close-up next, with “Quartet” and “Song for Marion” as lingering possibilities besides. And before long, the moneymaker: “Django Unchained.” But at the fest next week, we could see the beginning of an Oscar march for Robert De Niro and some serious consideration for Terrence Stamp, Maggie Smith, Pauline Collins, etc. We’ll just have to see what sticks.

Warner Bros. will ride the “Argo” high from Colorado to Canada and likely won’t miss a beat, but there will also be “Cloud Atlas” to consider. It’s an interesting situation and “it’s not for everyone” seems to be the constant meme from those close to it, but the word will be out soon enough.

Focus will try “Hyde Park on Hudson” in front of a new audience after not really lighting up Telluride (despite Bill Murray’s typically cute antics around town), but there will also be a lot of attention paid to “Anna Karenina.” The film is set to open in the UK next week (Guy’s review here). As if the trailer couldn’t have clued you in, it seems to be a definite contender in design categories, with outside shots at this and that elsewhere. We’ll see if his view of the film is shared up north.

Summit Entertainment has two great offerings in “The Impossible” and “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” The former in particular could emerge as a significant threat in the Best Picture race with Naomi Watts joining the Best Actress conversation in stride. Fox Searchlight, meanwhile, will bring “The Sessions” to TIFF looking to continue the goodwill received eight months ago in Sundance. John Hawkes is sure to get even more glowing notices for his work in the film. And will they look to continue the Terrence Malick relationship and acquire “To the Wonder” after decent enough notices in Venice? (Guy’s review here.)

Speaking of which, there are other films still for sale, whether it’s “The Place Beyond the Pines,” “Great Expectations,” “Frances Ha” (which played very well in Telluride) and “Imogene,” among others. Will buyers looking to fill awards season gaps bite? Or will conservative studios pocket some of these for next year?

Which brings me to Sony Pictures Classics. Michael Barker and Tom Bernard came to Telluride this year with a typically heavy slate of films, but only two of them — “Amour” and “Rust & Bone” — will be 2012 releases. “At Any Price,” “The Gatekeepers,” “No” and the recently acquired “The Company You Keep” (which didn’t play Telluride but will play Toronto) have all officially been set for next year, though things could change on “The Gatekeepers” once the documentary feature category is sussed out.

Barker told me during the fest that he has high expectations for “Amour” at the Oscars, mentioning it in the same breath as “Cries & Whispers.” Indeed, it would appear Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or winner is in the best position to make a run for it out of the SPC stable. And it continued to play well to festival audiences in Telluride. It was frequently discussed and seemed to be one of the highlights for most.

That ought to do enough to explain some choices we’ve made in running a quick comb through the Contenders section this week. It is, as always, a shifting landscape. And in two weeks, with Toronto in the rear view and New York on the horizon, we’ll have an even clearer idea. We’ll reassess then.

TELLURIDE – Things are pretty much wrapping up at the 39th annual. Monday is generally a great time for catch-up, as the schedule is filled in with repeat showings. Unfortunately, I tend to leave on Monday afternoon each year, so I don’t get to use the day productively. But nine-and-a-half movies over the three-day spread is good enough for me. (I won’t knock the movie I walked out of. I’ll come back to it at some point, as it’s generated interesting split reactions.)

The festival this year was more in line with its former identity. A few years of Oscar bait titles — “127 Hours,” “Up in the Air,” “The King’s Speech,” “Black Swan” — caused an influx of press recently, but things have been more refined this year and last. But in particular, the whole thing was quite subdued this time around. It’s the first Telluride I’ve attended where I didn’t even do any interviews, which is also kind of in keeping with its former self. They’ve never really wanted a strong press presence here. But who knows what might happen next year as the fest celebrates its 40th anniversary with an extra day of programming?

