Murder by Death

dvd of the week

Steven Soderbergh’s last studio film is basically a long, relatively well-acted Law & Order episode, complete with discussions of double jeopardy and a “shocking” but offensively retrograde ending.

Emily (Rooney Mara) is married to Martin (Channing Tatum), who is being released from prison after serving five years for insider trading. As they try to get their life in New York back to normal, which for them means black tie parties and lots of money, Emily cannot shake her depression. After driving her car into a wall, she starts treatment with the psychiatrist (Jude Law) who evaluated her in the ER. He prescribes several anti-depressants before settling on a new one called Ablixa, which Emily’s former psychiatrist (Catherine Zeta-Jones) recommends. Unfortunately, while Ablixa helps Emily love life again, it has a rather annoying side effect: sleepwalking. Oh, and murder.

If Side Effects had been an actual Law & Order episode, it would have been the best one ever. But as a Steven Soderbergh movie, especially for his last feature, it’s a bit lazy.

Doona Bae and Xun Zhou in Cloud Atlas

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David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas, considered one of the greatest literary achievements of the last two decades by many critics, was thought to be impossible to adapt for film. There are six narratives that take place in wildly different times and spaces and they’re connected in weird and wonderful ways.

The film is a towering achievement of editing, writing and directing, with several great performances (Jim Broadbent, Tom Hanks and Doona Bae), but it is not nearly as deep as writer-directors Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer and Andy Wachowski want you to believe. But the fact that they made a coherent, entertaining movie out of Mitchell’s post-modern masterpiece is a feat to behold.

Robert De Niro and Bradley Cooper in Silver Linings Playbook

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When I read that Silver Linings Playbook was about two psychologically troubled people, I was initially concerned. So many film depictions of crazy are just crazy awful. I wasn’t encouraged when the first few scenes of the film took place in a mental hospital. But shortly after Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper) is discharged by his extremely concerned mother (Jacki Weaver) and I watched them and Pat’s obsessive-compulsive father (Robert De Niro) communicate, or fail to, as a family, I saw that director David O. Russell was going for authenticity, not parody, and those worries dissipated.

And when Pat is set up with a similarly distressed Tiffany Maxwell (Jennifer Lawrence), and they start comparing their psychopharmaceutical experiences and debating who is more screwed up, the worries evaporated.

This is a movie about people and relationships, about love and self-forgiveness, about functioning within dysfunction; it is not a movie about illness. And it’s among the best films I saw last year. The entire cast was nominated for Oscars, and Lawrence won.

Denis Lavant in Holy Motors

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I missed this wildly weird French movie when it was playing in San Diego this fall, but I saw it on DVD this past week and I was amazed. Leos Carax’s hypnotic, fascinating, and somewhat opaque film follows Oscar (Denis Lavant) as he goes from appointment to appointment in Paris, driven in a white limo by Celine (Edith Scob).

At each stop, he transforms himself, from a homeless woman to an assassin, from a dying old man to a cruel and worried father. Each appointment is like its own short film, and what is tying them all together is not clear, but the trips between are full of Oscar’s pathos and Celine’s doting and some moral, existential, perhaps cosmic meaning.

I haven’t enjoyed being this confused since I saw Mulholland Drive, and Carax may be as gifted a director as David Lynch.

Christoph Waltz and Jamie Foxx in Django Unchained

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Tarentino’s homage to spaghetti westerns and blaxploitation films of the 1970s is his funniest movie by far and as nearly as fun to watch as Kill Bill Vol. 1. It’s also the movie that probably sets some sort of record for the use of the n-word, and it’s disconcerting, to say the least.

Tarentino loves that word for some reason, and every character in the film utters it in almost every sentence. (Except, very interestingly, for the character Tarentino briefly plays, who uses “blackie” instead.)

Granted, it takes place a decade before the Civil War, and it’s about a slave named Django (Jamie Foxx) who is freed by an intellectual German bounty hunter named Dr. King Schultz (Oscar winner Christoph Waltz). They team up first to kill bounties and then to save Django’s wife Hildie (Kerry Washington) from a most evil plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio).

As with most Tarentino films, Django Unchained is outrageously and specifically violent, full of depictions of pain and agony, and it’s not clear what the message is. But because it’s a Tarentino film, that violence, as with the comedy and the standard dramatic scenes, is meticulously, artfully staged and photographed.

James Gandolfini in Killing Them Softly

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This under-seen crime drama is Andrew Dominik’s follow-up to the under-seen, but brilliant The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. This one isn’t as powerful, but it’s just as amazing to look at, taking the slow-motion violence style to the pinnacle of the artform.

