TELLURIDE – Actress Marion Cotillard didn’t really explode onto the domestic film stage until “La Vie en Rose,” but what a coming out it was. She managed to win an Oscar that few (ahem) saw coming and transformed that newfound respect and goodwill into a thriving Hollywood career, but it was hardly an overnight success story.

Cotillard had already seen plenty of success in her native France before that 2007 explosion. She starred in Arnaud Desplechin’s “My Sex Life… or How I Got Into an Argument,” Pierre Grimblat’s “Lisa” and the “Taxi” action comedy trilogy — earning plenty of recognition for each — before breaking out in Yann Samuel’s romantic comedy “Love Me If You Dare” (in which she co-starred with eventual husband Guillaume Canet) in 2003. She also eventually landed a prime role in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s “A Very Long Engagement,” which brought her a César Award for Best Supporting Actress.

It was around this time that Cotillard appeared in Tim Burton’s “Big Fish,” and what an interesting director to have “discovered” her on these shores. But word gets out on talent wherever they may be on the globe, and soon enough, Cotillard was working with Abel Ferrara (“Mary”) and Ridley Scott (“A Good Year”). Then, it was “La Vie en Rose.”

Olivier Dahan’s Édith Piaf biopic was bound to be a ripe opportunity for whoever got the role, but Cotillard nailed it. It was much more than an impersonation of a larger-than-life singer. It was a brave portrayal, a fully immersive one. She went on to win the BAFTA and Golden Globe awards for Best Actress (the first winner of the latter for a foreign performance in 35 years), yet still pundits expected SAG winner Julie Christie to take the Oscar for Sarah Polley’s “Away from Her.”

That didn’t happen. Cotillard took the prize, as well as, eventually, another César — only the second person to win both awards for the same performance. She was also the first foreign performer to win the Best Actress Oscar in nearly 50 years.

Cotillard then lept out into a new phase of her career. Her next collaboration was with Michael Mann (“Public Enemies”), and it was one she relished for the director’s process of fully investigating a character’s backstory and thoroughly carving him or her out of whole cloth. She was one of the best parts of the film, which wasn’t all that well-received, and the promise was all the more clear that a star was on the rise.

She soon found roles in big ensembles of movie stars, and she seemed to fit right in: Rob Marshall’s “Nine,” Steven Soderbergh’s “Contagion,” Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” etc. The latter nailed down a nomination for Best Picture, while the very next year, she starred in another: Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris.”

This year she’s already appeared in Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Rises” (though in my opinion she was perhaps wasted in a role that had such promise but was ultimately little more than a cog in the twist-ending wheel). Yet again, she seemed at home in a blockbuster, a perfect fit as a first-timer at the end of a trilogy that was one of the biggest money-makers the industry has seen. She’s also present on the indie circuit this year in hubby Canet’s “Little White Lies.”

More importantly, though, Cotillard already dazzled audiences at Cannes with her performance in Jacques Audiard’s “Rust & Bone,” which is playing Telluride this year. The film will surely thrust her into the Best Actress conversation later this year as more and more people get a look at it.

Coming up there is James Gray’s currently untitled film (formerly known as “Lowlife”) that could be something to watch for next year, as well as a role in Canet’s “Blood Ties” (written by Gray) opposite Clive Owen, Mila Kunis, Zoe Saldana and James Caan, among other notables. And once again, surrounded by such firepower, she seems perfectly at home. Just five years after most of us really got a look at her, Marion Cotillard has been welcomed into a pantheon and shows no signs of letting up.

It’s a perfect time, then, for Telluride to offer up a tribute to her work. The festivities happen tonight at the Palm Theatre here in town, and I imagine she’ll likely be humoring similar this-is-your-life appreciations for years to come.

TELLURIDE – “I hope this film makes you angry,” filmmaker Sarah Burns said by way of introduction to this morning’s screening of “The Central Park Five.” She co-directed the film with her father, Ken Burns (a Telluride staple — as is Sarah: this is her 20th fest) and husband David McMahon. And angry is a good way to put it.

Maddening, gut-wrenching, deflating, these are all words I would use to describe the film, which tells the story of five black and Latino youths who were wrongfully convicted of the vicious rape of a female jogger in New York’s Central Park in April of 1989. Films like the “Paradise Lost” trilogy and “West of Memphis” have recently depicted miscarriages of justice in similarly infuriating ways, but few have been such a thorough and profound indictment of mob mentality as this. It’s a must-see effort analyzing an ugly and dark hour for society.

The film sets the scene well: a late-1980s New York overrun with crime in the wake of crack cocaine’s arrival to the city mid-decade. Racial tensions were high. “The most endangered species was the young black man,” says one talking head in the film, delivering an oft-quoted meme of the day. And terrible things happened every day. A minority woman is raped in Brooklyn and thrown from a roof. But the media relegates something like that to a single column piece on whatever page has the space. It’s all “according to plan,” to crassly quote a superhero blockbuster, when minorities perpetrate crimes against other minorities.

But if a young white stockbroker is brutally attacked and sexually assaulted in Central Park, that sacred space, as former mayor Ed Koch puts it in the film? That changes things. That’s a feeding frenzy. That’s a recipe for disaster, and disaster is just what met teenagers Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Kharey Wise. The five were in the wrong place at the wrong time on the night of April 19, 1989, when they entered Central Park from 110th Street along with a rowdy group of “wilding” young men who proceeded to assault and antagonize joggers, bikers, the homeless and whoever else happened to be unfortunate enough to be there at the time.

It wasn’t an uncommon ritual. That’s why it had it’s own slang moniker. But it was nothing these 14-16 year olds were interested in, so they bolted. Three were picked up by police on suspicion of the attacks and were on the cusp of being let go when word of the severity of an assaulted and raped Trisha Meili’s injuries made their way to the precinct at which they were being held. Later, the other two were picked up, and a long nightmare of heavy interrogation and trumped-up, coerced statements began. McCray and Wise were the two picked up the next day. “I came home seven years later,” McCray — who was the only one of the five who opted not to be photographed for the documentary — says. “He came home 13 years later.”

In 2001, serial rapist Matias Reyes, who had been terrorizing the Upper East Side and Central Park at the time of the crime, was incarcerated with Wise. After meeting the man serving over a decade for a crime he didn’t commit, Reyes finally came forward and confessed. But the unfortunate thing, aside from the time served by the Five, their youths ripped away, is that the swagger of the NYPD at the time, ignoring a lack of DNA evidence for the Five (when it was later discovered the rape kit would have pointed directly to Reyes), is the fact that leaving Reyes on the street meant more murders, more rapes, more lives shattered forever.

How, then, does this happen? Justice was demanded by a city rocked by the crime, that’s how. The pressure on the DA’s office and the NYPD was considerable. And any bone tossed would be devoured. But at times like that, the mob mentality that seeps in, it’s dangerous. And it even made it’s way to the jury room. Juror #5 is interviewed in the film, and with deliberations going into a second week largely because of his objections to discrepancies in the video taped “confessions” of McCray, Richardson and Wise, he finally buckled to the rest of his fellow jurors “just to get out of there.”

It’s the same thing the three said about those “confessions,” strikingly. They just wanted to get out of there. They just wanted to go home. And the pressure pushed them into a tragic circumstance.

If the film does anything, it calls for a step back from events like this. And I think there are fewer considerations more important today, particularly at a time when the cauldron is fiercely bubbling and divisions run deep. A miscarriage of justice is not just the fault of law and order. It’s the fault of a society out for blood at any cost.

Sarah Burns has lived with the story for over a decade. In a post-screening Q&A, she said she first learned about the case in 2003 when she was spending the summer interning with lawyers who were working on the civil case the Five brought against the city. She went back and wrote her thesis on it and later wrote a book. She was mostly interested in the media interpretation of the event, the racism-laced verbiage of the day, but she soon decided it had to be a film.

So she entered into a collaboration with her husband and father, who have worked together on a number of Burns’s documentaries, including “Baseball” and “The War.” Burns said he was “the old fogie who had to get over some things, but I was the one who suggested fairly early on that we didn’t need the traditional third-party narration that I think has served our films well, and they just went, ‘Oh, thank God.’ That was really stepping off a cliff in a really good way. It was liberating. And then it became possible to escape the specific gravity of many other sort of stylistic tropes that we’ve had and to go in other places graphically and musically.”

Added McMahon, “The Five had such an incredible mastery of what had happened to them. That gave us all the confidence to go forward and just let them tell the story.”