The big media story was of course the sneak preview of Ben Affleck’s “Argo.” The film played extremely well and will likely do the same when it moves on to Toronto next week (especially given its Canada-as-hero elements). It’s also the first inarguable Oscar play of the season. Affleck’s been around town all weekend but hasn’t done any press, and won’t do a lot at Toronto, either, apparently. There appears to be an effort to avoid over-saturation too far in advance of the release, and that’s actually a relief.

Documentaries were a big hit at the festival this year. I didn’t see Sarah Polley’s “Stories We Tell,” but more than a few have told me it’s her best film yet. I did catch “The Central Park Five” and “The Gatekeepers,” however, and both were sensational. Speaking of which, the Best Documentary Feature category rules have been a consistent topic of discussion with journalists and studio chiefs with docs in play. It’s going to be an interesting year as the nomination process has been opened up as well as the fact that the entire Academy membership can vote on the winner. It really changes things from a strategy standpoint. And in the end, popularity will win the day.

I didn’t find myself responding to Pablo Larraín’s “No,” which was surprising as it was a hit at Cannes and found a lot of champions here. I can’t help but think that most are responding more to the story itself than the way it was told, however. Michael Winterbottom’s “Everyday” also didn’t click for me and seemed to be a wasted opportunity, given the time put into it. But those are really the only films that fell short on my list.

Greta Gerwig could come out of the fest with a head of steam in “Frances Ha,” but it’s a tiny movie and an Oscar campaign could be tough. I was delighted to have enjoyed it as I had every expectation that I wouldn’t. Meanwhile, the commercial prospects for “The Iceman” should get it a buyer that may want to try for a Michael Shannon Best Actor push, but he really outshines his own film. And finally, “Hyde Park on Hudson” seemed to garner a lot of forgiveness here, but for me, it was dead on arrival. The movie just doesn’t work, has an awkward ick factor and is ultimately forgettable. And as one colleague put it, there are three presidents you just don’t mess with: Washington, Lincoln and FDR. And this film doesn’t paint the nicest portrait of FDR. I’m not saying anything is off limits, I’m just saying it’s a hurdle if you’re going to go there.

Other films that played include “Ginger and Rosa,” which some loved and some hated; “The Act of Killing,” a documentary that seemed to produce the strongest reactions of the fest (be them positive or negative); Ramin Bahrani’s “At Any Price,” which was a head-scratcher for many who felt there had to be more there than is readily apparent; and “Midnight’s Children,” the ambitious adaptation that most perceived as a noble failure. Again, I won’t note which of those was my “half” movie.

And I think one of the hits of the fest, just anecdotally, was Palme d’Or winner “Amour.” I’ll talk about that film’s awards trajectory a little more in today’s Off the Carpet column.

Today will bring the annual Labor Day picnic with filmmakers on hand and, soon enough, the curtain will officially drop on the 39th annual Telluride Film Festival. The rain was a pest, particularly the cloud cover (seeing the Milky Way up here is just a sight to behold at night), but all in all, another delightful trip to this mountain hamlet.

Greg Ellwood will have a few things in the way of closure later, so watch for that. As for me, that’s a wrap on the SHOW.

TELLURIDE – I’ve recognized over the last few years that sometime Sunday afternoon at the Telluride fest, I find myself yearning for a break, something different, something I don’t feel compelled to write about. Of course, I’ll often find myself wanting to write about it anyway, but the lack of obligation going in is the real gift. Last year it was the presentation of a restored version of Georges Méliès’s “A Trip to the Moon.” This year it was a 70mm presentation of Ron Fricke’s “Baraka.”

I’ve mentioned this briefly before, but I was fortunate enough to attend a film school that had a massive archive of prints, one of the top three largest collections in the world at the time. And part of that was a great 70mm selection, from “Aliens” to “2001: A Space Odyssey” to, indeed, “Baraka.” I had never heard of the film at the time, though a few of my classmates had. I went in blind and I fell in love. It was a very specific and noteworthy moment for me, an awe-inspiring experience in a pre-jaded time. I’ve owned the film on VHS, DVD and Blu-ray since and, naturally, it has just never been the same experience.

