Wong Kar-Wai’s long-awaited, long-delayed martial arts epic “The Grandmaster” looked to be the dream opening film at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, but it received a slightly rude awakening when it finally premiered. I was far from the only critic to voice my disappointment with the film, which bore the scars of work that had been labored over a little too long — though it still offered sporadic thrills and ravishing beauty aplenty.

Faced with a mixed response to a film that was arguably always going to suffer from inflated expectations, US distributors The Weinstein Company were probably wise to sit on it for a few months. The film has played other, smaller international film festivals since its Berlin debut, but will be making its first US appearance in the very different environment of Comic-Con this week. Will the film be more warmly embraced by the genre crowd than the festival press? It’s worth a try: the film certainly isn’t typical Comic-Con fare, but that novelty could serve it well, generating a fresh wave of buzz ahead of its August 23 release.

Meanwhile, it was announced today that the film will also be receiving a special screening at the Academy on Monday, as part of their season-long celebration of the kung-fu genre. Wong will be in attendance, while a Q&A with the filmmaker will be hosted by writer, director and “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner — not the first name you’d connect with the Hong Kong iconoclast, though both men know a thing or two about style on screen.

The Academy’s exhibition, “Kick Ass! Kung Fu Posters from the Stephen Chin Collection,” will be available to view in the Grand Lobby of the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater after the screening.

The Academy event, which is already sold out, lends additional class to the film’s profile as one of this summer’s potential arthouse blockbusters. It’ll be interesting to see if it can get a second wind nearly six months after its distant world premiere. Meanwhile, it’s nice to see the Academy showcasing a genuine titan of world cinema under any circumstances. Wong, incidentally, was one of 176 individuals invited to join the Academy last year.

If you’re interested in attending, more details can be found on the Academy’s website.

The cast of Christopher Nolan’s upcoming “Insterstellar” is, well, stellar. There are a handful of amazing ensembles out there these days, from “12 Years a Slave” to “Out of the Furnace,” but this one is just jam-packed with prestige, movie stardom and just about anything you’d want out of a cast. And now we can add John Lithgow to the ever-expanding list.

The Wrap reports Lithgow will round out Nolan’s on-camera crew. No details on the role were given. As you may know, the film follows a group of explorers who travel through a wormhole and into another dimension. The project was once set to be a Steven Spielberg, written by Nolan’s brother Jonathan. The word is that script was merged into one of Christopher Nolan’s original concepts but who knows what the truth is with all of that. I think I have a copy of the original script around here somewhere; I should dive in and figure out what’s what.

I thought Lithgow was rather fantastic in last year’s “This is 40” and thought he deserved to be in the Best Supporting Actor conversation. He won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for his work on Showtime’s “Dexter” recently and he also popped up in Jay Roach’s “The Campaign” last year. He’s pretty busy these days, clearly, and this is an interesting choice for the actor.

Lithgow joins Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, Casey Affleck, Ellen Burstyn and Jessica Chastain on the project. Paramount and Warner Bros. are teaming up on the film, which hits theaters in the middle of awards season next year. Will we be talking about it on the circuit? Time will tell.

“Interstellar” opens on November 7, 2014.

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Comic-Con is on the way but I’m skipping out on San Diego entirely this year for various reasons — none of them unfortunate. Meanwhile, James Mangold’s “The Wolverine,” one of at least 10 comic book adaptations hitting screens this year, is right around the corner.

The new film will be Hugh Jackman’s sixth as the mutant Logan/Wolverine after “X-Men” (2000), “X2” (2003), “X-Men: The Last Stand” (2006), “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” (2009) and “X-Men: First Class” (2011). Not only that, but next year’s “X-Men: Days of Future Past” will bring him into the rare air of a seventh portrayal, and as he told HitFix’s Drew McWeeny in a recent interview, the actor is “not ready to give him up just yet.”

All of this got me thinking: Who else has played a character seven times?

I came up with an interesting array. Sorry, “Police Academy” fans, I left that crew off, but yes, some actors appeared in all seven films. And Richard Belzer deserves a shout-out for playing Detective/Sergeant John Munch countless times across multiple series on television. But prepare yourself for the record-holder here; if anybody was ever tired of playing the same character over and over, it has to be that guy.

