This article first appeared in part at InContention.com on May 24, 2011. It seemed like a good time to re-purpose it for new readers here at HitFix with the release of “To the Wonder” on the horizon.

Director Terrence Malick is not often considered an “actor’s director” in any classic sense, so a list of the best performances in his films reads as an odd way, for some, to recognize his work. Perhaps no film to date props up that assumption more than his latest, “To the Wonder.” Therein, Ben Affleck, Javier Bardem, Olga Kurylenko and Rachel McAdams “aren’t performers so much as motifs”, Guy wrote in his Venice review. (Though for a smart take on why that might be, read Bilge Ebiri’s analysis of the film as the ballet Malick has always wanted to make.)

Nevertheless, I disagree with the oft-repeated notion about Malick and his players. For as many actors who may be disenchanted with how their work ended up represented in this or that film, there are as many or more lining up to work with the director. He can, in my opinion, drive out some stunning and unexpected portrayals.

Malick films contain a wide array of performances, all of them proving to be singular feathers in the caps of many actors. Indeed, when an actor stars in a Malick film, he or she is met with direction unique to any other experience. Naturalism and a sense of authenticity are hallmarks of these portrayals, as the filmmaker likes to scrape away the dishonesty of “performance” and get to something truer, with all the imperfection that comes with it.

For my money, the following 10 represent the best of the lot. Feel free to chalk up your own in the comments section below. More on Malick and “To the Wonder” tomorrow.

Richard Linklater’s “The School of Rock” was one of the best films of 2003. That opinion seemed odd to many at the time — it’s one of the handful of latter year declarations I’ve made that just didn’t go down easily for some — but I stand by it. It’s a brilliant screenplay with a top notch movie star performance and it’s a thematically resonant piece of work.

Apparently legendary musical theatre impresario Andrew Lloyd Webber is of a similar mind, as he’s snatched up the stage rights to the 2003 comedy. The news apparently came via CBC radio as Webber said he was very excited to tackle the project.

“There may be songs in it for me,” he said of adding original material to the story, “but it’s obviously got songs as it stands…So I will go from ‘Stephen Ward,’ which is really going to be sort of a chamber musical, to a musical about kids playing the guitar.”

Well, why not? “The School of Rock,” which was an original screenplay by Mike White, is full of potential for a big musical stage presentation. It’s kind of surprising someone hasn’t taken a stab at it already, but a guy like Webber being involved will up the ante all the more.

“The School of Rock,” you’ll recall, didn’t exactly light up the awards season. Though Jack Back did nab a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical. He also won the MTV Movie Award for Best Comedic Performance. (Hey, it’s worth mentioning that, given this week’s upcoming, uh, “ceremony.”) Not only that, he placed third in the New York Film Critics Circle’s Best Actor vote that year. I would argue it deserved more, but I’m content with it simply being a little comedy gem.

Linklater and Black collaborated again last year on “Bernie,” which brought the actor more awards attention. Tells you a little something about what Linklater can do, I’d say.

Slowly but surely, the trailers for this year’s (probable) Cannes selections are trickling in: we had “The Bling Ring” recently, “Only God Forgives” last week, “The Past” over the weekend and “Behind the Candelabra” yesterday. Today’s Cannes taster isn’t quite as eagerly anticipated, but it’s for a film that is very likely to be in Competition: Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino’s “La Grande Bellazza.”

Sorrentino is a Cannes regular, having competed for the Palme d’Or with his last four features: “The Consequences of Love” in 2004, “The Family Friend” in 2006, “Il Divo” (for which he won the Jury Prize) in 2008 and “This Must Be the Place” in 2011. The last of these films — his English-language debut, starring Sean Penn as a Goth rocker turned Nazi hunter on a Great American Odyssey — was, unsurprisingly, his most divisive to date, but that’s unlikely to stop the Cannes selectors tapping him once more. (He still won the Ecumenical Jury prize for “Place,” after all, and it has dedicated critical champions.)

Those who couldn’t warm to his last film’s bizarro sensibility can breathe easy: “La Grande Bellazza” could hardly look like a greater departure. That said, it looks an equally long way from the kinetic “Il Divo” or his labyrinthine breakout thrillers; if anything, the trailer’s oblique, wordless but entirely gorgeous Roman tour recalls Fellini by way of Terrence Malick. 

Details are relatively scarce, though we know this return to Italian-language fare stars Toni Servillo (who excelled as the lead in “Il Divo”) as an aging journalist recalling his lost youth in the Italian capital. Expect more luscious widescreen lensing from Sorrentino’s regular cinematographer Luca Bigazzi — who also did the Italian tourism board a solid in “Certified Copy” a few years ago. Beyond that, your guess is as good as mine. Still, look how pretty.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0pWbf0cVc0?rel=0&w=640&h=360]

The MTV Movie Awards are coming up this weekend (April 14), and the slate of nominees wasn’t as terrible as it has been in recent years, so it might actually be a fun watch. Last year I went back in time for a retrospective on the inaugural edition from 1992, and I plan to go back to the 1993 awards in an upcoming piece. In the meantime, here’s something different.

