May I have the envelope, please . . .

OK, let's start with the easy: my three favorite movies of the year, without any question, were Moonrise Kingdom (for sheer feel-good smiles), Ruby Sparks (for a stunningly tough and smart dissection of romantic narrative), and Cloud Atlas (for audacious and mostly successful ambition).

But if you're asking "best," that's probably Lincoln--which, I hasten to add, is also enormously entertaining, but I use the b-word because it is also so much much of what the movies can do big, to engage head and heart and soul. Unless, of course, The Master--about which I exited the theater of such mixed minds that I didn't even include it last night--is the best for the same reason.

To those four-plus, I'll add six more that moved me or wowed me or tickled me for a top ten or eleven, the ordering alphabetical, the criteria floating:

• Beasts of the Southern Wild
• Cloud Atlas
• Damsels in Distress
• Django Unchained
• Footnote
• Holy Motors
• Lincoln
• The Master (maybe)
• Moonrise Kingdom
• Ruby Sparks
• A Separation

The D was silent

I begin this 90 minutes before the new year comes to my time zone, and I don't expect to finish before I break for the split of Veuve Clicquot, but the rules are the same as the past two years: I'm just going to sift through the past 365 days' first-time screenings, no matter when released, and hang the notables on the wall, perhaps for some sort of numeric judgment, perhaps not . . .

January, typically, was notable only for a leftover from the previous year, but A Separation was one hell of a leftover; remind me: did it win the foreign-film Oscar®? Even if not, it wins my award for best Iranian film I've seen in any year.

February began with the breathtaking dance performance-cum-documentary Pina--also a 2011 Oscar® nomination (and yes, I just checked: A Separation won foreign). The coming-of-age, coming-out-in-a-middle-class-African-American-community Pariah is an excellent film with an awful trailer.

OK, I know I didn't spend the whole year being impressed only by art-house and/or foreign films, but the first best of March was the Albanian revenge feud drama The Forgiveness of Blood. OK, here, honorable mention for a studio film, Jeff, Who Lives at Home, a minor gem with a meaty part for sexygenarian Susan Sarandon. Enough slumming, though: from Israel comes Footnote, academic Aristotelian tragedy. And from Japan, Jiro Dreams of Sushi: father, sons, beautiful and delicious fish.

In April, a couple of very different films that wouldn't be on this list under old rules: Temple Grandin, a 2010 HBO film about the autistic pioneer in humane treatment of livestock, featuring a mindboggling performance by Claire Danes; and Attack the Block (2011), maybe the best of several very good schlocky sci-fi flicks in recent years. Back to the art house for Boy, your standard coming-of-Maori-age story. Then, at home, having been cheated out of it on an M4, Into the Abyss, Werner Herzog's crime-and-punishment documentary. Damsels in Distress: pure goofy pleasure from Whit Stillman.

Brit Marling is the highlight of a slow May as a creepy-beautiful messiah in Sound of My Voice, which she also cowrote.

In June, I was mostly distracted, but when I came home, Wes Anderson's magical Moonrise Kingdom was waiting for me.

Speaking of magic, Beasts of the Southern Wild is magical realism for us who don't much care for magical realism. But even with the June asterisk, this is three consecutive months with just one notable each.

August brought Ruby Sparks, which you'd expect from the poster and the trailer to be a smart but safe romcom. Well, there's nothing safe about it, and I'm not even sure if the "com" is accurate--maybe the best surprise of the year. But that's 4 straight one-notable months.

Hope Springs in September (well, not for Mets fans, but let's not talk about that), which I may overrate because it surprised me by not being schlocky. Chicken with Plums, heartbreaking beauty from Marjane Satrapi. Hello I Must Be Going I filed under expected-to-like-but-not-this-much. And then I saw the rough cut of Scary Normal, but let's save that for 2013.

October, Pitch Perfect, one of the funniest films of the year; my daughter has passed along the book on which it's based, with annotations by her & my son-in-law, and I look forward to reading and commenting on that in the new year. Searching for Sugar Man may be the most implausible music documentary I'll ever see, and I mean that in a good way. "Argo fuck yourself!" Cloud Atlas is a flawed, magnificent adaptation of what is probably my favorite novel of the millennium to date.

