This season’s champ is clearly the feel-good urban horror movie Precious. It leaves no stone unturned to flatten us. A partial checklist of miseries: Poverty. Illiteracy. Morbid obesity. Incest and rape with dad. Two-time teenage pregnancy, the first resulting in a Down’s syndrome child matter-of-factly named “Mongo.” Oh, and it’s 1987, as AIDS did its worst to decimate whole communities. The movie is based, as the subtitle tells us, on the novel Push by Sapphire, and it pushes hard, squashing our tearducts. I smell a musical.

But wait, it gets worse. Poor Precious (Gabourey Sidibe), the punching bag of the title, is stuck in a festering, shades-drawn-tight Harlem apartment with her monster mother, played, in a performance of epic degeneracy, by Mo’Nique. Director Lee Daniels has conceived the film as a kind of fairy tale, with the big-boned actress as an unstoppable seven-headed dragon. From her sweaty couch she smokes incessantly, drinks buckets of Sunkist orange soda, defrauds the welfare authorities, and treats her daughter as her personal slave, hurling everything including the TV at her and poor Mongo—and she uses Precious for sexual gratification, too. Come awards time Mo’Nique should be whisked from the red carpet and transferred to the Hague to stand trial for crimes against humanity.

With only a good right hook at her disposal Precious lumbers on, finding allies in a lesbian schoolteacher (Paula Patton), a no-nonsense welfare worker (Mariah Carey, completely scrubbed of glamour), a male nurse (Lenny Kravitz, ditto), and a gaggle of fellow special ed kids. Daniels films all of this from the perspective of Precious’ limited consciousness, with dream sequences that show her imaginary life as a plus-sized supermodel, or a skinny white girl. The movie is co-presented by Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry, and bears their earmarks—abuse stories, echoes of The Color Purple, and the weird shifts in tone that make Perry’s hits so jarring. And it has some of the neon flamboyance of Daniels’ unclassifiable feature debut, Shadowboxer (2006), which cast Helen Mirren and Cuba Gooding, Jr. as mother-and-stepson assassins and lovers. Social realism goes down the stairwell along with that TV as Precious ducks the usual uplift and empowerment treatment.

I’ll give it that, and add that a motley cast acts persuasively. Good intentions, however, are scrambled together with the overripe awfulness of Precious’ degradation; it’s not enough for her to be greasily raped, the act has to be intercut with shots of pigs’ feet boiling nauseatingly on the stove. Precious wounds. But it’s also shameless, and a shambles.

You leave The Road thinking it’s at least ten degrees colder outside the theater than it actually is. Javier Aguirresarobe’s desaturated brown-gray cinematography perfectly captures the feeling you get from Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winner, of a dying, sun-deprived planet where night and day are all but interchangeable, and the only season is a chilly late fall. I was shivering when it ended.

And also mighty sleepy—that aesthetic is hard on the eyes. Director John Hillcoat has made an apocalyptic prison picture, Ghosts…of the Civil Dead (1988), and an apocalyptic Western, The Proposition (2005). Here he takes on the whole enchilada, and he does it very conscientiously, following the story of a father and son trapped in this wasteland practically to the letter. That fidelity, though, is a problem. If you’ve read the book, you really have seen this movie. It doesn’t give you anything more than McCarthy’s scorched earth prose did.

If you haven’t, well, as usual when blockbuster books don’t come across on screen, you’re likely to be left scratching your head. Like last year’s Blindness, the movie is a surface in search of a soul. The novel communicates a great deal by saying very little. The father is tormented by dreams of the world before the catastrophe, one only barely remembered, while the son knows only the world after. The rest is sort of a zombie movie waiting to happen—marauding cannibal gangs roam the roads, looking for two-legged meals, and the few other survivors encountered are suspect. (Like George A. Romero’s living dead movies, most of the film was grimily shot in Pittsburgh, and the association with the end of the world must thrill the town fathers no end.)

