For me, the high point of the Academy Award ceremonies tonight was this selfie, organized in an apparently improvisatory, or mostly improvisatory moment while the telecast was in progress by host Ellen DeGeneres.

The Academy Award ceremonies are basically just a big selfie that the film industry takes of itself.  They’re usually pretty dumb but always successful, because people enjoy celebrity selfies.  It’s the self-importance and the fake jollity of the ceremonies that make them nauseating.  But in the picture above, the various stars reveal themselves as the narcissistic kids they are at bottom — “Look at me!” they’re all saying, with a cheerfulness that’s actually endearing.

The picture even got bombed by the brother of best supporting actress winner Lupita Nyongo’o — he’s the guy on the right-hand side of the picture, obscuring our view of Cate Blanchett — authenticating the spontaneity of the moment.

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This is a really bad movie. It’s got an o. k. storyline for a comic book film but it’s treated with a kind of ponderous seriousness that spoils the fun of a comic book film. It has some good design and effects work, and Michael Caine gives an appealing performance as Alfred the butler.

Unfortunately it’s staged and shot so clumsily that you rarely have a clear idea of the spaces the characters are inhabiting or what exactly is going on in them. The frenetic editing seems to have been deliberately designed to disguise or distract attention from the amateurish staging and shot making, but it doesn’t. Nothing could.

I saw Robert Wise’s The Haunting at the age of 13, when it came out, and it scared the bejesus out of me. I just watched it again on Blu-ray over 50 years later and it still creeped me out considerably.

It may be the best of the “old dark house” thrillers, because it doesn’t make the mistake of explaining the house’s malevolence rationally and it rarely shows anything shocking. It depends on creating an atmosphere of dread rooted in the psychological make-up of the characters but also literally invested in the house itself.

The old dark house genre works on its deepest level by combining the idea of the intrinsic coziness of a house — establishing it as a kind of refuge, from a storm, from problems the characters have elsewhere, which is what a house is supposed to be — with the idea of a house as a trap, a prison, which a house can become, psychologically speaking.

Wise sets up and sustains this dynamic expertly, keeping the supernatural terrors of the house always off screen, suggested by lighting, by sound effects, and by a few simple tricks, like having a massive wooden door bulge inward, as though from the effort of a monstrous unseen presence trying to enter the room.

Wise learned this approach to horror from the producer Val Lewton, who in the 1940s at RKO specialized in a kind of horror film in which atmosphere rather than shock carried the weight of the thrills and chills. Lewton gave Wise his first shot as a director on such films as this.

What Wise learned from Lewton, and his tasteful, intelligent execution of those lessons here, has kept The Haunting from dating — it remains a fine spooky entertainment for a dark and stormy night.

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Tasked with making an avant-garde movie in film school, my nephew Harry made this — great horror vibe . . .

Steven Spielbeg’s first foray into animation and 3D is surprisingly enjoyable. He has described the film as an Indiana Jones movie for kids, but given the fact that the Indiana Jones movies are already works made for kids it’s a little hard to understand what that means, except perhaps that The Adventures of Tintin has no romantic subplot, or any attractive female characters at all.

The film sticks to a simple adventure-thriller format and the 3D animation, based on motion capture, is inventive from shot to shot without an overuse of effects meant to startle.  There are too many big, chaotic set pieces and the emotional core of the film — the redemption of Captain Haddock — is thin, which keep the film from being great in any sense, but it’s fun . . . certainly the best of the modern 3D movies I’ve seen.

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The director André de Toth had a brilliant eye for composing shots that suggested great spatial depth, and for choreographing magical movement through those shots. That made him an excellent choice to direct House Of Wax, one of the first 3D films made by a major studio — Warner Brothers, in 1953.

He seems to have had a lot of fun making the picture — it’s one of the most entertaining of the 3D movies released in the 1950s.  de Toth generally avoided gimmick 3D effects — objects hurtled towards the camera to create a shock — but when he did use them he used them effectively.  One of his gimmick effect shots made me jump halfway out of my chair as I watched the film on TV in the new Blu-ray edition.