This will be the 22nd annual MTV Movie Awards, and over those two decades, well, it’s been interesting. Categories have come and gone (Best Song form a Movie enjoyed eight-straight years before taking a nine-year hiatus and returning for Miley Cyrus to get hers), bizarre moments have made the news (anyone remember Jim Carrey’s Jim Morrison stunt from 1999?) and the whole trajectory has made for some interesting factoids along the way.

I thought I’d cherry pick 10 of those factoids and toss them out there for you to chew on today. Have a look at those in the gallery story below, and remember to tune in April 14 for the big show. The MTV nominees for Best Movie are “The Avengers,” “The Dark Knight Rises,” “Django Unchained,” “Silver Linings Playbook” and “Ted.”

Lots of rumblings from the lab over at the Academy these days. Details have surfaced on what to really expect from that big May 4 membership meeting and today the organization has announced that entertainment industry magnate David Geffen has donated $25 million to the Academy’s ongoing Museum of Motion Pictures project, which is enough to land his name on the big theater planned for the space. Hawk Koch sure is making a lot of waves on his watch.

The gift was made as part of the museum’s $300 million capital campaign and is the largest commitment received to date, according to the press release. The David Geffen Theater will be a premiere-sized venue on the campus, which will be located next to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the historic Wilshire May Company building on Wilshire Blvd.

“David’s support of this project is transformative,” blurbs campaign chair Bob Iger in the release. “It takes a large and diverse group of supporters to build a project on the scale of the Academy Museum. David joins an esteemed group of individuals, companies, and foundations who are leading the charge.”

Iger’s co-chairs on the campaign are actors Annette Bening and Tom Hanks. The facility is slated to open in early 2017 and will contain nearly 300,000 square feet of state-of-the-art galleries, exhibition spaces, theaters, screening rooms, education centers, and special event spaces.

Adds Geffen in the release, “I’m pleased to support the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. This is an exciting opportunity to be part of the creation of an iconic architectural space and cultural institution that will combine the best of the old and the new and provide a permanent public home for the Academy’s rich tradition of honoring the shining stars of the cinematic arts.”

The museum will be designed by architects Renzo Piano and Zoltan Pali.

The David Geffen Theater will be a year-round operation. Programming will feature major restorations, premieres, symposia and, I’m sure, much, much more.

The lineup for next month’s Cannes Film Festival is announced next week, and while much of it is still shrouded in mystery, at least one title we’re certain will show up (and one of those we’re most eagerly anticipating) is Iranian auteur Asghar Farhadi’s “The Past.”

The Iranian director of the Oscar-winning “A Separation” has never played the Croisette before; “A Separation” and his 2009 breakout “About Elly” were both Berlinale premieres, but it’s time for a move up the hierarchical festival ladder. And given that Farhadi’s latest is a French production, Cannes is the obvious place to unveil it — most likely in Competition. (It opens in France on May 15, presumably simultaneously with its festival premiere.)

The first trailer for the French-language film hit the internet over the weekend; there are no subtitles, but those of you who speak no French should still get the gist. Like “A Separation,” “The Past” looks to be a morally tangled marital drama, starring Bérénice Bejo (an Oscar nominee last year for “The Artist,” of course) and Ali Mosaffa as a married couple in France who separate when the Iranian husband chooses to return to his homeland. Upon returning to Paris to finalize the divorce, he finds she has already taken up with another man (“A Prophet” star Tahar Rahim).

The trailer suggests all the even-handed, discursive intelligence we’ve come to expect from Farhadi. (If “A Separation” is your only taste of his work to date, be sure to seek out “About Elly,” which is very nearly as good.) It also promises a meaty opportunity for Bejo to show us a different side of her talent after her sparkly (and silent) ingenue turn in “The Artist”: the French-Argentinian actress inherited the role when Marion Cotillard dropped out. (Here’s hoping, too, that Rahim registers as strongly as he recently did in “Our Children,” another intense relationship drama.)

No word yet on a US distributor, though it seems likely one will surface not long after (or even before) its Cannes debut. (Whatever the response to the film, incidentally, don’t expect it to be in the foreign Oscar hunt: it doesn’t appear to be an Iranian production, so Farhadi won’t be able to compete for his home country, while France only submits French nationals. Still, that’s not the most salient point right now.)

As I wrote in yesterday’s best-to-worst overview of Danny Boyle’s filmography, the otherwise cutting-edge “Trance” is something of a trip back in time for the Oscar-winning British director — a return to the slick, sprightly genre filmmaking he routinely practised before “Slumdog Millionaire” and “127 Hours” elevated him to prestige status. That’s not to say the film is a triumph. As eye-and-ear candy, it pretty irresistible; as psychological thriller, for all its convoluted structuring, I thought it shallow, rather silly stuff. (You can read my thoughts in more detail, for Time Out, here.) Still, there’s much fun to be had here, and our colleague Drew McWeeny was more seduced than I was.