Find out who that is and more by clicking through the gallery below.

“The Wolverine” opens nationwide on July 26.

I’m pretty well stoked for Neill Blomkamp’s “Elysium,” which looks to put a bow on the summer spectacle season next month. And with Comic-Con around the corner, I’m reminded of that first screening of “District 9” four years ago and how much of a knock-out the experience was. I’m still shocked it managed to navigate the season and end up with Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay nominations. It’s such an anomaly to me for that, even in an expanded Best Picture scenario.

Will “Elysium” be so fortunate? Time will tell. Starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster, it certainly has more A-list talent on board to get AMPAS members to take notice. Or it could just be another fantastic entry in sci-fi cinema, which has of late become mired in the same high-gloss franchise-mongering that manages to ruin just about everything. And that would be fine, too.

Over at Wired, Mark Yarm has cranked out a wonderful profile of Blomkamp in advance of the film’s release. It’s a thorough consideration of the young filmmaker, tracing his relationship with actor Sharlto Copley, his eventual partnership with Peter Jackson and the failed “Halo” project, the complete opposite mentality that went into “District 9” and “Elysium”‘s likely place in a socio-political conversation. What caught my eye, though, was the involvement of futurist designer Syd Mead in the project. Sue me, I wasn’t aware.

It seems almost obvious that Mead, who helped usher in the worlds of “Blade Runner, “TRON” and “Aliens,” among others, would have a hand in “Elysium.” And indeed, as it turns out, his work managed to inspire the new film a great deal. From the Wired piece:

Growing up, Blomkamp had three major haunts: the Midrand Snake Park, the Museum of Military History, and Estoril Books, where he first saw the work of Syd Mead, the futurist designer who contributed to two of the director”s favorite movies, “Aliens” and “Blade Runner.” Young Blomkamp fixated on one image in particular: Mead”s National Geographic-commissioned illustration of the Stanford torus, a ring-shaped, rotating space habitat first proposed during a 1975 NASA conference. That design and, to a lesser extent, “Halo””s titular ring-shaped worlds were the basis for “Elysium””s orbital space station — in fact, Mead, now 80, designed sets for Elysium.

That NASA conference, which was held at Stanford University, was all about proposing and speculating on designs for future space colonies. The Stanford torus design in particular, Mead’s designs seen below, consisted of a doughnut-shaped ring (a “torus”) that was 1.8 km in diameter and would house 10,000 people. It would rotate once per minute to provide between 0.9g and 1.0g of artificial gravity on the inside of the outer ring via centrifugal force (which can’t help but conjure images Stanley Kubrick gave us seven years before the conference in the film “2001: A Space Odyssey”).

I would love it if a film like this could get some traction with the designers branch. I was similarly adamant in 2009 when “District 9” was in play. The two films share the same production designer, Philip Ivey (who cut his teeth on the “Lord of the Rings” franchise), but the presence of Mead in the art department makes it all the more special.

Granted, “Avatar” won the Oscar for Best Production Design (formerly known as Best Art Direction) the very same year “District 9” was released, but it seems the rare occasion. And ultimately, we can probably chalk that up to a combination of the film being a strong Best Picture contender and boasting a gorgeous landscape, rather than attention being paid to the nuts-and-bolts design of the material world on display.

Fantasy and, of course, period work always seem to do well with the branch, but “Avatar” is the only sci-fi film to have received a nomination in the category in the last 15 years. You have to go back to “Men in Black” for the last one, which was coincidentally recognized the very same year as “Gattaca”‘s sleek, stellar work. But movies like “Pacific Rim” (whatever one may think of the script or characters), “Prometheus” (ditto), etc., they deserve a fair shake here.

Mead’s colleagues on “Aliens” and “Blade Runner” managed nominations in their day, so maybe there’s hope.

“Elysium” arrives in theaters on August 9.

I”ve written before that I”ll be surprised if Thomas Vinterberg”s hot-button melodrama “The Hunt” – which was released in New York and Los Angeles on Friday – isn”t selected as Denmark”s representative in this year”s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race. I”ll be even more surprised if it isn”t an eventual nominee, but for now, we”re dependent on national committee decisions before we can speculate further. Whatever its fate in that category, however, there”s another where I think it”s worth flagging up the film as a dark horse: Best Actor for Mads Mikkelsen.