The film is impeccably edited and well-wrought, painting a vibrant portrait of a time and place. The sadness it evokes is ultimately it’s most profound gesture, however. Historian Craig Steven Wilder puts it well in the film by saying the incident holds a mirror up to society. But he goes a step further. “We’re not good people,” he says. “And we often aren’t.”

A little over a week ago, I mentioned that Germany had announced a shortlist of eight possibilities for their official submission in this year’s Best Foreign Language Film race — and had evidently ceded Michael Haneke’s French-Austrian-German co-production “Amour” to Austria this time, after beating their neighboring state in the tussle to submit “The White Ribbon” three years ago.

I had only seen one of the options on the list, but still found it hard to imagine they could make a better choice than “Barbara,” Christian Petzold’s excellent, broadly acclaimed Cold War drama about a female doctor in rural East Germany circa 1980, wrestling with her conscience over whether or not to defect to the West.

Happily, that’s exactly what they’ve chosen — giving Telluride audiences an extra reason to check “Barbara” out as it has its North American premiere there this weekend, before travelling on to both the Toronto and New York festivals. The film already has a US distributor in newish indie outfit Adopt Films, so Petzold’s team can now just bask in the further kudos they’re likely to receive on the fall festival track.

Our heads may be fixed on Venice and Telluride at the moment, but cast your mind back if you can to February’s Berlinale, where “Barbara” premiered, and wound up winning the Best Director award for Petzold. It was one of my top films of the fest — alongside “Tabu” and “Sister,” both of which, as it happens, have been picked up by Adopt Films too. (The newbies also nabbed Golden Bear winner “Caesar Must Die”; they were on it at Berlin.) In my short festival review of the film, I wrote:  

At the risk of invoking bland cultural stereotypes, this gravely humorous, sourly affecting character-study-as-thriller is as quintessentially, well, German a film as you’ll see all year. Across such similarly stoic films as “Yella” and his “Postman Always Rings Twice” riff “Jerichow,” Petzold has established a subtly distinctive brand of deliberate containment, but “Barbara” is perhaps his most expansive, deeply etched film yet: a study of social and self-isolation across the fraught political borders of 1980 East Germany that only incrementally reveals itself as a taciturn love story, it mines the same drably underlit history of crossover hit “The Lives of Others” with more teasingly ambiguous results.

I obviously wasn’t thinking ahead to the Oscars at that point, but the comparison to “The Lives of Others” is a pertinent one. Germany has been something of a fixture in the foreign-language race of late, scoring six nominations in the past 10 years (and making the nine-film shortlist with “Pina” last year), scoring each time with a politically charged period piece — and “Barbara” again fits that description.

It’s a familiar joke that Academy voters are powerless to resist Holocaust dramas, but more recent German history has also rung their bell, with “The Baader Meinhof Complex” sneaking a nod in 2008 and, of course, “The Lives of Others” coming from behind to win in 2006. “Barbara” shares enough of the latter’s stoic Stasi-era gravity for voters to forge an association with Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s arthouse hit in their minds, which could make it a formidable contender in the race, provided the branch doesn’t deem it a little too reserved. (I think Petzold’s is the better film, but that’s neither here nor there.) In any event, all those fall festival slots can only boost its profile. Well played, Germany.

Meanwhile, two other countries have added submission to the pile. Venezuela has entered multi-stranded urban drama “Rock Paper Scissors.” while Serbia has opted for “When Day Breaks,” a drama about a music professor and Holocaust survivor who learns that his father was a Nazi informant. What was I saying about Holocaust dramas?

We’re listing the submission as they come through over at the category’s Contenders page.

VENICE – How do you break an already broken man? It’d be presumptuous to say that this is one of the questions asked by Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master” — and it certainly asks no end of them, both verbally and otherwise — but it was the first of many it left me asking. In a film that devotes an abundance of screen time to replicating (though not, contrary to more excitable pre-screening rumours, ridiculing) the Scientological auditing process, an interrogative therapy designed to draw out unconscious truths, the spontaneous personal response is surely not to be distrusted.

Elliptical but hardly indecisive, testy but hardly incendiary, Anderson’s exquisitely sculpted film is about more individual-based values and desires than its grabby advance reputation as a Scientology exposé promised: trust, admiration, sex, kinship. “The Master” turns out to be many of the things I expected it to be — a sharp evaluation of what we are prepared to believe in exchange for self-possession, a richly textured evocation of American social vulnerabilities in the aftermath of WWII, most inevitably of all, another literate chapter in Paul Thomas Anderson’s ongoing thesis on the positive and corruptive powers of charismatic leadership. What I had not quite anticipated, however, was a romance — much less one between two men.

Of course, Freddie Quell — the gnarled, dissolute ex-seaman with whom we enter and leave proceedings — and Lancaster Dodd — the fruitily urbane man of letters (turned ambitiously to action) in whose vessel he haphazardly lands — don’t come close to fucking in this oft-unbuttoned film. Nor do they show any signs of wanting to, though the inveterately horny Freddie doesn’t seem a man to turn down an offer.

But from the moment Freddie (Joaquin Phoenix) and Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) meet in almost fairytale fashion — the sailor surreptitiously takes shelter in the older man’s boat/castle, only to be mysteriously summoned to the Master’s chamber the next morning — Anderson charts the beats of a relationship as one would a grand love story: seduction, acquiescence, devotion, betrayal and reconciliation, variously shuffled, rinsed and repeated across a robust two-and-a-quarter hours heavier on sinuously compelling micro-conflicts than grand dramatic peaks and troughs. 

Yes, these are the stages a suggestible person might also travel through in their relationship to any clique, philosophy, religion or — let’s get this four-letter word out in the open — cult. You can pick the word of your preference to describe The Cause, the opaque self-help programme founded by Dodd. The very cadence of his full name invites parallels to L. Ron Hubbard, the science fiction writer who expanded his own mental profiling strategy, Dianetics, into a self-contained Church in the early 1950s. (As someone who was once curious enough to take one of those “free tests” offered by wiry men in boxy-shouldered suits on many a city pavement, Anderson’s pseudo-auditing scenes prompted a cold tingle of recognition.) It’s no more a revelation that “The Master” is patently a riff on Scientology’s origins than that “Citizen Kane”  traces around the life of William Randolph Hearst.

Like “Kane,” however, Anderson’s film is a swaggering character study rather than a scabrous attack on an institution, and more far-reaching for it. As played, and brilliantly so, by Hoffman, there’s actually much to like and admire in the generous, persuasive Dodd, who has a lofty vision and fierce self-conviction, but isn’t quite a megalomaniac: “Above all, I am a man,” are the words with which he introduces himself to Quell, and the film leaves unspoken the question of whether he really believes that or not.

For his part, the feckless, psychologically stunted Quell never seems as invested in Dodd’s philosophies as he does in Dodd himself: like “Boogie Nights,” “Magnolia” and “There Will Be Blood,” “The Master” powerfully delinates the influence, for better and worse, that men can wield over boys. This time, however, it feels like less of a father-son dynamic than one of two unequal lovers in stasis: the film’s surprisingly (and sure to be divisively) sparse, stately second half amounts to a protracted, semi-circling breakup, as Quell realises he’s not benefiting or growing from Dodd’s guidance, and the more powerful partner can’t quite relinquish ownership. Small wonder that Dodd’s tightly wound wife (a sparely but scorchingly used Amy Adams) regards Quell with such growing hostility: “You can do whatever you want as long as nobody finds out,” she tells her husband, but she may have more control in this rum family than is immediately apparent.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s cinema has never not been enthrallingly untidy in its emotions and ideas. But while all observations about his latest feel tentative after a single viewing, it’s tempting to call “The Master” his most malleable film to date, for all the crisp lines of its formal construction. It’s also likely his coldest, in a way that may or may not chill the prestige-season awards hopes otherwise beckoned by its beefy political substance, uniformly remarkable performances and quite astonishing sense of craft, unmatched by anything in American film so far this year.

Phoenix and Hoffman — mutually enhancing co-leads, whatever the Weinsteins’ Oscar strategists have to say about the matter — dance an alternately fractious and delicately synchronised pas de deux. With Phoenix still channelling the writhing gonzo energy that informed his performance-art stint a few years back, he’s walked into a role here that could prove, if not career-defining, at least career-recapping: Quell seems built from the actor’s full arsenal of technical gifts and creative eccentricities. More sleekly mannered, but no less impressive, is Hoffman. Nattily presented for a change, the actor is as disquietingly self-possessed when dryly quizzing his recruits as when he calculatedly indulges Dodd’s hambone side: a sweetly unnerving rendition of “On a Slow Boat to China” late in the film is the work of — and do forgive me for this — a master. 