Brad Pitt plays a hitman who is brought to Boston to clean up a mess caused by three dumb thugs who rob the wrong poker game.

The all-star supporting cast includes Scoot McNairy, Richard Jenkins, Ray Liotta, and an outrageously good James Gandolfini.

The movie is ponderous and violent, but also fascinating, and Pitt does some of the best acting of his career.

I Want Your Love

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A couple weeks ago, Australia’s film censor banned I Want Your Love for being too sexually explicit, and that is also probably why the Travis Mathew’s film never found a nationwide distributer in the U.S.

A gorgeously shot, naturalistic story of the last 36 hours that Jesse (the quite amazing Jesse Metzger) spends in San Francisco before moving home to Ohio, it also features a lot of gorgeously shot naturalistic sex between men.

Mathews, who went on to co-direct Interior: Leather Bar with James Franco, is clearly extremely talented, both as a writer and a director, but the film seems disjointed, as if an American Weekend was spliced together with extremely good porn. Unlike with John Cameron Mitchell’s similarly explicit and artful Shortbus, the sex isn’t needed for the plot, so it seemed to me to be prurient. (Which makes sense, to a certain extent, since the movie was produced by the porn company Naked Sword.)

Still, it’s wonderful to watch gay sexuality and gay characters treated so lovingly on film, and I recommend watching it. You can download the movie on iwantyourlovethemovie.com/

Hugh Jackman in Les Misérables

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Based on Victor Hugo’s classic 1862 French novel about an ex-convict struggling to overcome his past (among several other plots), the musical version of Les Misérables is one of the few Broadway blockbusters that is as good as it is popular.

When Tom Hooper, fresh from winning an Oscar for The King’s Speech, was chosen to direct an all-star cast, he decided to have the actors sing during their scenes instead of lip-sync to a pre-recorded soundtrack. The result is performances that are much more intimate and much more powerful than those in any musical film in recent memory.

As Jean Valjean, Hugh Jackman has never had as great a role on film and he has never been better: anxious fear, righteous anger and deep and visible empathy. Anne Hathaway, as the doomed prostitute Fantine, is wrenching in her stunning, agonizing performance of “I Dreamed A Dream.”

It is a performance that will be remembered for decades, and her Oscar was much deserved.

Suraj Sharma in Life of Pi

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Ang Lee won his second Oscar for directing this gorgeous adaptation of Yan Martel’s Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi, a book that begins with an old man saying that “I have a story that will make you believe in God.” The film begins similarly, with Pi Patel (Irrfan Khan) telling his life story to a writer (Rafe Spall). The centerpiece of this is when the ship that is carrying teenage Pi (Suraj Sharma), his family, and their zoo animals sinks, and ultimately only Pi and a tiger make it to a lifeboat. I blame the film’s lack of theological profundity on David Magee’s adaptation, which underemphasizes Martel’s philosophical insights while overemphasizing Pi’s story of survival. Ang Lee and his cinematographer Claudia Miranda, however, overcome Magee’s script to produce the most visually stunning film since Avatar.

Anne Le Ny, François Cluzet and Omar Sy in The Intouchables

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When I saw that The Intouchables was a true story about a quadriplegic, I found other movies to see. I just didn’t want to do the work. And when I tell you that it is in French and subtitled, you may not want to do the work either.

But The Intouchables isn’t work. It’s not a movie about overcoming obstacles. It is a movie about friendship, and the friends just happen to be a quadriplegic and his aid.

Driss (Omar Sy) only interviews to work for Philippe (François Cluzet) because he needs a certain number of interviews to qualify for welfare. But something about Driss’ humor and brashness intrigues Philippe, and he gets the job.

Driss, a tall and handsome Senegalese man, has just gotten out of prison and kicked out of the overcrowded apartment where he lived with his mother and numerous siblings. That the job comes with an enormous bedroom room and enormous bathtub is rather attractive.

Sy’s performance is so charismatic, versatile, and charming that he won a César for Best Actor – France’s Oscar. He beat Jean Dujardin, who won the actual Oscar this year for The Artist. Sy’s is a better performance, but that is only one of many reasons to see The Intouchables.

Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Master

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While a great deal of the press about The Master is focused on how it is supposedly a fictional retelling of the birth of Scientology, I think this does a disservice to both the film and to Scientology.

While it may have been inspired by L. Ron Hubbard’s early days, it is not about him, nor Scientology, nor even about the birth of religion.

The Master is about the relationship between two men, Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a restless, somewhat disturbed, somewhat animalistic drifter, and Lancaster Doss (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a charismatic, charming, and narcissistic metaphysicist.