November takes Flight, which morphs from action entertainment into moral ambiguity, with Denzel. But for moral ambiguity, it can't hold a runway flare to The Flat, a documentary about an Israeli couple and their friend in the SS and his wife. Holy Motors is one of the trippiest trips of the year, and (dammit, Jennie Tonic, I've given you plenty of time to find this out for yourself) its soundtrack includes the #1 pleasant stunner of the year: Sparks, "How You Getting Home?" Yes, dammit, a Bond flick: Skyfall. And then a Spielberg one: Lincoln is pure magnificence.

In December, Anna Karenina didn't quite hit me like a runaway train, but I was prepared to dislike it, and it made that impossible. This Is 40 is all but great. Django Unchained is great, bloody great.

And that's the year, and it's 4 minutes to midnight in Illinois, so instead of figuring out a top however many now, I think I'll call my favorite filmmaker and return to the question in daylight.

I snored a snore

Les Misérables

Crit

Seriously? OK, look, I'll admit right up front that (please don't tell my daughter) I'm not really a fan of musical theater, though actually I'm probably a bit more inclined to enjoy musical theater on film. And anybody who knows more about music than I is welcome to tell me that these songs (the lyrics and especially the melodies) are not uniformly mediocre, or that the actors in the film--mostly mediocre-at-best singers--somehow ruined the best songs, or that the best songs were left out of the film version, or whatever, but as I'm seeing it right now, the 7 bajillion people who have loved this on stage must have found something--lots and lots of something--that is wanting here.

Far more interesting than any specific song is the fact that the actors sang as they acted, rather than acting to previously dubbed singing, the idea being that that would give them more flexibility in each reading/singing in each take. Well, yeah, I think that's a good idea, but that doesn't change the fact that most of them have singing-in-the-shower voices, and the lyrics they're acting and the melodies they're singing don't merit the special treatment that the technique provides.

Not counting the 18 or 20 death scenes--'cause face it, who's unaffected by death, especially when the dier is noble (pretty much all of them) or in love or unspeakably young?--I found exactly two sequences moving. About 6 hours in, Samantha Barks as Éponine sings about her unrequited love in a scene shot with minimal cuts (hold that thought); but the real show stopper comes several hours earlier, so early that Fantine (Anne Hathaway) is still alive, a single tight shot of that song about dreaming and tigers inexplicably coming at night. Now, I'm betting that people who love Les Miz reaaaaly love that song, but it's trite tripe--trite tripe that Hathaway makes moving and appealing, largely on the merits of that one-shot performance. And that's what could make a genuinely good musical utterly fantastic via the sing-it-on-film strategy. Yeah, I know: the stakes still are nothing like they are on stage, where you get one chance per night to nail the mother; this may have been Hathaway's first take, but more likely it was her twentieth. Nonetheless, it created a convincing simulation of the immediacy that makes the stage exciting, and the Barks performance got us fairly close, and you wonder why director Tom Hooper didn't go for that more.

But whatever. Sad to think that's my last in a theater of 2012, and I have a pretty good idea of how I'm going to cleanse my palate tonight.

Trailer

• Zero Dark Thirty--Yeah, I'd already seen a trailer for this, several times, but now that it's getting Best Picture buzz, the producers seem to have realized how unseductive that trailer was, and that even an unsmiling Jessica Chastain is more appealing.

Different drum

Gift of time M4

Starting on East Houston and circling clockwise, as I always do, I was close to deciding there wasn't anything on the docket to compel me to make an interholiday movie trip to the city. That was before I got to the Cinema Village schedule, containing a film about a rock icon of my youth, a film that had opened right after my Thanksgiving-weekend M4, so I hadn't even considered the possibility of its hanging around for my next trip. Mr. Baker is the raison d'être; the others are just garnishing raisins.

Keep the Lights On

CV

Someday I'll go to a film about a same-sex relationship and not feel compelled to mention that element in the first sentence. But not yet, obviously.