And since I’ve gone there, the same goes for Anderson’s scientifically calculated mise-en-scène. Working for the first time with cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr. (lately, the best thing about Francis Ford Coppola’s film), he proves that the film’s unconventional, much-ballyhooed 70mm treatment was no empty auteur gambit, even if the film is more intimate than ostentatious.

The depth of color and fullness of light here dazzles from one meticulous non-widescreen composition to the next, embracing the polished surfaces of Jack Fisk’s typically rationed but fastidious period production design — the taupe-marble department store where Quell works early in the film is a particular triumph — with almost sinister houseproud fervor. Lest his audience be lulled, however, Anderson isn’t afraid to chop up all this glowing beauty with fidgety, slow-quick editing rhythms and another splendid score from Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood that itself blends brooding orchestrations with yawning white space. Whether acolytes of the Church of Scientology are outraged or not by Anderson’s coolly reserved provocation remains to be seen — but they can’t complain he hasn’t given them style.

TELLURIDE – Actress Laura Linney — a part-time Telluride resident — missed the festival last year for the first time in eight years. Well, she’s back this year with the film that kept her away in 2011.

However, it was odd to more than a few that the festival decided to plop the world premiere of Roger Michell’s “Hyde Park on Hudson” in the Abel Gance outdoor cinema this year. It’s happened in the past, of course. But somehow, films like “Into the Wild,” “Napoleon Dynamite” and “Paranormal Activity” make more sense than a tiny, stuffy drama about a former president’s affair with a distant cousin.

But it is what it is, and the movie is what it is, too: problematic. The above logline aside, the film is also about a visit by the royal family — King George VI and Queen Consort Elizabeth (recently portrayed by Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter in “The King’s Speech,” but here taken on by Samuel West and Olivia Colman) — to President Franklin Roosevelt’s Hyde Park, New York retreat on the eve of war. They’d like a little help, you see, but the young king is struggling with confidence issues, while his strong-willed wife is obsessed with appearances (“They want us to eat hot dogs? What are they trying to say??”).

A lot of that stuff works, actually. The film’s best scene by far is a late-night smoking room chat between Roosevelt (Bill Murray) and the King. The President confides in the King, and vice versa. It’s a fatherly sort of conversation that the young monarch clearly needed and it makes one of the stronger cases for the film’s central theme: our rulers are people, too. (The old “he has to put his pants on one leg at a time” adage is even tossed in there somewhere.)

But the history lesson ultimately isn’t the story screenwriter Richard Nelson, adapting from his radio play, is interested in telling. The relationship Roosevelt had with Margaret Suckley (Laura Linney) — his fifth or sixth cousin, “depending on how you count” — is the dramatic draw for him. But all of that just grinds the proceedings to a halt. Linney is fine in the role, but the whole romantic drama feels like “The Real World: Hyde Park.” It never quite paints a portrait of a meaningful companionship and really just presents FDR as a total, well, player.

Murray is good as the commander-in-chief, though it feels like a bit of a supporting performance. He really shines in scenes with West, and that scene mentioned above is one of the few moments when it feels like the character’s layers are really peeled back. That’s an odd thing, given that FDR’s relationship with Suckley is supposed to be a fresh air thing for him to be himself and relax.

Olivia Williams ought to be mentioned in the role of first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. She’s given a lot of funny bits to chew on. Colman, meanwhile, is properly prim and nails the subtle humor when it’s called for.

But ultimately, “Hyde Park on Hudson” lacks cinematic heft and never breaks free of its confined radio play roots. I’m sure it was a lovely discovery when all of those letters were found in a shoebox under Suckley’s bed after she died at the age of 100, but maybe the story plays better in those notes and scribbles than it does on the big screen.

Other odds and ends: I caught Ben Affleck’s “Argo” this afternoon, which is the festival’s only Sneak Preview this year. I’ll write it up in due time (it’s fantastic), but here’s Greg Ellwood’s review in the meantime. I also saw Michael Winterbottom’s latest, “Everyday,” which hasn’t inspired me to write much, hours removed. But the film’s young stars offer up some of the best child performances I’ve seen. Very natural and raw.

More as it happens.

VENICE – In a strangely programmed day at the Venice Film Festival — no competition films are premiering, so we’re feeling the effects of the slimming-down of the lineup this year — so Spike Lee is enjoying the plum screening spot with his music documentary “Bad 25.” It played for the critics this morning, and had its grand outing this evening, following a ceremony where Lee was presented with the festival’s Jaeger-Le Coultre Glory To The Filmmaker Award.

It’s the start of what should be a busy publicity trail for the film, a thorough, track-by-track study of the making of Michael Jackson’s mega-selling 1987 album “Bad” — marking, as depressing as this is to contemplate, the 25th anniversary of its release. (How did we ever think we could live so large and get so old?) The film will also play as a Special Presentation at the Toronto Film Festival, and ushers in a lavish reissue of the album itself on September 18, with all manner of bells and whistles. Meanwhile, Lee’s two-hour-plus film will be televised by ABC on Thanksgiving in November — though whether that precludes any form of theatrical distribution in the US, I haven’t yet worked out. (It’ll surely see the inside of a few more theaters internationally.)

It’ll certainly make good holiday viewing for all loyal subjects of the late King of Pop. I’m not in a position to write a review of the film here, having already done so over at Variety. So permit me, as self-serving and this may be, to quote my own review:

“Thriller” may be the biggest-selling album of all time, but 1987’s follow-up, “Bad,” represents Michael Jackson’s career peak as pop’s master craftsman. A blockbuster melange of Motown, metal, hip-hop, world and gospel influences, bound by trailblazing production, “Bad” has stood in its predecessor’s shadow too long, and Spike Lee convincingly makes the case for reassessment with this exhaustive and entertaining if less-than-penetrating docu on its creation … Though very much a gathering of a one-way admiration society, “Bad 25” is refreshingly uninterested in celebrity mythos, focusing principally on the practical and physical nuts and bolts of Jackson’s talent as a songwriter, producer, dancer and vocalist.

The film was very warmly received at this morning’s screening: The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney raves that it’s “a sensational snapshot of the peak of the music video as art form, as well as the intricately layered process by which superior pop is crafted,” while The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw agrees that Lee’s “exuberant reverence for the lonely King of Pop is contagious… It’s impossible to watch this film without a great big smile on your face.” Some are less excited, and the film doesn’t aim to reinvent any wheels. It’s a straightforward compilation of archive footage, trivia and all-star talking heads (the Bieber generation has been catered for); it’s a testament to Jackson’s art, not Lee’s. 

Though the ABC airing will surely secure it a dream audience — funny to think that’s it on course to become the most widely viewed film of Lee’s career — it’d be a bit of a shame for it not to receive the same cinematic treatment as Kenny Ortega’s more rushed, less insightful box office hit “This It It” in 2009. Meanwhile, the TV appearance takes the film right out of the Oscar picture — not that the Academy ever takes even the best of examples of such pop-oriented documentaries seriously.

Either way, after the largely indifferent reception for “Red Hook Summer” earlier this month, it’s heartening to see a semi-kinda Spike Lee joint — and one he’s clearly invested in emotionally — earning some love. It could be his best turnout since 2006’s superb “When the Levees Broke” — which also premiered in Venice before winding up on American TV. Non-fiction really seems to be where his head’s at these days. Nice for Venice, too, that their career achievement award coincides with a credible film. 

TELLURIDE – What else can one say about Roger Corman? He may think his influence on the film industry has been “overrated,” but when future stars like Jonathan Demme, Curtis Hanson, Jack Nicholson, John Sayles, Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron, Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone cut their teeth under your wing, your mark on the form is undeniable.

That idea was explored in an interview I conducted with Corman last year on the occasion of the documentary “Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel.” It was on the heels of a David O. Selznick award from the PGA in 2006, Honorary Oscar recognition in 2009, a Fantastic Fest fete in 2010 and a Los Angeles Film Festival tribute in 2011. Indeed, it’s become rather posh to toast the maverick filmmaker, whose 400+ features may be on the fringes of cinema, but whose impact on some of its most successful artists simply means his fingerprint will always be on the industry.

And this year, Telluride is joining in on the fun, as Corman was the last unknown tribute to be announced when this year’s festival program was revealed yesterday. And perhaps it will be a good opportunity to see where the filmmaker wants to go next.

Judging by that interview in the fall, the internet is, in his view, the future of the medium. “These are poor times for the independents,” he told me at the time. “But…good times are coming. What did they say in the Depression? ‘Prosperity is just around the corner.’ Good times are just around the corner and it’s going to be the internet.”