McCarthy doesn’t often foreground the horror (save for one terrifying incident early on). The focus is on the transcendent bond, which given the spare use of dialogue, and despite a good but overcompensating score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, is tougher to communicate. Caked in mud and filth, a look he seems to prefer, Viggo Mortensen is bedraggled and determined—but The Man, as he’s called, is let down by The Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who gives a whiny, less dimensional performance. The movie perks up a bit when that sly fox, Robert Duvall, turns up as a philosophical Old Man, then it’s back to muttering, and collecting cans, and trying to stay warm. As a film, The Road leads nowhere.

The world ends not with a bang, but with an Adam Lambert power ballad. That’s the takeaway from 2012, the flip side of The Road. Most filmmakers want to stretch, to grow, but Roland Emmerich is happy to kill off multitudes. This is the third time he’s gone after our big blue marble, after Independence Day (1996) and The Day After Tomorrow (2004), and when big arks slosh around the terrestrial bathtub that the Himalayas have become following a rash of Mayan-foretold earthquakes, volcanoes, and “super tsunamis,” I think it’s 99% safe to say he’s finished the job. (Maybe 95%.)

But just because your graphics engine gives you the power to drop the U.S.S. John Kennedy on an ash-covered black president or ravage Los Angeles with Playstation-ish temblors for queasy laughs doesn’t mean you should. Cecil B. DeMille and Irwin Allen showed a modicum of restraint in their spectacles, and peopled them from the top ranks. Emmerich is of the money shot-is-everything school, lavishing $200 million on a B-list cast and a jerry-built C-script that gets an affable John Cusack and his estranged family from one hot spot to another over the eventful if fatiguing course of two-and-a-half hours. (Along for the ride is actor/director Tom McCarthy, of last year’s mortal-sized Oscar nominee The Visitor—I shudder to think what he learned from Emmerich.)

For all the world-splitting antics, however, the only really memorable image is of Rio’s Christ the Redeemer statue crumbling, which we glimpse on a hazy TV screen. Everything else has a been there-done that quality—Emmerich has trouble topping himself, with the spaceship attack on the White House in Independence Day and the tidal wave sluicing through the Manhattan canyons in Tomorrow (a truly arresting sequence in a truly awful movie) setting the bar high for this sort of thing. We’ve seen worlds destroyed plenty of times now. It’s more satisfying to see them built up.

At his best, Nicolas Cage is an A-list special effect, throwing off all kinds of sparks. But outside of the occasional Adaptation his post-Oscar career has pretty much been one big La-Z-Boy, as he goes from one high-salaried, low-impact gig to another. (The name of a recent dud says it all: Next.) There was reason, then, to hope that the no-budget Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a collaboration with Werner Herzog, might shake him up—“snap out of it!” as Cher once advised him in Moonstruck. But the film is as clumsy as its title.

Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (1992) was a geekshow, and a good excuse for Harvey Keitel to rip into his psyche and, figuratively and literally, expose himself. It’s a stunningly unkempt performance. This in-name-only followup (the sort of thing that usually goes straight to video) isn’t at all harrowing, partly because Cage doesn’t have much to share other than a bunch of tics and drug-addled shtick. His bad lieutenant, a pill-popper investigating the murder of Senegalese immigrants while ripping off dealers, users, and the police department evidence room for their stashes, has three moods: coke (frantic), heroin (slowed-down, hallucinating), and crack (over the top, somewhere near Pluto).

Cage’s performance might have made sense if Herzog had committed to it, and gave it the sort of context that allowed Klaus Kinski to rivet audiences. But the director’s recent documentaries have far outranked his recent features, and the two-hour movie just sort of sits there, inert, neither crime movie nor camp. (Ferrara had the good sense to end his bath of depravity at about 90 minutes.) Seemingly written in a fit of ADD, William M. Finkelstein’s screenplay introduces new characters in every scene, losing track of ones we might be interested in, like Val Kilmer as Cage’s hard-nosed partner or Michael Shannon as the guard unwisely entrusted with the department’s drug seizures. Herzog has never been strong on plot, and he’s clueless as to how to move this one along.

Disappointingly, Herzog’s weak on images, too: New Orleans post-Katrina would appear to be a natural fit for him, yet his typically excellent DP, Peter Zeitlinger, stuck indoors for most of the duration, has contributed shockingly shabby cinematography. The movie could have been set in Scranton or Des Moines for all it matters. (If you were hoping, at the very least, for hambone accents, forget it; no one has one, surely a deliberate, and peculiar, touch. Only Mark Isham’s score has a twang to it.)