Through this relationship, writer and director Paul Thomas Anderson explores what it means to be human, what it means to have control, and what it means to relate to other people. The resulting film is weird, disturbing, fascinating, entertaining and profound.

Ben Affleck in Argo

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Ben Affleck’s film about the insane plan the CIA devised (“This is the best bad idea we have”) to rescue six American embassy workers from Iran in 1980 is thrilling, funny and nearly flawless.

The merging of a satirical comedy about Hollywood, the paranoid suspense in Iran, and the wonkish, but often very funny drama of Washington, D.C. is seamlessly handled in Chris Terrio’s masterful script and Affleck’s direction of himself, his all-star cast, and the complex action sequences.

Nominated for seven Academy Awards, it is the odds-on favorite to win Best Picture. But bizarrely, Affleck was not nominated for Best Director, one of the worst crimes in Academy history.

Emma Watson, Logan Lerman and Ezra Miller in The Perks of Being a Wallflower

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Stephen Chbosky adapted his own novel for the screen and made a movie even more acclaimed and beloved than his book, which is a tall order. In Pittsburgh in the 1980s, Charlie (Logan Lerman) is a depressive outcast who befriends and is befriended by his high school’s one gay student Patrick (Ezra Miller) and his step-sister Sam (Emma Watson). Plot-wise, it is a somewhat standard coming of age drama, but Chbosky’s impressively sensitive direction and truly inspired performances by Watson, Lerman and especially Miller make the film arguably one of the best movies about adolescents ever made.

Denzel Washington in Flight

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I was one of the very few people who loathed Flight, the film about a high functioning but still very messy alcoholic airline pilot (Denzel Washington) whose impressive skills saves most of his passengers during a harrowing plane crash, but whose addiction enables him to be a convenient fall guy for the embattled airline.

I was irritated that the movie purported to be about a plane crash but was actually about alcoholism, and addiction narratives as obvious and clichéd as Flight really bug me, even if that narrative is plopped inside a rather original larger story.

If you know that’s what it’s about, you’ll have less trouble. Washington is excellent as a very conflicted man in megatons of denial. As his friend and dealer, John Goodman is hilarious if unbelievable. Robert Zemeckis’ direction is laudable. As weird as the screenplay is, it’s a marvel that Zemeckis can make it all seem almost plausible. But he does.

Frankenweenie

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The second animated film by Tim Burton to be nominated for an Oscar, Frankenweenie has more flashes of brilliance in it than anything he has done in more than a decade.

It is the story of a strange, nerdy boy – both a budding filmmaker and a genius scientist – who manages to bring his beloved dog Sparky back to life. The boy is named, of course, Victor Frankenstein.

While trying to keep this weird miracle a secret, his classmates are also competing to win the local science fair, and clearly, nothing would be guaranteed to win quite like reanimation.

As you can imagine, complications and slapstick comedy ensue. Unfortunately, as seems to happen in many recent Burton films, the third act is overloaded with needless action. But throughout, Burton makes incredible images, using his indelible style, and creates a memorable, and wonderfully weird, movie.

Megan Hilty in Smash

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The second season of that other musical on TV starts Feb. 6, which should give you enough time to catch up by watching the first 15 episodes. Like Glee, Smash is amazingly uneven, occasionally sublime, but mostly fascinatingly bad.

The story of the making of a Broadway musical about the life of Marilyn Monroe, it stars wooden but gorgeous American Idol runner-up Katherine McPhee as a chorus girl thrust into stardom; Megan Hilty as her much more experienced competition; Debra Messing and Christian Borle as the show’s creators and Angelica Huston as its producer.

The songs, mostly written by March Shaiman and Scott Whitman, are cute but mostly forgetful. But sometimes the musical numbers are sublime, as great as some of the soapy dramatic sequences are absurd and silly. It’s the best show to hate to watch this spring.

Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Looper

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In 2074, mobsters use time machines to send their enemies 30 years back in time to be killed and disposed of by loopers. More and more loopers are “closing the loop,” the phrase for being forced to kill their 30-years-older selves in a violent method of contract fulfillment.

But when Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is set to kill his older self (Bruce Willis), old Joe manages to escape. On the run from himself, old Joe hunts down the little boys who possibly are going to become a man known as the Rainmaker, who is responsible for not only the whole rash of loop closings in the future but also the murder of old Joe’s wife.

The mother of one of the potential Rainmakers is a farmer named Sarah, played by Emily Blunt. If you ignore the time travel paradoxes, and you just focus on the practical and moral crisis of the Joes, Sarah, and her son Cid, then you’ll most likely find yourself immersed in one of the best original science fiction films of the last few years.