So I was happy to see that the festival this year programmed the new 70mm print of the film, which has been shown here and there at places like the American Cinematheque. (It was actually guest director Geoff Dyer who made the selection.) It seemed the perfect thing at the perfect time, so I hopped in line, as did, I noticed, filmmakers Alexander Payne and Charles Ferguson, among others.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master” is really bringing 70mm into a broader conversation this year, but while I’m sure his film is beautiful both visually and sonically, the medium truly shines with a film like “Baraka.” When it was released in 1993, it was the first film to use the format in over 20 years. Filmed in 23 countries, it is a pure piece of work in eery sense of the word. If you’ve never seen it I encourage you to seek it out, particularly on the big screen if you can manage it.

The movie defies any attempt to review it. Some find it a new age bore, others a meditation on respect for the planet. I have never considered it anything more than an experience. To over-apply meaning or to cynically dismiss it are equally damaging to the fragility of life that the film conveys.

Fricke has recently released a sequel of sorts to the film, “Samsara,” in theaters now. I haven’t found the time to see it but I will as soon as possible. There is an essential quality to his work (he also collaborated with Godfrey Reggio on “Koyaanisqatsi”) for which I am thankful. The dedication is always apparent, and the effect is never less than profound.

Boy am I glad I took the time out today.

In the five years since Joe Wright last fixed his camera on a lissome, silk-swaddled Keira Knightley, he appears to have taken concerted, even hasty, steps away from a reputation he’d never made as much effort to acquire as his harshest critics would have you believe. Those accusing him of safely wallowing in Masterpiece Theater starch, or brashly seizing the mantle of the late Anthony Minghella (already a little moth-eaten from its time in David Lean’s wardrobe), seem prompted more by the comfortable middlebrow success of his first two films than the often invigorating evidence on screen. 

No one needed another “Pride and Prejudice,” true, but Wright’s frisky, grass-stained romp proved you could young up the classics without taking them to Vegas; “Atonement” occasionally buckled under the weight of its formal ostentation, but was bracingly concept-y in its romanticism, doubling back on Ian McEwan’s exclusively literary twists with cool elan. It was an impressive one-two, but Wright obviously felt cowed into contemporary material by glib Merchant-Ivory comparisons. The modern LA folk tale of “The Soloist” wasn’t as gloopy as it looked from a distance, but it felt like an assignment. Far weirder and more vital was “Hanna,” a daffy girl-oriented chase thriller lent cred and urgency by its full-throttle techno-Grimm styling; his best film to date, it’s also the one that had us wondering who Joe Wright, like his equally mutable heroine, really is. 

This question isn’t really answered by “Anna Karenina,” his typically resplendent but counter-intuitively conceived adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s teeming, bristly epic novel. You could argue for it being a retreat to corseted heritage drama after two forays into the 21st century that, respectable box office for “Hanna” notwithstanding, didn’t quite take – only juiced up with some of the whizz-bang flash he learned on his last feature. That wouldn’t be quite fair. Yes, “Anna Karenina” is a judiciously experimental costumer, but while it’s more hyper-stylized than either of his previous period pieces, it’s not especially more modern – or indeed post-modern – than “Atonement” was. 

Whether Wright believes that himself, however, is up for debate. He’s certainly lampshading his revisionism more than before, though it’s hard not to do so when the controlling conceit is this brash. In case you hadn’t heard, this “Anna Karenina” – a tale that usually spreads itself luxuriously across the ample upper-class playgrounds and earthier rural steppes of 19th-century Russia – is set almost entirely within the confines of a theater, its complex politics of bedroom and ballroom alike playing out on the stage, as well as in the balconies and rat runs of the same, endlessly refolded building. Well, it is and it isn’t: the characters aren’t in on the joke, oblivious to the weathered wooden boards and stray stage hands placing their personal dramas within quotation marks.