From time to time the movie bumbles into something worthwhile—the frowsy comedienne Jennifer Coolidge is surprisingly touching as Cage’s beleaguered stepmother. It’s a mystifying flop, as if Herzog were under the influence of gonzo cop melodramas like Year of the Dragon (1985), 8 Million Ways to Die (1986), and Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1987). But those 80s failures had a ridiculous conviction to them. This one, entirely reliant on Cage’s mannerisms, reeks of contempt.

This little clip is a litmus test for much you might get out of the movie. Imagine 20 minutes more of this and perhaps instead of seeing the film just wait for the most outlandish of it (the hallucinatory iguanas, the “gator cam”) to wash up on YouTube as well:

Magnet Releasing did a good job handling horror fave Let the Right One In last year so I’m confident its two-and-a-half-hour distillation of John Woo’s two-part, five-hour epic Red Cliff is in good hands, and I’m glad to see it getting some sort of theatrical release. Not having seen the U.S. version yet I can’t really comment on it, but I have seen the full-strength epic (which is available on DVD from Asia-based vendors) and can recommend this cut based on what I know will be retained—namely, its titanic battle scenes. The money’s clearly on the screen, and not, as with 2012, in the workstation, with digital effects complementing but not defining the complicated clash of ancient warlords. You sense Woo’s guiding hand throughout.

Hollywood appropriated Woo’s run-and-gun action stylistics, then the filmmaker himself, for about a decade. By the end of the era, and the appropriately titled Paycheck (2003), both were exhausted. With Red Cliff, Woo has joined the trend among Hong Kong and mainland filmmakers (Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, etc.) to mount elaborate historical pageants and, given his chops in the field (The Killer, Hard-Boiled, and Face/Off, an astute use of Cage, are favorites), he blows the lid off the genre. That said, it’s impersonal—the whirling dervish gunfights and their noir-ish underpinnings have no place in the Han Dynasty, and the sociopolitical resonance of Yimou’s Hero is absent. But what Woo does with ships, and swords, and masses of armies is hugely impressive. And the excellent Tony Leung (from Hero and In the Mood for Love, among other contemporary Asian classics) holds all the intrigue together by quietly flexing star power. With China absorbing everything else in the U.S., I’m glad the country has imported the grand old traditions of Hollywood, just in time for the dreariest moviegoing Thanksgiving on record.

This is the feature directing debut of Grant Heslov, who, with George Clooney, co-wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay of Good Night, and Good Luck. Clooney co-stars as Lyn Cassady, whose eyebrow-raising tales of being the army’s prized goat whisperer attract flailing reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor). Wilton, whose life and career are in tatters after his wife dumped him for an editor, wants to be embedded in Iraq, but instead winds up entwined with Cassady, who claims to be a member of the “New Earth Army” that is training “warrior monks” to literally brainstorm America’s enemies. But the program’s founder, uber-hippie Bill Django (Jeff Bridges) has gone missing, and the whole agenda is floundering due to petty grievances between the New Earth Army and a rival camp run by rebel psychic Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey), who is training his own elite squad. Hooper is wildly envious of Cassady, who is bent on finding his mentor, as Wilton ultimately finds himself.

Clooney, McGregor, Bridges, Spacey, with assists by Stephen Root, Stephen Lang, Robert Patrick, and a goat or two—it held promise. But the movie stares into its navel, then back at you, vacantly. Other than the amusing recreations of the experiments, there’s little to chew on. The updating to our present state of warfare is only tepidly satirical. It’s no Three Kings II for Clooney. He’s an expert doofus for the Coen brothers, whose current film, A Serious Man, is similarly mystifying—but open to interpretation. It gives you something to puzzle over and try to define. These Men, though, are yoked to a screenplay that’s nothing more than a ragtag collection of throwaway gags and arch mannerisms. Clooney is poker-faced and enigmatic, Bridges is a flower power Duke who’s thrown in with the army, Spacey is snide (which is better than his sentimental side, but not asking much of his abilities), and McGregor merely dull.