Still, this film makes me optimistic, because it's really a lot less about the lovers being of the same sex than about one of them being a crackhead. Which means an entirely different set of clichés. Writer-director Ira Sachs finesses the clichés by making the narrative telegraphic and non-sequitur-prone, as it leaps from 1998 to 2000 to 2003 to 2006, always returning to the question of whether Paul (Zachary Booth) has changed and whether Erik (Thure Lindhardt) can keep (or restart) loving him. And we care because the people move us.

Beware of Mr. Baker

CV

For those of us who knew Cream and Blind Faith back in the day, the biggest surprise should be that the best and most volatile (tall cotton, that) drummer in rock history would have been around to celebrate a 40th and a 50th and a 60th and bless his cantankerous soul even a 70th birthday. But since I already knew he was still alive, the biggest surprise for me was his passion for polo. Right, like with horses. Seriously. Otherwise, what we have here is a piece of remarkable found art with a kickass soundtrack.

Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel

CV

Huh, go figure: there's no indication that Ms. Vreeland shared Ginger Baker's enthusiasm for polo (though it was certainly much more a part of her milieu than of his), but horses meant at least as much to her idiom. This was one of those I-couldn't-care-less-about-topic-but-golly-look-at-those-Rotten Tomatoes-numbers picks, and as usual with such pics, I'm glad I paid a visit to this alien bedazzling world. And now, back to my unfashionable monde . . .

Tabu

FF

An odd Portuguese melodrama about love, infidelity, murder, and girl-group pop songs in colonial Mozambique. I think I have to confess that I was pretty much M'd out by this point, though that seems dangerously close to admitting that I'm not as young as when I started doing this.

Trailers

• Fairhaven--Black sheep son comes home, unwillingly, for Dad's funeral. Problems ensure.
• Generation P--Oddly, I saw two very different trailers; looks Russianly interesting.
• A Royal Affair--Even odder that they should still be showing the trailer of a film I've already passed on at home.
• Amour--Now showing at FF, so skipping it is a bit of a risk, I suppose, but Michael Haneke's last three films have shown downtown, and the buzz on this one is huge. Of course it'll be a little annoying not to see it until after it wins the foreign-film Oscar®, but I'll survive.
• The Gatekeepers--Shin Bet badasses! Who ya gonna call?

What's not to like?

Django Unchained

Crit

A viewer leaving the theater ahead of me wondered aloud what topic Tarantino will tackle "in his third film." Her companion and I were both puzzled, until I realized that she meant the third of his social-conscience films: we've had the Holocaust and slavery, and the implication was (and I've seen this assumption in print, too) that there has to be a social-conscience trilogy, so we've got one more to come. Well, I wouldn't be surprised--the Spanish Inquisition? climate change? talking out loud in movie theaters?--but I also wouldn't assume that the Q man finds anything sacred in the number 3, or even that if he does, he's going to feel obliged to punch the same ticket again.

Frankly, while slavery is unquestionably a Bad Thing in the moral universe of this film, I doubt that the particular Bad Thing is of as much interest to the director as the trappings he gets to bring to bear on it. And damn, they're fine trappings--all his films are buddy movies to some extent, but I'm not sure even Jules and Vincent were as simpatico as Django (Jamie Foxx) and Dr. Schultz (Christoph Waltz) here. Lots of blood, some big explosions, but a surprising amount of love and tenderness. Which is, of course, why I keep saying "Nothing says Christmas like Tarantino."

Trailer

• Oblivion--No, not likely.

Isaac and Ishmael

Le Fils d'autre (The other son)

Crit

I had no idea this would be such a perfect yuletide film: a Semitic boychild (actually, two here) born in fractious circumstances (during the Scud-dodging Tel Aviv January of Bush I's Gulf War) ushering in peace, love, and understanding.

The premise here is a cheesy relic of 18th-century novels--babies switched at birth--but in the context of an Israeli and a Palestinian family, the goofiness of the premise is trumped by questions of what constitutes family, what constitutes motherhood, what constitutes Jewishness, what basis is demanded for class hatred. It's a beautiful, wrenching tale, and if one might fairly complain that the working out of the complexities is an unrealistically simple conclusion, that one won't be me.

