I realize that this is my third post in the space of a week to mention the staggering wardrobe created by the late Eiko Ishioka for “Mirror Mirror.” But since a posthumous Best Costume Design Oscar for the Japanese visionary — a word diluted by overuse that fully applies here — who passed away in January after battling pancreatic cancer, is going to remain near the top of my wishlist for the next awards season, you may as well get used to it. Certain feats of genius demand appropriate respect, and with so many shiny (and shinily dressed) objects still to arrive and distract viewers in the next nine months, one may as well hammer the message home early.   

Accents, details and color flashes of Ishioka’s “Mirror Mirror” designs still drift into my head two weeks after seeing the film: the saturated cobalt tone of Snow White’s fighting gear, or the absurd detailing on the ship-shaped hats worn by Julia Roberts’ literal court pawns. Not many films invite a rewatch just to drink in background garments one might have missed; here’s one.

Happily, I’m not the only so taken with Ishioka’s work as to devote some column space to it: costume designers aren’t normally granted individual profiles in the arts pages, nor do multiple critics tend to dedicate entire paragraphs of their reviews to the frocks. Of course, much of the “Mirror Mirror” coverage has spilled over into delayed obituary territory, and the main reason I wanted to raise the subject again is to link to Lynn Hirschberg’s lovely overview of Ishioka’s career for W Magazine, many details of which will surprise movie buffs who knew her only for her film costuming. The lady’s work spanned architecture, advertising, graphic design, music videos and even the Olympic Games: who else can claim to have won Oscar and Grammy awards for collaborations with, respectively, Francis Ford Coppola and Miles Davis?  

Returning to “Mirror Mirror,” Hirschberg talks to director Tarsem Singh, who explains just how much strain the designer was under while fashioning her cinematic swansong, so to speak:

“Eiko wanted to evoke a true fairy tale,” Singh told me over the phone. “She was not well during the movie; she was undergoing chemotherapy. But Eiko had only two gears: full-out or no gear at all. Her work kept her alive-it was her reason for being.” Like all of ­Eiko”s movie projects, the costumes for Mirror Mirror are elaborate, richly detailed manifestations of character. A lace collar around the evil queen”s neck is designed to evoke the backs of reptiles; Snow White”s gossamer gowns include touches like overlapping leaves and climbing velvet vines that subtly underscore her exile in the forest. And, of course, there is the judicious use of what”s become known as Eiko”s Red. “Eiko would say that red is the most difficult color,” Singh explained. “But in many ways, red was Eiko: strong, intense, brilliant.”

The detailing mentioned there by Hirschberg typifies the level of invention and character definition — as opposed to merely dutiful, authentic replicas of period looks — that costume design awards should expressly be about. (Between “Mirror Mirror” and Robert Pattinson’s Belle Epoque romp “Bel Ami,” I’ve a hunch I’ve already seen 40% of next year’s nominee field, spanning both those camps.)

That Ishioka, after deservedly scooping an Oscar for “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” never got so much as a nomination (from either the Academy or the Costume Designers’ Guild) for any of her three previous, equally eccentric and dazzling, collaborations with Tarsem, is dispiriting proof that that isn’t always the case. Here’s hoping the next season puts that to rights. 

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We’re still over two weeks from the official announcement of this year’s Cannes Film Festival lineup, but speculation over the inclusions is in full swing — the blogosphere is littered with wish lists, predictions (the most thorough of which is this rundown by critic and betting man Neil Young) and even purported leaks, including this bogus one excavated yesterday by Jeffrey Wells.

As a guessing exercise, that list looked plausible enough in some respects — at this stage, few are going to bet against David Cronenberg’s “Cosmopolis” or Jacques Audiard’s “Rust and Bone” showing up in a Competition, while young Directors’ Fortnight and Un Certain Regard graduate Xavier Dolan seems ripe for his first appearance in the big show — but questionable in others. For starters, as much as we’d welcome some fresh blood in the mix, it seems unlikely-to-impossible that perennial Competition participants Michael Haneke, Ken Loach and Abbas Kiarostami, all of whom have films ready for the taking, are all going to miss out on a berth.

One thing the list does have right is the most disheartening rule-out of the Cannes conversation so far. Deadline has confirmed that Wong Kar-wai’s long-awaited, long-delayed martial arts film “The Grandmasters,” once seen as a likely inclusion, will definitely not be ready in time for Cannes — in fact, shooting will still be under way then. Don’t get your hopes up for a fall festival appearance, either: international sales agents Wild Bunch claim the film won’t be ready in time for Venice or Toronto this year. 

“The Grandmasters,” a biopic of influential martial artist and teacher Ip Man, whose students included Bruce Lee, is now rivalling “The Tree of Life” in its degree of postponement and intrigue — its title was mooted ahead of festivals as early as 2010, and now it seems we may not see it until 2013.

Terrence Malick’s film, of course, was rewarded for its prolonged festival tease with an eventual Cannes Competition slot and, ultimately, the Palme d’Or; if Wong’s latest, which reunites him with “2046” stars Tony Leung and Zhang Ziyi, follows a similar trajectory, it’d outdo even “2046,” his famously eleventh-hour Cannes delivery in 2004, for festival-related drama. The Hong Kong auteur is famous for taking his sweet time; impatient audiences, keen to see what he brings to such seemingly atypical material for his woozy aesthetic, will just have to humor him a little longer.

What are you hoping to see land in the Cannes lineup? Besides the virtual inevitabilities, I’m personally itching for a glimpse of Laurent Cantet’s “Foxfire,” Pablo Larrain’s “No,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master” and whichever product of Malick’s bewildering new stream of workaholism surfaces first. What about you?

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Probably shouldn’t be going there on my honeymoon, but, well, it’s relevant and our trip is winding down, so why not?

I’m on the tail end of a nine-day trip to Rome, typing this out from an apartment on Via dei Pettinari, listening to the sounds of joy and inebriation from those walking east across the nearby Ponte Sisto and a night of drinks across the Tiber in the Trastevere. Posters and full-bus adverts for Woody Allen’s “To Rome with Love” (née “Nero Fiddled”/”The Bop Decameron”) have been announcing the film’s imminent April arrival all over the city and the trailer dropped today, so I thought I’d give it a look and “work” for a bit.

Allen cranks out a film per year. The law of averages dictates that most of them will stink, and indeed, as of late, most of them do. For every “Midnight in Paris” (which held an impressive stay on the circuit last year and yielded a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for the writer/director), we’re due a “Scoop” here, a “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” there, etc. I have heard from only one person who has seen “To Rome with Love,” and from what I gather, it’s back to the junk pile. And the trailer sure does suggest some scattered silliness with little to stimulate the mind.

Of course, that’s just me. Maybe it’ll be charming enough. It’s weird to me that in a film featuring folks like Jesse Eisenberg, Alec Baldwin, Judy Davis, Ellen Page, etc., the actor I’m most interested to see chew on this material is Roberto Benigni. Penelope Cruz looks typically on fire, but overall, this is just an awkward mish-mash that doesn’t at all indicate top-form Allen.

And the thing about Page exuding sex appeal or whatever. That’s a joke, right?

Anyway, check out the trailer below, courtesy of Yahoo! Movies. It’s nifty seeing all the stuff I’ve been surrounded by for over a week. I’ll be back in the full swing of things soon enough, but for now, back to Roma.

(What do you think of the trailer for “To Rome with Love?” Rate it above!)

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So, the first quarter of the release calendar is complete. If it doesn’t exactly feel that way, that’s because we tend to spend the first two months of every year fixating on the previous year’s movies still in the hunt for Oscar glory, giving short shrift to the freshly released right under our noses. For Oscar-watchers, at least, there’s a reason for that, though you can debate the chicken-or-egg root of it all: first-quarter films don’t tend to feature much in the awards race nearly a year later.

