Ill-Informed Gadfly

“Splice” isn’t the sort of horror movie where things jump out at you, accompanied by deafening sound effects. It doesn’t pit good against evil or, in the case of many slasher pics, evil against banal. The monster isn’t the bad guy, or girl in her case, and the movie plumbs her complex relationship with her antiheroic creators, as in “Frankenstein.” “Splice” is provocative and unsettling, with sexual taboo-breaking that provokes discomfort more than visceral terror. No wonder it seems to have gained more traction with critics than with the moviegoers who favor the “Saw” series. Its seriousness is evident from the casting of Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley as geneticists who create a new species in a bid for pharmaceutical riches. They deliver nuanced performances, even when their characters show laughably bad judgment, recklessly adding human DNA to their stew and hatching a fast-growing girl they call Dren. She’s smart, physically imposing and increasingly easy on the eye, and her development is fraught with moral dilemmas and Freudian psychodrama. “Splice” is never dull, but it’s not always surehanded. Director and co-writer Vincenzo Natali has a few independent genre films under his belt, and he clearly knows how to stay under budget: He uses a mere handful of sets and locations, and only five actors get speaking parts. The movie needs a more expansive third act, but that’s not possible under those limitations, and Natali’s filmmaking disappoints in the crucial final reel. Even so, “Splice” is one of the year’s most interesting and rewarding major-studio releases.

If you pay attention to the Swedish-language credits of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” you may suspect that the title has been changed for English-speaking audiences. Indeed, the actual title translates as “Men Who Hate Women.” Sure, it’s not as evocative, but moviegoers unfamiliar with Stieg Larsson’s mega-selling novel would at least have an inkling of what they’re in for. The first hour alone features three graphic rapes, one of which we’re supposed to be OK with because it’s a rapist getting raped by his former victim. Larsson’s 600-page book is said to expose the corruption and misogyny of contemporary Sweden. But the lugubrious two-and-a-half-hour movie version is nothing but cheap exploitation wrapped in superficial female empowerment. It appeals only to our basest desires for revenge and vigilantism. The book may be a page-turner, but “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” has little verve on screen. The title character is an antisocial computer hacker. It takes 75 minutes for her to pair up with her co-protagonist, a disgraced journalist who’s investigating the 40-year-old disappearance of a teenage girl. There ought to be some amusing friction between our two heroes, but neither develops much of a personality. They are slaves to the plot, which devolves into a humorless, self-important “CSI” episode. “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” finally generates a chuckle with a moment of unintentional pop-cultural synergy, when an enraged Swedish woman swings a golf club at a sexual deviant. Tiger Woods’ wife — now there’s someone who might enjoy this ghastly movie.

“Twilight” begins with a teenage girl speaking in voice-over about how she had never thought much about death, but she feels that dying in the place of someone you love is a good way to go. Director Catherine Hardwicke chooses a curious visual accompaniment for these words. We occupy the frenzied point-of-view of a beast (or man?) as it chases a small, overmatched deer through verdant woodlands. Those who’ve read Stephenie Meyer’s novels will know what’s pursuing the deer. I knew, too, because I was catching up with “Twilight” on Blu-Ray and had read a bit about it. But assuming the audience knows what’s going on doesn’t excuse incoherent filmmaking. The story unfolds from the first-person point-of-view of the speaker, Bella Swan — not the “vegetarian” vampire she falls in love with. We never see what the vampires are up to when she’s not around. We learn when her boyfriend tells her — about an hour through the movie — that he and his kin abstain from human blood, hunting animals instead. That might be a good time for the chase sequence! As it’s placed, it’s a baffling beginning to an inexplicable movie.