Expect a good time, then, but don’t expect a third straight Best Picture nomination for Boyle. (A Best Cinematography nod for Anthony Dod Mantle’s molten vision of modern London, however, would be well-deserved.) If you see it this weekend, be sure to check back and tell us what you thought — and do vote in the poll below. 

I have a feeling most movie-going audiences will be hitting up “Jurassic Park 3D” this weekend. Universal staked out the perfect territory to unleash this one and grab some more cash for what was already a record-breaking box office wonder to begin with. I’ve written my appreciation of the film as well as the 3D conversion, and we’ve also offered up a list of other past films that we might consider seeing in 3D if the conversions were up to snuff. Now it’s time to hear what you took away from this one.

Again, Spielberg’s film picked up three Oscars 20 years ago, but the night was dominated by his other effort, the Holocaust drama “Schindler’s List,” which itself picked up seven. Two decades on and the director is still capable of delivering spectacle in one hand and drama in the other, witnessed just two years ago with “The Adventures of Tintin” and “War Horse.” There are few filmmakers who could bring something back around and make it as big as “Jurassic Park 3D” is likely to be. If you get a chance to see it this weekend, come on back here and give us your thoughts, particularly on the 3D conversion. And feel free to vote in our poll below.

The online geek press is lined up and ready to love Guillermo Del Toro’s “Pacific Rim,” and I’ve been wondering lately if they might be doing a bit of a disservice to it with such overwhelming hype. I’ve read the script, which has surely been studio-noted and then some since. It was elegantly written by Travis Beacham and what’s most exciting is that an original concept, without the benefit of built-in fandom, got this kind of love in the studio system. So I’m looking forward to it, definitely. I just wish the noise would die down just a little bit, that’s all.

In the meantime, the project has allowed Del Toro the chance to break out something like “Crimson Peak,” a haunted house picture that could use the success of something like “Pacific Rim” to find its footing. And people are lining up to be a part of it, as Deadline today reports that Benedict Cumberbatch, Jessica Chastain, Emma Stone and Charlie Hunnam have all signed on to star. Hunnam also stars in “Pacific Rim.”

Del Toro wrote the script with Matthew Robbins, with whom he’s collaborated on a number of projects, but only one of them, “Mimic,” has made it to the screen so far. Here’s what he told HitFix’s Drew McWeeney of “Crimson Peak” back in December, when it was revealed that the project had been picked up by Legendary Pictures out of turnaround from Universal:

“We wrote it ‘hush-hush’ as a spec in and around 2006. Universal acquired it by a big spec sum. It was to be my ‘next’ and then ‘Hellboy’ came through and then ‘The Hobbit.’ I have been keeping it close to my heart and vest and, fortunately, the interwebs never quite spoke about it. But when I came out of ‘Hobbit’ and said I was intending to resurrect a project of yore, this and ‘Montecristo’ were, alongside with ‘At the Mountains of Madness,’ the things I pushed for.”

So obviously it’s something that he’s personally invested in, and it’s nice that “Pacific Rim” is helping it to have its day. And naturally, these are some great gets on the cast. Stone is hot off the “Spider-Man” re-boot and Cumberbatch will really ignite in the public consciousness after “Star Trek Into Darkness” hits this summer.

Chastain in particular is a great get, coming off awards season success for her work in Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty.” Del Toro tapped her for January genre pic “Mama,” which he produced, and back around that film’s release, he told HitFix about his “prolonged courtship” of the actress back before she really blew up in films like “The Tree of Life” and “The Help” in 2011.

“Back in the day, Jessica Chastain was not well known,” he told us at the time. “But she was already very prestigious and very choosy about what she wanted to do. So I started a very, very slow, prolonged courtship of her manager, her agent.”

That led to her nailing the part, which, along with “Zero Dark Thirty,” put her in the rare air of being an actress with a one-two punch atop the box office chart in the very same weekend.

Del Toro told Deadline that “Crimson Peak” is “a very set-oriented, classical but at the same time modern take on the ghost story. It will allow me to play with the conventions of the genre I know and love, and at the same time subvert the old rules.”

Well…I’m stoked.

(By the way, if you haven’t checked out Drew’s interview with Del Toro about “Pacific Rim” from Wonder Con, it’s definitely worth a look.)

After inking a deal with worldwide sales firm Aldamisa International in February to tackle her first directorial endeavor since 1996’s “The Mirror Has Two Faces,” Barbra Streisand has settled on a project: a love story based on the relationship between photographer Margaret Bourke-White and author Erskine Caldwell.

Deadline’s “exclusive” says the film is untitled at the moment, but it was reported as “Skinny and Cat” as far back as June of last year by Showbiz 411’s Roger Friedman before the Aldamisa deal even happened, so it’s obviously something the multi-hyphenate has been eyeing for some time. At the time of that report, actors Cate Blanchett and Colin Firth were said to be attached, but this new brief says casting is underway, with an aim to begin production by the end of the year.

Bourke-White became the first female photographer for Life magazine in the 1930s while southern author Caldwell was enjoying acclaim for his work about poverty, racism and social concerns in novels like “Tobacco Road” and “God’s Little Acre.” They married in 1939 and the film, according to the Deadline report, will chart their “tumultuous relationship.”