With voters’ memories notoriously short, studios rarely risk releasing top-category awards material this early in the year. You have to go back to 2000 to find a Best Picture nominee that hit theaters before April: “Erin Brockovich,” which rather impressively locked up an Oscar for Julia Roberts over a year in advance. Last year, only two eventual Oscar nominees — in any category — opened in the first quarter, though one of them eventually proved an above-the-line winner: “Rango” took Best Animated Feature, while fellow March baby “Jane Eyre” snagged a Costume Design nod. The year before, the animation and design were also the kindest fields to the first quarter: “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Wolfman” won in craft categories, while “How to Train Your Dragon” scored a nod in the toon race.

Slim pickings, certainly. Still, if we follow that pattern, it would appear that we’ve already seen at least one future Oscar nominee in theaters. And for those who care to suss out what it is, animation and design once more seem to be the safest areas to consider.

Right now, the only film worth considering as a potential winner in any category is last Friday’s release “Mirror Mirror.” My review was far from the only one to wax lyrical over the late Eiko Ishioka’s astonishing costume design work in Tarsem Singh’s lavishly stylized fairytale adaptation, which, however avant-garde, is in a more Academy-friendly corsets-and-ruffles vein than last year’s similarly inventive but overlooked Tarsem-Ishioka collaboration “Immortals.”

The memorably off-the-wall splendor of the “Mirror Mirror” threads — combined with peer sentiment for Ishioka herself, a revered former Oscar champ who fought through terminal cancer to complete her final film assignment — should ensure a posthumous nod, if not the statuette itself. Amazingly enough, despite the director’s reputation as a visual stylist, it’d be the first production or costume design mention for a Tarsem film; if it breaks that wall, it wouldn’t be entirely surprising to see another regular collaborator, Tom Foden, land an Art Direction nod for his remarkable work in the same film. (Meanwhile, you know Julia Roberts is notching up another Golden Globe bid.) Of course it’d help if box office was in the “Alice in Wonderland” stratosphere, but the first of this year’s Snow White riffs should perform just respectably enough to stay on the radar. 

With domestic box office closing in on $200 million, we’ll likely be considering “The Lorax” as a possibility in the Best Animated Feature race all the way until the end of the year, even if reviews for the dayglo Dr. Seuss haven’t been ecstatic. Of course, 2008’s similarly scheduled Seuss pic “Horton Hears a Who!” was buried by Oscar time, despite stronger critical notices and only a slightly less formidable gross. With some voters in the hard-to-please animators’ branch likely to view its craft as insufficiently refined, “The Lorax” could be headed for a similar fate, but it depends on both the eventual number of nominees in this year’s field and the overall quality of the 2012 animation slate. (Meanwhile, Studio Ghibli’s gorgeous “The Secret World of Arrietty,” which I briefly highlighted last year, is a lower-profile candidate for a nom, but not necessarily a weaker one.)

The film that recent had no trouble breezing past “The Lorax” for the title of 2012’s highest grosser so far is a little teen-oriented fantasy called “The Hunger Games.” Perhaps you’ve heard of it. With better-than-expected reviews bolstering its cast-iron pop phenomenon status, the film will surely remain one of the industry stories of 2012, but it’s hard to see it making much of an impression on the Academy crowd: if the grey-haired voting majority never quite warmed up to a franchise as widely beloved, favorably reviewed and studded with tony actors as “Harry Potter” over 10 years, there’s little reason to think this darker, more difficult and more roughly crafted youth property will do the trick, even with a recent Best Actress nominee socking it in the lead. Chalk it up as a remote possibility for Costume Design and Makeup nods, at best.   

Beyond that, we begins to enter the realm of wishful thinking and the odd bit of barrel-scraping. I’ve already written a paean to Rachel Weisz, whose luminous, career-best performance in “The Deep Blue Sea” is more than worthy of an Oscar nomination — it’d be a pretty stunning year for Best Actress category if the Academy somehow found five superior performances. But boutique distributor Music Box is largely untested in this realm; they’ll campaign, but getting voters to see and remember Terence Davies’s delicate chamber piece will be a mighty challenge. (While we’re about it, Simon Russell Beale deserves a Supporting Actor push for the film too, but let’s not try our luck.) 

In some parallel universe, I’d love to imagine that failed foreign Oscar submissions like “Miss Bala,” “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” and (as if) “The Turin Horse” will pick up a few compensatory nods a year later, a la “City of God,” but that’s unadulterated fantasy. So is a Best Actress nomination for Linda Cardellini in “Return” (which I recently discussed here), or an equally deserving Best Actor bid for Neil Maskell in “Kill List.” And I’m not just dreaming about arthouse invisibles: two of my favorite performances of the 2012 so far come from Channing Tatum in “21 Jump Street” and Paul Rudd in “Wanderlust.” I hardly need to explain why those guys won’t cross the Academy radar, though I’ll bet anything they’ll wind up nominating some dreary biopic impression a lot less accomplished than either of those fizzy comic turns.

Meanwhile, few titles seem less likely to land on the Oscar list next year than my favorite film to hit U.S. theaters in 2012’s first quarter: Australian debut director Justin Kurzel’s shattering true-crime drama “The Snowtown Murders.” (I reviewed it last year under its rather more elegant international title “Snowtown” — it also appeared on my 2011 Top 20 list.) In a just world, neophyte actress Louise Harris — unshakeable as a straw-eyed deadbeat mom who could eat Jacki Weaver for breakfast — would be the Best Supporting Actress contender to beat.

That my pick of the release calendar so far is a 2011 film in my mind — if I were to pick from films that actually bowed in 2012, “Mirror Mirror” would probably take my gold medal — is perhaps indicative of why the first quarter gets so little respect in the long run. But hey, dig around. What films and individuals have you marked with a mental Post-It note?  

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A day late — for which, you know, apologies — but welcome to Cinejabber, your weekend Sunday space to kick around any stray movie-related thoughts you might have on your mind. (Or perhaps not movie-related. Hold forth. We’re not here to judge.)

For my part, I’m feeling frustrated once more by the internet’s dispiriting rush to brand new releases with Rotten Tomatoes numbers, letting mere mathematical averages divide success from failure. Regular readers know this is a routine gripe on my part, and I’ve been reminded of it largely because others keep reminding me that I’m against the Tomatometer, as it were, on the week’s two major multiplex releases. (One person, amusingly, suggested my two reviews amounted to an early April Fools’ gambit.) Among so-called Top Critics, it’s just me, Richard Corliss and Andrew Barker interrupting the inevitable avalanche of pans for “Wrath of the Titans”; “Mirror Mirror” has more defenders — here’s a particularly cogent rave from the excellent Stephanie Zacharek — but the growing majority seem to be immune to its impish charms. Oh well. 

This should hardly be an unfamiliar feeling for any independent-minded critic, but I’m struck by how many commenters on forums, Twitter and elsewhere reach first for RT and Metacritic scores, crowing with delight (or occasionally anguish) as the numbers fall, often disregarding against-the-grain views out of hand. I find it interesting that many place more stock in unedited consensus than in a personal selection of trusted critics; for my part, I rarely factor in opinions of critics I either don’t know or never read, making the Tomatometer at best an imperfect tool — though an undeniably useful gathering point.

What’s your approach? And what have you been (or perhaps stayed in) to see this weekend?

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“I bet you think you know this story. You don’t — the real one’s much more gory.” With this crisp opening couplet, Roald Dahl announced his imminent desanctification of the Grimm Brothers’ “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves,” one of six done-to-death fairytales given a black-comic makeover in his 1982 bestseller “Revolting Rhymes.”