He then noted that plans are in place to transfer his vast catalog of material to the web for instant access, really a brilliant move for a maverick like him.

Getting back to that legacy, there’s a great feature in the festival’s “Film Watch” program guide with thoughts and remembrances of Corman from the likes of Ron Howard, William Shatner, Joe Dante and the late Dennis Hopper. Naturally, one of the most thorough considerations of Corman as a directorial voice is Martin Scorsese’s blurb, which follows:

“I was aware as a filmgoer of his low-budget movies, whether it was ‘Teenage Caveman’ or ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ or ‘She Gods of Shark Reef’ or ‘Attack of the Crab Monsters.’ They were different from other B- or C-movies at the time. They may not have all been great films, but we knew that there was something happening behind the camera. They got our attention. So when the Poe films hit we saw something even more unique — a personality emerging from the Corman factory. Golng from ‘The House of Usher’ to ‘Pit and the Pendulum’ to ‘The Tomb of Ligea,’ which is my favorite, and ‘Masque of Red Death,’ this really set him up as a major filmmaker and a great voice. He was a great stylist

“I met Roger, and he asked if I would do a sequel to ‘Bloddy Mama.’ And I said I would like to very much. I think I got paid scale, but it didn’t matter, because basically you were getting the chance to learn how to make a film. Later, I brought ‘Mean Streets’ to him. He said if you could swing and make the characters black, I’ll give you a could hundred thousand dollars, and you can shoot it in New York. And I said I would think about it. But it would have changed the whole thing. I was disappointed, because I knew that I couldn’t make the changes.”

And on that last bit, it would have been a big deal for Scorsese to shoot the film in its Gotham setting. Alas, one of the things revealed (it was new to me, anyway) at his Santa Barbara American Riviera Award tribute in January was that the film was shot mostly in Los Angeles.

But I digress…

The 39th annual Telluride Film Festival will toast Roger Corman’s career today at 6:30 at the Sheridan Opera House. He will be receiving one of the Silver Medallion Awards during the fest and the program will be repeated again Saturday morning. Additionally, “The Masque of Red Death” will screen tonight.

VENICE – “God, that was a lot of America,” I heard an Italian critic remark to his companion as they slouched out of “At Any Price” at the Venice Film Festival earlier this evening. His tone did not convey great delight at this perceived abundance; perhaps he was among the few but unignorable critics heard lustily booing as the credits rolled on Bahrani’s classically involving and unexpectedly robust drama of heartland morality spread thin amid the cornfields of Southern Iowa .

He wasn’t wrong, however. America is an almost punitively dominant presence in “At Any Price”: we’re treated to a complete rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” sung in an assortment of isolated, unlovely voices, midway through the film, while the Red, White and Blue itself is a pronounced presence in many a composition, furling and flapping above characters’ heads like a veritable reproach.

You’d have to be almost clinically tone-deaf , however, to mistake this brashly inquisitive film for any kind of exercise in flag-waving; to label it anti-American, however, would be equally far of the mark. When the wife (Kim Dickens) of Henry Whipple, a genially buttery commercial farmer (Dennis Quaid) suggests that putting an image of Uncle Sam on his flyers for Customer Appreciation Day might be a bit much, he breezily responds that “this is marketing.” Bahrani’s previous, lower-fi films have promoted the idea that being American is what you make it; in “At Any Price,” some are representing the pinnacle-driven brand with more integrity than others.

This is Bahrani’s first feature not to center on (nor even contain) an immigrant character, save for Henry’s off-screen elder son, a presence only in the regular postcards he sends from an adventure-seeking sojourn in Argentina — though it’s his fraught, farm-bound family members, including younger brother Dean (Zac Efron), who sometimes appear farther from home.

Over a single, crystal-blue summer, Whipple’s dully successful agricultural empire is brought to the brink of destruction with neo-Shakespearean gravity: having cultivated much of his fortune from ostensibly harmless but ethically unsound farming practices soon to raise the suspicions of corporate goons, the perma-chipper patriarch finds his sons uninterested in taking the reins of his business. But while one son has left the U.S. behind for indefinite global-citizen status (the postcards he sends are pointedly adorned with the Argentinian flag), Dean’s ambitions are, if anything, even more quintessentially American than corn harvesting: he wants to be a NASCAR racer.

As is implicit in the title, the destructiveness of competition is a rippling concern in Bahrani and co-writer Hallie Elizabeth Newton’s unpredictably expansive script, which seeds further conflicts like wild strawberry plants, while leaving some very testy ones hanging — less out of negligence, perhaps, than the sense that they’re doomed to remain unresolved. Henry’s drive to be the top seed seller in the state — no, that’s not a creepy sexual metaphor, though he is banging wilted cheerleader Meredith (Heather Graham) on the side  — takes money directly out of the pocket of rival farmer Jim Johnson (Clancy Brown). As it happens, Johnson’s son is Dean’s chief competitor on the local racing circuit, setting in motion a violent rivalry with escalatingly severe consequences. Everyone’s American dream in this story comes at the expense of someone else’s.  

The unapologetic, occasionally ungainly symmetry of such plotting (and writing: “I’m looking at you and all I see is me,” says Meredith to Dean’s naive blonde girlfriend Cadence) should make it clear that Bahrani is working in a very different register here to the delicately observational indie miniatures on which he built his reputation. Some will find his new approach as heavy-handed or didactic as I found yesterday’s very different American address, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist.” It put me more in mind of the muscular Hollywood melodramas crafted by the likes of Nicholas Ray and George Stevens in the 1950s, back when star-driven character dramas about middle American insecurities were still big business — and not just because Bahrani has improbably secured the services of matinee dreamboat Efron, who looks more like a studio raffle prize circa 1957 with each passing film.

Bahrani doesn’t romanticize the human values of this faintly out-of-time society — a late-film gesture of folksy generational baton-passing from Henry to Dean rings disturbingly and deliberately false, given the secrets being guarded by this point — but he’s content to spend time on problematic protagonists who aren’t patronized as either local heroes or matchstick men of tragedy.

The performances are on much the same page. Efron does some solid, creditably unlikeable work here as the impetuous Dean, and Dickens brilliantly elevates her tersely written role as his careworn mother, socking the equivalent of the Laura Linney moment as the film’s finale turns eerily “Mystic River” in tone. But it’s an ideally-cast Quaid, whose performance could well net some awards attention if pitched right by Sony Pictures Classics, who has to shoulder the bulk of the film’s moral burden, as he’s gradually forced out of his rehearsed, sitcommy “American everyman” patter and into a subdued admission of an actual everyman’s shortfall between self-worth and self-doubt. There is, to requote a vexed Italian critic with a slightly different emphasis, a lot of America in this film. 

It had been rumored that the “mystery guest speaker” at the on-going Republican National Convention (which I’ve avoided like the plague, save for the inevitable Twitter eruptions over this or that nonsensical speech) would be Clint Eastwood. And today, CNN confirmed it.

My question is: why now?

Yeah, Eastwood backed Romney publicly earlier this month, just like he bumped his head and came out for Sarah Palin in 2008. He’s long been considered more libertarian than conservative, though. And I’ve always liked that his work as a director has never seemed agenda-driven (even if I don’t like a number of the films). Indeed, sometimes the art would paint a fuzzier portrait of the artist’s political leanings. But I guess in the world of “mystery guest speakers” for such a thing, he makes sense.

But the cynical part of me sees a new film on the way — Robert Lorenz’s “Trouble with the Curve” — and a likely Best Actor campaign to go along with it. The cynical part of me sees this as a ploy for publicity in advance of that. And in Hollywood, cynicism generally wins the day.

The thing is, how well is that going to go over? Make no mistake, there is a silent, right-leaning sect in Hollywood and in the Academy as well, but we’re talking about a town generally owned by liberalism. And come on, even Fox News is backing off this ticket a bit.

Of course, it probably won’t matter at all. Eastwood is probably one of a handful of guys who can do just about anything he wants because Hollywood loves him. He’s in a certain pantheon. And maybe he’ll get away with it because he’s a “political wanderer.”

What do you think? Will Eastwood’s appearance at the RNC tonight have any impact on his Oscar season hopes?

UPDATE: Well, here’s the speech…in all it’s batshit glory:

They just keep going back and forth on this. It really is time to let the category die its deserved death, but in any case, I’ll just let the press release convey the news:

“The Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has approved additional rules for the 85th Academy Awards. The most significant changes affect the Original Song category, in which there will now be five nominees.

“During the nominations process, all voting members of the Music Branch will receive a Reminder List of works submitted in the category and a DVD copy of the song clips. Members will be asked to watch the clips and then vote in the order of their preference for not more than five achievements in the category. The five achievements receiving the highest number of votes will become the nominations for final voting for the award.