Streisand’s “The Mirror Has Two Faces” was up for a pair of Oscars and Lauren Bacall famously conceded on Oscar night in an upset to “The English Patient” star Juliette Binoche. Five years prior in 1991, her film “The Prince of Tides” was up for a slew, including Best Picture. It also went home empty-handed. And 1983’s “Yentl,” Streisand’s directorial debut, was mostly recognized for its musical elements by the Academy.

This new film will not feature Streisand on screen. She figured in the last major tie at the Oscars in 1968, winning Best Actress for “Funny Girl” alongside “The Lion in Winter” star Katharine Hepburn. She presented Kathryn Bigelow with the Oscar for Best Director in 2010 for Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker,” a first for a female helmer, and she made a big splash in February when she performed “The Way We Were” for her late friend and collaborator Marvin Hamlisch at the 85th annual Academy Awards.

What I’m getting at is this: Streisand has a pretty healthy relationship with the Oscars. Might this latest project have a date with the dance? We’ll find out in due time.

Streisand will be honored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center with the Charlie Chaplin Award later this month.

It’s been interesting watching British critics dance around Danny Boyle’s “Trance” (which opened in the UK last week, and hits US screens tomorrow), squaring the film’s superficial genre pleasures with the director’s unlikely new status as a national treasure. Boyle has, of course, been regarded with affection for some time now, both at home and abroad, but in the last five years, his career has taken a turn for the prestigious that wasn’t easily seen coming.

First “Slumdog Millionaire,” once on course for straight-to-DVD indignity, ruled the 2008 awards season, earning Boyle an Oscar for Best Director. Then his follow-up, “127 Hours,” also tickled awards voters’ fancy, taking six Oscar nods including Best Picture — an impressive back-to-back feat for a director whose first eight films earned one Oscar nod between them. He moved onto the London stage scene, emerging victorious with an Olivier Award-winning take on “Frankenstein” that was the hottest ticket in town, before taking on a slightly bigger stage: directing the opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympic Games.

It is, of course, the last of these achievements that has earned Boyle the “national treasure” tag in the UK. A proudly eccentric and quintessentially British affair, his whimsically politicized Olympic spectacular left some international viewers scratching their heads, but earned rave reviews even from his routinely self-deprecating compatriots. When he returned to the day job, anything he produced would seem less grandiose by comparison, but erotic heist thriller “Trance” — his tenth feature film in a 20-year career — still catches us off-guard with its forthright genre aspirations.

Suffice to say “Trance” will not be the third consecutive Danny Boyle film to nab a Best Picture nomination, and frankly, that’s a good thing: the last thing we’d want for a stylist as vital and versatile as Boyle is for him to calcify into a maker of prestige product. “Trance,” with its kinky fetishism and loopy mind games, feels like the work of a filmmaker actively resisting deification, and if pretty much everyone agrees that it’s far from his best work, its very slightness offers rewards of its own. “It”s a kick to see Boyle back in lickety-split genre mode,” I wrote in my Time Out London review. “This is the kind of film he might have made in the “90s, only flashing all the technical elan he”s gained since then.”  

Most of all, “Trance” is an elegant reminder that, for all his smarts as a genre craftsman, Boyle is a director who has never made the same film twice: he’s somehow managed to forge a distinctive directorial stamp while bouncing from horror (“28 Days Later…”) to family fable (“Millions”) to urban hyperrealism (“Trainspotting”) to romantic fantasy (“A Life Less Ordinary”) and plenty else besides.

With that in mind, and given that “Trance” brings his feature count to a nice round 10, I thought this would be the right moment to review his diverse filmography to date, with a strictly idiosyncratic ranking from best to worst. You couldn’t exactly call it a Top 10 (no more than you could a Bottom 10), but grouped together, his films make for a fascinating collective, and even I was surprised by some of the preferences I found myself expressing. Let’s just say I don’t think the Academy necessarily recognized his best work — but ain’t that always the case?

So check out my ranking of Boyle’s films in the gallery below, and feel free to rate them as you go along. Then have at it in the comments: what are your favorites (and least favorites)? And how does “Trance” stack up for you?

I always found that my taste tended to line up quite a bit with Roger Ebert’s, particularly when it came to our favorite movies of all time. His list of 10 best ever overlapped with mine in three instances, while other films he loved — such as “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” — were certainly among those I held sacred.

With the unfortunate news of his passing this afternoon, I thought I’d go back and read his thoughts on the films that popped up on my list, which I published for the first time last May. Many of them were a part of his “Great Films” series and soaking up his insight seemed like the best way to remember him today. Check out blurbs on each, linked to his respective pieces, below.

“Citizen Kane” (Orson Welles, 1941):

“It is one of the miracles of cinema that in 1941 a first-time director; a cynical, hard-drinking writer; an innovative cinematographer, and a group of New York stage and radio actors were given the keys to a studio and total control, and made a masterpiece. ‘Citizen Kane’ is more than a great movie; it is a gathering of all the lessons of the emerging era of sound, just as ‘Birth of a Nation’ assembled everything learned at the summit of the silent era, and ‘2001’ pointed the way beyond narrative. These peaks stand above all the others.”