Johnson’s script, despite its time travelling logic, is complex but taut, managing to hit major themes about violence and loyalty and justice with great economy and with little needless, nerdy exposition.

Johnson uses few special effects to create a fully realized vision of possible dystopian future, and his direction of his actors is similarly focused and unflashy.

Gordon-Levitt, despite being second billed to Willis, is the star, doing both a finely honed imitation (physically and affectively) of a young Willis and a great turn as a sexy, noir hitman full of pathos.

Anna Kendrick in Pitch Perfect

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Written by 30 Rock writer Kay Cannon and directed by Avenue Q’s Jason Moore; Pitch Perfect is Bring It On crossed with Glee with an injection of Bridesmaids. It’s not perfect, but it’s a damn funny crowd-pleaser.

Beca (Anna Kendrick) is a world-weary freshman at Barden University who spends her free time making mash-ups on her DJ equipment. Barden is an a cappella powerhouse, with two out of four of its groups having made the national championships.

The men’s group the Treblemakers always wins, while the women’s group the Bellas was humiliated at the previous championship when Aubrey (Anna Camp), it’s now-leader, vomited during her solo.

This year is for rebuilding, and Aubrey and her friend Chloe (Brittany Snow) aggressively recruit a new group, scoring a motley crew of weirdos, including a very reluctant Beca, “the best singer in Tasmania” who named herself “Fat Amy” (Rebel Wilson) and a girl named Lilly (Hana Mae Lee), whose voice is barely audible.

Aubrey is desperate to beat the Treblemakers at nationals, and since it is a genre film, Cannon doesn’t stray from the expected plot turns.

Anne Hathaway in The Dark Knight Rises

No one could hope that Rises could ever be as good as The Dark Knight, which is inarguably the best superhero movie ever made. The main problem with Rises is that director Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan forced the Rises screenplay to tie up the plot threads of The Dark Knight and Batman Begins into a perfect and bleak bow.

This creates too many contrived revelatory moments, particularly during the film’s third act. However, I honestly didn’t care that I was suffering too many plot twists because I was watching, after all, a comic book movie.

I didn’t care that Anne Hathaway wasn’t as good a Catwoman as Michelle Pfeiffer was in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, because Hathaway was sly, slinky and funny. I was only bothered a little that Tom Hardy’s voice was occasionally muffled by the villain Bane’s mask because, when he could be heard, his speeches were so lyrical and so cynical they gave me chills.

I was so excited by the last hour of the film that for an hour afterward, my heart was still racing.

Daniel Day-Lewis and Alison Whelan in My Left Foot

John Hawkes’s performance in The Sessions is being described as reminiscent of Daniel Day-Lewis’ Christy Brown in the classic 1989 film My Left Foot.

Playing the Irish writer who was born with cerebral palsy that prevented him from using any body part but his left foot, Day-Lewis won an Oscar (as did Brenda Fricker playing Christy’s mother).

Yes, it is a typical disease-of-the-week movie in many ways – you know what you’re getting before the movie starts – it’s so well directed by Jim Sheriden and so brilliantly acted by Day-Lewis, it’s hard for even a cranky cynic like me not to like it.

Brave

A great deal was made out of the fact that Brave is the first Pixar movie with a female protagonist. Since Disney has had female protagonists from the beginning – Snow White was released in 1939 – Pixar isn’t exactly breaking new ground. If anything, Brave is the first major American animated film with a feminist female protagonist.

Belle in Beauty & The Beast and Mulan were the closest before, and they weren’t very close at all. Merida, unlike previous Disney princesses, does not need a prince to save her, either through swashbuckling or a kiss of true love.

Merida is self-assured, bold, courageous and outraged by the sexist double standards of medieval Scotland. Merida’s story is not about which boy she will love, and what hurdles she must jump to be with him. Instead, it is about what her refusal to be married off to a random prince does to her relationship with her mother.

Brave is an action-adventure tale about how a traditional mother and a rebellious and visionary daughter reconcile. It is the sort of movie that a lot of progressive parents of young daughters will find as thrilling as their daughters do.

Even if the film doesn’t have the emotional depth and cinematic wonder of Up or Wall-E, it’s a delightful movie with a laudable message; a combination quite rare in a children’s blockbuster.