“Additionally, upon the recommendation from the Designers Branch (formerly the Art Directors Branch), the Art Direction award will be known as the Production Design award.

“Rules are reviewed annually by individual branch and category committees. The Awards Rules Committee then reviews all proposed changes before presenting its recommendations to the Academy’s Board of Governors for approval.

For the complete rules for the 85th Academy Awards, visit oscars.org/rules.”

I’m happy to see the name change of Best Art Direction to Best Production Design. It’s always been a bit awkward that a category called Best Art Direction left art directors off the list of nominees (going instead with production designers and set decorators). Just ask art directors.

MONTROSE, Colo. – I’ve just landed at the airport and gotten a look at the fresh-off-the-presses release announcing the line-up for the 39th annual Telluride Film Festival. As I await the shuttle into Telluride for my fourth-straight SHOW, and as many of my Los Angeles brethren board the charter flight into Montrose here, let’s dig in and see what’s in store.

As is custom, Telluride withholds its line-up until the day before the festival really kicks off, but in the weeks leading up to the fest, people are talking and titles start to trickle out. A number of films have been expected presentations for a while now. Some respect the festival’s wishes and keep mum about it online. Others don’t.

The only big early get for the festival (though others may come in the form of TBAs) appears to be Roger Michell’s “Hyde Park on Hudson,” which is set for an official Toronto world premiere next week. Focus might find some performance love on the circuit for the film and this is a nice place to get some word out on it at the start of the fall festival circuit.

As for docs, Liz Garbus’s “Love, Marilyn,” a star-studded reading of private writings and musings discovered in a pair of boxes at the home of Marilyn Monroe’s acting coach nearly 50 years after her death, will preview here before moving on to Toronto. Ditto Ken Burns’s “The Central Park Five” (co-directed by daughter Sarah and her husband David McMahon), examining the 1989 case of five black and Latino teenagers who were wrongfully convicted of raping a white woman in New York’s Central Park. There’s also Sarah Polley’s “Stories We Tell,” investigating the secrets behind a family of storytellers. Each will move on to Toronto after playing here.

In the tribute arena, Mads Mikkelsen will keep a nice stride going after his Best Actor win at Cannes with a Telluride tribute and his films “The Hunt” (for which he won the Cannes honor) and “A Royal Affair” (also set for Toronto) on the slate. It’s certainly a unique choice. Even if Mikkelsen has been around for a long time, he’s only lately become recognizable to US audiences (after Hollywood stints in “Casino Royale,” “Clash of the Titans” and “The Three Musketeers”).

Meanwhile, it’s long been rumored that Marion Cotillard would get the medallion treatment here, and now it’s official. It’s a good year to do it. “The Dark Knight Rises” has just finished burning up the box office, while Jacques Audiard’s “Rust and Bone” could land her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress later in the year. The latter, which Guy called “a remarkable exercise in brute sentimentality and unwashed romance” at Cannes, is set to play Telluride this year with a typically full stable of Sony Pictures Classics selections. Director Roger Corman will also receive a tribute. 

Speaking of which, Michael Barker and Tom Bernard’s 20-year-old company once again has quite the presence and will hold its annual Saturday night dinner with talent on hand. In addition to the aforementioned “At Any Price” and “Rust and Bone” we’ll get Cannes carry-over and Palme d’Or winner “Amour” from Michael Haneke (he missed the trip in 2009 with “The White Ribbon”) and Pablo Larraín’s “No.” In addition there is one more recent acquisition from the company on the docket: Dror Moreh’s Shin Bet documentary “The Gatekeepers.” I was hoping for Robert Redford’s “The Company You Keep,” which the studio recently acquired. It would have been neat to see Redford in the Telluride environment. Oh well.

The Weinstein Company is here with only one title, Cannes delight “The Sapphires.” I’m told they tried to get “The Master” up here, but logistics made it pretty difficult. Paul Thomas Anderson already appears to be chafing at the idea of a festival circuit launch (hence the constant pop-up screenings for his film, which he likely wanted to show up at Fantastic Fest in Austin first, just like “There Will Be Blood” five years ago). That’s a bummer for those of us only doing Telluride, but Guy will have the first word on it out of Venice soon enough.

“Silver Linings Playbook” was also a distinct possibility at one point (talent couldn’t make the journey), while “Django Unchained” is obviously still in the cutting room. So Harvey is basically just testing the waters on Wayne Blair’s “feelgood Aussie musical,” as Guy described it at Cannes; it may even end up being held for a 2013 release at the end of the day. I would have liked to see Andrew Dominik’s “Killing Them Softly” here, but, alas, it’s not on the schedule.

Other little odds and ends include Sally Potter’s “Ginger and Rosa” with Elle Fanning and Alice Englert and Ariel Vromen’s “The Iceman” with Michael Shannon and Winona Ryder (very excited for this one — Shannon is a national treasure). Meanwhile, a few other films looking to peek out here first before moving on to the rest of the fall festival circuit include Noah Baumbach’s “Frances Ha” and Deepa Mehta’s “Midnight’s Children.”

UPDATE: The LA Times has broken the news some of us have known all week, that Ben Affleck’s “Argo” will get a world premiere here. I guess they were given permission to do so, but anyway, yes, that’s one of the Sneak Previews/TBAs hinted at above. Hopefully more are in store.

Check out the full line-up for the 39th annual Telluride Film Festival below.

THE ACT OF KILLING (d. Joshua Oppenheimer, Denmark, 2012)

AMOUR (d. Michael Haneke, Austria, 2012)

AT ANY PRICE (d. Ramin Bahrani, U.S., 2012)

THE ATTACK (d. Ziad Doueiri, Lebanon-France, 2012)

BARBARA (d. Christian Petzold, Germany, 2012)

THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE (d. Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, David McMahon, U.S., 2012)

EVERYDAY (d. Michael Winterbottom, U.K., 2012)

FRANCES HA (d. Noah Baumbach, U.S., 2012)

THE GATEKEEPERS (d. Dror Moreh, Israel, 2012)

GINGER AND ROSA (d. Sally Potter, England, 2012)

THE HUNT (d. Thomas Vinterberg, Denmark, 2012)

HYDE PARK ON HUDSON (d. Roger Michell, U.S., 2012)

THE ICEMAN (d. Ariel Vromen, U.S., 2012)

LOVE, MARILYN (d. Liz Garbus, U.S., 2012)

MIDNIGHT”S CHILDREN (d. Deepa Mehta, Canada-Sri Lanka, 2012)

NO (Pablo Larraín, Chile, 2012)

PARADISE: LOVE (d. Ulrich Seidl, Austria, 2012)

PIAZZA FONTANA (d. Marco Tullio Giordana, Italy, 2012)

A ROYAL AFFAIR (d. Nikolaj Arcel, Denmark, 2012)

RUST & BONE (d. Jacques Audiard, France, 2012)

THE SAPPHIRES (d. Wayne Blair, Australia, 2012)

STORIES WE TELL (d. Sarah Polley, Canada, 2012)

SUPERSTAR (d. Xavier Giannoli, France, 2012)

WADJDA (d. Haifaa Al-Mansour, Saudi Arabia, 2012)

WHAT IS THIS FILM CALLED LOVE? (d. Mark Cousins, Ireland-Mexico, 2012)

I’ll be here covering throughout the weekend along with Greg Ellwood. So keep an eye out, as well as for Guy’s updates out of Venice.

The Telluride Film Festival runs August 31 – September 3.

VENICE – Bar this morning’s review of “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” which christened the 69th Venice Film Festival (and the first under new director Alberto Barbera’s rule) this evening, I’m afraid I haven’t offered much in the way of festival foreplay.

I had meant to write up some form of preview piece, but travel preparations were more manic than usual, and Venice itself always offers its fair share of practical obstacles. Since arriving yesterday afternoon at the otherwise delightful flat I’m sharing with two colleagues, we’ve been trying to solve the riddle of how to run electricity, wi-fi and air conditioning simultaneously without short-circuiting the building’s entire switchboard. I’m not going steal Jeff Wells’ schtick with a diary of technical woes, but suffice to say we’re still working on it.

Anyway, offering up a “preview” after the opening film would be more than a little redundant — and anyway, yesterday’s combined HitFix gallery of our most anticipated titles of the fall festival season, to which Kris and I both contributed, set the festival mood rather nicely. The long and short of it is that I’m here and, with the programme’s prime offerings still under wraps — well, mostly — I’m excited.

