Ill-Informed Gadfly

1. TELL NO ONE. I look forward to rewatching this masterful French thriller next week, next year or half a century from now, perhaps in a double bill with one of its forebears, Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest.” Actor-turned-director Guillame Canet summons a dozen superb, unpretentious performances, starting with leading man François Cluzet, whose portrayal of an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances puts him in the company of Cary Grant or Harrison Ford. Canet is more than an actor’s director, though: “Tell No One” is pure cinema, electric with suspense, humor and passion. (Released in France in late 2006, it became a word-of-mouth hit in U.S. arthouses this past summer. If you missed it, it’s out on DVD and Blu-Ray March 31.)

2. A CHRISTMAS TALE. Another Frenchie, this one with an unfortunate title that too strongly recalls too many other movies for American audiences to think it’s anything special. Those familiar with the work of writer-director Arnaud Desplechin (”Kings and Queen”) will be unsurprised to learn that it’s something remarkable. Like “Kings,” “A Christmas Tale” is a gloriously messy dysfunctional-family saga that teems with bold ideas and contrarian behavior. Its multitudes of incident and emotion seem to spill over the edges of the frame, and you’re grateful for every one of its 150 minutes.

3. WALL·E. Easily the best American movie of the year, and the most visionary film I saw by far. I loved it even though I’m not programmed to respond well to a cutesy love story between robots. Director Andrew Stanton is a triumphant visual storyteller who creates an astonishing and deeply resonant milieu: an Earth that’s been trashed and abandoned, the victim of rampant capitalism and pleasure-seeking complacency. Frequent George W. Bush impersonator Fred Willard plays the deviously cheerful CEO of a corporation that’s taken over the government and keeps the population numb and distracted. While enormously entertaining, “WALL·E” is also a brilliant and bracing cautionary tale.

4. HAPPY-GO-LUCKY. I’ve never enjoyed a Mike Leigh movie more than this one. The typically dour social-realist English filmmaker, whose last film was the heavy-handed “Vera Drake,” dapples the frame in sunshine and gives in to the improbably sunny personality of his heroine, a primary-school teacher named Poppy (Sally Hawkins). Her triumphant performance imagines happiness as a bold and difficult choice in a world that tries relentlessly to defeat you — and succeeds more often than not.

5. RACHEL GETTING MARRIED. From Jenny Lumet’s crackling screenplay, Jonathan Demme imagines a wedding so rich in detail and so full of his generous personality that you’ll feel like you’re watching his own family. Anne Hathaway deserves the acclaim she’s received for a performance full of bite and vulnerability, but pay close attention to Bill Irwin and Debra Winger, as her divorced parents, for mature and masterful acting that summons the strikingly disparate ways people cope with tragedy.

6. LET THE RIGHT ONE IN. This droll and inventive Swedish movie, about a 12-year-old girl vampire and the introverted boy who befriends her, captures the confusion, frustration and occasional ecstasy of early adolescence. It has a quiet, offbeat rhythm punctuated by sudden shocks of outrageous violence and wicked humor. It’s touching and nasty in equal measures, and it’s never predictable.

7. THE FALL. Eye candy with soul. In an early 20th-Century Los Angeles hospital, the six-year-old daughter of immigrant citrus-grove workers befriends a recently paralyzed movie stuntman. He charms her with an outlandish story, made up on the fly, but the real world intrudes menacingly on his tale. Director Tarsem Singh, who shot in 18 countries over four years, finds strange and magnificent locations that evoke the girl’s teeming imagination. We see the story through her mind’s eye, and we watch with increasing disquiet as she wills it to her preferred conclusion, despite a slippery and unreliable narrator.

8. MILK. I’m not easily inspired by politicians, but thanks to Gus van Sant’s movie I’ll make an exception for Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in America. Sean Penn inhabits Milk as fully as he did Jeff Spicoli, Matthew Poncelet and Jimmy Markum. Oftentimes straight actors tense up when they play gay characters, but not Penn, who performs with breezy confidence. Van Sant’s filmmaking, too, is spot-on and seemingly effortless.