Yes, yes, you don”t need to tell me all the reasons why this is unlikely to happen. Any foreign-language performance enters the race having to work that much harder to get seen at all, after all, and a midsummer release date doesn”t make matters any easier. “The Hunt” took $44,000 on its four-screen release last weekend: a respectable rather than stunning result that doesn”t portend a significant arthouse hit. Magnolia Pictures is no Sony Pictures Classics yet in the campaigning department: the boutique distributors have great taste, but their awards-season success has largely been limited to the documentary and foreign-language ghettos. And while Marion Cotillard”s win for the modestly backed springtime release “La Vie en Rose” is a noble exception, Mikkelsen”s isn”t the kind of flashy, all-stops-out work that overrides more parochial voters” limitations.

Still, if we don”t keep the conversation inclusive at this early stage of the season, we”re only making things duller for ourselves, and Mikkelsen has a few significant factors in his favor – beginning with the performance itself, which won him Best Actor at last year”s Cannes Film Festival. (Recent winners of that award have been treated pretty well by the Academy: Christoph Waltz in “Inglourious Basterds,” Javier Bardem in “Biutiful” and Jean Dujardin in “The Artist” all began their Oscar runs with a Croisette victory. Meanwhile, this year’s winner, Bruce Dern in “Nebraska,” is a likelier bet than Mikkelsen to follow suit.)

As I”ve said, I was less impressed than most with “The Hunt,” a specious, borderline-misogynistic and admittedly well-made moral drama built entirely on straw-man social critique, but the straight-backed integrity of Mikkelsen”s performance as a kindly schoolteacher unjustly accused of child abuse is pretty much beyond reproach. There”s a grave, intelligent decency about Mikkelsen as a performer that is at its least compromised in Vinterberg”s wholly admiring character showcase.

It”s the kind of studious, sympathetic performance that would find plenty of fans even among more staid Academy types, if they just happened to see it – particularly if they proved susceptible, as most viewers have been, to the film”s ethical arguments and emotional manipulations. A twin Best Foreign Language Film campaign would aid visibility in that respect, while critical response to the film and performance alike seems only to have grown warmer since an already well-received Cannes bow. My own voting group, the London Film Critics” Circle, nominated Mikkelsen for their Best Actor award last year. Might any of their US counterparts be similarly moved?

The chief point in Mikkelsen”s favour, however, is Mikkelsen himself. Familar to English-speaking audiences since his villainous turn in “Casino Royale” in 2006, the 47-year-old Dane has, in recent years, grown into a genuinely international star. There are viewers who will never see or hear of “The Hunt” who are nonetheless fans of his sly, silky Hannibal Lecter in the NBC series “Hannibal” – and that kind of cross-platform presence counts for a lot. (All the more so if he nabs an Emmy nod for “Hannibal” on Thursday – it”s another long shot, though our TV critics Alan Sepinwall and Dan Fienberg are both rooting for him.)

Mikkelsen”s now at the enviable stage in his career where he can alternate between native-tongue art films (like “The Hunt” and last year”s Oscar nominee “A Royal Affair”) to classy English-language fare like the upcoming John Le Carre adaptation “Our Kind of Traitor” to a voicework gig in “Kung Fu Panda 3.” Like three-time Oscar nominee Javier Bardem, a comparable foreign-language heartthrob welcomed by Hollywood, he now has the gift of celebrity with flexibility. Could that translate into an Oscar nomination? Most likely not yet. But he deserves to be – if you”ll forgive me – in the hunt.

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I’m really, really hoping that Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave” makes it to Telluride next month (that’s right, next month). “Shame” made the journey from Venice to Colorado two years ago so it’s possible, if Fox Searchlight/McQueen want to bow there, they could make it back in time. It is, for me, one of my most anticipated films of the year, as I’m sure it is for a great many of you who have been impressed by McQueen’s work on “Hunger” and “Shame” in recent years.

