Time waits for no critic. I still have to see, much less review, end-of-the-aughts releases like Up in the Air and The Lovely Bones and Nine but here it is Jan. 8 and I have to pause for a minute to consider Youth in Revolt, which opens today. Confession: I saw it about three months ago and if it weren’t for the press notes I’d be grasping at straws trying to recreate the experience, sort of like Mariah Carey recalling her work on Precious at awards-giving functions. Mitigating circumstance: Dimension Films pretty much forgot about it, too, shooting it before star Michael Cera had a playlist with Nora and leaving it in the can until the tens arrived.

Well, let’s see. Consulting the notes, “Youth in Revolt is a coming-of-age comedy that puts a fresh and outrageous stamp on a tale of adolescent obsession and rebellion.” Stop the presses: even with a stamp a coming-of-age comedy is as fresh and outrageous as a vampire movie, and a shelf-sitter of that variety (Daybreakers) is also bowing today. “Youth in Revolt is the story of Nick Twisp…”—wait, it’s coming back to me now, as I untangle this Nick from Cera’s other Nick in the nick of time. This is the movie where everyone says the name “Nick Twisp” a lot, including Nick Twisp, as if it’s the funniest thing in the world.

Sorry to report that it’s one of the funnier things in the movie. C.D. Payne’s cult books about Twisp, a horny, fumbling adolescent who adopts the more confident persona of a smooth-talking Frenchman, Francois, to connive his way out of teen angst have been Cuisinarted into a single 90-minute feature. Not having read them, I don’t know if they would have benefited from the Lord of the Rings treatment, but this feels a little skimpy. Then again, not a lot that can honestly be stamped “fresh and outrageous” happens to Nick Twisp, a Sinatra and Fellini fan clearly not cut out for high school or trailer-level living with his slatternly mom (Jean Smart) and her latest boyfriend (Zach Galifianakis)—he falls for a freer spirit, Sheeni Saunders (played by a newcomer Portia Doubleday, who almost pulls off having a Bond girl-type name), puts on an ascot and a mustache to win her over, and gets into minor-league trouble in the pursuit of amour.

I can see how this might work on the page. Neither screenwriter Gustin Nash nor director Miguel Arteta (of the fresher, more outrageous indies Star Maps, Chuck & Buck, and The Good Girl) gets how to make it gel on film, though. Aimlessly structured, the movie relies on the wit and charm of Cera, which are tangible but not bottomless in his latest trying-to-get-laid part. I kind of like him, like I kind of like Jesse Eisenberg (of the “land” movies: Adventureland, Zombieland) and the other softly, sweetly neurotic boy-men who pass for male leads these days, but they don’t give you a lot of tones. And we don’t get enough of Francois—from the trailer you might take this for a high-school Fight Club, yet Francois is more of an affectation than anything else. We get too much animation; when all else fails, the movie stops dead in its tracks for clumsy sequences that depict what’s rattling around Nick’s head, the sort of frippery that’s a sure sign that the core of the material was lost in a glut of whimsy.

Steve Buscemi, Mary Kay Place, Ray Liotta, Justin Long, and M. Emmet Walsh make fleeting appearances. I have every confidence that the year in film will pick up.

In a recessionary year most of the holiday releases have slimmed-down grab bag budgets, but two come in outsized, wrapped-and-ribboned boxes. Sherlock Holmes would seem to be destined for Dad, or even Grandma, as the fusty super-sleuth has pretty much been walking the PBS beat since the 1980s. Director Guy Ritchie and producer Joel Silver (Lethal Weapon, The Matrix, etc.) collaborated on last year’s RocknRolla, and the prospect of a gangsta Holmes for the great unwashed surely had the base quaking in its Depends. But the dreaded lad magazine reboot hasn’t happened.

What we have here is an accommodation. Taking its cue from Arthur Conan Doyle, who mentioned Holmes’ pugilistic abilities, the 2009 version knocks about 19th century fight clubs with sweaty abs and ripped torso. His drug use is minimized—but he is played by a recovered user, Robert Downey, Jr. The actor’s transformation from highly regarded cult actor to jailbird to mid-life action star is as improbable as the twists and turns in a Holmes story, but stomach muscles and all he gives a rewardingly eccentric, motor-brained performance, with his Chaplin accent up to snuff. Ritchie hangs back and doesn’t jazz it up too much with flashy, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels editing. Having Holmes calculate in voiceover how to lick his opponents, which we see in his mind’s eye, then in reality, is clever once, and enough to get the point across about his superior intellect and intuition. But franchise-seeking filmmaking thrives on repetition, so there it is again. Like I said, an accommodation.