“Twilight” is histrionic, and it makes little sense, but its swooning t(w)een female fan base doesn’t care. It might even take a favorable view of such qualities. I’m no dummy. I can understand how and why it appeals to its fans. Niche marketing and microtrends are important elements of commercial moviemaking nowadays. Rule one demographic on opening weekend, and you’re in the black. But I don’t think it’s out of line to point out that “Twilight” could have been better, with a broader appeal. The elements are in place. A chaste, high-school girl/vampire romance could be poignant, comic and teasingly lurid. These qualities try to peek out on occasion, but mostly “Twilight” is overamped and underdramatized. It never finds a consistent tone, and Hardwicke’s direction is scattershot. This should not be surprising to anyone familiar with her work, especially her overpraised debut, the faux-gritty, girls-gone-wild potboiler “Thirteen.” I do give grudging credit to her joined-at-the-hip cinematographer, Eliot Davis, whom I ordinarily loathe because he shoots everything through a blue filter. He’s more varied and expressive this time; there are some beautifully lighted scenes. And sometimes you can even appreciate them, when Hardwicke quiets down her frenzied camera. She botches stuff that should be easy. When vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) shows Bella (Kristen Stewart) what happens to his skin when he steps into sunlight, she’s amazed: It looks like diamonds, she says. To the audience he looks, um, a bit blurry.

Hardwicke may feel the need to goose up the action because so little happens in “Twilight,” and even less of it is strictly relevant. The first hour is devoted to Bella’s very … gradual … discovery that dreamy, standoffish Edward is indeed a vampire. Then Edward’s family — vampires, all — does its best to embrace her. Arbitrarily, some evil vampires show up — they lurk around the margins of the movie, killing the occasional human — and make a move for Bella. That’s about it. The rest is longing gazes, played expertly by Stewart and shot in fetishistic slow-mo by Hardwicke. If you can watch these shots without chuckling, you’re a true-blue “Twilight” fan, and it’s all gravy to you. As I’ve pointed out, Hardwicke doesn’t always stick to Bella’s point of view, but I’ll give her credit for this much: The movie never, ever questions the 17-year-old’s devotion to Edward. It’s not like 99 percent of romances at that age, a crush that seems all-consuming but will run its course quickly. She hardly even articulates what she loves so much about him. For the target audience, she doesn’t have to — he’s just so gorgeous! Tormented, too.

Despite everything, Stewart is wonderful. She’s an uncommon talent, and even a grump like me, who so doesn’t get this movie, can stick with it just to watch her. She commands your attention in closeup. She conveys Bella’s clumsiness, her nervousness, her intelligence. She captures the waves of delight and self-doubt that accompany her pursuit of a guy who, according to the school hierarchy, is out of her league. Billy Burke, too, is excellent as Bella’s dad, a taciturn but compassionate police chief.

I haven’t heard many good things about the “Twilight” books. Apparently the threadbare plotting continues in subsequent chapters. But as long as Stewart remains involved, the movies will have potential, and perhaps the capable director Chris Weitz can zero in on a coherent story arc for the next installment, “New Moon,” due in theaters this fall. Get ready to squeal again!

“Frost/Nixon” is a good Ron Howard movie, which means it’s thoroughly competent and professional, with a few sparkling performances and fluid but uninspired camerawork. It’s diverting and engaging but hardly ever riveting. With Howard at the helm, this meaty Best Picture nominee feels lightweight and inconsequential. Based on the play by Peter Morgan, “Frost/Nixon” follows British talk-show host David Frost as he pursues and conducts a lengthy interview with disgraced former president Richard Nixon. Howard’s best move was to retain the leads from Broadway — Michael Sheen as Frost and the great Frank Langella as Nixon. Frost comes across as a consummate broadcaster, a dogged salesman and a novice journalist. Sheen makes him insecure, aware of his own shortcomings and quick to forgive foibles in others. Nixon can’t help but exploit such qualities. The crafty former president is a wounded but still potent colossus, socially awkward but intellectually nimble. Langella finds the fascinating contradictions in a politician who despised the establishment but yearned for its approval. His performance rockets to the heavens during the movie’s one clear departure from reality, a drunken, late-night phone call from Nixon to Frost in the middle of the interview sessions. Otherwise “Frost/Nixon” remains grounded, dramatizing real events with little urgency or flair.