Dahl’s book was itself a tangy kid-lit response to Angela Carter’s ingenious adult sexualization of that dusty literary canon in her essential 1979 volume “The Bloody Chamber”; working at opposite ends of the scale, both writers were making a concerted effort to reclaim these darkly symbolic stories, originally targeted to grown-ups, from their sweetened, child-oriented colonization by Disney. Bar the occasional valiant but underseen effort, however — Neil Jordan’s Carter adaptation “The Company of Wolves” among them — it was a while before Hollywood arrived at a similarly subversive memo, particularly as Disney revived their commercial fortunes at the end of the 1980s by returning to the pages of Andersen and Perrault, their traditionalist approach interrupted only by happier endings.

By the time the theoretical spirit of Dahl had entered mainstream cinema, it had curdled most unappetizingly: the sloppy, biliously spirited 2001 smash “Shrek” earned a lot of undue credit for its alternately cynical and scatological disrespect of fairytale tropes, but the absence of any moral or ideological fiber in their place made for an increasingly vapid and joyless subgenre. (And that’s before we even touch the likes of “Hoodwinked!.”)

There’s only so long one can titter at oh-so-naughty character names like “Farquad” before one craves a bit more perspective, a bit less guile, or both — particularly with filmmakers like Catherine Breillat, Julia Leigh and even Darren Aronofsky playing rather more inventive, romantic, spiritually loyal games with the fairytale form, though still within the adult bracket.

It’d be a stretch of both the truth and the film’s very intention to say that “Mirror Mirror,” Tarsem Singh’s lithe, literate, extravagantly daffy redesign of “Snow White,” quite fulfils that lofty brief — it’s girlier and more good-natured than anything from the Dahl school of storytelling, for starters, though with its scattering of macabre visual gags and morally corrupt septet of dwarves, I’m willing to bet there’s a dog-eared copy of “Revolting Rhymes” on the bookshelf of writer Melissa Wallack. But for all its parodic 21st-century nudges, it’s also an authentic fairytale, at least three parts swoon to one part snark, unapologetically reclaiming the genre from “Shrek” levels of smugness.    

There’s the merest threat of a false note in the film’s opening beats, but it’s a momentarily alarming one: “They called her Snow White,” Julia Roberts narrates, her familiarly spiky tones tinged with creamy contempt, “because it was the most pretentious name they could come up with.” 

It’s a reasonably smart line, one that gently announces a wink-wink postmodern perspective while still sounding more or less in character from Roberts’s bored, haughty Wicked Queen. (After all, if we’re likening magic-kingdom royalty to contemporary notions of celebrity, “Snow White” is just the sort of affected moniker Hollywood’s great and good assign their offspring, inviting similar sneers.) But even as it got the required chuckle, this blithe intrusion of 21st-century irony sets up prickling concerns that we are, once more, pitching ourselves far above the source. 

No sooner are such concerns established, however, than they are thrillingly banished by the exquisitely animated shadow-box prologue that follows. Tidily filling in the nuts and bolts of the Snow White legend for younger viewers that haven’t yet made its acquaintance — both responsible and responsive to its audience, this is the rare revisionist fairytale that doesn’t take its public-domain source as a given — with an elegantly revolving diorama of layered, stylized tableaux from multiple schools of past illustration, it’s a knockout sequence in isolation. More crucially, however, it sets up the storybook meter and heightened visual fancy that are to be the cornerstones of this adaptation; even when it shifts into frenetic comic riffing, “Mirror Mirror” remains bound by its obligations to magic.

That Tarsem, the advertising-schooled oddball whose astonishing visual concepts are rarely tethered by logic or practicality, should prove such a delicious fit for the genre is hardly surprising. To various degrees, his three previous features — “The Cell,” “The Fall” and last year’s swords-and-sandals-and-fetishwear spectacular “Immortals” — have all been fairytales to one degree or another, precoccupied with parallel realms and dream coding.

After flirting (okay, fucking) with Greek mythology in his last film, the similarly entrenched universe of European folklore was an obvious follow-up destination, and it’s been suitably, rewardingly Tarsem-ized: the director’s singular panoply of culture-clashing motifs, his saturated blood-and-mustard palette and, of course, his enduring mask fetish are splashed liberally across Tom Foden’s dazzling, CGI-brushed production design, which expands the expected Gothic spaces of past screen renditions with vast, gilded orientalism and the occasional witty flash of bare-boards theatricality.

It’s hard to think of a contemporary director whose auteur credentials are represented quite so assertively by his story worlds. It harder still to imagine his future work without the similarly defining contributions of the late Eiko Ishioka, whose jaw-droppingly catholic costumes — touching on everything from commedia dell’arte burlesque to block-colored Asian warrior wear to laser-cut Hollywood glamor, complete with a closing nod to Disney’s own iconic Snow White gown — represent a stunning sign-off to an extraordinary career; if a posthumous Oscar nod doesn’t materialize, serious words need to be had with that Academy branch.  

The bigger surprise, then, is that Tarsem should be so comfortable with the frisky farce that makes up much of the film’s second half, its unashamed silliness cresting with a potentially disastrous, but finally riotous, sequence in which Armie Hammer’s appealingly dim Prince Charming is possessed by the spirit of a slobbering puppy; the director’s work has always toyed with absurdism, but never copped to it quite so openly or gleefully.  

Still, to credit Tarsem’s bouncy pacing and the neat emotional throughline of the script — Roberts’ narration turns on a clever literary somersault about whose story “Snow White” even is — for keeping the soufflé from falling is to undersell the invaluable contributions of an imaginatively chosen cast, who tussle far more playfully with their helmer for control of the scenes than any remarkably attired Tarsem ensemble to date.

Roberts especially, more alert and mischievous than she’s been in anything since “Erin Brockovich,” is having a blast. Her gawky sweetheart charm makes her an unlikely choice for high-camp villainess duty, but her strikingly venomous line readings (in, admittedly, a touch-and-go accent) and stroppy body language swiftly prove the wisdom of casting someone who might well have played the wide-eyed princess 20 years ago: it’s that much clearer why the Queen would feel personally affronted by Lily Collins’ milky charms. (Further points to Roberts for being a good enough sport to undergo a black-hearted makeover scene that pokes wicked fun at her profession’s own vanity.)   

Roberts doesn’t have it all her own way. Collins belies her wan appearance to emerge as a surprisingly game heroine; her interaction with the endearingly characterized dwarves, notably one (an excellent Martin Klebba) whose name in the 1937 Disney rendition would have to be Skeezy, gives the character spark beyond her slighty rudimentary proto-feminist assignation.

Better yet is Hammer, revealed here as a comedian of expressive elasticity and calculatedly slack timing, whose forte clearly lies in goofily undermining his immaculate WASPish hotness: “Someone get the man a light covering,” a blushing, twinkly-eyed Roberts barks to an orderly as the Prince enters her court, sheepishly shirtless. It’s a million miles from Angela Carter, but this subtle sexing of characters in an otherwise fluffy family petit four is a welcome sign that Tarsem’s fairytales have some blood running through their veins.

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Two nearly simultaneous items of industry news struck me today as closely related halves of the same story, and not just because they both involve The Weinstein Company. The news of the studio snapping up US distribution rights to “Populaire,” a French throwback romcom that has been generating international buzz since appearing in the Berlinale market last month, has probably been greeted with too many “It’s this year’s ‘The Artist!'” headlines — but tied to the news of the Weinsteins going ahead with a remake of French smash dramedy “Untouchable,” with Colin Firth and “Bridesmaids” director Paul Feig tentatively attached, a linking narrative is hard to resist.