A trailer has been released for the film over at Apple and boy does it reveal a lush, meticulously designed world. It starts with looks at Brad Pitt and leading player Chiwetel Ejiofor’s performances but soon reveals what we pretty much know, that Michael Fassbender has a lot to chew on with his role of a despicable slave owner. I’ve also heard Lupita Nyong’o is someone to pay attention to here.

I might have done without another use of Danny Elfman’s “The Wolfman” score (which was used brilliantly for the “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” trailer) or Hans Zimmer’s work on “The Thin Red Line” that was used to sell “Pearl Harbor” back in 2001 and “Man of Steel” more recently. (A little bit of Zimmer’s “Inception” work kicks the trailer off, too.) Was there nothing of Zimmer’s original work on “Slave” to use? Maybe not, but no matter; it all makes the film seem incredibly epic and, again, I can’t wait.

Check out the new trailer embedded at the top of this post, as well as the film’s poster below. “12 Years a Slave” opens on October 18.

According to an Academy press release, 10 first-time governors have been elected to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Board of Governors. In addition, eight incumbents have been reelected and one previous governor is returning to the board. This year’s election increases the Academy’s governing body from 43 to 48.

The first-time governors are Judianna Makovsky and Deborah Nadoolman, representing the Costume Designers Branch; Rick Carter (fresh off an Oscar win for “Lincoln”) and Jan Pascale, Designers Branch; Alex Gibney, Documentary; Lynzee Klingman, Film Editors; Amy Pascal, Executives; Kathryn Blondell and Bill Corso, Makeup Artists and Hairstylists; and Nancy Utley, Public Relations.

The reelected governors are Ed Begley, Jr., Actors Branch; John Bailey, Cinematographers; Kathryn Bigelow, Directors; Charles Fox, Music; Jon Bloom, Short Films and Feature Animation; Curt Behlmer, Sound; Richard Edlund, Visual Effects; and Robin Swicord, Writers.

Mark Johnson, representing the Producers Branch, is returning to the board after a hiatus.

The Academy’s 16 branches, including the recently created Costume Designers Branch, are each represented by three governors, who may serve up to three consecutive three-year terms. For the first time, the Makeup Artists and Hairstylists Branch is represented by three governors; the branch was previously represented by one.

Governors who were not up for reelection and who continue on the board are Annette Bening and Tom Hanks, Actors Branch; Jim Bissell, Designers; Richard P. Crudo and Dante Spinotti, Cinematographers; Jeffrey Kurland, Costume Designers; Lisa Cholodenko and Michael Mann, Directors; Michael Apted and Rob Epstein, Documentary; Dick Cook and Robert Rehme, Executives; Mark L. Goldblatt and Michael Tronick, Film Editors; Leonard Engelman, Makeup Artists and Hairstylists; Arthur Hamilton and David L. Newman, Music; Gale Anne Hurd and Kathleen Kennedy, Producers; Cheryl Boone Isaacs and Rob Friedman, Public Relations; Bill Kroyer and John Lasseter, Short Films and Feature Animation; Don Hall and Scott Millan, Sound; Craig Barron and John Knoll, Visual Effects; and Bill Condon and Phil Robinson, Writers.

While the triple terrors of robots, sea monsters and Adam Sandler fight for box office glory, the arthouse talking point of this weekend is Ryan Coogler’s debut feature “Fruitvale Station.” This critically acclaimed anatomy of a true-life tragedy won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at Sundance, played Cannes and will be one of several titles The Weinstein Company pitches to Oscar voters at the year’s end — but do you think it’s worth the hype? I’ve already had my say with an against-consensus review, while Kris gave his thoughts at Sundance. The film certainly offers many interesting points of discussion and/or argument, so the floor is yours. Share your thoughts in the comments, and be sure to vote in the poll after the jump.  

File this under badass projects that I had no idea were happening. I guess the news of a samurai remake of Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven” made the rounds nearly a year ago, and I either glossed over it or missed it completely. Now a few trailers and a poster for the film have surfaced and, well, I’m totally on board.

Westerns and samurai films have a special bond. “Yojimbo” and “Seven Samurai” were remade as “A Fistful of Dollars” and “The Magnificent Seven” respectively. But now it’ll go the other direction as David Webb Peoples’s screenplay (which was originally called “The Cut-Whore Killings” and “The William Munny Killings”) will be remade as a Samurai film.