Speaking of which — “2001: A Space Odyssey” (Stanley Kubrick, 1968):

“Only a few films are transcendent, and work upon our minds and imaginations like music or prayer or a vast belittling landscape. Most movies are about characters with a goal in mind, who obtain it after difficulties either comic or dramatic. ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ is not about a goal but about a quest, a need. It does not hook its effects on specific plot points, nor does it ask us to identify with Dave Bowman or any other character. It says to us: We became men when we learned to think. Our minds have given us the tools to understand where we live and who we are. Now it is time to move on to the next step, to know that we live not on a planet but among the stars, and that we are not flesh but intelligence.”

Sticking with the maestro — “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (Stanley Kubrick, 1964):

“Kubrick made what is arguably the best political satire of the century, a film that pulled the rug out from under the Cold War by arguing that if a ‘nuclear deterrent’ destroys all life on Earth, it is hard to say exactly what it has deterred.”

(Side note on that one: Ebert once said, “Every great film should seem new every time you see it.” The first film I thought of when I read that quote today was “Dr. Strangelove.” Sure enough, the opening statement of the 1999 “Great Movies” entry on the film quoted above reads, “Every time you see a great film, you find new things in it.”)

“Metropolis” (Fritz Lang, 1926):

“‘Metropolis’ does what many great films do, creating a time, place and characters so striking that they become part of our arsenal of images for imagining the world. The ideas of ‘Metropolis’ have been so often absorbed into popular culture that its horrific future city is almost a given…Lang filmed for nearly a year, driven by obsession, often cruel to his colleagues, a perfectionist madman, and the result is one of those seminal films without which the others cannot be fully appreciated.”

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For balance, one he didn’t care for that much — “Once Upon a Time in the West” (Sergio Leone, 1969):

“The movie stretches on for nearly three hours, with intermission, and provides two false alarms before it finally ends. In between, we’re given a plot complex enough for Antonioni, involving killers, land rights, railroads, long-delayed revenge, mistaken identity, love triangles, double-crosses and shoot-outs. We’re well into the second hour of the movie before the plot becomes quite clear.”

And another — “The Thin Red Line” (Terrence Malick, 1998):

“The movie’s schizophrenia keeps it from greatness (this film has no firm idea of what it is about), but doesn’t make it bad. It is, in fact, sort of fascinating: a film in the act of becoming, a field trial, an experiment in which a dreamy poet meditates on stark reality. It’s like horror seen through the detachment of drugs or dementia.”

“Network” (Sidney Lumet, 1976):

“The movie has been described as “outrageous satire” (Leonard Maltin) and “messianic farce” (Pauline Kael), and it is both, and more…a quarter-century later, it is like prophecy. When [screenwriter Paddy] Chayefsky created Howard Beale, could he have imagined Jerry Springer, Howard Stern and the World Wrestling Federation?”

Speaking of the late, great helmer — “12 Angry Men” (Sidney Lumet, 1957):

“The movie plays like a textbook for directors interested in how lens choices affect mood. By gradually lowering his camera, Lumet illustrates another principle of composition: A higher camera tends to dominate, a lower camera tends to be dominated. As the film begins we look down on the characters, and the angle suggests they can be comprehended and mastered. By the end, they loom over us, and we feel overwhelmed by the force of their passion.”

“The Godfather” (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972):

“Although the movie is three hours long, it absorbs us so effectively it never has to hurry. There is something in the measured passage of time as Don Corleone hands over his reins of power that would have made a shorter, faster moving film unseemly.”

And finally, perhaps my favorite bit of insight from this collective — “Apocalypse Now” (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979):

“What is found at the end of the journey is not Kurtz so much as what Kurtz found: that all of our days and ways are a fragile structure perched uneasily atop the hungry jaws of nature that will thoughtlessly devour us. A happy life is a daily reprieve from this knowledge.”

When the news landed two days ago that a meeting of the entire AMPAS membership had been scheduled in May, with “the future of the Academy” as its theme, Kris speculated that it likely wasn’t as dramatic as it sounds. “One should not expect major issues like the number of Best Picture nominees or the Academy’s calendar to be on the table in any significant way,” he reminded us. “Those decisions are left to the elected Board of Governors.”

Now that Deadline’s Pete Hammond has passed on more details of the planned agenda for the “unprecedented” event, it seems Kris’ instincts were correct — though it should still be an interesting and potentially productive gathering. According to Academy CEO Dawn Hudson, the principal focus of the event will be on the Academy’s activities away from the Oscar scene:

“Really this is to give an overview of what”s coming up in the future … It is what the Academy is doing the other 364 days of the year, and when you talk about those things directly it is quite impressive. Having a face to face conversation about all the programs the Academy is doing, all the institutions we support, all the new designs for the museum. It is an impressive spectrum of activities and support in the middle of our film community.”