That edition is not ideal.  The original 3D negative elements have been lost, so the Blu-ray is derived from dupe prints of those elements.  The result is overly grainy in many sequences, which tends to undermine the 3D illusion, but not enough to destroy it.

All in all, the 3D Blu-ray is wondrous — well worth watching if you have a TV capable of showing it.  Its images are captivating and often extremely creepy.

This film is a standard romantic-domestic melodrama, with one curious quirk — there is almost no expository dialogue. You have little idea what the precise issues are that push the characters together or drive them apart . . . yet since such issues tend to be generic, tiresomely familiar in real life — “She completes me” . . . “He loves me for who I am” . . . “He doesn’t listen to me” . . . “I’m losing my self” — one really doesn’t need to have them spelled out in order to appreciate the emotional ecstasies or miseries they reflect.

The result is a radical experiment in cinema, which tries to analyze romantic love through the spaces people traverse together, through the spaces between them, through the landscapes that embrace or isolate them, through the light that softens or exposes them.

One’s reaction to the experiment will depend a lot on one’s need for precise narrative information. I myself found the narrative perfectly legible and powerful. It is a profound insight to see love as a sort of cosmic reorganization of space, as a transformation of the world from a plastic environment defined by the position of one’s own body moving in it to a plastic environment defined by two autonomous but sympathetic bodies moving in it.

The elation of romance is thus seen to proceed not just from physical or emotional intimacy but from a redefinition, a re-charting of personal space — feeling one is there where the loved one is, wherever the loved one is, feeling that a fifth dimension has been added to one’s physical perception of the world.

Dance, including dance in movies, has often been able to express this insight, and much of the power of romance in the more naturalistic genres of cinema has to do with the  suggestive choreography of lovers in space, but Malick is going after it here without the formal disciplines of dance or conventional exposition.

Malick is a religious, specifically Christian artist, and he understands the physical transformation of space by love as a form of grace — not as an expansion of our own love of creation but as a sign that creation loves us.

There is an isolated priest peripherally involved with the main characters who serves in the film primarily to demonstrate the spiritual claustrophobia of a life lived without participation in the somatic existence of other people.

The priest understands his isolation and the symbolism of the bread and wine (somatic intercourse) theologically, but he still inhabits a small and constricted space in the world, despite his desperate peregrinations through it.  The lovers at the center of the film inhabit a universe of infinite space, even when they go their separate ways, because they have shared not just a vision of a merciful creation, but an actual, physical journey through it.

In Malick’s view, cinema can record this physical recreation of the world by passion or supernatural grace, and thus can record the practical workings of love.  It’s about as extreme a claim for movies as has ever been made.

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I worked in the Hollywood film business on and off for about a quarter of a century. Jim Jacks, who just died at the shockingly young age of 66, was one of the only Hollywood producers I ever met who cared more about what audiences thought than about what his peers in the business thought, who cared more about making cool movies than about his place in the pecking order of the industry.

Jim’s place in that order was nevertheless pretty high because he had a pretty good idea what audiences wanted, having come, like the rascals who created Hollywood, from the world of distribution. It was fun to talk to him about movies, fun to collaborate with him making movies.

I suspect that there were more people like him in the business before my time in Hollywood — I’m glad there was at least one person like him left by the time I got there.

If you hired Nate Silver to identify and collect every single cliché about the American heartland, plot them out on a graph and divide them into the incidents of a three-act screenplay, the result would be August: Osage County.

The film is part of a new genre invented by Hollywood in its waning days — thespornography.  Celebrated actors are hired apparently with the express promise that they will be allowed to chew the scenery until their gums bleed, with no distracting attempts to tell a coherent story or to create recognizably human characters.  The Master and American Hustle helped define this genre — Meryl Streep’s performance in August: Osage County takes it to new heights of ham.

Streep calls on every ounce of technique she possesses in order to telegraph a simple message, over and over and over again — “Give me my Oscar now.”