“The Wrestler” has one of those magical marriages between actor and character that make me happy movies exist. It’s unfair to suggest that Mickey Rourke was born to play aging professional wrestler Randy “The Ram” Robinson, but with his scarred and pockmarked face, gravelly voice and beefy body, it’s certainly the right role at the right time. Rourke conveys Randy’s desperation, his masochism and his joy, sometimes all at once. At the end of his career, with no money and no prospects, Randy remains a consummate entertainer and a kid at heart. I won’t say Rourke transcends the narrow circumstances that director Darren Aronofsky and screenwriter Robert D. Siegel have imagined for Randy, but he makes “The Wrestler” as good as it can be. So does the soulful Marisa Tomei, who, in a too-cute parallel, plays a stripper who has also lingered too long in her chosen profession. The final role of any consequence goes to Evan Rachel Wood as Randy’s estranged daughter, but the scenes between them are forced and unconvincing. Siegel’s screenplay hits familiar beats. He mistakes a malnourished plot for realism, and I don’t think he gives his hero enough credit. Aronofsky brings a wincing immediacy to Randy’s bouts; otherwise, his style could be described as hack cinema verite. “The Wrestler” is a little movie about a big man. Rourke could handle more than what’s thrown at him.

The Bielski brothers were Jewish freedom fighters who established and successfully defended a colony of refugees in the forests of Belarus during the Holocaust. It’s amazing that no one had made a movie of their story before now, and it’s regrettable that Edward Zwick is the director who finally did it. Zwick, who made “Glory,” “The Last Samurai” and “Blood Diamond,” is a curious case. For 20 years he’s been trying to pull off David Lean-style epics, yet his name carries little cachet, because he’s not a gifted visual storyteller, and his work bogs down with clunky message-mongering. He populates “Defiance,” which he also co-wrote, with stock characters, simplistic contrasts and forced grandeur. He battles his own instincts: At times “Defiance” is a believably rough and rugged war movie, at times it’s a bombastic and sentimental Zwick movie. Still, if we’re doomed to choose between “Defiance” and no movie at all about the Bielski brothers, “Defiance” will do. It helps that Zwick casts Daniel Craig, Jamie Bell and especially Liev Schreiber to play them. Schreiber is at ease navigating conflicting motives, and he brings a hard-earned fatalism to Zus, the bloodthirstiest of the brothers. Craig mantains his gruff dignity even when Zwick has him address his followers atop a white horse. I’m sure the Bielskis’ true experiences didn’t so closely resemble a square Hollywood melodrama. Nonetheless, “Defiance” left me with a profound respect for them.

“The Reader” has a setup that belongs in a high-class porno. Michael, a strapping German teen, falls ill and is escorted home by Hanna, a brusque but fetching thirtysomething woman. He returns to her apartment and spies her naked. He shovels some coal for her and gets dirty, and she orders him to take a bath — then jumps his nubile bones. Oh, did I mention Hanna is a former Nazi? Kinky. The movie also has a laughably obvious secret that belongs on daytime TV — she never learned to read! This could all be so much campy fun, but director Stephen Daldry signals early on that it’s meant to be taken very, very seriously. He’s coyly tasteful even during the hot-and-heavy moments. “The Reader” so insists on its importance that a preview audience wouldn’t dare laugh during the only funny scene, when Michael can’t suppress a goofy, I-just-got-laid grin during dinner with his family. A dull portentousness hangs over the movie, in part because the story unfolds as a flashback. Ralph Fiennes plays the middle-aged Michael as a mealy-mouthed schmuck. You’re primed for the revelation of wartime atrocities, and they finally come out during a tedious courtroom sequence. Then the movie makes a wan attempt to find allegory in the preposterous circumstances of Michael and Hanna. Yes, Kate Winslet skillfully teases out Hanna’s contradictions — she’s earthy yet haunted, frank yet evasive. But “The Reader” is deeply silly, and Daldry can only hope that, because it’s about the Holocaust, you’ll feel too guilty to notice.