Midlife critical mass

This Is 40

Crit

I may have said this before, but Judd Apatow has made a nearly great film here, incising the fine line between love and hate with an X-acto blade and suturing to every laugh (of which there are many) an equal and opposite grimacing groan. And then after tough and tough and tough and tough, just when you fear he's going to go soft on devoted combatants Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann), he . . . goes soft on 'em.

Still, a much better film than most people would make from this raw material, and the performances of teen Maude and teeny Iris Apatow suggest that the Apatow household is a damn good repertory company. And then there's Albert Brooks finding yet another interesting way to be a character that only he could play.

Trailers

• Admission--Fey and Rudd, directed by Paul Weitz; got a better formula for irresistible?
• The Heat--God, this looks so dumb that I'm ashamed to admit how much I laughed. Melissa McCarthy kicks that canard about women not being funny right in that funny part of the male anatomy to be kicked in.

Goblins and trolls and orcs, oh my!

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Crit

I was really hot for this, was planning to make the long bus ride out to hell (aka the Connecticut Post Mall) to see it in Imax 3D, but given that I really didn't have that much extra time to invest in a picture already pushing 3 hours, I allowed myself to be dissuaded by the lukewarm-at-best reviews. And I gotta say: the only better decision would have been to let myself be dissuaded from seeing it at all.

Peter, what a snoozer you have wrought. What's an adjective like "glacial" only lots slower? That's what the pacing is like (not surprising, given the decision to inflate a kids' book into a Big Important Trilogy). How can anyone make this stuff boring?

One aspect I found interesting (though not interesting enough to invest the time in parts 2 & 3 unless someone writes a review that begins "Forget the godawful sloggy first installment, . . . ") is the obvious Israelite connection of the dwarves' quest for their promised land. Unfortunately, while I found Gimli simpatico in those other Tolkien flicks Jackson made, here I find the race so uniformly intolerable that I'm forced to confront the possibility that I made be an anti-Dwarfite.

Trailers

Oddly, 3D films but 2D trailers before a 3D screening.

• Jack the Giant Slayer--Seems unlikely, though Bryan Singer directed, so maybe.
• Man of Steel--Huh! Why hasn't anyone ever thought of making a movie about Superman before?

Express

Anna Karenina

Crit

All the world's a stage--well, a stage and a train station--in Tom Stoppard and Joe Wright's audacious adaptation of Tolstoy. Anna's fate is repeatedly foreshadowed, and indeed, for two-thirds of the 2-plus hours, the film maintains a dizzying locomotive momentum, shifting between stage sets and exteriors (most memorably, a stage door that opens onto a vast, snowy steppe) with such facility that it gives the impression of being a single tracking shot. The staginess that gave me pause in the trailer is in fact grand, gloriously goofy theatricality, which facilitates the conveyance of plot via shorthand.

I get the mixed nature of the reviews--many viewers will be unable or unwilling to go along with the film's central histrionic conceit--but I found it about two clicks shy of brilliant.

Trailers

• The Guilt Trip--Yeah, pairing Seth Rogan and Barbra Streisand as son and mother oughta ensure a popular and critical disaster.
• Safe Haven--Nicholas Sparks novel; need I say more?

Revelation

Killing Them Softly

Crit

A very well-made unpleasant film, with scenes of physical and emotional torture strung out to brutal length, as well as intimate studies of the poetics of ballistics. What makes it work is the almost Elmore Leonard-esque wiseguy dumbguy language--that, and the cool bravado of Brad Pitt's hitman.

But here's a practical question: if you're filming in and around New Orleans, why would all the place names mentioned be in greater Boston? And then, if you're intent on presenting New Orleans as Boston, why would you let us see highway signs at the intersection of U.S. 11 and 90?

Trailers

• Broken City--Russell Crowe as the comically coiffed corrupt mayor of New York, Mark Wahlberg as his lackey with a conscience.
• Dark Skies--Poor Keri Russell; it has come to this; call it Parastupid Activity V.
• Wait a minute: Dark Skies, Broken City--Wasn't that Jay McInerney's first novel?

