Jane Eyre: Bride of Rochester

For a film about a singular meeting of minds, Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre is kind of undistinguished. Now, the words remain delicious morsels straight from Charlotte Bronte’s novel, and the performances (Mia Wasikwoska, Michael Fassbender, Jamie Bell, and Judi Dench) embody three-dimensions like James Cameron never dreamed of. But like Never Let Me Go, another painterly romance where the words preach transcendence and the style settles for ordinary, Jane Eyre is pretty in the usual ways—jewel tones, peat planetscapes, lived-in antiques—animating everything in Bronte’s story except its spirit.

Rango: High-strung drifter

Like all stranger-comes-to-town plots, only with a wink and a monologue, Gore Verbinski's Rango is literally about a protagonist in search of his story, an identity defined by a plot, so maybe it’s right that the chameleon stumbles across an Old West that isn’t quite content to stay camouflaged to dusty leather and tattered denim. The fantasy elements—not just the anthropomorphism that comes with the ticket but a rattlesnake’s biological machine gun—and the war film interlude—an old-fashioned western horseback chase complicated with Apocalypse Now helicopters—overcrowd an already rich spaghetti West, but it hardly diminishes the basic postmodern pastiche, and the surrealist dream sequences provide passages of such beauty, wit, and imagination that you follow Verbinski down whichever rabbit holes and dead ends he falls into.

Hanna: Weapon XX

I was along for the ride until it turned out we weren’t going anywhere. In fact, I was really grooving on the film, thanking Orson Welles in heaven above for granting us a mainstream action film this insanely weird! Joe Wright must have spent decades studying Run, Lola, Run to capture Tom Tykwer’s delicate formula (hyper camera + running), though, of course, Tykwer had a method and Wright just had madness, and he marries this with fairy tale imagery, again for no reason, other than, I guess, it’s what we read to little girls, not that either the Grimm tradition of scaring little kids into submission or the Disney tradition of providing them fantastical hope has anything to do with this particular little girl, and we’re treated to the off-kilter performances of a ferocious Saoirse Ronan and Southern-fried Cate Blanchett and Tom Hollander’s take on Peter Lorre with a spring in his step, and all the while blares Hanna’s true claim to fame, a delirious score by the Chemical Brothers that has you wishing you could spend the rest of your days in a wintry German cuckoo clock shop/performance art sex club.

Source Code: Middle track

Here’s a lesson in relativity: Just because Duncan Jones makes movies that are challenging by Hollywood standards doesn’t mean he makes challenging movies. Source Code is such a Rorschach that it averages to a flatline, my heart euthanized by its total lack of passion. Most telling is Jake Gyllenhaal, who plays the goofy idiot blockbusters demand, constantly veering between groaningly miscast and almost breathlessly perfect. The opening is a jolt of energy that’s completely generic—establishing shots with an electric Hitchcockian score—and the closing is a bridge too far with intriguing complications (though, it should be said, the film utterly ignores them; despite the rampant fan-wanking, there’s a fine line between not spoonfeeding and not addressing). The romance is passionless, the shots are undistinguished, and Rod Serling whispered the twist in my ear fifty years ago.

Paul: Revenge of the nerds

There are two things to say about Paul, a game of Spot the Reference that could have been a lot more exhausting than it turned out to be. The first is its raison d’etre, a puzzle compiled by graverobbers who made no attempt to cover their tracks: here’s the Gorn, there’s the cantina song, someone just said “Get away from her, you bitch!” to Sigourney Ripley Weaver herself! No wit, no satire, just quotes from rotting carcasses that amount to a pleasant, nostalgic diversion with no return value. It’s postmodern plagiarism.

Mildred Pierce: A woman's picture

I’m not surprised by the deafening drone of Mildred’s detractors, who were all too happy to give Boardwalk Empire the exact same breaks they withhold here—it dilly-dallies but it looks like it’s headed somewhere interesting, it’s indulgent but who am I to contain Martin Scorsese, it’s all style and no substance but maybe it’ll grow—but I am dismayed by the sheer refusal to engage with a woman’s picture as a woman’s picture. Chalk it up to whatever you want—cultural politics, the decline of the miniseries, the melodrama’s transfer into the men’s lockerroom—but Mildred Pierce is one of television’s only feminist works about feminism, set—where else?—in the Haynesian Hollywood Hills, cultural capital of tawdry scandal and constant performance. And just like its magnificent heroine, it thrives on underestimation.

Certified Copy: Je ne sais quoi

It might be imperial to claim Abbas Kiarostami’s best film is his first outside Iran, not in Farsi, and starring an international star—in other words, the one that’s most European—but I have no guilt, because in my universe it’s true: Certified Copy is the most intellectually and emotionally stirring film I’ve seen since Inland Empire, waking long dormant oxygen tanks and then exploding them like Apollo 13 before successfully landing this bird somewhere, somehow, in some plane of existence. It’s a distillation of his decades-long projects—investigating the camera as a medium of truth and society as a medium of men—and a sly expansion of them, bridging the gap between Koker and Marienbad without so much as a wink. I can’t imagine you’re waiting for my endorsement, but I had a powerful experience going into the film blind and I’d hate to steal that from you, so I won’t so much as tiptoe past the trailhead—with William Shimell as James Miller as Kiarostami surrogate and Juliette Binoche as the world’s worst audience member—but I have to examine some of the film’s profound meanings, and that demands some discussion.

My Cinematic Alphabet: Diamonds of the night

In the interests of totally pinko inclusiveness, I tried to exclude films I already flog to death (like Diamonds of the Night and Last Year at Marienbad), but there are some stalwarts that will not be moved out of mere politeness. My other goal was to limit directors to a maximum of two, which covered most of my favorites, but unfortunately, no Rossellini; Antonioni wins that fight every time. No Coen or Kiarostami either, and their stock is right where I left it, standing proudly atop the current heap, so don't think of this as a list of my favorites. This is just a list of words and pictures wielding for me the semantic power of a lively, black-and-white dance to "This Time Tomorrow."

Red Riding Hood: Season of the witch

2011 in general and the weekly viewing of films in particular have taught me a valuable lesson: there are many different kinds of terrible movies. The Eagle may be incompetently scripted, but it’s degrees of quality better than the immoral (The Lincoln Lawyer), the amoral (The Mechanic), and the thunderously boring (Battle: Los Angeles). There are interesting failures (The Adjustment Bureau), and there are hilarious trainwrecks (Country Strong), but there are also totally harmless low-hanging fruits like Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood. If bad were the necessary and sufficient condition for critical drubbing, we’d be here all night wailing on goofy pieces of trash that just want to be goofy pieces of trash. Red Riding Hood is a Hallmark channel TV movie in the vein of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, but it’s hardly trying to do more than give tween girls an empowering fairy tale. And it’s a damn sight better at that than Sucker Punch.

Becoming Shameless: The changing face of TV's gay youth

I survived Shameless and all I got was this lousy idea. I mean, it can be powerful when William H. Macy’s drunk, abusive father isn’t stealing the spotlight with his drunk, abusive antics—par for the course for Showtime’s asshole antiheroes we’re supposed to root for—especially because it’s these interludes where the show is actually about something, the way these people on the margins, the economic state of nature, pull themselves together to survive. But what most blows me away in the age of Kurt and Blaine and Victoria Jackson is Ian Gallagher, played by Cameron Monaghan as a gay kid who expresses his gayness not through fashion or decorating or beating up fags but through gayness itself. Fancy that.