“The Frogs are coming!” is no less premature a rallying cry now than it would have been immediately after the Oscars last month. But while other American studios are still looking to Scandinavia for their crossover fodder — cue remakes of “Let the Right One In,” “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and “Headhunters” — the Weinsteins clearly have a lot of faith in the French. The last time Gallic property was this hot in Hollywood was 20-odd years ago, when everything from “La Femme Nikita” to “The Return of Martin Guerre” to “My Father the Hero” was ripe for a remake.

Since then, France’s presence on the US cinema scene has been limited to the arthouse fringes; even with occasional breakout hits like “Amelie,” producers have been largely content to look but not touch. “The Artist,” with its $45 million gross, armload of Oscars and hefty media presence, represents a renewed breakthrough for French crossover filmmaking, but still a compromised one: it’s in English and set in Los Angeles, with a solitary non-American character that some viewers (particularly ones who don’t think too hard about the origins of the surname “Valentin”) mightn’t realize is French until the final punchline. Made almost entirely by Frenchmen, its very form nonetheless makes it palatably denationalized fare for wary international audiences. 

One assumes “Populaire,” still in post-production and only slated for a release at home in October, wears its nationality a little more obviously: allegedly a stylized, 1950s-set confection about a wide-eyed country girl groomed for glory as a champion speed typist (don’t ask me, I just report this stuff), it promises the requisite brand of exotic whimsy for crossover status, as well as familiar names Romain Duris and the Weinstein-approved Berenice Bejo.

It’s presumably a subtitled affair, though partly set in the US; it’s too early to gather whether the Weinsteins are aiming for an “Artist”-scale hit or merely a tidy arthouse performer. Either way, it sounds a solid investment: let’s not forget, while we’re talking about the company’s recent French successes, that their Kristin Scott Thomas-starrer “Sarah’s Key” has, without generating much conversation of any sort following its summer release, quietly put away over $7 million Stateside; a foreign title needn’t be a phenomenon to represent a sizable hit.

I’m guessing the bigger Gallic story for the Weinsteins will, in the long term, prove to be “Untouchable.” The original French film, a mainstream buddy pic bout the unlikely friendship formed between a wealthy white quadriplegic and his young, wrong-side-of-the-tracks caregiver, received mixed reviews but proved a massive crowdpleaser — its popularity even helping star Omar Sy pull off an upset over “Artist” star Jean Dujardin at the Cesar Awards last month. (On a side note, it could feasibly be France’s selection for the foreign-language Oscar this year; if it is, count on the Weinsteins to go full-bore with the campaign.)

The Weinsteins are opening the film on US screens in late May. They’re doubtless anticipating healthy arthouse returns, but the release is really just marking time while they play the long game — should the remake begin rolling in the autumn, as planned, with Firth in the role of the quadriplegic, commercial and awards expectations will be justifiably lofty. (One doesn’t like to be cynical, but on-paper bait doesn’t get more blatant.) Until then, the Weinsteins seem happy to keep shopping in the French aisle: the Jean Dujardin comedy “The Players” is also under their banner. Meanwhile, we await word of, say, a Kristen Stewart do-over of “Enter the Void” with bated breath. Allez!

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It’s hard to think of a major 2012 release I was looking forward to much less than “Wrath of the Titans,” a largely uninvited sequel to 2010’s singularly ghastly “Clash of the Titans” remake — a notorious nadir in post-converted 3D sludginess, but also a dour, incoherent slog even in two dimensions. It made millions, sure, but so do the Kardashian sisters… and no right-minded person is clamoring for further editions of them.

Indeed, I wasn’t planning on seeing “Wrath of the Titans” at all. Every year, there’s a certain number of obviously whiffy releases one can reasonably relegate to the “only if you pay me” pile, and there I felt comfortable chucking Sam Worthington’s latest skirt-opera — until, well, someone offered to pay me. Commissioned by Time Out to review the film, I slumped into the screening room earlier this week with the grim-faced mien of a man keeping a urologist’s appointment — only to emerge, some 90-plus minutes later, with ears and eyes bludgeoned but a wholly unanticipated spring in my step. Whisper it soft if you must, but as my review explains, “Wrath of the Titans” is not half bad. Okay, it’s good.

I’m as stunned as you are. Improving on the 2010 film, admittedly, is a pretty low bar to clear, though “Wrath” does so with an almost contemptuous degree of comfort: with South African genre upstart Jonathan Liebesman taking the reins from Louis Leterrier, the effects are more polished, the set pieces more tidily constructed, the cast more discerningly chosen. The only conceivable point in the former film’s favor is that Sam Worthington looks better with a buzz cut than with the curly pro-footballer mullet he adopts here, though even that minus scores cred by representing less of an anachronism.  

Rather more impressively, the film betters even the original 1981 “Clash of the Titans” (an affectionately regarded but fundamentally ropey curio) for sweeping boys’-own silliness. What’s lousy about it is the joyous preserve of B-movies: the egregious manhandling of mythology (sample exchange: “Gods don’t die!” “They do now!”), the hilariously bald expository dialogue, the expression-challenged lead. there’s not quite enough inspiration amid the rubble to make it special, but there’s enough care, craft and self-awareness here to show up the indefensibility of too much shoddy Hollywood product, the 2010 “Clash” included. 

Some of the improvements are obvious, self-explanatory even: we needn’t go into the hows and whys of Rosamund Pike representing better value than Gemma Arterton as a female lead. Others, however, are subtler, relating to the logical thrust of the storytelling, or the comparative lack of clutter in the imagery. (The 3D’s a lot less muddy, too.) Some of this may be put down to more resourceful direction and (within limits) writing; others suggest studio suits may actually have taken notes on what didn’t work about the first film. If so, that’s encouraging: with “Clash” having raked in $490 million worldwide, the sequel didn’t need to be markedly better than its predecessor, but enough has been tweaked here to indicate many of our objections were heard.  

It’ll be interesting, then, to see if the critical and commercial response to “Wrath” reflects the filmmakers’ extra effort. I’ve heard enough horrified reactions from colleagues to my favorable assessment to indicate that a kneejerk bevy of one-star pans awaits it on Friday — Slant’s Jaime Christley has already gone one better with a zero-star evisceration — but I’m also not the only one noticing an improvement. Our HitFix neighbor Drew McWeeny was also pleasantly surprised by the film; Glenn Kenny and Variety’s Andrew Barker are among the high-end critics giving it a bemused pass. Box office, I both expect and hope, will be robust: if the Hollywood machine doesn’t get rewarded for its tentative stabs at franchise quality control, it won’t bode well for riskier innovations.  

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A reader asked yesterday why we haven’t yet updated the sidebar with Oscar predictions for the 2012 season. In truth, neither Kris nor I think it’s a particularly healthy practice, and with Kris about to set off on his honeymoon, I like to think that the question of who will win Best Supporting Actress in 11 months’ time is the furthest thing from his mind. My mind, meanwhile, has a less ironclad excuse, but refuses to go there all the same.

For those that are daring to put their necks on the block with such projections, however, I imagine that one title is very much in their thoughts. “Les Misérables” is the umpteenth screen version of Victor Hugo’s beloved doorstop of French literature, but the first of the blockbuster 1985 stage musical that ranks as the third longest-running show in Broadway history. Alongside the no-introduction-needed source material, the cast (Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway et al) is starry, the director (Tom Hooper) recently if unpopularly Oscared, the release date (December 14) in the prime of awards season. Ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching — for those who regard Oscar punditry as a kind of mathematical process, this adds up to a frontrunner.