Also accommodating is the storyline, tailored for those in the audience who aren’t the sharpest pencils in the box. There’s detection, far-fetched in spots, yet no real mystery. In 1890 London, Tower Bridge is going up, and the nefarious Lord Blackwood (the formidable Mark Strong, cast in every other London-set movie including RocknRolla) is going down, for heinous Jack the Ripper-type crimes. That we’ve encountered before, in Nicholas Meyer’s excellent Holmes continuation The West End Horror and two good films, 1965’s A Study in Terror (an early film credit for Judi Dench, airing during Turner Classic Movies’ Holmes fest this Saturday at 4:15 am) and 1979’s Murder by Decree—but Blackwood slips the noose and, apparently undead, ringleads magick misdeeds with an eye toward world domination. Watson, staunchly played by a hoping-for-a-hit Jude Law, assists, and worries/fumes about his friend, who can’t help experimenting on the dog and interfering in his relationships.

1985’s Young Sherlock Holmes had a similar, supernatural plot, and early, Oscar-nominated CGI effects. This Young-ish Sherlock Holmes has a lot more of them, and those that brought production designer Sarah Greenwood’s vision of the work-in-progress Tower Bridge to cinematic life are a lot of fun. (As is Hans Zimmer’s score, kind of Victorian Morricone, and one of his most entertaining.) The movie abandons the gentlemanly London of the Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce films for squalor, shot in burnished brown tones by Philippe Rousselot, that out-mucks and out-mires Gangs of New York, though that’s its only nod toward any sort of realism.

After the Madonna bust-up, I would have expected Ritchie to fill the production with babes, but, as a sign of reasonable restraint and sobriety, there are only four women in the whole movie, one of them suspiciously…wet in the first scene, one of them Watson’s put-upon fiancée (Kelly Reilly), one of them the criminally underused Geraldine James as landlady Mrs. Hudson, and the most conspicuous of them Rachel McAdams, as Holmes’ larcenous lady, Irene Adler. She is, unfortunately, the film’s weakest link. While Ritchie and the three screenwriters refrain from putting a winking “gay” angle on the Holmes and Watson partnership, McAdams is too girlish and not seductive enough in the role that gets to the heart of the great detective. But in a movie that I thought be studded with them, one misstep is forgivable. If you can bear the idea of a farting bulldog and slo-mo fireballs that shoot past Holmes and Watson in one scene, clue into Sherlock Holmes.

“Good movie, good movie,” said the ticket taker as I checked in for Avatar. With a bailout-sized pricetag, 3D, and the King of the World looking to reclaim his crown, it had to at least be a good movie. Hell, if James Cameron can wait 12 years to make a new feature, it should take me at least as long to recover from it.

Avatar, where the military industrial complex clashes with The Lord of the Rings, is an entertaining super-spectacle. But the second coming of film art will have to wait as Cameron takes the third dimension to its limit. Since the world-beating success of Titanic (a movie I love) and his long absence, Peter Jackson has stolen some his thunder, while George Lucas has gone a bit senile and Steven Spielberg has gotten into bed with Michael Bay, the Gollum of fantastic filmmakers. Cameron, meanwhile, has been making immersive undersea documentaries in IMAX 3D, and here he takes that weird, intriguing phosphorescent world, moves it to the surface, and shifts it to outer space. The Na’vi, the resident aliens, have a culture as dense as Tolkien, and a belief in the interconnectedness of all living things; the planet, Pandora, is a literal worldwide web. Having wasted our own resources, we humans are itching to get our grubby hands all over its precious elements, whatever the cost.

The uneasy coexistence of science, the military, and the natural order is Cameron’s recurrent science fiction theme. Avatar most reminded of The Abyss (1989), with one crucial difference. Twenty years later Cameron, a peacenik fascinated by warriors and warfare, seems to have given up on the human race. The Cold War-set The Abyss and the apocalyptic Terminator movies (his two worthwhile ones) offer some hope for us, and provide a means to reverse course—hey, the Berlin Wall came down just months after The Abyss premiered, so maybe we were really redeemable after all. No such luck this time, as Cameron recasts insurgency Westerns like Dances With Wolves or the Man Called Horse pictures as a firepower fairytale; not to spoil your Christmas moviegoing, yet unless there’s a sequel, we’re pretty much stuck with our inconvenient truths.