For a radical treatment that was reportedly necessitated by budget cuts rather than any theatrical metaphor initially ingrained in playwright Tom Stoppard’s reasonably thorough adaptation, it holds together surprisingly well. However inorganic, the motivation is logical, if a tad literal: the play-within-a-play framing underlines the claustrophobia, the sense of constant scrutiny Anna feels as the dissolution of her marriage is observed, judged and finally condemned by Moscow high society. When the film sporadically exits the theater for the great outdoors, setting intimate scenes between Anna and her dashing military lover Vronsky, both attired in blinding “Elvira Madigan” white, in verdant sunlit forests, the symbolism couldn’t be less subtle if Wright cued up Tiffany’s “I Think We’re Alone Now” on the soundtrack.

That, of course, is a trick Baz Luhrmann would have pulled, and while Wright contents himself with grandiloquent Dario Marianelli orchestrations instead, there’s a lot of Luhrmann’s self-branded Red Curtain aesthetic at play here — beginning with the red velvet curtains that open the film in the first place. It’s great fun — a word that deserves to be applied more often to Tolstoy’s profound yet compulsive soap opera — watching Wright work out the practical nuts and bolts of his slightly dotty, drama teacher-ish flight of fancy. Each familiar scene is freshly tinged with curiosity over just how he’s going to stage it: screens slide and collapse to waltz us seamlessly from room  to room; a furious horse race flashes by from one stage wing to the other, like film yanked through a nickelodeon; even the novel’s all-important steam train morphs between a life-size model and a Toy Town edition, like the prettiest Scalextric you ever saw.

This is origami-style filmmaking, complicating forms because it knows how, and if it doesn’t add much to the text — the straight-arrow script isn’t playing along with its romantic make-believe games — it doesn’t obfuscate things either. Chiefly, it gives Wright’s regular production designer Sarah Greenwood a veritable wonderland of environments to create, merge and shuffle, her sets alternating between the heightened reality of theater and the heightened theatricality of upper-crust decor, with all the backstage sawdust and tinsel also in plain sight. Her exhaustively playful work is, to my mind, the shoo-in frontrunner for the freshly renamed Best Production Design category at the upcoming Academy Awards.

Similarly unbeatable-looking are Jacqueline Durran’s remarkable costumes. They’re ravishing, of course, but less for their predictably expensive rufflery — and the increasingly spidery black veils that seem to swallow Anna whole as her emotional state becomes ever less tenable — than for the unexpectedly contemporary accents the designer weaves into the corseted formula. (And out of it: a striking last-reel scene finds Anna tellingly standing in just her underclothes and the rickety skeleton of a hoop skirt before making her famous final decision.)  Just as that green dress in “Atonement” seemed to have slipped from the pages of a 2007 edition of Vogue, the modernity of Anna’s sharp bias-sliced necklines and glittering asymmetrical jewels here seem calculated to underline the cultural durability — indeed, the precocity — of Karenina as a female icon of fiction.

That Knightley’s angular, tightly controlled performance appears to have similar aims is hardly surprising, given that the young Londoner has long been the go-to girl for bringing a brisk 21st-century sensibility to out-of-time period heroines, whether in “Pride and Prejudice,” “The Duchess” or “A Dangerous Method.” She’s getting craftier at it, too — here, she uses the regular quaver in her voice to the character’s nervous advantage — but it’d have been exciting to see her try matching her director’s florid excess with a more grandly stylized star turn in the register of cinema’s reigning best Anna, Garbo. (Alicia Vikander, the hugely promising Swedish actress, might have given it a game go: as it is, she steals the film with her tenderly flirtatious, open-hearted interpretation of Kitty.)

Still, such an approach might only further have shown up the inadequacies of a sorely miscast Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Vronsky: the curious stylistic choice of blonde jheri churls may not be his fault, but all that pouty sashaying is. Taylor-Johnson projects Vronsky’s cockiness, but not his magnetism — and with no chemistry to ignite them, these two brittle young figures wind up reflecting, rather than consuming, each other.