I’ve been more sceptical than most about the project, as I tend to be — sometimes rightly, often wrongly — off prospects that sound a little too perfect on paper. (Hey, I doubted “The King’s Speech” for that same reason, and look where that got me.) Though he has form in period epics for TV, this is a heftier assignment than Hooper has ever undertaken before; with the backlash against “The King’s Speech” having swelled since last year’s Oscar triumph, there are plenty waiting for him to fall.

Meanwhile, there are always going to be nerves surrounding a cultural behemoth like “Les Mis” that has somehow gone 27 years without reaching the screen; the similarly long-awaited “Chicago” overcame the pressure, but “The Phantom of the Opera” cracked fatally. (It doesn’t ease matters that, for all the attempts at doing so, Hugo’s novel has never yet translated to film with complete success, Claude Lelouch’s overblown but involving 1995 meta-adaptation representing perhaps the nearest miss to date.)

Whether or not the film hits its marks, however, all eyes will be on Jackman in the supersized heroic role of Jean Valjean — one of those beefily iconic parts that will draw the attention of awards voters to even a merely serviceable performance in a high-profile adaptation.Jackman’s song-and-dance skills, demonstrated to the world at large during his hosting stint at the 2008 Academy Awards, are beyond reproach; as a thespian, generally relegated to twinkly-eyed romantic or action-hero duty in Hollywood fodder, he’s rarely been handed roles of such range or gravity.

The Australian charmer will therefore be looking on this role as an opportunity to surprise people with his dramatic chops, so it’s no accident that the first official still, introduced via the actor’s own Twitter feed, from the film finds Jackman in the most committedly against-type form imaginable: his matinee-idol features masked in facial scars, a moth-eaten buzzcut and a scraggly hedge of a beard, his trademark Colgate smile replaced with an earnest scowl, he may as well have “LET’S GET SERIOUS” tattooed in flowing calligraphy across his forehead.

After posting the photo, he tweeted that his look will be changing soon — not a fact that will surprise anyone familiar with the story, but there’s a reason they’ve led with Valjean’s most severe guise. This is the kind of calculated instigation of awards buzz that makes self-fulfilling prophecies of certain roles, particular for actors as well-liked (though as-yet-unawarded) as Jackman. We know a Golden Globe musical/comedy nod (if not win) is in the bag; the film would have to be a colossal disappointment for the Academy not to follow suit. 

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You thought the groaning trophy cabinet for “The Artist” could finally be locked after last month’s Academy Awards? Think again. The reigning Oscar champ has one more honor to collect, and it’s one that brings things neatly back to where the film’s journey started. The International Film Festival Summit has named Michel Hazanavicius’s silent-cinema homage its Festival Film of the Year — an award that will be presented at the Summit in Paris next month.

If you’re looking to award a title that demonstrates the power of film festivals to launch and nurture successful titles, you’d be hard pressed to choose much better than “The Artist,” which relied on positive word of mouth from the festival circuit — artfully amplified by the campaigning savvy of The Weinstein Company — to propel it from niche curio to crossover arthouse sensation. Harvey Weinstein may carry an awful lot of clout on his own, but even he couldn’t have done much for the film if the Cannes reception had been chilly.

As it is, audiences and critics lost their hearts to it at festival after festival, with the likes of Toronto, San Sebastian, New York and London bridging the gap and sustaining the buzz between the Croisette and the awards season — not bad for a film that wasn’t even originally slated to premiere in the Cannes competition. The festival circuit is the only place an item this novel could be safely reared these days, however much of an easy middlebrow lob its detractors later tried to claim it is.

“The Artist” was, of course, just one of several key 2011 titles to go the festival route — two-thirds of the Academy’s Best Picture nominees were introduced to us that way, continuing a recent pattern of festival berths becoming an increasingly essential badge for would-be prestige fare. “The Artist” is the fifth Best Picture winner in a row to emerge pre-approved from the festival pen — a distinct shift from the 1990s and early 2000s, where most winners of the prize were robust studio productions that could afford to skip that stage.

We’re a couple of weeks from the unveiling of this year’s Cannes lineup: whether it’ll feature another success story on the scale of “The Artist” (or “The Tree of Life,” or “Midnight in Paris,” or even “Drive”) remains to be seen, but chances are it’ll turn up at least one or two titles that wind up sneaking past the arthouse ghetto.

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With all due respect to the general public (which, if I’m being honest, is a variable amount) I don’t tend to pay much attention to awards voted for entirely by them: such awards happen on a weekly basis, and they’re called the box office charts.

Still, that’s not to say Joe Public can’t occasionally surprise us, and at least one result at last night’s Jameson Empire Awards — the last, and booziest, stop on the 2011 kudos calendar, voted for by the readers of the mainstream-oriented film magazine Empire — reflects rather well on the British masses.

They may not have shown up in great numbers to see “Tyrannosaur” in theaters last autumn, but word of Olivia Colman’s tremendous performance has clearly spread enough to nab the humble Brit a Best Actress win over the likes of Meryl Streep and Rooney Mara. When even the multiplex crowd has joined critics in feting Colman — who also took the British Independent Film Award, London Critics’ Circle Award and Evening Standard Film Award — that BAFTA snub looks ever more boneheaded.

Other results were more as you’d expect from Empire readers, with genre fare dominating: those still smarting from the “Harry Potter” series ending its run without one Oscar to its name will be comforted by its Best Film and Best Director wins here. Even the power of the Potterheads, fortunately, wasn’t enough to get Daniel Radcliffe the Best Actor prize ahead of Gary Oldman.

With three wins, including Best British Film and Best Thriller, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” was the most-rewarded film at last night’s London ceremony. “Thor” took a pair of prizes, while other winners included “Kill List,” “The Adventures of Tintin” and UK comedy smash “The Inbetweeners Movie.” Full list of nominees and winners below:  

Best Film
“Drive”
“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”
“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2”
“Rise of the Planet of the Apes”
“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”

Best British Film
“Attack the Block”
“The Inbetweeners Movie”
“Submarine”
“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”
“Tyrannosaur”

Best Director
Nicolas Winding Refn, “Drive”
David Yates, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2”
Rupert Wyatt, “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”
Tomas Alfredson, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”
Steven Spielberg, “War Horse”

Best Actor
Daniel Craig, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”
Ryan Gosling, “Drive”
Gary Oldman, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”
Daniel Radcliffe, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2”
Andy Serkis, “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”

Best Actress
Olivia Colman, “Tyrannosaur”
Rooney Mara, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”
Carey Mulligan, “Drive”
Meryl Streep, “The Iron Lady”
Michelle Williams, “My Week With Marilyn”

Best Male Newcomer
John Boyega, “Attack the Block”
Asa Butterfield, “Hugo”
Sam Claflin, “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides”
Tom Hiddleston, “Thor”
Jeremy Irvine, “War Horse”
Craig Roberts, “Submarine”

Best Female Newcomer
Celine Buckens, “War Horse”
Elle Fanning, “Super 8”
Laura Haddock, “The Inbetweeners Movie”
Felicity Jones, “Like Crazy”
Hailee Steinfeld, “True Grit”
Bonnie Wright, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2”

Best Comedy
“Attack the Block”
“Bridesmaids”
“Crazy, Stupid, Love”
“The Inbetweeners Movie”
“Midnight in Paris”

Best Thriller
“Drive”
“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”
“Hanna”
“Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows”
“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”

Best Horror Film
“Attack the Block”
“Insidious”
“Kill List”
“Paranormal Activity 3”
“Troll Hunter”

Best Sci-Fi/Fantasy Film
“Captain America: The First Avenger”
“Rise of the Planet of the Apes”
“Super 8”
“Thor”
“X-Men: First Class”

Art of 3D Award
“The Adventures of Tintin”
“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2”
“Hugo”
“Thor”
“Transformers: Dark of the Moon” 

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When Woody Harrelson signed on to play Steve Schmidt and Haymitch Abernathy in “Game Change” and “The Hunger Games” respectively, he likely wasn”t thinking that the roles are actually strange mirrors of one another (although, who”s to say what Harrelson is thinking really?). Aside from the obvious similarities – both films are adaptations of books and they each have the word “game” in the title – there are some equally clear distinctions.