9. SHINE A LIGHT. Mick sings and struts, Keith and Ronnie jam, Charlie keeps the beat and all is right with the world. Director Martin Scorsese’s concert documentary shows the Rolling Stones defying their years through exuberance and showmanship.

10. SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE. Yes, it’s a conventional crowd-pleaser with a gimmicky structure, but this year’s Academy Award favorite has plenty of substance. It addresses the long odds against climbing out of poverty, the opportunities for both self-improvement and exploitation that abound in modern India, and the broad knowledge that can be gained from a street education if you’re sensitive to your surroundings. The vignettes that illuminate the hero’s answers to his quiz-show questions are beautifully dramatized, and Danny Boyle’s direction is vibrant and expressive.

HONORABLE MENTIONS: APPALOOSA, FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL, GHOST TOWN, PRIDE AND GLORY, VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA, THE VISITOR.

“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.

I can see how remaking this one was irresistible. “The Day the Earth Stood Still” works wonders with the special effects and cinematic sleight of hand available in 1951, and it remains both charming and compelling. Despite its obvious political allegory, it’s an effects-driven picture, and, for better or worse, moviemakers have come a long way in their ability to represent alien invasions. “The Day the Earth Stood Still” gets its kick from the flying saucer that lands on the ballfields adjacent to the National Mall, and from the 8-foot-tall robot, Gort, that emerges from the UFO and vaporizes guns and tanks with a beam of light from its head. This is cool stuff, and sure, you can see the seams, but unless you’re pitiably literal-minded it’s still visually persuasive.

It’s also great at capturing ’50s paranoia. After the UFO lands, it’s surrounded by tense, trigger-happy soldiers, and when a humanoid creature steps out, announcing that his mission is peaceful, he gets a gunshot wound for his trouble. The alien, Klaatu (an elegant Michael Rennie), is badgered and persecuted during his stint on earth, arousing little more than suspicion and incredulity from a smug and arrogant U.S. government. Unsuccessful in his effort to address the world’s population through official channels, he goes rogue, trying to gather scientists and intellectuals to disseminate his stark message: Earthlings must embrace peace or face extermination. The anti-nuclear message is firm if a bit simplistic; the filmmakers don’t seem to have grasped the implications of the alternative they propose. As Nicholas Meyer, who had nothing to do with the film, points out in his commentary with director Robert Wise, the utopia Klaatu describes, with invincible Gort-like robots enforcing the peace, is disturbing and Orwellian.

The movie deserves credit, though, for having more depth than perhaps Wise intended: He also confesses in the commentary that he did not realize during the shoot that Klaatu was a Christ figure. Let’s see: Klaatu takes the name “Mr. Carpenter” when he’s undercover and is persecuted and ultimately killed by the government for his message of peace. Then he’s resurrected. I have to wonder whether Wise is or was a bit thick-headed! Nonetheless, he’s a good director. He presents the fantastical elements matter-of-factly, with a no-frills shooting style punctuated by occasional elegant, atmospheric lighting. And Wise, who worked as an editor before becoming a director, does fantastic work integrating second-unit and stock footage. It’s amazing that the main cast and crew never did any work on location in Washington, because there’s so much great D.C. footage. Wise also manages to suggest the global reach of Klaatu’s power, especially during the sequence that gives the movie its title, when he shuts off electricity to the entire world.

The lanky, dark-haired Rennie plays Klaatu with impressive calm and confidence, and Patricia Neal is at her luminous best as the war widow whose young son takes a shine to the alien. The middle third of the movie, which unfolds largely from the boy’s perspective, has a lot of flab. He’s a stock movie child, cutesy and vanilla. You feel like Wise is biding his time for the next big set piece. How little things change in movieland. But the time spent with Neal pays off at the climax, when she delivers one of the great gibberish lines of all time: “Klaatu barada nikto!” The words are remembered not only because of Neal’s impassioned delivery but because they sound just familiar enough to please the ear. I have not seen the 2008 remake of this movie; perhaps I never will. I doubt it’s anywhere near as good as, say, Peter Jackson’s “King Kong,” which for all his skill proved anew that you can’t top the crazy inspiration and roughhewn perfection of the original. The same, I’m sure, applies to “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”