That’s not to say the subject of the Oscars won’t come up at all. E-voting, which was somewhat contentiously introduced in the last awards season, will be a key discussion topic, though don’t necessarily expect a debate about its future: Hudson says there will be a “recap” of the procedure for members. And while she expects reactions to the most recent, rather coolly received Oscar ceremony will come up in the conversation, she insists “that’s not why we called this meeting.”

More than anything, however, it seems the event is being positioned as a professional mixer on a large scale, allowing fellow members to meet and interact, and to open avenues of communication between general members and higher Academy brass. Individual branches have apparently had such meetings in the past, but this is the first time the Academy has attempted to engineer a membership-wide gathering, and across three locations to boot: Los Angeles, New York and the Bay Area. (If it’s a success and others follow, Hudson says, they may expand it to the Academy’s UK contingent in London too.)

And while this innovation reflects well on newly elected Academy president Hawk Koch, suggesting his desire to freshen up Academy practices during his one-term-only reign, it’s apparently an idea that has been on the table for some time — one was mooted for last autumn, though perhaps the Oscar off-season is a better time to discuss the Academy’s other facets. Anyway, we’ll surely hear some interesting tidbits after the meeting is held on April 22. 

Legendary Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert stepped away from his perch but two days ago. Calling it a “leave of presence,” he wrote that he was taking time away from the usual to work on a number of projects, and also noted a recurrence of the cancer that he had already fought off once (which silenced his voice in speech, but certainly not in print). It was as if it was the job that was keeping him here, the work at hand. And so today comes the news: Roger Ebert is dead.

There will be countless appreciations today, plenty of them here at HitFix. And you can bet they will, each of them, be full of unique insights and takeaways from the critic’s life and times. He had such an invaluable impact on so many in this world of film commentary and criticism that the words will come like a landslide. And that very fact will reveal so much of his legacy.

For my part, like so many, I discovered Ebert as a youth via his “Siskel & Ebert” television program. It would air very late on Sunday nights and it was the first real moment I can recall listening to someone speak about movies from a unique place of passion. He would break down why a film was great or wasn’t. He would get into heated, spirited discussion with his co-host, the late Gene Siskel, when there were disagreements.

On the surface, the bickering was entertainment alone. But underneath it was something meaningful that dug in and stayed with me, and, I’m sure, plenty of you as well. It was something about the power of a movie to get under your skin. As a young boy happening upon a film review show, that was formative. It became part of the fabric of movies, even as I went about seeing them superficially until finally sparking to them as something more a bit later in life.

So it’s going to be generational. People my age, that was their experience with Ebert. But while that kind of impact would be more than lasting for just about anyone else, Ebert’s legend will live on all the more because he — not reinvented, but reinvigorated himself in the wake of the cancer scare that took his actual voice away. He found new life online, blogging ferociously, amassing a following via social media that reached a whole new generation, a generation that has surely been touched by the man’s passion in new yet similar ways as people of mine were.

A number of my colleagues met Ebert, worked with him, some even appearing on his show after Siskel passed away. My first personal experience with him was kind of an unfortunate one: It was a dispute. I linked to and embedded a YouTube clip of him “talking” (via his computerized voice) with “Up in the Air” director Jason Reitman and he took umbrage with the fact that I did that rather than just link. While my instinct normally would have been to get riled, respect took hold and I simply assumed he wasn’t aware it was fair game, noted as much, and said I would remove it. He wrote back immediately after squaring that with his editor, apologizing for his haste. Knowing it clearly bothered him nevertheless, I said I would take it down anyway, and he begged me to leave it. So I did.

We had a few pleasant exchanges about this and that after that. He liked my piece on “A Trip to the Moon” and George Méliès. But I don’t want to bog this down with something about me and I’m certainly in no position to say I knew the man. But I will say I wish I did. I knew his passion, though, and that’s perhaps all that counts. That’s his mark. And while “the balcony” may now be closed forever, the spark Roger brought lit a fire that will never die.

Thumbs up, Roger. You mattered. You matter.

http://players.brightcove.net/4838167533001/BkZprOmV_default/index.html?videoId=4912341320001

I was already eager to see Baz Luhrmann’s take on “The Great Gatsby” when it was scheduled for a December release last year, so at this point my impatience could hardly be greater. As a die-hard Baz Luhrmann defender — yes, I liked “Australia” — I remain more curious about this 3D spectacle than any other summer release, which is not to say I’m necessarily expecting an unqualified success.

The latest trailer — presumably the last we’ll see before the Cannes curtain-raiser opens next month — doesn’t make it any clearer what we have on our hands here: a wonder, a grand folly, or a bit of both. Either way, it’s tantalizing stuff, remixing a lot of the imagery we’ve already seen with some new footage that promises still further visual dazzle. With every frame I see, I’m increasingly convinced that Catherine Martin (with an assist in the wardrobe department from Prada) might be a shoo-in for the Best Production Design and Best Costume Design Oscars (a double she previously managed for “Moulin Rouge!”).