The film is directed by Lee Sang-il and stars Ken Watanabe in the Munny role. There’s a lot of promise in something like this. I know everyone has remake-itis but this is something I’d love to see, personally. The story takes place in 1880 at the start of the Meiji period in Japan. Watanabe plays a feared former swordsman of the fallen Edo shogunate. He takes up bounty hunting in the years after his wife, who transformed him from a life of killing, has passed away.

Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven,” which celebrated its 20th anniversary last year, was nominated for nine Oscars. It won the Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Gene Hackman) and Best Film Editing and is, in my mind, one of the absolute gems of the genre.

Watanabe starred in Eastwood’s 2005 Oscar nominee “Letters from Iwo Jima.”

Check out the new Japaense trailer for the remake below, as well as a side-by-side comparison between the two films’ posters.

“Unforgiven (Yurusarezaru mono)” is set for release in Japan on September 13. I want to see it.

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This year’s annual compromise candidate between Sundance and Cannes’s otherwise divergent definitions of a festival film, “Fruitvale Station” is a clean-scrubbed tragedy that aims for a commendable reversal: taking a real-life human subject best known for the way he died, Ryan Coogler’s debut feature instead builds its drama around the way he lived. 

At least, it purports to do so. In Coogler’s angry but unremittingly adoring portrait, how close you feel to Oscar Grant, the 22-year-old Bay Area proletarian whose life was cut unaccountably short by a brute transit officer on New Year’s Day in 2009, may depend on how much truth you see in its tidily condensed life-in-a-day structure. And that, unlike the incontestable video-phone footage of Grant’s death that Coogler unspools as early as the prologue, is strictly in the eye of the beholder. It is one thing to present us with an atrocity that we know, and possibly even remember, happened. It is another to make us believe it.

With everything in the film but the climactic assault on the eponymous station platform shot in bright, even, comfortingly televisual primaries by cinematographer Rachel Morrison, “Fruitvale Station” has no surprises up its laundered sleeve – its brutal denouement is also its beginning, its very reason for being. Faced with that dramatic restriction, Coogler instead preys on our short-term consciousness by cultivating a sunny, honeyed tone for the bulk of his film”s necessarily brief running time, painting a protagonist so charmed – and charming – that we”re reluctant to believe he could also be so ill-fated. It”s as relentlessly feel-good a feel-bad movie as any in recent memory, but in directing those feelings to the victim rather than the crime, “Fruitvale Station” winds up telling a smaller, easier story than it could do.

Rightly or wrongly, it”s not the kind of story you”d instinctively fashion as a star vehicle, though it”s on that level that the film most unreservedly scores. Michael B. Jordan, who already announced himself as one to watch with his turn a teenage drug pusher in “The Wire,” has easily enough loose-limbed, bright-eyed charisma to bear the weight of the camera”s devoted gaze as it follows him through one scene after another constructed to demonstrate Grant”s unimpeachable niceness as he goes about his day. (On the evidence of this week’s releases alone, he may be a more natural movie star than his “Wire” co-star Idris Elba.)

Practically Jimmy Stewart in a beanie, though with more laddish, no-sweat sex appeal than that image might suggest, Jordan plays Grant as a figure whose individual magnetism is accented by his fierce sense of community, whether he”s strutting the streets while out on the lash or tenderly scaling himself to the doll”s-house world of his doting young daughter Tatiana (Ariana Neal).

He”s an irresistible enough screen presence that I wished Coogler”s thinly episodic script would challenge our inevitable response to him a little more, instead of redundantly stacking the deck in his favor as he racks up the selfless brownie points. He calls his mom on her birthday! Repeatedly! He lends his hard-up sister money, despite being hard-up himself! Repeatedly! He helps out strangers in the supermarket with recipe suggestions! He cradles dying dogs on the sidewalk! He leads impromptu unifying dance parties on crowded trains! He has weaknesses too, but none that Coogler is willing to enact: there are vague allusions to a spell in prison, though we”re never told the cause, while past infidelities to his lovingly weary girlfriend Sophina (Melonie Diaz, in a flintily sympathetic performance) are brushed aside in an incontrovertible past tense.

