Ill-Informed Gadfly

“Pan’s Labyrinth” engages your conscious and your unconscious, your brain and your gut. It’s wondrous but horrifying, timeless but somehow entirely new. These contradictions emerge easily from the structure of Guillermo del Toro’s electrifying fairy tale, which mixes beguiling fantasy with the repellent reality of Fascism in 1940s Spain. Del Toro’s hero is an 11-year-old girl named Ofelia whose mother has married a sadistic captain in General Francisco Franco’s Army. While her stepfather seeks to crush what remains of the Republican resistance, Ofelia retreats into a magical underworld guarded by a faun who may have similar tyrannical impulses. As in his previous Spanish Civil War tale, “The Devil’s Backbone,” del Toro subjects children to shocking physical and emotional trauma. He knows that political upheaval doesn’t spare the young, and that they can sometimes see the folly of ideology more clearly than adults. The way he incorporates this theme into the parallel universes of “Pan’s Labyrinth” is nothing short of masterful. Del Toro tells his stories with visual dynamism and rigor. He has a painterly feel for the way color can evoke mood, and his set pieces, particularly Ofelia’s encounter with a spindly, voracious monster with eye sockets in his palms, throb with the excitement that only great movies can conjure. “Pan’s Labyrinth” is heart-rending and ecstatic – a work of art to be treasured.

LISTEN: Pan’s Labyrinth

For more on this movie, Click here to read my interview with del Toro.

Given the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ obstinate devotion to celebrating the middlebrow and the mediocre, the annual announcement of the Oscar nominees, like the ceremony itself, is a time to be thankful for small favors. So: Hooray for the recognition of Paul Greengrass for directing “United 93,” and huzzah for the six nominations for “Pan’s Labyrinth” (although, sadly, none of those was where it was most deserved, in the director category). There was relief to be had in the many nominations for “The Departed” — along with tingling surprise from the recognition of Mark Wahlberg, whose record of precisely etched characterizations in glorious movies can stand proudly against any actor of his generation. I also breathe a little easier in knowing that his peers appreciate Stephen Frears.

Then there’s the not so good: The broad Judi Dench, the vague Cate Blanchett, the glib writer Patrick Marber and the simply awful composer Philip Glass, all nominated for a silly movie, “Notes on a Scandal,” that no one will remember two years from now. (Director Richard Eyre has a knack for this: Jim Broadbent won five years ago for Eyre’s “Iris,” a dreary movie that nobody saw and nobody wanted to see even after the Oscars.) More forgivable but still unfortunate were the best-picture and supporting-performance nods for “Little Miss Sunshine” and the seven nominations for “Babel.” I thought the movie was flimsy and ridiculous, but then it was still much better than its structural cousin, “Crash,” last year’s nightmare of a Best Picture winner. Confronted with so much globalized misery and cross-cultural misunderstanding — not to mention the affirmation of a wealthy, liberal, culturally sensitive Southern California family that nonetheless employs illegal Mexican immigrants — the Academy can hardly be expected to help itself. I snicker anew at Samuel L. Jackson’s possibly apocryphal, incredibly pithy description of “Babel” as “Crash Benetton.”

Anyone who follows the movie industry closely would tell you this year’s best-picture race is difficult to handicap. One standby for prognosticators is to favor the movie with the most overall nominations. Can’t do that this year, because the most-nominated movie, “Dreamgirls,” was shut out of the best-picture category. Everyone looks to “Letters from Iwo Jima” as the culprit, and while it would be hard to find two less similar movies, they’re both earnest, admirable and deeply flawed. I wouldn’t have objected to either or neither of them being nominated. Anyway, back to Best Picture harbingers: The Golden Globe for Best Drama went to “Babel,” while the stealthy but hugely important Producers’ Guild award went to “Little Miss Sunshine.” Can we dare to hope that neither of these movies will win? I think so. The other choices are “Letters from Iwo Jima” and two genuinely great movies: “The Queen” and “The Departed.” In this schizophrenic awards season, the Screen Actors Guild award for best ensemble acting will be key: If “Babel,” “The Departed” or “Little Miss Sunshine” triumphs, it will have to be considered the front-runner. And something in my gut tells me not to rule out “The Queen,” a movie everybody seems to agree is really good.