For all Knightley’s best efforts, theirs never seems like a love for which Anna might abandon everything, or indeed anything. There’s more passion in the parallel story of society girl Kitty and the guileless Levin (a pleasingly cast Domnhall Gleeson), but the film never quite forges the required emotional exchange between these narrative tracks; with Wright seemingly more fixated on the design of his narrative than the narrative itself, the door is left open to the chill. This is a richly, rewardingly, improbably alive “Anna Karenina,” but there’s a difference between a film that is constantly in motion, and one that actually moves. All the men and women merely players, indeed.

TELLURIDE – I’m not the Noah Baumbach subscriber many of my colleagues are. I even choked a little bit yesterday at the premiere of “Frances Ha” when Scott Foundas, in introducing the director, called him “the voice of his generation.” But I do think a case may have been made in his latest.

The film is Woody Allen by way of Williamsburg, “Girls” by way of…well, Baumbach. And it’s easily his best yet, his most thematically refined outing. And it’s been interesting to see some call it his least essential, others his best effort. But few have bad words for it. At the center is a fantastic, flighty portrayal from Greta Gerwig, continuing her indie star rise, but I was once again charmed right out of my seat by Adam Driver.

You’ll probably recall him for his work in Lena Dunham’s aforementioned HBO series, and yes, he’s treading similar waters here. But there’s something so charismatic and easy, assured and magnetic about the actor. I’d say when he was on screen, I was most invested in the film. And I hope he gets more and more work.

But while some have already disagreed with me here, I think there’s a versatility lurking underneath there. He’s been tapped for similar stuff lately, but this is an actor who just worked with Clint Eastwood (“J. Edgar”) and has collaborations with Steven Spielberg (“Lincoln”) and the Coen brothers (“Inside Llewyn Davis”) on the horizon. That’s a pretty stellar start, and I’m hoping we see more and more of him in the coming years.

Speaking of charisma, Michael Shannon is certainly a different breed where that is concerned. I caught up with Ariel Vromen’s “The Iceman” last night. The movie is on the commercial side and isn’t overly compelling in and of itself. It tells an interesting but somewhat rote story of mob hitman Richard “The Iceman” Kuklinski, a cold and ruthless killer who was nevertheless a committed family man.

Shannon absolutely kills in the title role (no pun intended). It’s one of his best performances to date. We’ve really come to expect no less of him, but he seethes and explodes in equal portion in the film, crafting a fabulous arc and popping out from an awesome cast. Though on that front, I’d say Chris Evans almost steals it. He’s unrecognizable for most of the film under facial hair and long locks, but he’s a live wire and a great sparring partner for Shannon. Ray Liotta (who was on hand), David Schwimmer, Winona Ryder, Robert Davi and — in fleeting cameos — James Franco and Stephen Dorff also star.

Getting back to Shannon, the guy is unbelievably prolific lately. I bumped into his personal publicist at a dinner last night and got excited for a moment thinking maybe he made the journey. But I knew that was wishful thinking. He went straight from Venice to New York for rehearsals on “Grace,” his big Broadway debut that’s going into previews later this month. Add to that another play (the off-Broadway “Uncle Vanya”), the production schedule for “Boardwalk Empire,” the recently wrapped “Man of Steel,” next year’s “Mud” and the just-released “Premium Rush,” the guy clearly loves to work. We’re the lucky ones in that equation.

Both “The Iceman” and “Frances Ha” will hit the Toronto Film Festival next. They’re both looking for buyers on these shores.

That’s just a little clean-up. Today I’m going to catch up with Pablo Larraín’s “No” and then see where the wind takes me. I can already feel things winding down.

VENICE — Stop the presses: There’s been booing at a screening of the new Terrence Malick film. Whether they came from the same small-but-loud faction of supposed journalists who vocally expressed their displeasure at “The Tree of Life” in Cannes last year, or a fresh batch of doubters, such jeers are unusual for films that feature no purported moral transgressions, nor any sheer ineptitude of craft. (Films aren’t booed at festivals simply for being bad, you know: a year ago, Madonna’s “W.E.” heard not a one.)