Channing Tatum and Matthew McConaughey in Magic Mike

Whoever was behind the marketing for Magic Mike decided that they were not even going to mention the great, Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh, let alone promote him; they were going to hide the fact that the movie is actually really, really good. They were going to focus the ads on a shirtless, occasionally pants-less Channing Tatum and, in various stages of undress, his costars Alex Pettyfer, Joe Manganiello, Matt Bomer and Matthew McConaughey, all looking like Men’s Fitness models.

As fun as it was to watch all of these gorgeous men show off how nicely they fit into thongs, the rest of the movie is even better than their abs. Tatum is fantastic. Magic Mike forces him to articulate almost every emotion, from flirtation to grief, and he is convincing at every turn. Tatum is already a star, but contrary to how Magic Mike was marketed, he may actually turn out to be serious one.

Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman in Moonrise Kingdom

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In Wes Anderson’s incredibly arch Moonrise Kingdom, dorky and awkward Sam (Jared Gilman) runs away from his Khaki Scout summer camp to go on an adventure with a girl named Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward). She is as off as Sam, but while Sam is nerdy and odd, Suzy is angry and depressive. Her parents Laura and Walt (Frances McDormand and Bill Murray) are distraught, while Sam’s Scout leader (Ed Norton) and the local sheriff (Bruce Willis) are determined.

In Moonrise Kingdom both humor and pain, and irony and sincerity exist side-by-side. The result is a profoundly entertaining and also profound film that matches and perhaps surpasses Wes Anderson’s best achievements, which include the minor classics Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Anderson’s direction of his and Roman Coppola’s ingenious, intricately plotted script is a marvel. There are some scenes that are so beautifully set that the still images of them could alone be hung on the walls of a museum.

Every prop, each bit of blocking, and all of the art direction is carefully and specifically stylized, inspired, it seems, by vintage Boys Life and Norman Rockwell paintings.

I want to go see the film again just to gawk at the smart animal costumes for a Noah’s Ark church pageant; or at the Scouts’ campground; the Bishop’s house floorplan and Captain Sharp’s trailer. And I want to catch more of Sam’s dorky witticisms, which not surprisingly made Suzy fall in love.

Chris Hemsworth and Kristen Stewart in Snow White and the Huntsman

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What a great idea: Remake Snow White, but throw out everything that made the Disney film work and replace it with everything that made The Lord of the Rings work. And it is, actually, a great idea. In this film, the huntsman who is charged with capturing Snow White has a much, much bigger role as her friend, ally, and, potentially, lover. Chris Hemsworth, best known as Thor, is fantastic as the dark, drunken action hero. As Snow White, Kristen Stewart is fine when she’s not looking so concerned and breathing so hard. But she’s miscast, because while she’s pretty, she’s not remotely as stunning as Charlize Theron, who plays the queen. Theron is the reason the movie works; she manages to avoid camp while playing a role that almost begs for it. She’s ruthless and truly evil, but – and this is particularly amazing – she’s also sympathetic.

Irene Cara and Philip Michael Thomas in Sparkle (1976)

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I was surprised that the original film was written by Joel Schumacher, who went on to gayify Batman and direct St. Elmo’s Fire and The Client. But I was more surprised by Irene Cara in the title role. She’s so young, so vulnerable, and her singing is as soulful as Jordin Sparks is studied. As Sister, Lonette McKee is stunning, both vocally and visually, and it’s odd that she never became a superstar. While the film is full of cheesy dialogue – Philip Michael Thomas delivering much of it as Sticks – the depiction of 1950s Harlem and both Cara and Mary Alice’s performances have an authenticity that the new version never achieves. It was the only film the acclaimed film editor Sam O’Steen directed, and it’s a shame, because it’s a beautifully shot movie.

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Nick Flynn’s memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is a lyrical and harrowing tale of alcoholism, homelessness, redemption, and the artist’s life; and there’s probably no way that it could have survived the trip to the screen without losing some of its charm. Being Flynn, Paul Weitz’s sturdy and moving adaptation, is nowhere near as good as the book, and it couldn’t be. Paul Dano plays Nick, a wayward young man who falls into a job at the homeless shelter while he’s trying to find himself. Robert De Niro is Nick’s absentee, alcoholic and slightly insane father who reappears in Nick’s life, disappears, and then reappears in the shelter. I’m a sucker for father-son stories, and this one made me cry. Dano is particularly smart, sympathetic and subtle, and De Niro is better than he has been in 20 years.