What does Cameron believe in? For moviegoers, the things that matter: A solid three-act structure, and technology in the service of storytelling, not the other way around. 3D is built into the DNA of the film (there’s no other way it should be seen) and, knowing that we’ll have enough things tossed at us during the previews (one, amusingly, for Piranha 3D; Cameron debuted on the ill-fated sequel to the 1978 original), he concentrates on more subtle atmospheric effects that welcome us to this strange new world, like the tendrilled “jellyfish” that live in the forest. He opens Pandora’s box carefully, and allows us to believe in it.

Cameron’s not the greatest writer, and can be crude. (I can only watch True Lies with the sound turned low.) He has a knack, though, for hiring actors who can push through the worst of it and stand and deliver when it counts. Encased in sensors and God knows what else, Zoe Saldana gives a passionate, even sensual, and altogether full-bodied (under the circumstances) performance as the Na’vi princess, and it’s a treat to see Aliens star Sigourney Weaver back in the saddle again. Cameron admires his bad guys, and Stephen Lang, who swiped Public Enemies from his co-stars in its final scene, plays Marine machismo with tremendous tyrannosaur intensity. That he was able to get any acting at all from the one-note and sullen Michelle Rodriguez, as a friendlier grunt, is a notable achievement.

I wasn’t sure what to make of Sam Worthington, who, with this, Terminator Salvation (no hard feelings between him and Cameron I assume), and the upcoming Clash of the Titans remake has cornered the market on half-humans. He is our avatar, the one who most fully, and dangerously, takes on alien form. It may be that I couldn’t quite believe that this foreign-bred actor, whose inconsistent accent apparently couldn’t be tamed, was a U.S. soldier; or perhaps Cameron failed to make his transition from our tribe to another as dramatic as it might have been. In a movie full of 3D wonders the lead lacks dimensionality.

There are other failures, such as Cameron’s belief in the redemptive power of closing credits theme songs—British pop singer Leona Lewis is no avatar for Celine Dion this time out. Of all the rotten things to come out of 9/11, and the war on terror, and all the highfalutin punditry spit out on cable news, the worst is having it recycled as movie clichés. Real-life shock and awe doesn’t translate too well as bigscreen metaphor, and Avatar goes through a bad patch of interconnectedness to The Huffington Post—then rouses itself for a non-stop return to pulpy Edgar Rice Burroughs territory, where it’s most easily assimilated and enjoyed. There’s a kind of greatness to Avatar, and a flatness, too. It’s a good movie, even a good movie in places, from the creator of some of the best genre entertainment ever made—and that’s all.

The Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man is in theaters. Michael Douglas is starring in Solitary Man, coming soon. Opening today is A Single Man, with Colin Firth as a serious, solitary man—with a death wish.

Eight months after the accidental death of his younger lover Jim (Watchmen co-star Matthew Goode), college professor George Falconer feels he’s reached the end of the line. It’s 1962, and the Cuban Missile Crisis is playing out, so everyone’s a bit fatalistic. But particularly George, who plans to end it all that day with a bullet to the head. First, however, there are the mundane practicalities to sort out before his dramatic exit, in the tastefully appointed cocoon of a home he shared with Jim in Santa Monica. These routines, however, throw him mildly off course, as he meets a handsome Latino hustler (model Jon Kortajarena) who takes life as it comes, sees an irritating neighbor (Big Love co-star Ginnifer Goodwin) in a different light while at the bank, and reconnects with his gin-swilling friend Charley (Julianne Moore), a fellow British expat who nurses an irresolvable crush on him. Offering a life-changing opportunity of a different sort, however, is one of his students, Kenny (Nicholas Hoult), who unexpectedly turns up outside his door.

Christopher Isherwood’s slender 1964 novel is a milestone in gay literature. Changing some of the particulars of the story the film pushes a reading of it as the author’s paranoid vision of his relationship with portrait artist Don Bachardy—they met when Isherwood, best known for the stories eventually adapted into the stage musical and film Cabaret, was 48 and Bachardy was 18. Their lifelong union, which ended only with Isherwood’s death in 1986, was the basis of last year’s moving documentary Chris & Don: A Love Story. Bachardy, now 75, consulted on the new film, which at its finest shares with its source George’s consuming, but quietly expressed, terror at being alone.