Rather, Malick is one of the few senior A-list filmmakers who can get razzed in this fashion for being too sincere, too lyrical, too himself. And he is all of those things, to both bewitching and bemusing effect, in “To the Wonder,” a follow-up to “The Tree of Life” in more senses than mere proximity. With not even 16 months separating their premieres, they are by far the nearest-born works in a filmography otherwise thick with white space, underlining the impression of two sister films: both iridescently pictorial, ambiguously self-focused and inclined to lure critics into terms they should normally feel self-conscious about using. “Tone poem.” “Meditation.” “Elegy.” “Prayer.” Ghastly words when abused, the lot of them. Malick’s cinema somehow wears them well.

So why, given this tonal and textual consistency, did I feel admiringly detached from “The Tree of Life,” finding its explosion of formal beauty a discontinuous front for its unnourished human expressions, but far more stimulated and moved by his latest? “To the Wonder” is structurally a more modest, more linear film than “Tree” — no dinosaurs here, folks, though fans of sea turtles should prick up their ears — but it’s no less vulnerable to charges of excessive preciosity, particularly from those whose secularity applies to churches beyond the House of Malick.

Though not evangelical, “Tree” was unapologetically steeped in the director’s Christianity, its hushed negotiation of nature and grace culminating in a rapt celebration of the afterlife. The more earthbound “Wonder” isn’t as fixated on such unknowables, but it’s no less faith-based, and not just in the secondary presence of Javier Bardem as a Catholic priest  struggling to bring comfort to an economically famished Oklahoman community.

Its lean primary narrative, too, amounts to an investigation of sin, forgiveness and devotion in the domestic space, as Midwest engineer Neil (Ben Affleck) and his French lover Marina (Olga Kurylenko) struggle to build a moral foundation for their relationship, and subsequent marriage, on the unwelcoming, wind-blown plains of his home turf. (The “Wonder” of the title is the French island of Mont St. Michel, where the couple are shown frolicking in halcyon days.) At different stages of the protracted breakup, both fall prey to other people’s arms: Marina, fleetingly, with a street acquaintance at an Econo Lodge; Neil, with more lasting and troubling impact, to former high-school flame Jane (Rachel McAdams). 

Seemingly inspired by the dissolution of the director’s own second marriage in the 1980s, the story forms a less far-reaching basis for spiritual investigation than its predecessor’s classical, era-hopping war between father and son, but there’s dramatic satisfaction in watching these otherwise opaque characters emerge through their tussles with more contained moral decisions and consequences: it’s the rare film that feels more affecting for the stakes being slightly smaller. Though Malick’s requisite rolling landscapes and infinite bruise-colored skies are still very much present and correct (Emmanuel Lubezki devotees should prepare for, well, the wonder), it’s the director’s most intimate film since 1978’s “Days of Heaven,” as well as his most gaspingly romantic. If the title “Tree of Life” loftily bracketed a branching journey through mortality and beyond, this is his Tree of Love. 

“Everything’s so beautiful here!” cries Marina’s pre-teen daughter from a previous liaison, as the makeshift family wheels its way through a cavernous, hard-lit supermarket. The line prompts one of the few laughs ever likely to be heard during a Terrence Malick film, but it’s indicative of the earnest enchantment coursing through “Wonder”‘s veins that he and Lubezki themselves seek to beautify everything in this onscreen environment: the first fully contemporary setting of his career, and one even more grayishly forbidding than that explored in his 1974 debut “Badlands.”

As befits the title, everything is a gaze-demanding spectacle in this simple world, be it minutiae like the shadow-box theater created by a gaudy chandelier in an underlit corridor and the technicolor tangle of real-life tattoos on Affleck’s biceps, or more extravagantly surreal flourishes like the stormy herd of bison closing in on Affleck and Kurylenko as they embrace in a wheaten field. Speaking of which, we hardly need reminding at this point that no one shoots swaying expanses of grass like Malick — and Lubezki’s further virtuosic-yet-specific wizardry here marks a happy extension of their own professional romance. (Chalk up one non-negotiable Oscar nomination for a film that looks unlikely to be garlanded as generously as “The Tree of Life.”)