Quintessence of dust

Black Saturday M4

The most awe-inspiring element of my first Manhattan movie trip in months came about via a film I didn't see, a Japanese animated feature called The Mystical Law, which had a couple of young woman (including the director, I suspect) at Cinema Village in support of its weeklong run. As I waited for the film I was there for to seat, one of the women interviewed a 13-year-old audience member from their film's previous screening.

She started off the young man (who looked much younger than 13, in fact) with a softball, "How did you like it?" He gave the hoped for response, but with a spin at the end, commenting that the conclusion was unconvincing, declaring as it did that we must pray for the world to be saved. It seems the idea that holding your hands in a certain way while reciting prescribed words didn't resonate with him.

OK, I'm with him, and I'm impressed. But it gets better. She asked another simplistic question, "What was your favorite part?" and again he refused to give a simplistic answer. "My favorite idea was the oneness of the world." OK, seriously? Thirteen?

Finally, she asked whether he believes in aliens. He considered the question a moment, then began, "I believe in extraterrestrials, but . . . " and I'm thinking, no, he's not going to make that distinction. Yes, yes, he was: "I believe in extraterrestrials, but to call them 'alien' makes it sound like they don't belong."

Jesus! I hope I'm that smart and sophisticated if I ever get to be 13 again. Also, I'm really glad this wasn't at the start of the day, because the films on the agenda would have had a hard act to follow. As it was, while there were no Hall of Famers, the lineup was full of good, solid players, maybe an All-Star or two. And it seems extremely unlikely that any will ever reach New Haven. So a successful day.

Barrymore

VE

First, let me say: SIX DOLLARS! SIX FREAKIN' DOLLARS for your ticket before noon! (Though they will then get $ 13.75 from you for your large corn & soda.)

This is one of those odd stage-cinema mergers the point of which is perhaps less to tell you something about the subject than to reconfirm your appreciation of the actor embodying that subject. In which case, mission accomplished. Funny, this is the first time in ages I've seen Christopher Plummer in a film and been reminded of what I saw him in first, repeatedly. We've discussed this before, right? I don't have to go into it again, right? Suffice it to say, Catholic kid, early '60s, OK?

Anyway, I'm guessing no one would have guessed then that he'd have the chops to play a Barrymore (multiple Barrymores, actually--John mimics the old man and Ethel, too, and while I have no way to gauge the accuracy of those takes, or of Plummer's John, for that matter, I can testify that Plummer's John Barrymore does a bangup Lionel Barrymore. A limited film, but a fine one of its ilk.

Price Check

IFC

Ah, Ms. Posey, you have come back to indy, and indy still loves you. A potentially conventional story of a good man and good husband seduced in more ways than one by his crazy, obsessive boss, but the film is smart enough to use the potential for conventionality only as a tease en route to something more interesting and infinitely sadder (though conventionally happy, too).

The Central Park Five

IFC

The notorious gang-rape case that gave crypto-racists the word "wilding" as a convenient label for savage "urban" depredation gets the justice-deferred treatment from the second-generation documentarian Sarah Burns.

There's a lot of angry-making here, but I think the angriest-making point is one articulated by the history professor Craig Steven Wilder (disconcerting surname, that, in this context) that "Their innocence never got the attention that their 'guilt' got." Which, as a onetime journalist, I heard on corrections with much lower stakes. Police, prosecutors, press, even the majority of the Harlem community, were all so invested in what Ed Koch called "a test of our legal system," and on mutual congratulations for passing that test, that "we walked away from our guilt."

Chasing Ice

CV

Photographer James Balog's frustrating, exhilarating, heroic quest to document the deterioration of the Northern Hemisphere's glaciers into Slushies. That quest is challenged by brutal weather, equipment that can't stand up to said weather, and a gimpy knee that shouldn't stand up, full stop.

The point is climate change, of course, but the surprise is the terrible beauty--"the miracle, the horror," he says--that the planet's literal meltdown displays.

Trailers

• Waiting for Lightning--Yeah, that sounds like a good idea: dude's gonna jump the Great Wall on a skateboard.
• In Our Nature--Fathers, sons, and their lovers.
• Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet--Rocking in spite of ALS.