For reasons both sentimental and cinephilic, Venice is my personal favorite stop on the festival circuit. In 2009, it wasthe first film festival I’d ever attended outside the UK, and in four years, it’s introduced me to a lot of films dear to my heart, from “Black Swan” to “Alps,” “Meek’s Cutoff” to “Post Mortem,” “Damsels in Distress” to, most beloved of all, “White Material.” Going on past form, I’m bound to see something in the next ten days that’ll wind up in my year-end Top 10: your guess is as good as mine as to what it might be, though I think we can rule out “The Reluctant Fundamentalist.”

Quite aside from the films, however, there’s Venice itself — or, to be more precise, the stalled, elegantly crumbling romance of the LIdo, the sleepy resort island immortalized in Thomas Mann’s (and Luchino Visconti’s) “Death in Venice”. It’s a coolly uncool location for a festival that I maintain offers the glamor of Cannes, but without the stress: the programme is slimmer (especially this year, as was Barbera’s wish), the crowds quite, the red tape lax and faded to a breeze-blown pink. Yesterday, I stumbled across the photo above, of Paul Newman arriving at the festival back in 1963, and thought it summed up that balance rather well.

Not that I won’t be busy, of course. To give you an idea of what lies ahead — and when — I thought I’d draw up a basic day-by-day rundown of the programme’s biggest gets below. There are, naturally, plenty of things to see besides, but for those of you impatient to know when, say, reactions to Terrence Malick’s latest will start emerging, take a look.

Thursday 8/30: A morning double feature of Xavier Giannoli’s “Superstar” and Ariel Vromen’s “The Iceman” — out of competition, but one of the starrier items in the lineup, with Chris Evans, James Franco, Winona Ryder and Michael Shannon. Evening brings Ramin Bahrani’s “At Any Price,” starring Zac Efron and Dennis Quaid, It’s back-to-back with Ulrich Seidl’s “Paradise: Faith,” but as much as I’m looking forward to his follow-up to “Paradise: Love” — which I admired in Cannes — I’ll have to catch a next-day screening.

Friday 8/31: A quieter day (which should enable that Seidl catch-up), with no new competition films unspooling, and Spike Lee’s Michael Jackson documentary “Bad 25” the catch of the day.  

Saturday 9/1: Okay, now things get serious: after all those pop-up screenings, Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master” finally has its “official” premiere, whatever that means these days. The evening’s competition film, meanwhile, is Israeli drama “Fill the Void,” which is currently in the running to be the country’s Oscar submission.

Sunday 9/2: Completing a weekend of the big guns, we’ll see Terrence Malick’s “To the Wonder” bright and early in the morning. Susanne Bier’s “All You Need is Love,” unluckily enough, backs onto it, but I’ll have to wait for a later screening. Evening brings Takeshi Kitano’s “Outrage Beyond,” but given how little time I had for its non-Beyond predecessor, I can wait.

Monday 9/3: Olivier Assayas’s “Something in the Air”  is the morning’s big draw, but less essential fare filling out the day — but don’t tell Kim Ki-duk’s diehard fans I said that.

Tuesday 9/4: This would be a good day to discover an unheralded gem, or catch up with a word-of-mouth favorite, since until Harmony Korine’s “Spring Breakers” in the evening (which I’ll be reviewing over at Variety), it’s a bit of a lottery. By the way, is Zac Efron now a European festival fixture? Has he got something for Berlin in the hopper?

Thursday 9/6: A spectacularly unlikely double-bill in the morning: “Thy Womb,” the latest from divisive Filipino provocateur Brillante Mendoza, followed by Robert Redford’s all-star political thriller “The Company You Keep.” Perhaps they’ll complement each other. Perhaps.

Friday 9/7: The last of the big guns, held until nearly the end to spite those leaving early for Toronto, is Brian DePalma’s “Passion.” If it’s the shot of trashy fun I’m hoping for, that’s welcome timing.

Saturday 8/9: The last day of the fest, with closing film “L’homme qui rit” not high on most people’s priority lists. Still, this would be as good a day as any to catch up with the restoration of Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate.”

So there it is — a rough layout, though these self-drawn schedules never go entirely according to plan. Look out for tomorrow’s “At Any Price” review, and hopefully some thoughts on “The Iceman” and “Superstar” too.

As noted in the updates of Monday’s Best Animated Feature Film ponderings (which revealed the acquisition of Cannes hit “Ernest & Celestine” for a 2013 release), the indie distributor GKIDS will be qualifying four films for Oscar contention this year: “From Up on Poppy Hill,” “Le Tableau,” “The Rabbi’s Cat” and “Zarafa.” Added to Disney’s “Secret of the Wings” and “Arjun: The Warrior Prince” (which were confirmed to me as well), that puts us at 17 titles officially in the running thus far, one more than the 16 necessary for a full slate of five nominees. And I don’t see any eligibility concerns being raised for any of them on the horizon, so we should be good to go.

I assume many readers would like to know more about these films, which could ultimately shake up the race much like the studio’s efforts did last year. So below, read through the official GKIDS synopses of each and start your speculating: which, if any, could end up on the eventual slate of nominees? My bet is currently on “Poppy Hill,” but each film has a shot and each, most importantly, could really connect with animators — you know, the folks who have the ultimate say on the matter.

“FROM UP ON POPPY HILL”

The latest release from Japan”s legendary Studio Ghibli was the top-grossing Japanese release of 2011 and took home the Japan Academy Prize for Animation. The film was directed by Goro Miyazaki from a screenplay by Hayao Miyazaki, with Hayao Miyazaki supervising the production, marking the first feature collaboration between father and son. An English-language version is currently in production by Studio Ghibli with Frank Marshall executive producing. Voice cast announcement is expected within the next two weeks. Set in Yokohama in 1963, the film centers on a high school couple”s innocent love and the secrets surrounding their births. The story takes place in a Japan that is picking itself up from the devastation of World War II and preparing to host the 1964 Olympics – and the mood is one of both optimism and conflict as the new generation struggles to embrace modernity and throw off the shackles of a troubled past. The film’s rich color palette and painterly detail capture the beauty of Yokohama’s harbor and its lush surrounding hillsides, while the 1960″s pop soundtrack evokes nostalgia for an era of innocence and hope. The film will qualify in the English language version.

“LE TABLEAU”

French animation auteur Jean-Francois Laguionie”s latest work is a wryly-inventive parable executed in a stunning painterly style. A kingdom is divided into the three castes: the fully painted Alldunns who reside in a majestic palace; the Halfies who the Painter has left incomplete; and the untouchable Sketchies, frail charcoal outlines who are banished to the cursed forest. Chastised for her forbidden love for an Alldunn and shamed by her unadorned face, Halfie Claire runs away into the forest. Her beloved Ramo and best friend Lola journey after her, passing between the forbidden Death Flowers that guard the boundaries of the forest, and arriving finally at the very edge of the painting – where they tumble through the canvas and into the Painter”s studio. The abandoned workspace is strewn with paintings, each containing its own animated world – and in a feast for both the eyes and imagination, they explore first one picture and then another, attempting to discover just what the Painter has in mind for all his creations. The film will qualify in the original French language version.

“THE RABBI’S CAT”

Based on the best-selling graphic novel by Joann Sfar, The Rabbi”s Cat tells the story of a rabbi and his talking cat – a sharp-tongued feline philosopher brimming with scathing humor and a less than pure love for the rabbi”s voluptuous teenage daughter. Algeria in the 1930s is an intersection of Jewish, Arab and French culture. A cat belonging to a widowed rabbi eats the family parrot and miraculously gains the ability to speak. Along with the power of speech comes unparalleled sardonic wit, and the cat – and filmmaker Sfar – spare no group or individual as they skewer faith, tradition and authority in a provocative exploration of (among other things) God, lust, death, phrenology, religious intolerance, interspecies love, and the search for truth. Rich with the colors, textures, and flavors of Mediterranean Africa, the film takes us on a cross continent adventure from the tiled terraces, fountains, quays and cafes of colonial Algiers to Maghrebi tent camps and dusty trading outposts, in search of a lost Ethiopian city. Joann Sfar is an award winning filmmaker (Gainsbourg) and one of France”s most celebrated comic artists. The film will qualify in the original French language version.