Like Malick’s customary accompanying swirl of highly recognizable classical scoring — selected composers this time range from Tchaikovsky to Shostakovich to Arvo Part, with young Kiwi-born, Texas-based composer Hanan Townshend doing the bridging work — this super-aestheticized approach is bound to aggravate as many as it enthralls, but in a film dedicated to ideal but elusive forms of love, it feels thematically grounded. Ditto the casting: with their vocal contributions limited to the same strain of hushed, ecstatic voiceover (“I open my eyes… I melt into the eternal light,” and so on) delivered predominantly by Jessica Chastain in “The Tree of Life,” the four stars aren’t performers so much as motifs.

One could wonder why a director as famously indifferent to actors (and commerce) as Malick — Rachel Weisz’s role, incidentally, has been given the old Adrien Brody heave-ho here — continues to hire such big-name actors. (You might think he of all directors would be in favor of non-pro casts.) The combined attractiveness of this star quartet runs the risk of making the film’s least integrated or resonant sequences — those in which Bardem wearily calls on all manner of buck-toothed, poverty-stricken local parishioners — the teeniest bit condescending to boot. Even this faint absurdity, however, seems parcelled up in Malick’s restless, tender, unfashionable quest for beauty in its highest physical and spiritual forms. Never, to crib a line from “A Clockwork Orange,” has a Terrence Malick film felt more like gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh.

TELLURIDE – Fewer movies are going to be as important and provocative at this year’s Telluride Film Festival than Dror Moreh’s “The Gatekeepers.” The documentary filmmaker was granted an extraordinary amount of access to six former heads of Shin Bet, the ultra-secretive Israeli intelligence agency, and turned out a striking, candid assessment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from those with the very power to dictate what can and cannot be divulged.

Along the way there are plenty of defensive exchanges regarding the organization’s handling of terrorism and notions of morality in a situation seemingly lacking any sense of it, but ultimately there is a sense of weariness from the former agency chiefs and a desire to negotiate peace with their enemies. “We can sit down and I can see that you don’t eat glass and you can see that I don’t drink petrol,” one of them — who even goes so far as to compare the “cruel” Israeli occupation to Nazi Germany — puts it.

Most intriguing, though, is the sense from these men that much of their work has been for naught. The equivalent would be to get a number of former CIA heads to admit on camera that the Cold War was a waste of time. It’s pretty staggering stuff.

The film gives a thorough retelling of the tensions that have boiled over time and again since the Six-Day War of 1967, which led to the Israeli occupation of territories in Israel and the Gaza Strip. It serves as a history lesson from those who lived it, and provides an invaluable perspective on evolving methods of anti-terrorism while treading the philosophical waters of playing God and having the power to extinguish another life with the push of a button.

At this evening’s annual Sony Pictures Classics dinner at La Marmotte, I found myself sitting next to Moreh and, with his film on my mind, had plenty to ask. He told me that, of course, the access was difficult and a glacial process, getting one former head to finally commit, then slowly reining in more. And even he was surprised at what he was able to capture.

“It was stunning,” he said. “And I have met many Jews here at this festival who have come up to me and said, ‘Thank you.’ Many feel they can’t speak up on this. They’re afraid.”

Indeed, it’s such a liberal point of view that I don’t think the film will face much opposition from the documentary feature branch. A journalist colleague wondered to me earlier in the fest whether the film’s somewhat anti-Israel sheen could hurt it with a well-represented Jewish community within the Academy, but if there are more like those Moreh is meeting here in Telluride, perhaps that’s not the case at all. Perhaps “The Gatekeepers” will be less a thorn than a breath of fresh air.

“The Gatekeepers” will move on to the Toronto and New York film festivals from here. Sony Pictures Classics will release it domestically next year. Put it on your Best Documentary Feature shortlist. It’s going to be a widely-discussed title.

