TRON: Legacy is set to roll out in dozens of countries around the world this week and next, though it won’t arrive in some European countries for another month or so. We’ve been gathering early reviews right here. While we wait, take a look at this nifty little mashup from Nick Tierce:

Nick Tierce’s Tron-ified Modern Times from Nick Tierce on Vimeo.

Now, as Alex Weekes pointed out the other day, you can enter the world of TRON: Legacy via TRON: Evolution and set up your own “personal space in Estates, where you can experience life on the grid.” Wouldn’t it be kind of great if you could step into the world of Charlie Chaplin‘s Modern Times, too? To us, in the 2010s, it’s as exotic and as aesthetically intriguing as the original TRON was to audiences in 1982. What other worlds might be fun to explore? Of these potentially immersive worlds conjured by a few of cinema’s masters (and one hard-working but unremarkable director), which would you like to wander into most?

1. Last Year at Marienbad has been described as a “surreal fever dream, or perhaps a nightmare.” Alain Resnais‘s 1961 masterpiece has been seducing and confounding audiences for nearly half a century. Dressed in 20th century evening wear, you wander a sumptuous Baroque château and, as Miriam Bale explains, there’s even a game within the game.
2. In the Mood for Love. To walk the nighttime streets of Hong Kong in 1962 as imagined by Wong Kar-wai and cinematographer extraordinaire Christopher Doyle… to experience the exquisite pain of longing for what cannot be had, your every strategy aborted just moments too soon… to take in the beauty of Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung in silence, hour after hour, night after night.
3. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives “is a film that you slip into as you would a warm blanket,” wrote Daniel Kasman from Cannes this year, where Apichatpong Weerasethakul‘s latest film, set on the edge of a jungle in Thailand and perhaps the most intoxicating of this quartet, won the Palme d’Or. “Uncle Boonmee stretches out in the countryside to take a final, deep, accepting breath of air and live life before passing on, from animals to men to ghosts and myths.”
4. Just Imagine. Dystopian visions of the future are a dime a dozen. For kicks, picture venturing into the New York City of 1980 as director David Butler hoped it would be in 1930. Sort of like The Jetsons, and just as goofy, only on an outrageously grand scale: Art Deco buildings stretch 250 stories high; traffic zooms and flies by on nine levels. Oh, and it’s a musical.

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Welcome MUBI‘s first monthly roundup of need-to-know news from the world of film. The month is November, which can only mean that critics and fans alike are already tinkering with their lists of what they consider to have been the best films of the year. It’s a daunting task ― so daunting, in fact, that IFC’s Matt Singer recently tweeted a little pop quiz to his nearly three thousand followers: “Finish this sentence: ‘The movie you need to see before making your 2010 best-of list is ____________.’” From the deluge of responses, he’s compiled a list of 59 films, a sort of crowd-sourced first draft of the highlights of 2010.

Funny thing, though. The film that’s probably sparked more heated discussion at MUBI than any other in quite some time ― and that’s saying something, considering that MUBI is swarming with literally hundreds of thousands of passionate cinephiles ― is not on that list. Whether or not Tony Scott‘s Unstoppable will be considered one of the year’s best a month from now, a year from now, or a decade from now, there’s no denying its potency as a conversation-starter. Check out the debates here, here and especially here.

Rather than wallow in instant nostalgia (after all, there’ll be plenty of that going on next month once awards season gets rolling in earnest), let’s take a sneak peek forward to 2011. British writer Tom Shone has already sketched out a bare bones schedule for us, so I thought I’d draw up ― yes, that’s right ― a list of what may be the best films of next year. Or at least the most interesting, going by the buzz and whispers they’re generating so far. In approximate order of the most eagerly anticipated…

1. The Tree of Life. Each of Terrence Malick‘s films (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World) has entered the pantheon, either immediately or eventually. This one stars Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and Fiona Shaw and somehow combines the story of a family in a small town in 50s-era America with, well, as Pitt’s put it in an interview, “a little, tiny micro-story of the cosmos, from the beginning of the cosmos to the death of the cosmos.” Okay. In a break with his usual pace (that is, averaging about a film a decade, give or take), Malick’s already at work on his next project, which might be called The Burial and will definitely feature Ben Affleck, Rachel Weisz, Javier Bardem, Olga Kurylenko and Barry Pepper.



2. Hugo Cabret. Adapting Brian Selznick’s bestselling work of historical fiction about a boy who befriends that magical pioneer of cinema, George Méliès (creator of that iconic image above), Martin Scorsese ventures into 3D for the first time ― and evidently, it’s a challenge. Recently asked how the film’s coming along, he replied, “It’s going, it’s going. It’s an experience. The geometry of it, everything, you’re really redefining. You’re trying to figure out how to tell the story again in pictures with this 3D, which is really interesting.” That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s running into troubles, but it probably doesn’t mean he’s having a blast. If nothing else, he’s got a wide variety of star power to fall back on: Chloe Moretz, Ben Kingsley, Christopher Lee, Emily Mortimer, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jude Law, Ray Winstone and, as the boy, Asa Butterfield.

(more…)

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