As for the omissions, I could inundate you with my pet faves that had zero chance of being nominated (Maggie Cheung for “Clean”! Gretchen Mol for “The Notorious Bettie Page”! Richard Linklater for “Fast Food Nation”!), but that’s hardly a worthwhile exercise. It’s hopelessly naive to expect someone to score an Oscar nomination simply for doing great work. I will say that the exclusion of both del Toro and Alfonso Cuaron (”Children of Men”) in the directing category in favor of their repetitious and less talented countryman, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (”Babel”), saddens me slightly. But it’s hard to get too worked up about a body that, when asked to name the year’s best picture, frequently can’t even come up with a good picture. Just this decade, we’ve had “Crash,” “Million Dollar Baby,” “A Beautiful Mind” and “Gladiator.” Enough said.

Clint Eastwood’s companion piece to the overwrought, undercooked “Flags of Our Fathers” is unquestionably better: an austere, brutal but somehow paradoxically gentle retelling of the battle for Iwo Jima from the perspective of the Japanese. Their mission was simple: to die for their country and, in doing so, stave off, however briefly, an American attack on the mainland. Say what you will (and I will) about Eastwood’s shortcomings as a director, but “Letters from Iwo Jima” makes an eloquent antiwar statement without giving voice to a single antiwar sentiment. It simply shows the awfulness of combat and, in a beautifully uninflected final shot, shows Iwo Jima as it appears today: the same stark landscape, empty and quiet, the horrors of what took place there muted by time.

The hero, Saigo (a wonderfully expressive Kazunari Ninomiya) would rather be home with his pregnant wife than fighting for a desolate scrap of volcanic rock, but who wouldn’t? Saigo doesn’t reject war, just the way his countrymen choose to fight it: They value “honorable death” over sound tactics; in other words, they’d rather storm a heavily fortified American position or blow themselves up than show weakness by retreating, even if, by doing so, they’d ultimately be able to kill more Americans and help hold the island longer. Saigo is allergic to this poisonous groupthink, as is the commanding general, Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), who nonetheless can’t undo centuries of military culture in the few weeks he spends preparing for and fighting the battle. His strategies are viewed as radical, and insubordination is common. The sad irony is that it matters little whether they follow Kuribayashi’s orders: The battle cannot be won, and everybody’s going to die, whether they take any Americans with them or not. In the movie’s most powerful, excruciating scene, Saibo watches a half-dozen of his comrades commit suicide by holding hand grenades to their chests. It doesn’t take a revolutionary to find no honor in the sudden transformation of vibrant young men into piles of limbs and entrails. “Letters from Iwo Jima” is stark and honest about the ways men respond to violence, the way it happens in an instant but reverberates forever. This is the resounding subject of Eastwood’s ouevre and the reason he sometimes touches greatness.

I don’t think he’s a great filmmaker, though. In fact, I’m mystified by the way so many critics — writers I respect — swoon over his work. The weird thing, particularly with “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters from Iwo Jima,” is that these reviewers level praise for the movies’ content, not their execution. “It is hard to think of another war movie that has gone so deeply, so sensitively, into the mind-set of the opposing side,” writes A.O. Scott in The New York Times. True, but novelty does not a great movie make.