Taylor Kitsch in John Carter

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When you cast someone whose last name is Kitsch in a bound-to-be-cheesy sci-fi action film, you’re begging for a review that says that the movie is “kitschy.” And that would be a perfect description of John Carter, which stars Taylor Kitsch: The film is “a worthless imitation of art of recognized value.” In some ways, I thought I was watching some weird mash-up of two other kitsch touchstones, Flash Gordon and Stargate. Yet, I think the director Andrew Stanton, who gave us Wall-E, and the film’s original screenwriter Michael Chabon were trying for populist high art, something along the lines of Avatar or Star Wars. But the film is just two hours and 12 minutes of kitsch: wooden dialogue, outlandish costumes, crazy plotting. That said, its technical achievements are impressive, and it is good, silly sci-fi fun.

Kim Wayans and Adepero Oduye in Pariah

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That Focus Features, the distribution company that puts out such highbrow star-vehicles like Brokeback Mountain and Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy, would get behind a gritty first feature with virtually unknown actors and a lengthy scene about a strap-on dildo is testament to how affecting Pariah is. Alike (Adepero Oduye), the teenage lesbian hero, has the self-possession of the smartest and coolest girl in school. She is nervous about finding a girlfriend and playing into the butch-femme role-playing that seems to govern the lesbian culture she and her best friend hang out in. But her bravery, not only in her poetry but in her willingness to give up her family and her world for freedom, is inspiring. Wonderfully acted and brilliantly written and directed by Dee Rees, it is among the best lesbian movies ever made.

Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady

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Meryl Streep finally won her third Oscar for her brilliant portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. Some people thought she was great and the movie wasn’t, but I loved the whole thing. Told in flashbacks from the perspective of an elderly Thatcher heading into the dementia from which the real Thatcher now suffers, the film is in some ways a typical biopic; we see her go from an eager and brilliant daughter of a grocer to a prickly and ambitious member of parliament to become, finally, the longest-serving prime minister of Great Britain in the 20th century – the century’s most powerful woman. Director Phyllida Lloyd and screenwriter Abi Morgan do what Clint Eastwood failed to do in J. Edgar. They didn’t make a dull history lesson; they created something artful, inventive, intriguing, wry and entertaining. Much – but not all – of this is because Streep gives a performance as towering as any in her career.

George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Nick Krause and Amara Miller in The Descendants

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Alexander Payne won another Oscar for his screenplay to this low-key dramedy about a man dealing with finding out that his comatose wife cheated on him, their problematic children, and a large family squabble about what to do with a huge track of Hawaiian land they inherited. George Clooney is more sensitive, subtle, funny and sympathetic than he has ever been, and as his daughter, Shailene Woodley is wise and prickly and, out of nowhere, a star. By no means Payne’s best movie – that would be Sideways – it is still a moving, affecting little movie about the meaning and power of family.

The Adventures of Tintin

One the most underrated and underwatched movies of 2012, Tintin probably suffered from fear of the “uncanny valley,” the creepy name for the creepy feeling we get when CGI humans look too real. It initially unnerved me, too, but my love for Hergé’s original comic books about a young investigative journalist, his terrier Snowy, and a drunk ship’s captain named Haddock forced me to see what Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson would do with the iconic characters. And, wow, what they did. Stunning visuals, rollicking action, boisterous humor and a classic adventure story all reminded me of the Indiana Jones movies. Luckily, while Americans didn’t embrace the film, the rest of the world made it a massive hit, and a sequel is certainly to follow. Added bonus: Wondering if there’s a homoerotic subtext to Tintin and Captain Haddock’s friendship.

Felicity Jones and Anton Yelchin in Like Crazy

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Like Crazy is a naturalistic romance about two young people in love who behave like young people in love. There’s nothing crazy about them or the movie. That it’s still so successful, so entertaining and moving, despite being so honest and realistic, is a testament to the skills of director Drake Doremus, his co-writer Ben York Jones and the two little-known stars of the film, Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones. The movie is sort of like Weekend for the straight people. I adored it.

Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill in Moneyball

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On my favorite movies list of 2011, Moneyball manages to make baseball statistics dramatic and funny. Bennett Miller’s crafty use of slow motion, muted colors and slyly gorgeous cinematography creates an epic grandeur for what is really a story of office politics. He and the screenwriters use American audiences’ sentimentality about baseball to wonderful effect; Brad Pitt, as Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane, even comments on it when he asks, “How can you not be romantic about baseball?” Even Jonah Hill’s nerdy Peter, whose analytical geekiness is what drives much of the plot (and much of the humor), cannot help but get emotional about the game. Billy’s conflicting emotions – between love of baseball, righteous anger at how the business is run, anxiety about whether his decisions are right, frustration with his team – make this Brad Pitt’s greatest role.