Steve Schmidt is, of course, the campaign strategist who functioned as the senior adviser on the 2008 John McCain Presidential bid. Haymitch Abernathy is a fictional character who resides within the world of author Suzanne Collins’s novel “The Hunger Games,” an imagined dystopic future where North America has been reduced to a conglomerate of 12 “districts” which are presided over by a dangerously self-indulgent “Capitol.”

Schmidt is a successful, high-functioning leader of the Republican Party. Haymitch Abernathy is a man who was psychically fractured in his youth (by his participation in the games) and is an intractable, erratic adult who spends the large majority of his time buried in the depths of a bottle.

“Game Change” focuses on Schmidt and Team McCain”s selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as the Senator”s running mate, the subsequent coaching that the team was required to do to prepare the grossly underprepared and unqualified candidate and the realization that they had, inadvertently, created a monster within their party. “The Hunger Games” is a political allegory that uses a fantasized version of our future and an exaggerated set of circumstances to highlight (among other things) the egregious discrepancy between the 1% and 99%.

In the latter, war and natural disasters have ravaged the earth, leaving a far smaller population and physical landscape in the wake of the chaos. North America, now the country of Panem, is comprised of (as mentioned) 12 distinct and impoverished districts that rarely interact. Each produces its own “specialty” (meaning resource that they provide to the Capitol), whether it be coal (district 12), fabrics (district 8) or luxury goods (district 1). The transfer of the resources from the have-nots to the have-too-much-time-on-their-handses is one of the ways in which Collins highlights some of the existing disparities in our world and points to an ever widening chasm between the rich and the poor.

As a remembrance of a long ago attempt at rebellion, a reminder of the scope and power of the Capitol”s authority and a warning to those who may hope to challenge it, the Capitol demands that all districts deliver one boy and one girl “tribute” to participate in a yearly televised fight to the death: the Hunger Games. Haymitch is the only living district 12 survivor of the games and as such is tasked with preparing Katniss and Peeta, the two children selected from 12, to play and win against nearly insurmountable odds.

The central character, Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence), is a grounded and unselfconscious girl, unselfconscious in the sense that she has no ability to discern her impact on those around her. She has no wish to charm a crowd, to adopt a persona, and has little regard for what others may or may not make of her – until it becomes a matter of life or death. Game playing is as unnatural to her as it is (seemingly) inherent for Palin. She acts from unbidden instinct, often the base instinct to survive both in body and in spirit and in so doing she becomes an unwitting revolutionary.

It is Haymitch”s job to find a persona for Katniss, one that will work to please the avaricious Capitol audience who want nothing more than “a good show,” for it is their donations of food, medicine and water during the games that will strengthen her bid to stay alive. The audience expects an entertaining player too cheer on. The realities of Katniss’s character are of very little interest to them, however.

Are the mirroring qualities beginning to emerge a bit?

Katniss and Palin are two sides of a coin just as Haymitch and Schmidt are. Each man played Pygmalion in some sense to the women in their charge. Each was called upon to play the “game” of politics, one in an attempt to win an election and one to keep a teenage girl’s heart beating. They are the designers of figureheads. Pailn became a reflection of the people for many members of the Republican party as Katniss becomes a symbol of a revolutionary spirit in “The Hunger Games.” Haymitch’s machinations and Katniss’s role as a political unifier evolves as the series of books does.

Each woman was tasked with painting a portrait for an audience that had lost all sense of legitimate priorities and of reasonable expectations from their leadership: a thirsty crowd that wants little more than, as mentioned, “a good show.” Collins is, perhaps in part, imparting a warning with her trilogy. I do not believe that it supports a particular “party line,” quite the opposite in fact. It eventually illustrates the inherent error in aligning oneself too closely with any rigidly constructed ideological organization. She favors fundamental humanity, the individual and, well, sanity.

But the parallels between the Capitol – a small group so bloated with excess, distraction and diseased values that they fail to see (or take offense to) the struggle that the majority of their fellow human beings, or they themselves, are subjected to – and some of our cultural and geopolitical realities are hard to miss. Collins seems to be saying with her book: “This outcome is unlikely but possible in the coming years if we do not awaken to the fact that there are inequities that must be addressed and things that ought to be held sacred rather than reduced to the ephemeral mists of entertainment and celebrity.”

In the film, the population is controlled in three key ways: an enforced separation and nurtured hostility between the districts (which distracts them from all that could unite them and thus make them stronger), a large measure of fear tempered with a small measure of (mostly unrealistic) hope and (in the wealthiest sections) a limited understanding of the outside realities and a focus on the superficial and celebrity culture. They relish the razzle dazzle and dismiss the blood, bones and bread of human existence. In their perception, life, death, entertainment and politics all bleed into one.

Haymitch Abernathy and Steve Schmidt both endeavor to get the world at large to “buy into” their respective mentees. But, again, one is a power grab with potentially disastrous consequences and the other a bid for survival. The interesting part of these paradoxically perpendicular and parallel storylines is that the mistakes the McCain campaign made by choosing to focus on and nourish division, greed and shallow presentation rather than substance when they selected and groomed Palin is precisely what the Collins series (in part) warns could lead to our peril.

Now, we do not literally equate the 2008 Republican primary to a grotesque teenage bloodbath, but metaphorically, perhaps. As “Game Change” depicts it, the McCain campaign became so focused on winning that it lost track of its true value and what it is everyone involved were trying to accomplish. Unusual in politics? Clearly not.

But Harrelson”s Schmidt backs a woman he knows could mean the ruin of the nation he loves in order to do so. He attempts to craft her into a shiny package the citizenry will happily purchase despite its lack of true nourishment. She is a distraction, a glittering toy dangled before children who seemingly fail to see that their own good is being disregarded.

Harreslon’s Haymitch Abernathy is forced to shape a young girl of unusual substance and little artifice into an image that a fat, self-centered, shallow populace that has become blind to even the basic tenants of moral integrity can “root for” in a sick approximation of “reality TV.” He does so because he knows, whether she is aware of it or not, that Katniss can be a beacon to the many who suffer greatly at the hands of the few. Where Katniss is an unwilling symbol who would rather live an actual life, Palin was “the best actress in politics,” a woman who (in this rendering) revered fame for fame’s sake and had little interest in the true business at hand: serving the people.

Palin’s toxic narcissism is dangerous to those who would allow her to govern them while Katniss”s unflinching honesty makes her a reluctant but worthy leader. But in each case, it is the populace”s poisoned value system and obsession with the shallow veil of contrived “personalities,” sensation and flash that leads to their ultimate decline.

Perhaps Harrelson – quite the socio-politically-minded individual – consciously meant to point to a gaping cultural wound when he took on these respective roles. Perhaps not. But for some of us, that”s just what he did.

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Okay, we haven’t done of these in a while — welcome (back) to Cinejabber, your weekend open thread to kick around whatever’s on your mind film-wise or otherwise, while we seek life beyond the movie theater.

This weekend, however, the biggest event in the In Contention family has nothing to do with the box-office blocks being predictably busted by “The Hunger Games,” the current industry hot topic of Variety going up for sale or, indeed, anything to do with the movies whatsoever. Today, I’m happy to remind you, a certain guy we all know and hopefully love, Kris Tapley, is getting married to his longtime partner and fiancée, April Smith. And I’m sure I speak for us all when I say I couldn’t be happier for them.