“ZARAFA”

The French box office breakout from animator Jean-Christophe Lie (Triplets of Belleville) and live action director Rémi Bezançon (A Happy Event) was inspired by the true historical account of a giraffe given as a gift to King Charles X of France by the Pasha of Egypt. Under a baobab tree, an old man tells the story of the everlasting friendship between Maki, a little boy aged 10 who has narrowly escaped slavery, and an orphaned baby giraffe named Zarafa. Hassan, Prince of the Desert, is instructed by the Pasha to deliver Zarafa to France. But Maki has made up his mind to do everything in his power to stop Hassan from fulfilling his mission and to bring the giraffe back to its native land – even if it means risking his own life. During an epic journey that takes them from Sudan to Paris, passing on the way through Alexandria, Marseille and the snow-capped Alps, they have many adventures, crossing paths with the balloonist Malaterre, a pair of mystical twin cows called Mounh and Sounh (Moon and Sun), and falling into the hands of the fearsome pirate queen Bouboulina. The film will qualify in the original French language version.

VENICE – I haven’t got my Peanuts archives to hand at the moment, unfortunately, but I think it was that pint-sized sage Linus Van Pelt who once opined that “there is no heavier burden than good intentions.” Mira Nair’s “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” a commendably argumentative but airlessly diagrammatic plea for parity in the still-ragged post-9/11 dialogue between Islam and the West, feels that strain more than most. A somewhat speciously juiced-up adaptation of Mohsin Hamid’s acclaimed 2007 novel, adding a shrill hostage-thriller framework to an otherwise theory-based study of mutable cultural and spiritual identity, it would be typical book-club cinema even without a noble literary source: distributors might want to consider handing a bulleted printout of Points For Discussion to patrons as they leave the cinema.

In a nutshell — and the film is rather fond of nutshells — “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” tells the story of Changez (Riz Ahmed), a young, whip-smart Pakistani immigrant whose vertiginous ascent up the Wall Street ladder begins to stall when the grim events of September 2001 raise external barriers of xenophobic American paranoia, not to mention internal concerns of cultural betrayal. It’s material that seems tailor-made for the touch of Mira Nair, the maddeningly inconsistent Indian-American director, many of whose best films to date have focused on brittle clashes between Eastern and Western social and political mores, sometimes within a single character.

Modest but searching works like “Mississippi Masala,” “Monsoon Wedding” and “The Namesake” negotiated this tricky line of conflict with warmth, good humor and an emphasis on personal and familial idiosyncrasies over broad We Are The World sentiment. Dismayingly, that lightness of touch is scarcely in evidence on her latest, surrendered to the potted, broad-stroke plotting and cloying exoticism that, respectively, hampered “Amelia” and “Vanity Fair,” her disastrous forays away from contemporary, ethnicity-oriented storytelling.

“The Reluctant Fundamentalist” is a smarter, more tension-fuelled film than either of those Reader’s Digest farragos, but persistently thwarts its most interesting ambiguities by underlining them so emphatically. It’s not enough, for example, for Changez’s Soho-boho artist girlfriend (Kate Hudson, dispiritingly wan under a dark curtain of Very Serious Hair) to have find her own inadvertent prejudices excavated by their subtly diverging reactions to New York in crisis; she has to stage an implausibly tone-deaf  exhibition titled “I Had A Pakistani,” complete with exhortations to “throw on a burqa.” It’s not enough for the punitive actions of Changez’s fatherly, company-guzzling boss (Kiefer Sutherland, amusing in Lane Pryce glasses) to suggest the punitive entitlement of an America heading for a fall; we have to witness a thudding eureka moment when he stresses the importance of “fundamentals” to a boardroom of corporate trainees. Oh, such irony!

The film is, thankfully, a little braver and less lurid when it comes to detailing the purported fundamentalism in Changez himself, who, as the film’s ungainly framing device reveals upfront, has since abandoned finance — and indeed America — for a career as an influentially radical academic back in Lahore. There’s a genuinely jolting moment when he confesses a detached admiration for the terrorist attacks on the US: “The ruthlessness of the act,” he says in conversation with a skeptical American journalist played by Liev Schreiber, “was surpassed only by its genius.”

It’s a line that makes one wish there were an actual character to nourish and contextualize such provocations: though sharply played by exciting British up-and-comer Riz Ahmed, Changez isn’t written with enough wit to render him any more than a handsome spout of strong ideas. (“How do I become less interesting?” he asks rhetorically at one point, as if aware of the problem himself.) As such, he doesn’t serve Nair’s impulse to forge inter-cultural conversation as well as he might, and matters aren’t helped by a visual and sonic palette that tends more toward rote Eastern mystique than it really should: an ominous kidnapping sequence at the start, all murkily spotlit jewel tones by usually ace DP Declan Quinn and the percussive world-music overkill of Michael Andrews’s strident score, seems particularly ill-judged.

Indeed, that might go for the whole present-day subplot introduced by screenwriter William Wheeler, and not only because the sequences between Ahmed and Schreiber, as the former relates his life story in flashback, are the film’s most perfunctorily staged and performed. (Changez’s gifts don’t extend to narrating: “As the tensions got worse, the biryanis got more delicious,” he relates, his face valiantly straight.) More importantly, embellishing the material with genre trappings, while presumably a commercially-minded move, runs counter to the film’s stand against fear-mongering, regardless of Changez’s culpability.

The Mira Nair of “Mississippi Masala” would have found sufficient dramatic fire and urgency in the protagonist’s ample personal conflicts with his family, his colleagues and his lover to make such a stakes-raising gambit redundant; as it is, all the film’s characters are straw men in an argument as promisingly heated and finally un-nuanced as those between Anna Paquin’s naively righteous Lisa and an opposingly impassioned Middle Eastern classmate in Kenneth Lonergan’s “Margaret.” That, incidentally, is a film that spoke no less provocatively, and a lot more subtly, about the see-sawing burdens of guilt and martyrdom in post-9/11 America — without ever being as strenuously About Things as Nair’s sporadically stimulating misfire.

Despite mixed reaction at Cannes, one of the films I’ve been most looking forward to all year has been Walter Salles’s “On the Road.” It’s set to play Toronto next month, and I have heard that Tom Luddy — one of the Telluride Film Festival co-founders and co-directors — is high on the film, so it could pop up there, too (fingers crossed). But as it turns out, it won’t be the version seen on the Croisette in May.

Indiewire’s Jay Fernandez sat down with IFC Films president Jonathan Sehring recently, and amid a bunch of talk about the film being “an opportunity [he] couldn’t pass up” and apparently loving it just the way it is (“for us it’s a step up”), it seems Salles went back to the cutting room and came out with a new cut. According to Sehring, this was the filmmaker’s decision, as he took a lot of the summer reactions to heart.

The new cut “is about 15 minutes shorter,” Sehring tells Fernandez. “It”s a little over two hours now. He”s added certain things that weren”t in the cut that was in Cannes. He has been in New York and Rio and L.A. working on it the past couple of months, and it”s going to be very wet when it gets to Toronto. We”re locked, but they”re finishing the mix up right now.”

Well, yikes. If they’re finishing the mix up now, maybe there’s too much of a time crunch to get it up to Colorado first. In any case, I hope the original cut isn’t lost to the winds and will become available at some point. It did, after all, have passionate champions and I got the vibe I might take to it based on what I read at the time.

Guy, however, was not one of those champions. Calling the film an “assiduous, attractive and somewhat airless adaptation” of Kerouac’s novel, he seemed to chafe at the interpretation’s inherent disavowal of the beat classic’s wandering spirit.

“Salles and his ‘Motorcycle Diaries’ screenwriter Jose Rivera have fashioned a distinctly unspontaneous film from a text about going where the road takes you, a paean to madness that never once loses its mind,” he wrote at the time. “Perhaps it’s the book’s general bleeding into any number of pop-culture avenues, then, that makes the final arrival of a straight adaptation feel so much less totemic than this faintly self-awed film purports to be.”

As if to emboss the split reaction, Drew McWeeny had a slightly different point of view. In noting that the film “mostly gets it right,” he wrote that Salles and Rivera “managed to make something that has a pulse of its own…When you see it onscreen, without the cascading power of Kerouac’s meth-driven language, it seems smaller somehow, less ‘important,’ but Salles certainly can’t be faulted for how he approached it. His ‘On The Road’ has a real heartbeat, and it’s a trip worth making.”

Whether Guy’s take is valid or not, or whether Drew’s forgiveness of its approach is appropriate, I don’t know. And whether the new version addresses concerns like Guy’s, I don’t know that, either. But I hope whatever comes out the other side of this re-edit is at least not merely the results of an attempt to satiate one sect of an overall reaction that was somewhat split. I’m sure Salles is smart and maybe took this or that as constructive. And art is a process until it’s complete — which, it never is. But I’m looking forward to it, whatever it ends up being.