Joel Edgerton and Tom Hardy in Warrior

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One of the great surprises of last summer, the mixed martial arts drama Warrior has a somewhat hard-to-believe plot, but that is subsumed by the intensity and authenticity of the performances and the scenes in the cage. Inception’s Tom Hardy seems to be channeling some cross between Rocky-era Sylvester Stallone and On the Waterfront-era Marlon Brando; he is the size of a gorilla and as angry as a rabid one. It would be perhaps too simple if not for a scene with a cowed Nick Nolte toward the end that flips our opinion of Tommy completely – he is more than a furious brute. But Joel Edgerton, in the Aussie’s first major role in an American film, is the biggest surprise here. As the sensitive, guilt-ridden family man and the smarter, rather than the bigger, fighter, he learns more of love and support than the damaged, unnerving Hardy. This is an excellent family drama masquerading as, and slightly hampered by being, a sports film. The final scene, as powerful and gut-wrenching as anything I’ve seen this year, merges the two genres brilliantly. I surprised myself and cried.

Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams in Midnight in Paris

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Woody Allen has been hit or miss over the last decade or so, but his latest film, Midnight in Paris, is one of the good ones; a delightful, fantastical comedy about what happens when one of your greatest dreams comes true. As in most of Allen’s comedies, if Allen isn’t the star, the lead actor is usually a stand-in for Allen. This time that stand-in is Gil, played to wide-eyed, neurotic, self-flagellating perfection by Owen Wilson. Wilson is wonderful, but the star of the film is Allen’s witty and wacky fabulist script.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

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If your jaw dropped at how realistic, how life-like and creepy Gollum was when you first saw him in The Fellowship of the Ring ten years ago, it will fall open again and your mouth will dry out when you see Caesar, the super smart chimpanzee at the center of Rise of the Planet of the Apes. In this surprisingly good prequel to Planet of the Apes, I was thrilled when the humans (James Franco and Freida Pinto) were off-screen, because Caesar and his fellow apes, communicating almost entirely in grunts and body language, starred in scenes as fascinating, entertaining, suspenseful and action-packed as the human scenes were dreary. By the end, as Caesar and his pals are marauding through San Francisco, you cheer for their dominance. These computer-generated apes just seem so much more alive.

Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer in The Help

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I must admit that I walked into The Help expecting to be offended. Because I knew it to be about a young white woman writing a book about the black maids in early 1960s Jackson, Miss., perhaps unfairly I expected it to be a prequel of sorts to the insidiously racist Sandra Bullock vehicle, The Blind Side. However, I was thrilled that The Help, in fact, is nothing like that. Despite (or maybe because of) some cloying sentimentality and an overly simplistic binary of good and evil, The Help is strikingly good populist entertainment about morality, ethics and bravery. Yes, it is about a white woman who helps black women rise up; but it is also about why and how these women fight back, why they decide to risk everything and why telling the truth becomes more important than anything else.

Paul Rudd in Our Idiot Brother

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Paul Rudd has been in a string of broad, absurd comedies over the last five years that have made him a star but which have not been remotely insightful. Our Idiot Brother does not have the depth of a good Woody Allen or the painfully strong laughs of Judd Apatow’s best, but I appreciated the moral center of the film. Ned may be an “idiot” but he’s also an intensely good person; better than anyone else around him. Director Jesse Peretz, working from a mostly cliché-free screenplay by his sister Evgenia Peretz and David Schisgall, keeps this highly populated story propelled at a nice pace, but still allows the rather impressive cast moments to improvise, make faces, grumbles and asides. Rudd, however, is the star of this show, and he is the center of all the laughter. And since he’s just so damn likeable, so is the film.

Christopher Plummer and Ewan McGregor in Beginners

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If you missed seeing Beginners in theaters this summer – and shame on you – it’s out on DVD Nov. 15. As I wrote a few months ago, the story of a gay father and his straight son “hasn’t found its way into too many movies. This is only one of the things that makes Beginners, Mike Mills’ exquisite new film starring Ewan McGregor as the straight son and Christopher Plummer as his newly out father, different. The other things – a non-linear story structure and a smart, funny and moving voice-over – are seamlessly combined with the kind of acting you expect from late-fall movies released as Oscar bait. I assume Beginners will be re-released at the end of the year just for that purpose, if for anything Plummer’s performance, arguably the best of his extremely long career.”

Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford in The Way We Were

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I must admit I didn’t see The Way We Were until it was referenced, and part of it recreated, in the season finale of Season 2 of Sex and the City, the great episode Ex in the City. Sydney Pollack’s 1973 film features one of the more iconic Barbra Streisand performances in a romance-over-the-decades, also starring Robert Redford (who never looked hotter). It’s funny, melodramatic and dated, and it’s rather perfect. A massive hit at the time, it should be on the list of “Films Every Gay Man Must See.”