Not to get into speech mode or anything, but Kris has been an invaluable friend and colleague to me for over four years now, and it pains me that I can’t be in Los Angeles to share the most important day of his life with him. I had the pleasure of meeting April in London back in 2008, and know what a special and storied relationship she and Kris share; I was delighted to hear of their engagement the following year, and am thrilled it’s all coming together today.

This wedding has been a long time in the works — here’s hoping it’s everything they’ve planned and dreamed it to be, and just the first of many red-letter days in a long and blissful lifetime together. (Meanwhile, a honeymoon in Rome awaits.) Congratulations, Kris and April. I’m raising a glass to you as I type, and I expect our readers are doing the same. 

Right, I’ll stop before things get too mawkish around here. The floor is yours.

We’re not quite past the first quarter yet, but I feel comfortable saying that if December arrives and Miguel Gomes’s “Tabu” isn’t on my Top 10 of 2012 list, we have one hell of a year ahead of us. This Portuguese black-and-white marvel was, as I rather gushingly wrote back in February, the highlight of an unexpectedly strong Berlin Film Festival, where it won the Alfred Bauer Prize for Innovation. It stands comfortably as my favorite film of the year so far, which sounds like fainter praise than it is.

Earlier this week, a Portuguese trailer surfaced — and while the absence of subtitles might leave you a little confused, the glimpses of its swoony imagery and soundtrack should hopefully give you some idea of why I’m so besotted with the film. To be honest, even with subtitles, chances are you wouldn’t be much the wiser as to what’s going on in this enigmatic fusion of contemporary absurdist comedy and luscious period romance — though you would have a clearer sense of how rhythmically and poetically written it is atop its more immediate sensual delights.

At the time I wrote my review, “Tabu” was still seeking a U.S. distributor: happily, this distinct niche item has since found a home with a relatively new kid on the block, the aptly named Adopt Films. Needless to say, this won’t be coming soon to a theater near you: they’re reportedly planning a late-December release in New York in LA, before taking it to other cities in 2013.

I assure you it’s worth the wait. In the meantime, enjoy the tease. (Thanks to Stale Popcorn blogger Glenn Dunks for finding the trailer.)

[vimeo 38651515 w=640 h=360]

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It’s heeeeeere. “John Carter” may have got blockbuster season off to a false (if unseasonally early) start, but the real deal arrives today — Gary Ross’s adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ young-adult publishing phenomenon “The Hunger Games” has been breathlessly anticipated for months, if not years, and early box-office numbers (not to mention a broad swathe of reviews) already suggest the hype has not been misplaced. I confess I haven’t seen it yet. Ill health got in the way of press screenings this week, plus I’ve been dutifully catching up on the book — which, rather to my surprise, I found entirely captivating. So I’ll be queuing with all the other excited punters this weekend; in the meantime, if/when you’ve seen it, be sure to share your thoughts here.

First off, apologies for the slow business around here this week. As some of you may know, Kris is on leave, occupied with the small matter of his wedding on Saturday. And while I’m supposed to be keeping things on track in his absence, I’ve been hit by a mystery illness this week that hasn’t done much for my posting efficiency. Unfortunate timing on my part, but things are looking up — do bear with me.

One item I’ve been meaning to write that got unduly waylaid this week is a review of Terence Davies’ “The Deep Blue Sea,” which I saw at the London Film Festival last October and has been waltzing in and out of my mind ever since. It finally lands in US theaters tomorrow, and while I’m still hoping to finish an appraisal of the film as a whole — which, as you’d expect from as rigorously mannered a stylist as Davies, is as fascinating in the ways it doesn’t quite coalesce as in the instances it quite gloriously does — I’d like to pre-empt that discussion with an unqualified endorsement of its standout feature: the astonishing lead performance of Rachel Weisz.

Academy Award contenders for Best Actress don’t tend to be minted as early as March: just ask Juliette Binoche or Mia Wasikowska, both more than worthy of awards consideration last year and long forgotten by the time critics started throwing trophies at winter babies like Meryl Streep and Michelle Williams. They are even less likely to resurface when steered by nobly humble boutique distributors like Music Box Films — an outfit more regularly associated with foreign-language fare that took advantage of the Davies film’s cool Toronto buzz to snap up an unusually starry title for their collection.

But damn it, if we don’t even bother to hope, the underdogs never get their due — and Weisz’s work in “The Deep Blue Sea” needs and deserves all the naïve hope it can muster. By the normal rules of play in such matters, when an Oscar-winning actor excels themselves in a polished, literate prestige piece, another Oscar campaign is par for the course — and as Hester Collyer, a brittle trophy wife emotionally paralyzed by her own infidelity in Davies’ meticulous adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s 1952 stage play, Weisz doesn’t so much excel herself as define herself as the actress we’ve long either believed or wished her to be.

For those who have been full-fledged advocates of her heavyweight status since (or even before) her 2005 red-carpet run for “The Constant Gardener” — where she turned from sneak-attack Golden Globe victor to Oscar dead-cert with an ease that surprises even more in retrospect than it did at the time — this is the worthy post-win close-up that she’s long merited and not quite found in the no-cigar showcases of “Agora,” “The Whistleblower” or “The Brothers Bloom.” And for those who have been enticed by, but not wholly sold on, her gifts, it’s a retroactive free pass to the thespian A-list that erases, without prejudice, sundry CV inkblots like “Fred Claus” or “Dream House.” 

I’ll confess that I’ve been in the latter camp for several years: charmed by her presence, intrigued by her potential, without ever quite seeing the whole picture that came so clearly into view for admirers of her work in “The Constant Gardener,” an intelligent, conscientious, even seductive outline of a character that, for me, never asks enough of the ambiguities the script so carefully laces around her. That admirably lissome yet effort-driven subtlety is what has distanced me ever so slightly from much of Weisz’s strongest work over the years — with her beguiling against-type daffiness in “The Brothers Bloom” a welcome interruption.

It’s all the more surprising, then, that her breakthrough — or to be more fair, perhaps, my breakthrough with her — should arrive in a film that is itself occasionally hampered by its calculated delicacy. Brittle, heightened and hushed even by Davies’ porcelain standards, “The Deep Blue Sea” seems ideally tailored for the passively lovely Weisz we know, so it’s first disorienting, then thrilling, to find the actress throwing herself at Rattigan’s upright words with such curdled, wounded abandon: torn between two men and two lives, both rapidly receding into her past, her Hester is tangily irrational, touchingly self-deceiving and thoroughly unstudied, even if Davies’ woozily besotted camera can’t turn its gaze from her for a second.

Decked out in a dazzling array of 1950s oil-pastel gowns, the actress has never looked this pristine, this honest-to-God-movie-star-beautiful; conversely, she’s never appeared this internally stained, this sincerely shattered. It’s not reaching too far to say Vivien Leigh comes to mind — both physically and otherwise — and not merely because Leigh played Hester in Anatole Litvak’s generally buried 1955 screen adaptation of Rattigan’s play.

There’s something of Leigh’s glinting-eyed, edge-of-destruction composure here, and it’s a razored romantic register in which we’re not that used to seeing actresses of Weisz’s generation playing. Coincidentally, she took on another Leigh-colonized property, Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” on the London stage a couple of years ago to great, and reasonably merited, acclaim — and still this feels a ferocious revelation.