Otherwise, it seems to me the new trailer offers us slightly more Joel Edgerton than we’ve seen to date — though, perhaps appropriately given his character’s perspective in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, Tobey Maguire is being withheld.

The trailer’s freshest revelation, meanwhile, is the taste it offers of the film’s all-star, Jay-Z-produced soundtrack: we can hear snatches of Lana Del Rey’s “Young and Beautiful,” Florence and the Machine’s “Over the Love” and Beyoncé and André 3000’s cover of Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black” (hmm, not sure I’m ready for that one). Katie Hasty has the full soundtrack listing, a mixture of covers and original compositions from the likes of Gotye, Jack White and Emeli Sandé — could a Best Original Song nod be in the works too?

Check out the trailer embedded above, and be sure to tell us what you think in the comments.  

I confess I haven’t thought much about Robert Redford’s “The Company You Keep” — which finally opens in theaters tomorrow — since reviewing it at the Venice Film Festival seven months ago. Though it takes on the potentially incendiary subject matter of the Weather Underground, the film’s political ideas are handled as softly as the lighting on its veteran stars’ faces — but as an old-school Hollywood entertainment with a classy, cannily cast ensemble, it mostly delivers the goods. I’d call it Redford’s strongest directorial effort since 1994’s Oscar-nominated “Quiz Show,” though films like “Lions for Lambs” and “The Conspirator” have admittedly set the bar pretty low.

“Everyone is given something of a moral leg to stand on in Redford”s film, a rare example of a Hollywood thriller without any real bad guy,” I wrote back in September. “As washed-out, variously retired members of the Weather Underground, a terrorist network that carried out overly extreme acts of protest against the U.S. Government”s military policy in the late 1960s and 70s, Redford, Susan Sarandon and Julie Christie all project a kind of burning righteousness beneath a coat of autumnal regret … We don”t really want to see these burnished fighters-in-exile go down – not least because they”re Redford, Sarandon and Christie, and so uniformly well-preserved it seems a shame to lock them away.”

While we might have expected something a little tougher from a film written by Lem Dobbs (“The Limey”), “The Company You Keep” operates most effectively as an exercise in star power. Redford sells it on the screen, and he’s been selling it off the screen too — it’s a pleasure seeing the 76 year-old star back on the publicity circuit. (No, I can’t believe I just typed “76 year-old” either, but the math checks out.)

Nearly as enjoyable (and very nearly as long) as “The Company You Keep” is this live video interview with Redford and co-star Shia LaBeouf, conducted by the New York Times’s David Carr. Carr is, of course, a large personality in his own right — his old Carpetbagger persona is still much missed on the Oscar-reporting beat — and it’s fun watching him banter with Redford about the film, and plenty else besides.

There’s an interesting aside about “All the President’s Men,” and I loved their exchange about Redford’s struggle to get the reclusive Christie, herself something of a political firebrand, on board. (Carr: “I think it’s okay to admit that, just once in your career, you wanted Julie Christie to turn to you, eyes shiny with love, and look at you. And if she was paid to do it…”) Shia LaBeouf looks comparatively left out of proceedings, but that’s somewhat fitting: he may ostensibly be the film’s leading man, but it’s very much the old hands’ show.

The video isn’t available to embed, but you can check out the full interview on the Times’s site here. Will you be checking out “The Company You Keep” this weekend? 

Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Only God Forgives,” the follow-up to his 2011 genre thriller “Drive,” ranked pretty high up on Guy’s recent wishlist of Cannes entries. It wouldn’t be outrageous to anticipate a bow there, seeing as “Drive” was so warmly received on the Croisette, translating to a Best Director prize for Refn. Pity, though, that the awards season yielded a mere single Oscar nomination for the film, albeit in the unexpected (though no less deserving) field of sound editing.

“Only God Forgives” is an original concept from Refn with “Drive” star Ryan Gosling front and center once again, this time running a Thai boxing club as a front for his family’s drug smuggling operation. Kristin Scott Thomas stars as his mother, a merciless mafia head that will surely turn a number of heads if it’s the kind of role it appears to be.

The new red band trailer for the film features very little of her and plenty of Gosling’s ruthlessness. Most dazzling, though, is the overall look of the film, vibrant set design and cinematography that feels perfectly of a piece with Refn’s vision across a number of films to date. And it’s all eerily cut to the sounds of Proud’s “Tur Kue Kwam Fun (Music Box)” (thank you, Shazam).

Check it out below. I’m pretty excited that Refn’s voice is out there giving us stuff like this. I’ve been on board for quite a while and both “Bronson” and “Drive” landed on my top 10 lists in their respective years, so this is easily one of my most anticipated films of 2013.

To tell you the truth, I wasn't all that interested in seeing “Jurassic Park” in the summer of 1993. The movie that had me riled? “Last Action Hero.” No, seriously. (And I'm a pretty big apologist for that Arnold Schwarzenegger actioner to this very day.) So I didn't even see Steven Spielberg's dinosaur spectacle in the theater when it was released.