Holy crap! A postscript

Sunday morning, and, ahead of making a return trip to the city to meet an author/friend for lunch, I'm getting a Diet Dr Pepper and preparing to read a bit of the Times when my doorbell rings. "What the what?" I think. "I don't do 'social' on Sunday a.m." I go to the door, expecting to see Sunday-dressed Jehovah's witnesses, but there's just one man, in casual dress, unknown to me.

I feign welcome as I open the door, and he greets me warmly and says, holding up something that looks a lot like my wallet and my driver's license, "This is you, right?"

Well, yes. I had no idea it was missing, but it must have slid out of my hip pocket on the train. Funny, I'd almost gone back to check to see whether I'd left anything on the seat, but it was one of the new cars, and the big Amtrak-style restroom was between the door I was standing at and the seat I'd occupied, and I didn't.

Naturally, I was gobsmacked, so much so that I turned into my mother and hugged the guy, so much so that though I gave him all the money that was in the wallet, which was only about eight bucks, it didn't occur to me to get his name & address so I could send him more. Best I could do was to wish him an extra Thanksgiving, because he had certainly given me one. Now I feel bad about rewarding him so lightly--but not, I confess, as good as I feel to have come through this apparently unscathed.

Nearer, my gods, to thee

Life of Pi

Crit

No, I didn't read the novel--I'm not particularly a fan of magical realism--and I might not have seen the film but for Ang Lee. And while I'm sure many are finding it magical (and perhaps real, as well), I didn't for a moment. It is visually impressive, without a doubt--though even that element didn't work as well for me as it might have had the theater not been too crowded to permit me to view from the optimal 3D zone. In all, I'm willing to concede that I was a little too grumpy to give the film a fair shot at winning me over. But the bottom line is: meh.

Trailers

• Epic--Speaking of meh . . .
• Parental Guidance--Crystal and Midler: stop them before the kill comedy again.

Does that make me crazy?

Silver Linings Playbook

Crit

Never thought I'd use "David O. Russell" and "programmatic" in the same sentence, but this is straight out of the romcom playbook--girl loves boy, boy is saving himself for another who isn't interested, audience sees from the get-go that girl & boy are written in the stars--and the addition of bipolarity and depression to the mix doesn't meliorate the roteness much. What does make it watchable, even marginably ejoyable, is the commitment, you should pardon the expression, that Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper bring to their cute crazies.

What need of one more corpse?

Lincoln

Crit

A good Hoosier friend of mine and I like to spar over our respective claims to this Kentucky native ("Just look at the license plates," I say), and here is a Lincoln well worth a civil war. This is a great, grand film, and the Anglo-Irishman who plays the Ohio Valley's all-time favorite son sets a standard for the role that no actor in his right mind will ever attempt to challenge. The Lincoln that Spielberg gives us (abetted by Tony Kushner, whose script is based in part on Doris Kearns Goodwin's magnificent Team of Rivals) is a consummate politician, in a context in which that is not a slur. And the western yarn-spinning that typically has been treated as something a little fey is here shown to be integral in articulating and understanding his political powers. His genius, or part of it, at least, was in being so thoroughly human that no human heart, no matter how innocent or cynical, was beyond his ken. Far from cornpone relics of backwoods lack of sophistication, his tales of the logical behavior of simple folk get to the nub of precisely the sophistication that allowed him to cobble together the unlikeliest but absolutely vital coalition to get the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery forever, through a fractious House of Representatives.

Something else we see here as never before, at least in my experience, is a nobility attached to Mary Todd (Sally Field, in a performance that might just make us like her, really like her, again); we are reminded that being married to a genius, or a saint, is a decidedly mixed blessing, and we tunnel well beneath the rote cantankerous madness that has long been her caricaturization.