If I sound facetious at this point, it”s because the film”s strenuous sanctification of its working-class hero doesn”t just flatten the drama: it massages the moral stakes of the injustice at hand. Are we being encouraged to feel angrier about Oscar Grant”s senseless death because he was such a stand-up guy? Would “Fruitvale Station” be a less worthwhile cri de coeur if he”d been a profoundly flawed wastrel? And if Coogler doesn”t believe so, why is his narrative so smoothly, inorganically shaped – right down to cute chance encounters on the fateful train – to make such an agreeable martyr of its protagonist? Many will respond to the film as a gut-level human interest piece, but it”s as curtailed and nuance-free a character study as it is a political polemic.

Perhaps tellingly, the most vividly affecting sequence of the film is Coogler”s urgent, uncluttered restaging of the Fruitvale Station attack, wherein Jordan finally, genuinely bristles in response to the brash, brainless bullying of his eventual killers (played with thankless effectiveness by Chad Michael Murray and Kevin Durand). It”s the first scene in which neither Grant nor the audience can be protected with his force-of-nature personality, and it promises a necessary snap in the film”s storytelling approach, as the personal, social and legal fallout of the events demands to be mapped without the benevolent warmth of the victim”s presence.

But the promise is never fulfilled. “Fruitvale Station” stops (I wouldn”t say ‘ends”) just where I was keen for it to begin. Relegating the scandalous official consequences — which saw the offending officer, Johannes Mehserle, convicted merely of involuntary manslaughter — and ugly, community-rupturing aftermath of Oscar Grant”s death to a few tasteful title cards, the film pulls its punches so as not to misshape its neat 24-hour study of an ultimately unexamined life, and sidelines the more resonant story in the process.

We are, at least, left sharing in the tears of Grant”s mother, who – as played by the customarily wonderful and subtly skeptical Octavia Spencer, folding creases into the script from thin air – evidently knows and loves her boy”s foibles as intimately as she does his virtues. It”s more than this superficially well-intentioned but finally phony film can claim, but even that”s not quite the point. “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Coogler asks throughout with plaintive sincerity, ducking the simpler, more vital, but yet-to-be-answered question. Why did this bad thing happen to anyone at all?

Looking ahead to the upcoming awards season, pundits are spoiled for choice when it comes to predicting the Weinstein Company’s annual prize pony. But while obviously baity titles like “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom” (which just unveiled a teaser trailer today) and “August: Osage County” dominate that particular conversation — along with established festival hit “Fruitvale Station” — Stephen Frears’s “Philomena” is quietly waiting to pounce, most likely at the fall festival season.

On the face of it, this smallish British character piece — described in the publicity as a “bittersweet comedy” — might strike some as a surer bet for acting award consideration than anything else. (Two-time Oscar nominee Frears, after all, has been off the boil lately with such misfires as “Lay the Favorite” and “Tamara Drewe.”) But a closer look at the project suggests the kind of story that could hit the Academy’s emotional sweet spot, just as a film like “Secrets and Lies” did back in 1996. Based on a true story, it stars Judi Dench as an Irish woman searching for the illegitimate son she gave up for adoption decades before when she forced into a convent. Steve Coogan, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jeff Pope, also stars.

The film was at the center of a fierce bidding war at Cannes, where a seven-minute preview was screened to buyers: the ever-savvy Weinsteins ended up beating Focus Features, among others, to the punch. And positive advance word on the film has been circulating since before Cannes — particularly with regard to Dench’s performance.

The last time Dench and Frears collaborated, on 2005’s “Mrs. Henderson Presents,” the veteran actress was arguably lucky to score her an Oscar nod for the lightweight comedy; those I know who’ve seen the film say she presents a more substantial case for the award this time. Dench was a late bloomer with the Academy, scoring her first nomination in her mid-sixties and proceeding to rack up six in the space of a decade — but she hasn’t caught the voters’ collective eye since “Notes on a Scandal” seven years ago.

I would guess that the film will make its premiere at the upcoming Venice Film Festival. That, after all, is where Frears unveiled “The Queen” in 2006, with Helen Mirren winning the festival’s Best Actress award — and we all remember what happened from there. (As does Dench, one of the actresses left eating Mirren’s dust that year.) Could “Philomena” follow a similar path? The film’s first official still landed today — it’s nothing to set the world alight, but I expect a trailer will follow soon.