TELLURIDE – Like my colleague Greg Ellwood, I attended yesterday afternoon’s “Sneak Preview” premiere of Ben Affleck’s “Argo.” Last year the spot — an unannounced screening for patrons of the festival and invited press — went to “The Descendants,” the year before, “Chico & Rita.” It’s not a typical spot for Oscar bait to bow, it just happened to fall that way the last couple of years. And it was a big winner this time around.

I found the film to be yet another step up for Affleck, who continues to grow as a filmmaker and surprise not just formally but with his adeptness at handling ensembles as well. And that’s what “Argo” is: an organic, finely tuned ensemble where no one really stands out from the pack. And that’s not a bad thing, particularly for a film that is very much about the efforts of the many.

The question, though, for the purposes of the season we’re about to launch into, is this: Does it have Oscar potential? And I think the answer, particularly judging by the reaction from the audience yesterday, is an unequivocal “yes.”

Greg’s review lays out the plot and history lesson of the thing, so feel free to check that out for those particulars. I’d like to get into some nuts and bolts here, though, and first and foremost is the tension Affleck mounts with this film.

I’ve never chewed my nails down like that in a screening before. The propulsive and at times artful editing by two-time Oscar nominee William Goldenberg (“The Insider,” “Seabiscuit”) is a big reason the film works so well. He deserves another notice for his work here, no question about it. But everything from the in-scene construction to the overall sense of pacing in the film is just outstanding, and it really brings everything home in a third act that’s even better than the rest of the film.

(And the crowd ate it up. Applause in the middle of the movie, constant “wow” and “outstanding” reactions outside the theater after the screening, etc.)

Rodrigo Prieto’s lensing also deserves some real recognition, a smooth hue to the enterprise, a slick but properly creative capturing of things. And the design of the film, from Sharon Seymour’s pitch-perfect production detail to, particularly, Jacqueline West’s period-nailing costume work, is equally deserving.

On the ensemble front, I think it’s the kind of thing where people will have their favorites. Bryan Cranston, for instance, is typically solid and more of a supporting anchor than most of the other actors.

Meanwhile, it’s true that Alan Arkin — as a Hollywood producer brought in to help cook up the fake movie that serves as a cover for getting six hostages out of harm’s way during the Iran Hostage Crisis — steals the movie when he’s on the screen. But he’s not on the screen a lot, and he shares plenty of it with John Goodman (as Academy Award-winning makeup artist John Chambers, who, as a civilian CIA assist, gets the whole ball rolling), who’s equally cheeky and fun. Together they really make up the “Wag the Dog” DNA of the film.

Which brings me to why I think “Argo” is sure to play for the Academy and the industry as a whole: it’s a story about how the film business came to the rescue and had a defining, albeit classified for decades, moment. It’s at once a send-up of and a thank you to Hollywood and all it’s sad, devilish charm. And that’s sure to resonate.

Mostly I’m just so happy to see Affleck continue to find his voice. He takes a few chances here, stretches his legs creatively (an opening narration sequence setting the scene over storyboards is an interesting, clever touch) and seems to be catching a confident stride. This after films like “Gone Baby Gone” and “The Town” already revealed a filmmaker who was ready to hit the ground running.

I also like that he didn’t try to overstate the heroism of his own character in the film. It’s not a big movie star performance and I get the hunch he very much wanted to step back and let the ensemble push the whole thing forward.

And that it does. The Screen Actors Guild should bite on an ensemble nomination. In addition to those mentioned above, Clea DuVall, Rory Cochrane, Tate Donovan, et al. are great, with nice accents from Zeljko Ivanek and Kyle Chandler, among others.

So chalk it up as, I feel, the first major Oscar play to come along this year. Films like “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and “Moonrise Kingdom” have made their modest cases, but “Argo” really announces the arrival of the season.

We’ll see how Toronto audiences take to it next week.

“Argo” opens nationwide October 12.