There’s a vocal minority of Eastwood skeptics — my pal Michael Sragow of The Baltimore Sun is one of the loudest — and I’m much more comfortable in their camp, even when I find moments of grace in movies like “Letters” or “Mystic River” or even “Space Cowboys.” Cumulatively, “Letters from Iwo Jima” is not particularly powerful, in part because of Eastwood’s plodding, unimaginative style, in part because he’s so insistent about the most obvious points. The Americans soldiers and the Japanese soldiers were the same! To get this across, Eastwood has a gallant former Olympic equestrian, Lt. Col. Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara), spare the life of a wounded soldier from Oklahoma and chat with him in English. Wouldn’t you know, after the boy dies, his adversaries find a letter he wrote to his mother, and Nishi reads it, and, gosh, it’s just like the letters their own mothers wrote to them! Compare this leaden sequence with the amount Terrence Malick was able to communicate in “The Thin Red Line” by showing the haunted faces of the Japanese soldiers and giving us tiny fragments of untranslated speech. We know the combatants on Guadalcanal share something that mere words could never express. Malick’s movie has the haunting quality Eastwood’s lacks because of its quirks and idiosyncracies and its adventurous use of film grammar. He can visualize unspeakable trauma while still exhilarating you with his artistry; this is beyond Eastwood. At best, “Letters from Iwo Jima” is an earnest piece of narrative journalism, not a poem of image and sound.

Speaking of sound, a note about the score: Eastwood composes the music for many of his movies, but for “Letters from Iwo Jima” he cedes that task to his son, Kyle, and Michael Stevens. Still, the strategy is the same: Bang out seven notes on a piano and repeat them ad nauseam. You know exactly when the musical cues will come in and exactly what they will sound like. It’s amateurish and maddening.

Terry Ann Wolfmeyer pushes her grocery cart up the liquor aisle (in Michigan, as I recently discovered, you can buy hooch in the grocery store), and she stops at the Grey Goose vodka. She puts one bottle in her cart, then another. She pauses. Will she put one back? No. With exquisite timing, she snags another bottle and hurries out of the frame.

“The Upside of Anger” follows Terry (Joan Allen) through a tremendously entertaining and touching three-year bender, enabled by her next-door neighbor, Denny Davies (Kevin Costner), an alcoholic former major leaguer who refuses to talk baseball on his radio talk show. Writer-director Mike Binder’s movie is lively, rounded and true, with an unforced vitality and homespun wit. Terry’s anger stems from the unexpected departure of her cheating husband, who disappears just as his Swedish secretary moves back to her homeland. Coincidence? Terry thinks not. Money’s not much of an issue for the Wolfmeyers, who live in a posh Detroit suburb, but Terry has to fend alone with her four college- and high school-age daughters (Alicia Witt, Erika Christensen, Keri Russell and Evan Rachel Wood), who largely internalize the trauma of losing their father, taking it out on their mom in subtle ways that make perfect sense. Binder writes female characters with offhand confidence; in the DVD commentary, he asserts that “men and women aren’t that different.” But he also casts himself as the least appealing character — Denny’s sleazy, ratlike radio producer — to leaven the mother-daughter tension with some accessible battle-of-the-sexes humor.

This movie is such a delight that, watching it nearly two years after its release in the spring of 2005, it makes me angry at New Line Cinema for not promoting it properly. This is the studio that, under former production chief Michael De Luca, was the most daring in Hollywood in the late 90s, making “American History X” and “Pleasantville” and “Dark City” and “Magnolia.” De Luca got canned after some expensive flops in 2001, and since then, with the exception of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, New Line seems to have no clue how to handle the occasional good movie it makes. (Consider “The New World,” dumped into unsuspecting multiplexes last January, or “Little Children,” which I still haven’t seen because New Line put it out in September but still hasn’t expanded its release, no many how many awards it’s nominated for.)

New Line did this movie wrong because there’s no reason it shouldn’t have been a hit. It seems to have garnered good word of mouth with no help from the studio, and no wonder — it’s honest and unpretentious and fun. Costner, pudgier and pastier than he’s ever been on film, is extraordinary as the groggy, lazy, self-aware Denny. He lets you see Denny’s sadness but doesn’t overdo the pathos. And, my goodness — any competent studio marketing department would have pushed Joan Allen for an Oscar nomination. She’s played a lot of repressed suburban housewives, but in “The Upside of Anger” she’s thrillingly manic and unhinged — as lifelike as she’s ever been. Terry is titanically flawed, but you feel privileged to get to know her. That’s great writing and acting.