A Single Man peaks when Firth is doing very little. The slightly furtive way George folds shirts and rearranges his refrigerator speaks volumes about his fragile mental state, which he conceals with as stiff an upper lip as an Englishman can muster in the California sun. A spare and lovely score, by In the Mood for Love composer Shigeru Umebayashi, adds to this portrait, whose artist is very much the actor. Firth has never really added up for me—women (my wife included) adored him in the 1995 version of Pride and Prejudice, and his stock-in-trade has been a string of romantic roles that tend to put his female co-stars in charge. Here, though, he holds the screen. Roles like this, with few big moments, are difficult to pull off, but Firth does so immaculately—you can’t take your eyes off him. The supporting parts are cast to offset his enriching gloom: Moore is fun in a rowdy Ab Fab way, with great 60s hair and couture, and About a Boy co-star Hoult, who’s now about a man, has eyes as blue and deep as swimming pools, suitable for George to fall into as the story takes a Death in Venice turn.

The film’s virtue is its rippling silence. Its vice is the artsy clutter that first-time director Tom Ford imposes upon it, not unexpectedly given his fashion design fame. Eduard Grau’s desaturated-to-glam cinematography, pegged to George’s changing mood, is too pat a device, and at times he packs too much stuff in the frame, unintentionally undercutting his lead. A star voiceover early on, delivering bad news on the phone, is another distraction, however much it fits the timeframe and the ambiance the movie is going for, and Hitchcock references are as played out as last year’s collections. Another Ford, John, would have disapproved. But he brings empathy to his labor-of-love project, and as long as A Single Man concentrates on its single man the film is rewarding.

There are probably as many films about Orson Welles as there are films directed by him, including the 1975 TV movie The Night That Panicked America (Paul Shenar as Welles during the War of the Worlds radio broadcast fracas), 1994’s Ed Wood (Vincent D’Onofrio, adrift is late 50’s Hollywood), 1999’s Cradle Will Rock (Angus Macfadyen, staging Marc Blitzstein’s controversial musical piece), and 2001’s HBO film RKO 281 (Liev Schreiber, filming Citizen Kane). New York has recently seen two plays about him, Orson’s Shadow and the one-man show Rosebud: The Lives of Orson Welles, which starred Christian McKay, who is now playing the great multi-hyphenate in Me and Orson Welles.

Portraying Welles as he directs the Mercury Theatre in a teetering Broadway production of Julius Caesar in 1937, McKay goes beyond impersonation, or acting. It’s more like reincarnation. How thrilling it is to be in the presence of his whipsaw talent again, in all its splendor and its tyranny, as he improvises his way out of tight spots and gets into more of them with its amazingly generous, and extravagantly terrible, behavior. One scene alone, where he reads a passage from Booth Tarkington’s novel The Magnificent Ambersons five years before be made the famously doomed film version, is enough to warm the cockles of a critic’s cold, cold heart. Ladies and gentlemen—this is Orson Welles.

The “Me” is a problem. He, Richard (Zac Efron), is a callow high schooler who’d rather be in Julius Caesar than study it, and Welles, sensing a kindred daredevil spirit, gives him a small part. When the film is onstage, showing how the legendary production came together by the seat of its pants, it’s great fun, with colorful performances by Ben Chaplin as the egotistical George Coulouris, Eddie Marsan as the endlessly put-upon John Houseman, James Tupper as the horndog Joseph Cotten, and Leo Bill as the wily Norman Lloyd (still with us at age 95). The remainder, while not bad, is coming-of-age filler, as Richard seesaws between Welles’ ambitious assistant (Claire Danes, trying to make sense of a somewhat confused role) and an aspiring writer (the appealing Zoe Kazan). Efron, the Robert Pattinson of 2006, is as wooden as a desk. If his leftover appeal got this film off the ground, though, so be it. (Another plus is its stylish period detail, achieved not on the island of Manhattan but on the Isle of Man.)

What drew director Richard Linklater to this film I don’t know; then again, there’s not much of a thread between his indie triumphs like A Scanner Darkly and more commercial work like School of Rock. He films what interests him, and the prospect of McKay bringing a conception of Orson Welles to life may have moved him. It did me. With the right actor for the job Linklater should ditch the “me” next time and focus on the man, the myth, and the legend.