“On the Roads” opens nationwide December 21.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center announced today a bunch more goodies for the upcoming 50th annual New York Film Festival. First up is the 2012 NYFF HBO Films Directors Dialogues feature, which will include fillmmakers Abbas Kiarostami (“Like Someone In Love”), David Chase (“Not Fade Away”) and Robert Zemeckis (“Flight”) as participants. The annual program pairs a director with a journalist as they discuss the filmmaker’s career, views on their own approach to making movies as well as the current state of the art of filmmaking.

Separately, the fourth edition On Cinema master class will feature two directors for the first time, who will share the stage for an expansive dialogue about influences, filmmaker choices and their own personal histories of cinema. Tapped for the program are Noah Baumbach (“Frances Ha”) and Brian De Palma (“Passion”). All five filmmakers’ respective films are featured on the NYFF slate.

Meanwhile, it was also announced that a director’s cut presentation of Frank Oz’s 1986 remake “Little Shop of Horrors” would be added to the Masterworks line-up along with restored versions of Federico Fellini’s “Fellini Satyricon,” Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate” (which is also set for Venice) and the world premiere of a new version of the long unseen Rolling Stones documentary “Charlie is My Darling” from director Peter Whitehead.

The whole program is just bursting at the seams this year. Talk about doing it up for your golden anniversary.

The 50th annual New York Film Festival runs September 28 – October 14.

I’ve written pretty much all I should about Juan Antonio Bayona’s “The Impossible” at the moment. But to recap, I walked away thinking Naomi Watts was probably the film’s best shot at an acting nomination for the raw emotion and embattled nature of her character in the film (which depicts one family’s plight during the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004).

Otherwise, I figured that even though Ewan McGregor doesn’t have as much to chew on as Watts (though he nails it when he’s called upon), he’d probably get a lead actor push to go along with hers, while young actors Oaklee Pendergast, Samuel Joslin and Tom Holland (who play McGregor and Watts’ sons in the film) would be shoved into the supporting ranks like so many child actors before them. Well, in the case of Holland, who largely anchors the film and is a definite lead by anyone’s measure: not so fast.

After this morning’s Oscar update I was notified that Summit will actually be campaigning Holland as the lead he is, while McGregor will be pushed for Best Supporting Actor in the film. And it immediately struck me as a unique and brave move at a time of year when the safe bet is always placed.

We’ve seen it time and again. Young performers like Hailee Steinfeld (“True Grit”), Mary Badham (“To Kill a Mockingbird”) and Tatum O’Neal (“Paper Moon”), though largely considered leads in their films, are campaigned in the supporting ranks. Sometimes the Academy balks at the attempt at category fraud, as they did in 2003, giving a Best Actress nomination to 12-year-old Keisha Castle-Hughes for her performance in Nikki Caro’s “Whale Rider.” But mostly, they just go with the flow.

Going with the flow is what studios count on, of course. The Academy — it is assumed — is loathe to nominate young, unproven talent in the lead ranks. And to me, that attitude is a sickness. You’ve heard me chafe at my Oscar Talk colleague Anne Thompson’s assertions that it’s not about the role, it’s about the performer. But I’m sorry, the idea that Hailee Steinfeld hasn’t earned her stripes and shouldn’t be allowed to contend for a lead acting nomination alongside a veteran like Jeff Bridges is nonsense.

But I digress.

Some might think this is a mistake, but I think it’s an interesting call by Summit. It will put more focus on Holland’s work in the film. Once it premieres at Toronto in a few weeks, I imagine many will be talking about how well he carries the epic endeavor, how so much of the emotion is tied to what he offers and how he holds his own opposite stars like McGregor and Watts. I’m not saying it will be enough to land him a nomination, mind you. I’m just saying it’s a noble play.

Fox Searchlight is in a similar boat this year with Quvenzhané Wallis in Benh Zeitlin’s  “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” But it hasn’t been a question since day one in Park City that she carries that entire film and is a clear lead of the piece. And indeed, that’s how they plant to proceed.Some have a hard time seeing her land a nomination, but frankly — as has been discussed in the comments section of today’s Oscar column — both of the actress categories are a bit weak this year.

Elsewhere the studio is toying with the idea of pitching Helen Hunt for supporting in “The Sessions,” barring reaction out of Toronto. But to me, it’s a pretty easy get on either side of the line for her. She’s really good in the film, but then again, that movie is all about John Hawkes.

So we’ll see how Summit’s strategy pans out. I’m just happy to see someone going against the grain for a change.

“The Impossible” hits theaters December 21.

Strike one potential animated contender from the list (which was just updated this morning). You might recall that Guy was a big fan of Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar and Benjamin Renner’s “Ernest & Celestine” at Cannes, offering that it’s “schooled in the gentle economy of picture-book storytelling: its words are witty and well-chosen, yes, but it’s the delicate visual construction of its parallel worlds that invites the most scrutiny and empathy.” He then went on to declare that it deserved US exposure.

Well, it looks to get it, as hero to the independent animated film community GKIDS has just announced acquisition of the title. But it won’t be bowing it in this year’s race. It’s being held for fall 2013, where it should be considered formidable amongst whatever usual usual studio fare will surely be in the conversation. The film is officially set for a North American debut at the upcoming Toronto Film Festival, but I’m hoping it might pop up at Telluride first. That’s where I discovered “Chico & Rita” a year before GKIDS picked up that unassuming but beautiful ditty, which went on to nail down an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature Film last year.

“We are overjoyed to be bringing Ernest & Celestine to US audiences,” GKIDS president Eric Beckman said via press release. “The film is a triumph of 2D animation and storytelling. A phenomenally beautiful hand painted watercolor design, immensely likable characters, a wonderful ‘friendship against all odds” story that sweeps you up and does not waste a single minute of screen time. It is just overflowing with warmth and playful visual humor, there is so, so much to like about this movie.”

I know he’s the president of the company and everything, but consider me sold. Further thoughts from Guy out of Cannes:

“The film represents a slight challenge to prospective backers: it’s perhaps too child-focused for the kind of highbrow arthouse play that, say, ‘The Illusionist’ received through Sony Pictures Classics, but a little too quiet and rarefied for a crossover kid audience, even in redubbed form. GKIDS, which has recently handled such in-between animated items as ‘A Cat in Paris’ and ‘Chico & Rita’ (earning Oscar nods for both), would be the ideal home for Aubier, Patar and Renner’s lovely film.”

Nice bit of prognostication, there. He went on to note, rightly, that the studio’s slate was looking a bit stacked, but it’s being shaped more and more for the season. “Tales of the Night” was a film recently nixed from our slate of contenders, but it is ineligible due to it being a 3D reworking of short films that previously aired on French TV. “From Up on Poppy Hill” from Studio Ghibli is in contention and could certainly be a nominee.

That leaves “The Rabbi’s Cat,” which landed at GKIDS after being considered a potential possibility early on last season in the same announcement as Berlinale and Annecy Animation Festival hit “Zarafa” and two other films: “Le Tableau” and “A Letter to Momo.” I’ve heard only “The Rabbi’s Cat” and “Zarafa” will be released this year out of that list, but I’m awaiting confirmation. If so, that would leave 18 films on my prospective list. But four of those don’t have distribution yet, putting us at 14, which according to last year’s rules shake-up would yield just four nominees. There needs to be at least 16 qualifying titles to make a full slate of five nominees.

GKIDS surely knows their decision on these other films puts the category on the bubble, so it would probably be wise to qualify all that they can in order to guarantee a wider net. Last year they surprised with two nods, though, so clearly animators respond to the work they distribute, regardless of the number of nominees. In any case, they’re holding a lot of cards in this hand.

GKIDS is handling US theatrical, home video, digital and TV rights for “Ernest & Celestine” and will dub the film into English for release in Fall 2013.

UPDATE: A source tells me that he has heard GKIDS will be releasing all but “A Letter to Momo” for qualification this year, but nothing official yet from the studio. However, Beckman tells me they will be announcing their plans shortly, so we’ll know soon enough. I’m also told Disney could release “Secret of the Wings,” the new “Tinker Bell” movie, for a week at the El Capitan in Los Angeles before marching it out on home video, thereby helping the numbers game. They have pulled that trick with the franchise before. So I’m adding that and a few Toronto-bound titles mentioned in the comments section to our list.

UPDATE 2: We can confirm a qualifying run for “Secret of the Wings” now and Disney will also be qualifying “Arjun: The Warrior Prince.”

UPDATE 3: Now it’s official: GKIDS has issued a press release announcing that it will be qualifying the four films noted in update #1 above. Also, Steve Pond is reporting that “A Liar’s Autobiography,” mentioned yesterday, will be given a qualifying run as well.