(By the way, I rented “The Upside of Anger” after seeing a promising-looking trailer for Adam Sandler’s latest attempt at serious cinema, “Reign Over Me,” also written and directed by Binder. Sandler plays a man whose family was killed on 9/11; Don Cheadle befriends him. It seems Binder is one of few moviemakers willing to engage with the post-9/11 world; in “The Upside of Anger,” Terry and Denny bond by getting drunk and watching the invasion of Iraq on CNN.)

At this point I have to question the competence of any filmmaker who hires Philip Glass to compose an original score. But then maybe Glass’s loud, insistent, droning music is the right fit for a movie that climaxes with Cate Blanchett braying like a wounded mule while surrounded by paparrazi. The score and this scene capture the tone of “Notes on a Scandal”: histrionic and glib. Blanchett plays Sheba Hart, an art teacher at a low-rent London public school who has an affair with a 15-year-old male student; Dench is Barbara Covett, the lonely, delusional, predatory lesbian who leverages her discovery of the liaison into a friendship with Sheba. Director Richard Eyre quickly dashes any hope that he would explore the psychology behind the growing phenomenon of sexually predatory female teachers when he develops the affair in an ill-conceived flashback, sapping it of any tension. This is the sort of movie where Barbara shows up at Sheba’s house and Sheba’s daughter is screaming: “He’s younger than I am!” Well, duh. That’s the whole point, and yet Eyre completely misses the point, because he gives us just the sketchiest idea of why Sheba might find such a dalliance irresistible. Another example: Sheba’s husband (Bill Nighy) demands, “Why?” Sheba: “I don’t know!” Neither will you.

I can’t recall ever disliking a Judi Dench performance before her broad, shrill work here. We’re never intrigued by Barbara because there’s no mystery; we always know exactly what she’s thinking, and we’re neither intrigued nor horrified. We just wait, patiently, for her to set her trap. I suppose we may wonder why it takes Sheba so long to figure out what Barbara is up to. “Notes on a Scandal” spins its wheels a lot, and yet it’s only 93 minutes long. You may feel that it ends just when it could potentially become interesting — at the moment where Sheba has to start rebuilding her life.

Murder most foul: From Edgar Allan Poe to “CSI,” the act of killing a human being has been characterized in fiction as a sinister deed, performed with brilliant calculation and leaving behind a puzzle to solve. “Alpha Dog” knows better. This squalid, entertaining and sometimes insightful movie depicts murder most banal: as the accidental consequence of half-witted plans. Oh, and it’s a cinch to figure out whodunit. In a droll touch, writer-director Nick Cassavetes keeps a running tally of the literally dozens of people who witness the kidnapping of a 15-year-old Southern California boy by a gang of not-much-older drug dealers. Based on the case of Jesse James Hollywood, who at 20 became the youngest fugitive on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, “Alpha Dog” persuasively depicts a rudderless suburban culture of easy money, partying and macho posturing. What it can’t provide is a hero who lives up to the title. The underwhelming Emile Hirsch stars as Hollywood, renamed Johnny Truelove for the movie, and it’s hard to buy him as a leader of boys or men, despite the knowledge he’s accrued as a third-generation crook. Justin Timberlake, as Johnny’s fun-loving sidekick, makes a far more authentic hood, as does Ben Foster as the deranged meth addict whose feud with Johnny leads to the kidnapping of his younger brother. Like all the criminal activity in “Alpha Dog,” the abduction is haphazard and sloppy – motivated not by evil, but by convenience.