Of course awareness was high. You couldn't escape it. TV commercials, toy stores, fast food tie-ins, it was everywhere. And in short order, it became the second-highest grossing film of all time, behind “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,” giving Spielberg the one-two punch atop the domestic chart. This was before “Star Wars” saw a re-release four years later, which would take George Lucas' space epic past both Spielberg films, before “Titanic” would come along later and blow everything out of the water.

But back to “Jurassic Park,” I caught up with it on VHS. And of course, I fell in love with it. For those in my generation, it was a pretty undeniable element. For my part, I gave that tape a workout, watching it countless times over the years. And when a chance came to see it projected on 35mm in film school, I leapt at the opportunity.

As the years went by it seemed the film was held in an a curiously dimmer light. Classic action adventures from the director such as “Raiders of the Lost Ark” lived on, while “Jurassic Park” was simply considered lesser-than. And here I was thinking it deserved a place right along side them. Watching the film again (post-converted for 3D) last week, I was struck by how quintessentially SPIELBERG that opening scene loading the raptor really is. It had that awe-like construction you find all over “Raiders,” for example.

Maybe it was the clearly inferior sequels that added to the diminishing of the film (though “The Lost World” has its moments), I don't know. But when bringing it up as one of the director's best, there always seemed to be a scoff of dismissal. Well, come what may, it IS one of the director's best.

The new 3D release, marking the film's 20th anniversary, is pretty stellar. The conversion was a successful one, really making a lot of the natural depth pop. Shots like the downward angle of the Jurassic Park gate as the jeeps approach, or the upward dolly under the electric fence as Alan, Tim and Lex scale it near film's end, are great examples. Like James Cameron, Spielberg is a filmmaker who already composes with a lot of depth anyway, which makes a transition like this much easier.

RELATED: 15 films we might consider seeing in 3D

The big moments are still every bit as big as they ever were, maybe more so. I was caught by surprise as a tear of wonder welled up during the Brachiosaurus reveal. Yes, it's an incredibly manipulative scene, John Williams' score breathlessly building to a crescendo, Richard Attenborough's overtly weighty “Welcome to Jurassic Park” monologue, etc. But that manipulation has always been Spielberg's genius, and it has always been why “Jurassic Park” is a textbook example of it. You don't feel dirty from being manipulated, you feel — forgive the cliche — like a kid again.

And truly, the film has more going for it than mere diversion from real life for two hours. It elegantly handles a message about meddling in the affairs of genetics, serviced perfectly by actor Jeff Goldblum. It says something that that message stands out for a kid who saw it 20 years ago and wasn't just some crutch to get from point A to point B in the narrative.

With that in mind, I suppose it would be negligent to not utter the name “Michael Crichton” here. Crichton, who authored the novel on which the film was based, was a divisive writer in life and death. One is somewhat reminded of reaction to Dan Brown's work. But if you grew up reading “Sphere” and “Congo” and the like, you find that you're a defender. It's interesting, though, that many who read “Jurassic Park” took umbrage with the film's adaptation (which was written by David Koepp, who certainly has his share of detractors). I never read it, so I have no take on it. But my ultimate point here is that the marriage of Crichton and Spielberg couldn't have seemed more fitting, particularly on this project. Filmmakers like Frank Marshall and Barry Levinson would try to capture similar magic in the immediate wake of “Jurassic Park,” but they found diminishing returns.

On the Oscar front, “Jurassic Park” won every Academy Award for which it was nominated, and none of them are disputable. The sound effects, sound mixing and visual effects were all gold standard. The blend of CGI and practical effects wizardry is still considered by many to be the best example of visual effects in a motion picture (though the new 3D conversion doesn't do the CG work a lot favors, I must say). I remain particularly impressed with the way the film tells its story with sound. Hearing it in a movie theater is probably the best reason to go out and give “Jurassic Park 3D” a look this weekend. (The film screened at the Academy Tuesday night with production designer Rick Carter and effects artists Dennis Muren and Phil Tippet among the attendees.)

The question, though, is did it deserve other nominations? Again, I still maintain that it is one of Spielberg's very best movies, and while it's understandable that major nominations would not have been in store, elements like the film editing and production design were deserving. Given his massive tally of career nominations, it's perhaps a little surprising composer Williams wasn't nominated for Best Original Score, but 20 years on, his work on the film seems more iconic than ever. He did win an Oscar that year, though, for “Schindler's List.”

And on that last note, perhaps Spielberg's transcendence beyond popcorn entertainer with the Holocaust drama is what really kept “Jurassic Park” down on the awards scene. While one may have been the epitome of what he could do as a spectacle storyteller, the other provided an all-encompassing narrative that Academy voters love: a genre filmmaker's dominance in more serious territory. Of course, Spielberg had navigated such dramatic waters with ease in the past with films like “The Color Purple” and “Empire of the Sun,” but this is the one that sparked brightest, making it easy to relegate “Jurassic Park” to the blockbuster ghetto categories.

But I submit that that's a shame. “Jurassic Park” was — and still is — so much more than that.

“Jurassic Park 3D” opens everywhere Friday.