Lest this read like hyperbole, I’ve encountered a number of colleagues (both inside and outside of the existing Weisz fan club) who feel similarly strongly about this performance — even, or perhaps especially, if they don’t feel that strongly about the gorgeous film surrounding it. British awards voters, however, were considerably less seduced when the film opened here last November. Eyebrows were raised when the film was stunningly blanked in the British Independent Film Award nominations, even in a Best Actress category that resorted to negligible filler contenders like Rebecca Hall in “The Awakening” to round out the ballot. BAFTA voters, meanwhile, continued to neglect the talent right under their noses: Weisz was omitted from a Best Actress longlist that included Emma Stone in “The Help” and Helen Mirren in “The Debt.”

Some UK critics’ groups did their best to rectify the situation: Weisz was nominated for Best British Actress by the London Film Critics’ Circle (which I’m pleased to say I had a vote in) and the Evening Standard Awards jury. But whether due to the film’s respectful-rather-than-ecstatic reviews, inevitably muted box office and/or chamber-piece air, the career-crowning achievement of a big-league star has somehow become the kind of word-of-mouth secret usually circulated about far less celebrated names. It’s only March, I know. But you can fix this, America.     

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For some reason, amid the building media hype about the release, I feel oddly disinclined to see “Titanic 3D” — neither because I fear, as Roger Ebert bemoaned, the defacement of some kind of masterpiece, nor because I so dislike the film as to make an active point of not revisiting it.

That said, I somehow haven’t revisited it since December 1997, though it certainly hasn’t slipped from memory. What I remember fondly of it (and there’s much to go under that column) I remember vividly enough not to crave a reminder. I also remember much that was lunky and crass and tin-eared, none of it likely to be remedied by an extra dimension. The film’s charms are, in my mind, irrevocably tied to conditions of who and where I was when I first saw it, aged 14, smack in the middle of the demographic that rather infectiously lost their collective minds for it that summer. (Yes, I was in the southern hemisphere then.) Historical epic it may be, but it’s a teenage time-capsule piece for me, and coating it in the ubiquitous 21st-century veneer of state-of-the-art 3D seems somehow anachronistic. I’m not claiming it’s rational, but it’s why I’m personally resisting.

Whatever my reasons for distancing myself from James Cameron’s film, they’re certainly not the same as those of Julian Fellowes — who has rather bluntly lashed out at “Titanic” (with or without 3D) on the basis of its factual inaccuracies. This isn’t an unmotivated statement: the Oscar-winning writer of “Gosford Park” and recent TV hit “Downtown Abbey” has his own dramatization of the Titanic story due to hit small screens later this year, He claims that it’ll right several of Cameron’s historical wrongs, notably what he perceives as the unjust treatment of the ship’s real-life first office William Murdoch, played in the 1997 film by Ewan Stewart. Fellowes tells Britain’s Radio Times:

“That was very unfair how Murdoch was depicted. He wasn”t cowardly. He fired the pistol to just stop a potential riot. It was suddenly getting out of hand, and he fired it in the air. That”s not being cowardly. I don”t think you can just say, ‘Well, we”ll make this guy a villain – he”ll do.’ I think with real people you have a kind of imperative to be true to who they were. I don’t think you can take someone who was moral and decent and make them do something immoral and indecent. I would feel uncomfortable doing that. So we do have Murdoch, and we have him firing a pistol, [but] there is a little bit of setting the record straight.”

Well, yes and no. I have little doubt that Fellowes’s narrative treatment of this oft-told story will boast more even-handed fidelity to the facts than Cameron’s unabashed fantasy, but we’re talking about two separate modes and objectives of storytelling. No film in which Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” winds up at the bottom of the North Atlantic — as opposed to the Museum of Modern Art, where it hangs safe and dry today — is claiming to be any less than 90% a romantic fiction.

As a fairytale riff on a true event, mixing Harlequin-level imaginary figures with real-life ones scarcely less cartoonish, “Titanic” is free to mold the truth to its own purposes in the pursuit of audience feeling, however gauchely it does so. (Fellowes has some experience in this area, having inserted a fabrication of legendary British composer Ivor Novello into the fiction of “Gosford Park.”) Self-professed biopics and historical studies are fair game for fact-checking trials; wilful flights of fancy like “Titanic,” which essentially amounts to storytelling about storytelling, less so. There, I might have talked myself into revisiting it after all.

For more views on movies, awards season and other pursuits, follow @GuyLodge on Twitter. 

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We spend so much time in the blogosphere looking forward to things that we don’t always notice, or at least sufficiently discuss, worthwhile work that is ready for viewing right away. For so many films, all conversation about them ceases the second they become available to audiences — which is least kind, of course, to small specialty items that need sustained chatter to prod the viewers they deserve. 

This is a roundabout way of expressing my regret that Liza Johnson’s independent drama “Return” — which I saw and greatly liked in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes last year, and had been looking forward to spotlighting closer to its release — actually hit US screens last month, and amid the flurry of Oscar-related coverage, I somehow didn’t notice.

Hey, better late than never. The film, a modest, intelligent entry in the growing American genre of post-Iraq war-at-home studies, may have largely vanished from theaters, but Focus Features has made it available on iTunes and On Demand, and you owe it to yourself to dig it out. More pointedly, you owe it to Linda Cardellini, who has quietly delivered the performance of her — or many an undersung TV actor’s — career here.

I’ve always been rooting for Cardellini, a warm, dryly engaging actress most affectionately remembered for her droll star turn in the abruptly curtailed cult sitcom “Freaks and Geeks.” She was an equally valuable sweet-sour presence in the latter, lesser years of “ER.” Save a tart, emotionally crucial bit part in “Brokeback Mountain,” however, she’s never been given the big-screen workout her unassuming talent calls for. Here it is.

If you still need persuasion, there’s typically robust supporting work from Michael Shannon and John Slattery on offer, but Cardellini’s the one the film is generously, though not fawningly, constructed around. Playing Kelli, a PTSD-afflicted army reservist returning to her husband and children in Ohio after a tour of duty in the Middle East, and having predictable trouble readjusting to her working-class suburban existence, the actress is impressively wary of the role’s ample scope for showy, affectedly gritty hysterics.

Given the unfamiliarity of such substantial leads in her filmography, you’d hardly blame the actress for grandly flexing her range, but she’s opted for a flintier, more morally inquisitive approach to Kelli’s surfeit of inadequately Band-Aided psychological crevices, which manifest themselves both in idle depression and more severe alcoholism — though she and Johnson take equal interest in both routes of mental decay, creating a character too bored by her own damage to detect its escalation.

Some will find the film a shade anti-dramatic compared to recent, more urgent cinematic takes on this well-worn subject, but that’s rather the point. Kelli’s horrific past is no more actively analyzed than her numb present; trauma is not presented here as a structured state of being, but as a dully indefinite one.

Assisting the film’s smart evasion of pat redemptive arcs is the equally faulty moral compass of the men in Kelli’s life. Michael Shannon’s lovingly bewildered husband appears at first to be a dependable baseline of sorts — if you squint slightly, you can cast Cardellini in Shannon’s role in the recent “Take Shelter,” with Shannon himself flipped to Jessica Chastain duty — until his infidelities surface. John Slattery, as a jovial motivator type Kelli meets at a reluctantly attended therapy session, appears poised to play substitute, until his own inner wounds prove alarmingly untended.

“Return” is a film that distributes pain without cheaply universalizing it; countering some faintly pedestrian storytelling and its beigely indie composition, it’s that clear-eyed maturity that makes it a tiny bit special. Well, that and Linda Cardellini: a call for awards attention (save perhaps the Spirits) would be sadly far-fetched, but here’s hoping this is the first of several such showcases for her in the independent realm.

Any of you seen it yet? Do chime in if you have. 

For more views on movies, awards season and other pursuits, follow @GuyLodge on Twitter. 

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