LISTEN: Alpha Dog

The title characters of “The History Boys” inhabit a homophobia-free zone. They take turns accepting rides home from their rotund teacher, Hector (Richard Griffiths), on his motorscooter, and inevitably, at some point on the ride, Hector will reach back and briefly fondle their genitals. They’d rather not have to go through this, but it doesn’t bother them, and they wouldn’t think of alerting the headmaster to Hector’s activities. Of the eight boys the movie chronicles, all of whom are studying for their entrance exams to Oxford or Cambridge, one, Posner (Samuel Barnett), is gay, and he’s the only one who never gets a ride from Hector, much to his chagrin. Posner has a crush on Dakin (Dominic Cooper), the Lothario of the group, and Dakin knows about it and doesn’t mind. Nobody else has a problem with it either. Dakin, in turn, becomes obsessed with getting their new, younger, closeted gay teacher, Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore), to fall in love with him, and wants to have sex with him once, just for fun.

I’m not quite sure what screewriter Alan Bennett, who adapted his own play, is up to with all this. It’s hard to fathom that out of eight teenage males in rural 1980s Britain, even boys as enlightened as these, not one would be the slightest bit squeamish about homosexuality. So, is “The History Boys” merely fanciful, or is Bennett expressing admiration for the ancient Greek model of education, in which the exchange of knowledge was intertwined with the exchange of bodily fluids? I don’t know. Probably a bit of both. The teacher, Hector, despite his tendencies, is no lech. As he explains it, his cupping of the boys’ balls is an act of aesthetic appreciation. He’s also a dynamite teacher.

Griffiths, ruddy-faced, white-haired, gap-toothed and spectacularly portly, delivers a precise, exuberant, utterly thrilling performance. He makes education a time for play, for improvisation, for joy. Hector is sublimely comfortable in his own skin, resigned to his flaws and intoxicated by the prospect of sharing with the boys the magnetism of great writing. The words “larger than life” don’t do him justice; he’s a colossus, but Griffiths’ acting is never overly broad. It’s dead-on. Frances de la Tour, a London stage veteran with a beautifully strange face and tar-coated voice, also shines as the boys’ wry, incisive history teacher. “The History Boys” is witty, profound, in love with language and performance. Director Nicholas Hytner doesn’t overstrain himself trying to open up the stagy material; his choices are grounded and shrewd. It’s an altogether pleasant movie, sprightly and fun and alive, but, beyond Griffiths, hard to call important or revelatory.

Many thought “Mulholland Dr.,” David Lynch’s haunting tale of unrequited love in Hollywood, was difficult to understand. Sure, it had plenty of weird, unexplained elements, but Lynch’s follow-up, “Inland Empire,” makes “Mulholland Dr.” seem like an episode of “Sesame Street.”

“Inland Empire” never lets your find your footing. You think you’ve settled into a groove, and then it pulls the rug out. It’s difficult to describe how exactly this happens, because the movie demands so much of you that I can’t recall the precise moments when I said, “OK, now we’ve slipped into another plane of unreality.” But, looking back, you’re never really grounded. Yes, for a half-hour, maybe 45 minutes, Lynch pursues a vaguely linear narrative, about an actress (Laura Dern) with a wealthy, domineering husband who gets a part in a romantic melodrama, with Justin Theroux as her co-star and Jeremy Irons as her director. She finds out that the movie they’re shooting is actually a remake of a picture that was never finished because the two leads were murdered, and she starts to see parallels between her own situation and the turmoil that led to the slayings. But … there’s a lot of crazy stuff before we get to Dern, and we’re introduced to her by a bug-eyed, creepy elderly woman with a hard-to-place Eastern European accent. She says something about having trouble distinguishing between today, two days from now and yesterday, and then she tells Dern that this time tomorrow, she’ll be sitting on the sofa across the room from where they’re sitting, and then, after a single bravura edit, Dern is in fact sitting on that sofa, chatting with her friends. The old woman is gone, never to return. Is it the next day? It seems to be. She gets a call telling her she’s got the part, and off we go. It’s impossible, then, to trust anything you’re seeing, even in the movie’s most seemingly straightforward scenes.