At the risk of sounding crass, one has to wonder how Nelson Mandela’s current state of health will impact the upcoming film “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom,” starring Idris Elba as the South African revolutionary. Thankfully things seem to be looking better for him than they were a week ago.

Meanwhile, Elba takes flight today with his first big leading role in “Pacific Rim,” and The Weinstein Company has seized the opportunity to offer up a little tease of Justin Chadwick’s film to go along with it. It isn’t much. One helicopter shot of Mandela walking surrounded by children. It focuses more on Elba’s accent as the actor speaks a monologue over the scene.

I see that some journalists are finally getting around to the notion that the upcoming film awards season has a lot of minority representation and could be a major year for seeing African American and Latino actors recognized, from Octavia Spencer to Michael B. Jordan, Oscar Isaac to Oprah Winfrey to, indeed, Idris Elba and Naomie Harris as Mandela’s wife Winnie in this film. There’s a real opportunity, anyway. We’ll see if the Academy seizes it.

Check out the teaser trailer for “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom” below.

I have not seen “Grown Ups.” I don’t plan to see “Grown Ups 2.” But hey, maybe you are. And maybe maybe you love it. And maybe you can change my mind. So hey, here’s your challenge: convince me. And no silly “Isn’t it your job to see everything?” talk (and no, it actually isn’t, thank God). Or if you don’t feel like building a case just tell us what you thought of the movie. And I’m assuming some of you will see it; it’s going to win the box office this weekend, after all. Rifle off your take in the comments section below and go ahead and vote in our poll while you’re at it. Also, if you’ve seen anything else you’d like to discuss, in theaters or at home or wherever, consider this an open thread to do so.

Travis Beacham had an idea, Guillermo del Toro ran with it and now we have a massive summer blockbuster in the form of “Pacific Rim.” Box office chatter is grim but that’s not what we’re interested in here. We’re interested in what you thought of the movie. Some people are doing cartwheels over this thing; Drew sure did. Others have a heaping helping of thumbs down for it. Others still might find their way to the middle. That’s where I am, for a handful of reasons, but I’m glad there’s something like this to chew on this summer as opposed to more sequels and more IP pillaging, etc. So when/if you get around to seeing the film — which just kicked off midnight screenings in New York — head on back here with your take on it, and feel free to vote in our poll.

I wish nothing but the best for Ava DuVernay. If female filmmakers are already a regrettable minority in Hollywood, African-American female filmmakers are still practically novelties, so anyone working to bust that particular glass ceiling has my attention. Still, DuVernay deserves notice on her individual gifts alone: the writer-director’s coolly assured breakthrough feature “Middle of Nowhere,” which won her the Best Director prize at Sundance, was one of last year’s most richly characterized, formally striking US microbudget indies. Furthermore, DuVernay’s not only looking out for number one: the former film publicist is doing much to support other independent talents via her own distribution outlet, the African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement.

So I’m pleased to hear that the gears have already started grinding for DuVernay’s follow-up feature, which appears to be a considerably bigger project: she’ll directing “Selma,” a drama about the role played by Martin Luther King in the Selma Voting Rights Movement of 1965, a dramatic turning point in the civil rights movement that culminated in the historic Selma to Montgomery marches.

British producer Christian Colson, who won the 2008 Best Picture Oscar for “Slumdog Millionaire,” is steering the project, with the support of Pathe UK and Brad Pitt’s Plan B production company. British actor David Oyelowo, who played the principal male role in “Middle of Nowhere,” will play King. He’s been attached to the project for some time, however: “Selma” was originally set to be directed by his “Paperboy” director, Oscar nominee Lee Daniels. Funding delays forced Daniels had to bow out, and he instead signed on to another Civil Rights-era project, the soon-to-be-released film formerly known as “The Butler” (in which Oyelowo also stars).