When I read Goodwin's book, I so fell in love with the man I'd always loved that I didn't want mid-April 1865 to come; I'd have been happy to have her end the book at Appomattox. In the film, we see him hurriedly getting ready for an evening out when he'd rather stay in, and we're hoping he's not en route to Ford's Theatre. (We've had a foreshadowing of that fatal trip already, with Mary in dangerous dudgeon over eldest son Robert's enlistment.) So when we see "Oriental" garb onstage, and realize that such costumes have no place in Our American Cousin, we are relieved, if only momentarily. But the last of Spielberg's many wise choices is to spare us "sic semper tyrranis" and take us quickly past "Now he belongs to the ages" in order to close with words spoken the month before, the last of Lincoln's best speech, maybe the best speech ever by an American statesman, at his second inaugural:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Is it asking too much for our leaders a century and a half later to at least consider that spirit of reconciliation?

Trailer

• The Lone Ranger--Depp as Tonto? Armie Hammer as the Masked Man? Hell, yeah, kemo sabe!

If our instruments go out of tune . . .

A Late Quartet

Crit

A good-looking film, a well-made film, a well-acted film, a thoroughly rote film: a familiar dynamic of love and obsession and conflict, and the only surprise is that the inevitable love affairs begin and end so abruptly.

Loved the music, though. As you know, my brow is very low, so I don't have any idea how long op. 131, but I could swear I read somewhere that we got to hear the whole thing uninterrupted; not so, by a long shot. OK, now I've checked the length, and at < 40 minutes, it could be done. Not saying it could be done with an effective dramatic dynamic, but I'm not sure it couldn't, either, and as I've suggested, I don't think much of the existing dramatic dynamic. I think I'd have liked that movie more than this one.

Agent down

Skyfall

Post

It's his sled! Skyfall is his sled! Well, sort of.

I'm here to tell you: size matters. If you have a chance to see this on Imax, do not imagine for a moment that the extra $3 or whatever will not be worth it. It's worth it!

But this would still be a pretty remarkable film even on the moderately big screen. Is it sacrilege to talk about theme in a Bond film? All of the Daniel Craig generation have emphasized Bond's vulnerability, the flip side of which is that he's not superhuman; he's a very human being doing things requiring the will to reach into the super, a very different thing. And that theme is present here again (along with the trope of extreme sadism that has characterized at least two of the villains--my scrotum still aches when I contemplate that scene in Casino Royale), but what this film (is it sacrilege to call a Bond movie a "film"?) is really about is time--time lost, time wasted, time regretted, and, in various ways, the past recaptured, if repurposed.

The usual gritty Bondean and M-ean performances from Craig and Judi Dench, a deliciously wicked turn from Javier Bardem (is there a better sicko in the movies today? and do you expect to see a better seduction attempt this year than that between his Silva and Bond?), and not nearly enough of Naomie Harris (she of 28 Days Later), but a clear indication that she'll be around in the future of the franchise. And don't believe reports that director Sam Mendes has drained all the humor; it's just English humor.

Trailers

• The Hobbit: Long Subtitle--Yes, I've already mentioned this when I saw the standard 2D trailer and again when I saw the 3D, but Imax raises the stakes even farther: I'll be seeing it big & deep if I can.
• Jurassic Park--Yes, it returns, in Imax 3D; yes, I think that sounds like a fine idea.
• Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters--They're grown up & sexy (Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton) & maybe a tad too close.

Cruel to be kind

Smashed

Crit

I'm not quite sure why this is so effective--there's nothing in the treatment of alcoholism that we haven't seen a million times before, from silly charm to sloppy (and sleepy) sex to embarrassing release of bodily fluids to lies, lies, lies to the death of careers and relationships to the testimonies of the 12-step-program. And yet somehow it seems fresh, credit to director James Ponsoldt and his cowriter Susan Burke, and to Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Aaron Paul as the title couple, happily married, happily drunk. Until Kate is not.

Even the dynamic of the drinking couple who split on the issue of stopping has a long history, but maybe every drunken unhappy family is drunkenly unhappy in its own way. As is hammered home when she comes home hammered late on, Kate's thirst for Charlie's love is as desperate as--and inextricably intertwined with--her thirst for whiskey. (By the way, am I the only one who finds it a false note whenever an experienced drinker in a movie asks for "whiskey" at a bar? That's like asking for "food" at a restaurant--there are so many choices; wouldn't she want Basil Hayden's or Glenmorangie 18-year or even Jack Daniel's?)

Painful, true.