And that’s when you set aside the shadowy, suggestive chronicles of prostitutes in Poland, or the young woman who weeps as she watches, on television, a surveillance-style camera observing three people in rabbit suits — one a harried husband in a suit, one a housewife with an iron, and a third of indeterminate gender — as they exchange seemingly banal but subtly barbed dialogue. Occasionally, at an uncomfortable moment between the bunnies, a sitcom-style laugh track will chime in. I don’t know what the rabbits are for, but I can’t say they’re not fun to watch. The same goes for the harem of women who may or may not be Theroux’s ex-girlfriends, who break into a precise, enthusiastic dance to “The Loco-Motion.”

Lynch incorporates pop music from different eras with stunning fluidity. He’s also brilliant at locating a panoply of moods within the same physical space, be it spartan or opulent. He’s a breathtakingly talented filmmaker.

The movie, while occasionally mind-numbing as it progresses from one grubby, amorphous image to another (Lynch shot on low-grade digital video), really is enjoyable, on the whole. It has moments of utter hilarity, moments of bone-chilling tension, moments of searing emotional truth. It’s just that none of it has the connective tissue that moviegoers expect. Broadly, I think Lynch is exploring themes of female victimization. The tagline for “Inland Empire,” presumably concocted by Lynch himself because he’s distributing the movie himself, is “A Woman In Trouble.” And Dern plays several variations of that archetype. She’s an object of desire and an object of revulsion; she’s subjected to overt violence and hovering menace, much of it sexual, all of it the fault of men. The movie is essentially feminist: Lynch appears to be responding to the way women are conventionally treated in movies, the way their experiences are filtered through a male point of view, and trying to liberate them. (Note the qualifiers in these claims — I’m not sure about any of this, and I don’t think anyone could be after just one viewing of “Inland Empire.”) Dern is extraordinary. It’s not a “performance” in any conventional sense of the term, because she’s not building a character across the span of a narrative with any temporal or spatial consistency. She’s playing several different women, or the same woman with several different personae. Either way, she pours herself into every scene and shows heart, grace and emotional nakedness.

“Inland Empire” is a brave, uncompromising, incomprehensible movie that springs from the mind of a genuine artist, unconcerned with anything beyond his own obsessions. (The title suits the film, in that I have no idea what it means, but it sounds really cool.) If you like this sort of thing, I can’t recommend it more highly. For my part, it makes me want to see everything Lynch ever made, then go back and find out what a second viewing would reveal.

Oof! You can say a lot of things about “Dreamgirls,” many of them laudatory, but you can’t call it effortless. Writer-director Bill Condon is hard at work, and it shows. He knows he’s a generation or two late to make a straightforward Hollywood musical, and he’s clearly terrified that its conventions can seem anathema to contemporary audiences, so he push, push, pushes it forward, crosscutting and intercutting and moving the camera constantly throughout the musical numbers. That way, he posits, maybe you won’t mind that the characters are expressing their feelings and propelling the story through song. Since I adore musicals, I wouldn’t have minded anyway, so Condon’s earnest busybody style, to me, feels overwrought. Especially since “Dreamgirls” is never better than when it simply puts Jennifer Hudson in front of the camera and lets her wail. “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” is as wondrous as advertised, an earth-shaking lament. Hudson, an “American Idol” also-ran, has been touted as the show-stealer, and she is, but it’s not like everybody else stinks. True, she has the biggest, brassiest, heart-stoppingest voice, but she also gets the best songs, and her character has by far the most involving arc. “Dreamgirls,” for all its sprawling melodrama, truly is her story, and it might have been sharper and punchier if Condon had trimmed the stretches when she disappears from the action.