Steve Carell and Ryan Gosling in Crazy, Stupid, Love

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One of the better movies of the summer was also its most under-watched. Crazy, Stupid, Love is about the divorce of Steve Carell and Julianne Moore; Carell’s friendship with an expert lothario played by Ryan Gosling and Gosling surprisingly falling in love with Emma Stone. It’s quite funny and enormously insightful about why we love and despair about love, and the acting, aside from Marisa Tomei’s insane cameo, is subtle and smart. It was written and directed by the guys who made the great I Love You Phillip Morris; Glenn Ficarra and John Requa are showing that they’re among the most promising American filmmakers.

Chris Evans in Captain America: The First Avenger

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I don’t think there’s much argument that Captain America: The First Avenger ended up being the best surprise of the summer movie season, at least as far as action films go. As I wrote in the middle of July, “Captain America is the fourth massively expensive comic book superhero movie to come out in the last three months, and it’s the only one that I wasn’t somewhat disappointed by. While Captain America is not quite in the league of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films, Bryan Singer’s X-Men or Christopher Nolan’s Batman, Joe Johnston has made one of the few comic book movies in the CGI era that uses technology to tell a mythic story better, instead of hoping technological wizbangs will mask a weak story or terrible script.”

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As I wrote in the spring, I laughed out loud several times while watching Bad Teacher. The younger men in the audience when I saw the movie were particularly enamored with the movie, especially when the issue of breasts was first and foremost. While Bad Teacher is a female-driven comedy, unlike Bridesmaids, it is not a depiction of a remotely realistic female; Cameron Diaz’s Elizabeth is a male fantasy, a hot and dirty, bawdy and easy cartoon. She’s like a Will Ferrell character in the body of a Victoria’s Secret model. Which is a pretty funny thing.

Brad Pitt in The Tree of Life

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The winner of the Palm D’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Terrence Malick’s tone poem about love, family and the meaning of life is not widely loved. Some people hate it, but I am not one. I think it’s one of the great achievements in film of at least the last decade. Outside the central story of a strained family in 1950s Texas (led by brilliantly sensitive and wrenching performances by Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain), it’s a nearly mystifying collection of images of nature, space, architecture and emotions. It is not a movie to be understood but rather to be experienced. I recommend watching it on a large-screen, HD TV. The Tree of Life

The winner of the Palm D’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Terrence Malick’s tone poem about love, family and the meaning of life is not widely loved. Some people hate it, but I am not one. I think it’s one of the great achievements in film of at least the last decade. Outside the central story of a strained family in 1950s Texas (led by brilliantly sensitive and wrenching performances by Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain), it’s a nearly mystifying collection of images of nature, space, architecture and emotions. It is not a movie to be understood but rather to be experienced. I recommend watching it on a large-screen, HD TV.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

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As I wrote back in June, “If you are the kind of moviegoer who is happy, even gleeful, about paying $16 to see Michael Bay’s special effects bonanzas in 3-D, then you will need to see, and may love, Dark of the Moon. It is by far the best of the three movies, and yes, that is damning it with faint praise. If you don’t compare it to other Bay movies, but rather to the work of his genre-mates like James Cameron, Peter Jackson and Spielberg, Dark of the Moon is a bombastic, occasionally fun to look at, but still craven piece of schlock.” On DVD, it’s a lot cheaper! Though you’ll probably miss some of the 3-D excitement.

James McAvoy in X-Men: First Class

Some people seem to think that the X-Men prequel that came out earlier this summer is the greatest superhero movie in years. It’s not, not by any means, but James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender, as Professor X and Magneto respectively, are both perfectly cast and have a lot of fun chewing scenery. (Jennifer Lawrence and January Jones, however, are problems.) The special effects and the action sequences are both pretty awesome, and the story about the creation of the super team of mutants during the Cuban missile crisis is pretty entertaining.

Paul Giamatti and Alex Shaffer in Win Win

The bittersweet comedy about a down-on-his-luck wrestling coach (Paul Giamatti) is not as wrenching and beautiful as writer-director Thomas McCarthy’s last film, The Visitor, or as revelatory as his first, The Station Agent, but Win Win is still a pleasure. While he works without studio money, McCarthy is still creating populist entertainment, but in that sort of world, rarely does anyone write and direct with the emotional authenticity that McCarthy does. The need for a win is something that we all desire in this rather dreary world, and McCarthy gives it to us.