Trailers

• Stand Up Guys--Pacino as the hood just out of a long stretch in the joint, Walken as his best friend, and the guy whose job it is to put him down. Could be great.
• De rouille et d'os (Rust and bone)--Maybe the orca ate your baby. Or Marion Cotillard's legs.

An awful sadness to come

The Sessions

Crit

Hard to imagine anyone disliking this, but let's face it: rooting for a guy paralyzed by childhood polio to find the sex and love he hopes for is pretty easy. But for a bunch of A-team actors--William H. Macy, a largely naked Helen Hunt, Moon Bloodgood, the trio of Deadwood alumni John Hawkes (as the real-life iron-lung-bound Mark O'Brien), W. Earl Brown, and Robin Weigert, plus, as a special TV nostalgia bonus, a cameo by Rhea Perlman--this might easily have devolved into some pretty gooey schmaltz. With that all-star team, though, it makes you feel good without challenging you a whit, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Trailers

• Stoker--Unfortunately, not a biopic of the author of Dracula, but rather a creepy incesty-looking thing with a great cast (Kidman, Wasikowska, Matthew Goode).
• A Late Quartet--Speaking of great casts. This is probably going to be widely acclaimed and wonderful, but it looks like medicine on the stage.
• Hitchcock--This, on the other hand, promises to be great wicked fun, unless (or perhaps even especially if) it's a disaster.

Trois, douze, merde!

Holy Motors

Crit

Golly, I didn't realize that to get to a movie on my biennial post-Election Day holiday, I was going to have to brave snow and swirling winds. Good thing this didn't hit my region about 36 hours earlier--especially since my satellite has gone out, which didn't happen during Sandy (or Irene). But this brilliant film was well worth the effort.

I had read that it was surrealistic, and that's certainly the case, but that doesn't mean it lacks a plot. After a prologue in which a man apparently wakes from a dream only to find himself in another--unlocking a door to a movie theater with his socket-wrench middle finger--we meet M. Oscar, who, judging by his opulent home, his attire, and the stretch limo waiting for him, seems to be a financier.

"Many appointments today?" he asks his driver. Nine, she tells him. He has a phone conversation, the gist of which seems to be a need for more firepower in his security detail. So far, he could be an older version of the protagonist of Cosmopolis. Then he starts combing out the long gray wig.

His appointments, it develops, involves making himself up, costuming himself, and getting into character to appear in the world as a stooped old beggarwoman, a motion-capture actor for an erotic martial arts/sci-fi film, a sewer-dwelling floraphage in a cemetery where the headstones invite passersby to visit the deceased's website (yeah, it starts to get a tad weird at this point). A labeled entr'acte, in which Oscar leads a rock-and-roll accordion band, turns out to be yet another appointment, as is an assassination after which he begins to trade identities with the target, only to be assassinated in return, and in identical fashion.

So yeah, surreal; also thrilling, compelling, though also about 20 minutes too long. And it contains one of the best musical surprises imaginable for someone who rummaged West Virginia discount stores' cutout bins in the early '80s for alternatives to the crap he'd been listening to for the past decade or so--the best such surprise since Wreckless Eric's "Whole Wide World" in Stranger than Fiction.

One good German

Ha-dira (The flat)

Crit

What Arnon Goldfinger knows about his grandmother before she dies, leaving her family to clean out the Tel Aviv apartment to which she and her husband had emigrated from Berlin in 1937: that she never made any attempt to learn Hebrew, that she never stopped considering herself German, that the décor and extensive library in the flat made it "Berlin in Tel Aviv" for him.

What he learns in the process of dealing with the piles of gloves, purses, and scarves left behind--and the books, all in German! ("No one reads Shakespeare," a dealer tells him. "No one reads Balzac. Goethe? Forget it")--is that she has also kept a vast trove of documents dating back to the couple's days in Germany. And from newspapers and magazines and personal letters in this archive, the filmmaker makes about as shocking a discovery as a Jew could make: that his grandmother and Zionist grandfather had been friends with an SS officer and his wife until emigration . . . and then, making regular trips to Germany after the war, had rekindled that friendship.

And those, incredibly, are just the beginning of the discoveries. A truly remarkable documentary.