Then again, Condon’s ambition is part of what makes “Dreamgirls” so impressive. It’s brassy and glitzy and, crucially, it pulsates with authentic emotion despite the artifice of the genre. As it whisks the audience through a thinly veiled chronicle of the rise of Diana Ross and the Supremes, it captures the excitement, the backstage intrigue and the soul-draining compromises that accompanied African-American music’s crossover to white listeners. “Dreamgirls” is never funnier or more piercing than when it shows how “Cadillac Car,” a propulsive, sexy ode to conspicuous consumption, loses all its verve when a buttoned-down Caucasian crooner re-records it. Even whites are ready for something a little edgier, the movie shows, but Curtis Taylor Jr. (Jamie Foxx), manager of the Dreams (Hudson, Beyoncé Knowles, Anika Noni Rose), understands the limits of commercial viability. He’s not interested in challenging or provocative music, and when you’re working with genuine artists, that’s a sure recipe for alienating everyone around you. “Dreamgirls” chronicles Curtis’s creation of a wildly successful musical “family” and its dissolution, which springs largely from his refusal to loosen his grip with time. At first, the Dreams need his discipline, but he suffocates them when he should allow them to blossom. Effie White (Hudson) is the first to go, shunted aside in favor of the lovelier, less talented, more marketable Deena Jones (Knowles), both as the Dreams’ lead singer and as Curtis’s lover. Others to wither when confronted with Curtis’s intransigence are Effie’s brother, C.C. (Keith Robinson) and the James Brown analog, James “Thunder” Early (Eddie Murphy, who performs with enthusiasm and charisma but not much soul). The only one who can successfully stand up to him is Deena, and Knowles does a fine job suggesting the steely resolve and genuine passion to perform lurking beneath Deena’s malleable voice and face.

The sheer professionalism and glossy showmanship of “Dreamgirls” are thrilling. Like “Chicago” (also a Condon project — he wrote the screenplay), it reasserts the viability of the movie musical as a draw for audiences and as a form with still-untapped artistic potential. Both are honorable efforts — “Dreamgirls” is better; it’s by far the more substantive — but both have obvious flaws. I think many of the problems stem from the fact that neither was originally conceived for the screen; both are adaptations of Broadway shows, and both suffer from the awkward transition from one medium to the other. One sign that reports of the musical’s rebirth may be premature is that so many of them are recycled — movie musicals adapted from Brodway and Broadway musicals from the movies. There have even been two titles — “The Producers” and “Hairspray” — that started as non-musical films and became stage musicals only to have the shows adapted into movie musicals. It’s dizzying. That’s why I think the best recent musical is “Moulin Rouge,” because, whether you love or hate Baz Luhrmann’s frenetic style and simplistic, cheap-seats melodrama, his song-and-dance spectacle was a movie to the bone.

Alfonso Cuaron wields his camera like a branding iron. His images sear themselves onto your mind’s eye. Cuaron’s “Children of Men” is one of two movies released in 2006 that can truly be called visionary – along with “Pan’s Labyrinth,” from his countryman Guillermo del Toro. Cuaron looks 20-odd years into the future, and his vision is vast yet intimate – and harrowing. Like Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report,” “Children of Men” doesn’t try to grab you with bombastic special effects – the throwaway details in the margins are what make Cuaron’s dystopia so fully realized. The movie posits that the most urgent problems of today – environmental degradation; the divide between rich and poor; terrorism and the ruthless, incoherent response to it – will be much worse in 2027. To these all-too-believable horrors, “Children of Men” adds one fantastical wrinkle – the human race has become infertile. That’s the impetus for the story, which follows a man charged with shepherding to safety the first pregnant woman in 18 years. The movie’s weakness is this extended chase narrative, which leaves little room for multi-dimensional characters to emerge. That’s why, for the first hour or so, “Children of Men” feels astringent and clinical. Yet as he raises the dramatic stakes, Cuaron savvily accumulates small moments that illuminate the endlessly fascinating human personality, and “Children of Men” emerges as an enraged, passionate plea for tolerance. It will be relevant today, tomorrow and two decades from now.

LISTEN: Children of Men