Daniels managed to gather a name-heavy cast while he was assigned to “Selma”: Hugh Jackman, Robert De Niro, Liam Neeson, Ray Winstone and Cedric the Entertainer were all in the mix alongside Oyelowo. With individual schedules having presumably moved on, and with DuVernay having a distinctly different sensibility from Daniels, it’ll be interesting to see whether she summons similar star power or assembles a more indie-oriented ensemble. 

Deadline’s Mike Fleming reports that “Selma” will be looking to get on track before a couple of King-related projects jostling for prestige position — with Paul Greengrass and Steven Spielberg among the directors developing them. DuVernay, meanwhile, has been engaged in research and script-polishing for “Selma” since April, and is ready to go — here’s hoping she brings the intimacy of her previous work to bigger biopic fare.

The marketing for Scott Cooper’s “Out of the Furnace” is rumbling to life over at Relativity Media. A few production stills were released in conjunction with a USA Today story earlier this week, shortly followed by more photos and the official poster at Entertainment Weekly. Today, a trailer.

The USA Today story did a good job of spotlighting Christian Bale’s process with the movie. He showed up to set without any of his own clothes, wearing only what his character would wear, and he recorded a local man at length to nail down the Braddock accent, which is an interesting blend of New England meeting with the south and the midwest in Pennsylvania steel country.

“You’d think he was listening to Daft Punk or something with his headphones on, but it was these recordings,” Cooper told the outlet. “He would listen to it endlessly, even between takes.”

RELATED: ‘Out of the Furnace’ director Scott Cooper on the road after ‘Crazy Heart’

The new trailer spotlights Bale’s performance considerably, revealing a lot of nuance in the portrayal. The poster, meanwhile, has him front and center. The actor won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in Relativity’s “The Fighter” three years ago. He’ll surely be in the conversation again this year with this and Russell’s “American Hustle.”

By the way, the version of Pearl Jam’s “Release” featured in the trailer was re-recorded by the band for the first time since 1991. It also features in the film itself.

Check out the new trailer and poster for the film below. “Out of the Furnace” arrives in theaters on November 27.

[youtube=://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClzRVlMhU2E&w=640&h=360]

When Ben Affleck was making the press rounds for “The Town” a few years back, I talked to him about his friend Matt Damon’s career path. We discussed the fact that Damon had been gearing up to direct a film (which ended up being “Promised Land”) for some time but he kept getting calls from the likes of Martin Scorsese and the Coen brothers to star in their films. When you’re an actor who wants to direct, you’d be a fool not to audit those classes, so to speak.

So I find it really interesting that in the midst of a strong and building filmmaking career that has already brought him a Best Picture Oscar (last year’s “Argo”), Affleck has decided to star in David Fincher’s adaptation “Gone Girl.” It seems to me he may be taking note of his buddy’s trek through the business, loading up on some crucial studies with master filmmakers. He already has Terrence Malick under his belt.

According to the Deadline story, this means Warner Bros. will have to push back Affleck’s next directing gig, an adaptation of the Dennis Lehane novel “Live By Night.” But I’m sure they’re happy to acquiesce after what he’s done for the studio the last few years.

“Gone Girl” is the story of a marriage gone terribly, terribly wrong, not to put too fine a point on it, and it’s been sitting on my iPad waiting for me to read it for months. I should get around to that already. The project is set up at Fox.

Yesterday Walt Disney Pictures gave us our first official look at John Lee Hancock’s “Saving Mr. Banks” with a production still tease. Today, via Moviefone, the studio has dropped the first trailer for the film.

The plot involves Walt Disney’s struggle to acquire the rights to P.L. Travers’s “Mary Poppins,” which was made into a film in 1964 and secured the film industry titan his first and only Best Picture nomination. Tom Hanks stars as Disney with Emma Thompson as Travers.

I’ve heard a lot of excitement behind the scenes about the awards season prospects of this one. Hancock has always been a workmanlike filmmaker, but has never really turned out much that registered in the Oscar race. “The Blind Side” changed all of that a couple of years ago and “Saving Mr. Banks” could be a significant film for him. Emma Thompson should certainly be in the lead actress race at the end of the day, with Hanks running in the supporting category (largely because it’s her story, but also because he has a big leading role in “Captain Phillips” on the way, as well).

Check out the new trailer below. “Saving Mr. Banks” arrives in theaters on December 20.