“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is an odd and fey movie that insists on its profundity and emotional heft. It goes so far as to graft Hurricane Katrina onto an already unwieldy plot in a bid to amplify its themes of impermanence and mortality. Director David Fincher brings a delicate, lingering melancholy to the tale of a man who is born old and ages in reverse. He pours his considerable visual gifts into Benjamin’s fleeting moments of bliss and agony, which by all rights ought to provoke similar feelings in the audience. The movie is so well-made that you’ll want to be moved. But I didn’t feel much of anything. Benjamin Button is born, a bunch of stuff happens to him, and he dies, and all the while it’s hard to see him as much more than what the title suggests: a curiosity. His reverse aging remains inexplicable, and it’s difficult to comprehend his experience: He operates at a remove, isolated and strange. Brad Pitt clearly has a grand old time playing a naïve old man and a wise young man, with the aid of makeup and digital manipulation that’s remarkable for its seamlessness. Cate Blanchett, oddly, comes off as haughty and superficial as Benjamin’s ballet-dancer sweetheart. Both speak with mannered Southern accents, and their characters are too diffuse to anchor such a sprawling story. “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” ambles along for two hours and 40 minutes, never boring but rarely intense. You’ll leave as puzzled as you were at the start.

Tom Cruise wants you to come out of “Valkyrie” talking about the story and not his performance. He delivers his lines with a minimum of fuss, trying to make himself a mere cog in director Bryan Singer’s machine. It’s not an entirely wrongheaded approach by the embattled star. Singer fashions a lean and propulsive thriller out of a failed attempt by the German military brass to assassinate Adolf Hitler. He envelops you in the logistics of the doomed coup. “Valkyrie” suggests that if the conspirators had acted more boldly, they might have toppled Hitler despite their failure to kill him. This revelation doesn’t carry the emotional weight that it should, but nonetheless it’s easy to root for people who tried to rid the world of the 20th century’s worst villain. You’d root harder, though, if Cruise were a better actor. He’s not inept; he’s just empty. He plays Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg as a stoic man of action, a choice that doesn’t accentuate his strengths. He’s more interesting when he explores the dark side of his feral intensity, as in “Magnolia” or “Collateral.” As the good guy Stauffenberg, he comes off like a super-competent Boy Scout. Stauffenberg was maimed by Hitler — he lost a hand, an eye and two fingers while fighting for the Fuhrer in North Africa. It’s an obvious entry point for an actor to explore Stauffenberg’s wounded psyche, yet Cruise treats the disability like a minor annoyance. “Valkyrie” might have been fascinating, but thanks to Cruise, it’s merely diverting.

“Milk” sets the bar high for fact-based moviemaking. Thanks to a brilliant screenplay and a magnificent lead performance by Sean Penn, it pulls off the remarkable trick of riveting an audience to events that, if not remembered, could be Googled in seconds. Director Gus Van Sant doesn’t make mainstream movies often, but when he does, as in “Good Will Hunting,” he’s a master manipulator. “Milk” is about a gay, left-wing San Francisco politician, but, like its subject, its style is thoroughly accessible. It has impeccable timing, reaching theaters in the wake of a breakthrough and a setback for progressive politics: the election of Barack Obama and the passage of a gay-marriage ban in California. Like Obama, Harvey Milk used diligent organization and unparalleled political instincts to defy the conventional wisdom that said he was unelectable. Van Sant and writer Dustin Lance Black join Milk at age 40 and bring him to life through action, smartly avoiding the psychological navel-gazing that mars so many biopics. Penn inhabits Milk with breezy confidence, channeling his effervescence, his empathy and his ego-driven tendency to neglect those closest to him. Josh Brolin works wonders, too, as Dan White, the disturbed and ineffectual fellow city supervisor who became Milk’s assassin. White roams City Hall like a lost puppy; you understand why Milk felt sorry for him. And that’s how Milk’s triumphant life story gains its heartbreaking power.