The movie is more frivolous than the Ocean’s pictures, which wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t so strenuously empty. Without having to concentrate too hard I predict it will leave you as it left me, at a loss for words. Why was The Men Who Stare at Goats made into this movie? The climax suggests it’s a male empowerment fable, like the film pulled from Oliver Sacks’ Awakenings, which indicated that all those people had to go in and out of comas for the socially inept Sacks character to work up enough nerve to ask a woman out on a date. Some smart people have conspired to dumb down a potentially fascinating tale. Read my mind: The Man Who Stare at Goats is a waste of time.

Since then I’ve pretty much been on the other side of the fence, finding von Trier trying. I did enjoy the supernatural satire of his two-season Kingdom TV show, which Stephen King did not improve upon for US viewers. But the Oscar-nominated Breaking the Waves (1996) made me seasick, and don’t get me started on his alleged musical Dancer in the Dark, with the ever-glamorous Catherine Deneuve in a kerchief as an oppressed factory worker, and Bjork so terrorized on-set she ate a sweater between takes (Cannes ate it up, and von Trier and Bjotk split an Oscar nom for best song, the aptly titled “I’ve Seen it All”). The Brechtian Dogville (2003) was another exception, marred by closing credits that suddenly underlined everything that had been fascinatingly submerged in its seamy portrait of an America he has never visited (intensely phobic, he doesn’t get out much)—the awful sequel, Manderlay (2005), was essentially that condemnatory coda extended by 135 minutes. So I didn’t know what to think when, after an intense period of depression, von Trier announced his return with a horror movie, Antichrist, which expands its run this Halloween weekend (and is also available on IFC on Demand).

Antichrist puts the “porn” in “torture porn.” It’s explicit, ridiculous, and infuriating. And also beautiful. One of the best films of the year—and maybe one of the worst, the dividing point is very fine—I emerged from it with my head cleared. Whatever else was on my mind has been temporarily erased. A chunk of the audience hooted it down, and I knew where they were coming from. Von Trier is a world-class mindfucker who does nothing in half-measures, which is a gift and a curse all at once.

The film begins with thrashing sex, complete with hardcore insert shots (which are, as it happens, vital to the story). Stunningly shot in slowed-down black-and-white by Anthony Dod Mantle (this year’s Academy Award winner for Slumdog Millionaire), the sequence is set to high-church Handel music, and is as artfully paced and composed as one of Brian De Palma’s filmic arias. (The movie credits a “horror movie researcher,” one of several researchers on the project—the credit made my audience giggle, but he did his job well, with Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion also checklisted in a borrow-from-the-best way.) The bathroom coupling of stars Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg includes a toothbrush being knocked to the floor in slo-mo, the sort of thing that perfectionist De Palma would have reshot, but von Trier lets ride, no matter that it’s silly. Anyway it’s not the point. As they grapple, their son hops out of his crib in his room, walks to the window, and plunges to his death.

Thereafter Dod Mantle’s cinematography switches to a pallid color, the hues of grief and regret. The nameless husband and wife try to cope, but flounder. He, a therapist, tries to get her to face her deepest fears; she resists. But to continue their unorthodox therapy she agrees to accompany him to their cabin in the forest of “Eden,” where the previous summer she was developing a thesis on gynocide (the mass killing of women, as in witch hunts). Though set outside Seattle, the film was shot in Germany, in a fairy-tale forest, and there are dream-like sequences as voluptuous as any ever devised.

Yes, Eden: the movie is awash in the symbols the therapist discredits. Nature itself seems to be in revolt, as the trees crash about, acorns rain down, and the animals act—unusually. In the scene that came to define the movie when it was shown to an uproarious crowd at the Cannes Film Festival, a fox that is chewing on its own innards turns to Dafoe and hisses, “Chaos reigns.”

Ever the self-promoter, Von Trier seems to enjoy that the scene has become creepy camp—whatever gets paying customers. But I find that attitude annoying—if you’re going to put a talking fox in your movie, and it’s not a stop-motion figure that’s speaking with George Clooney’s voice, you should defend it unto death artistically. But perhaps its presence is a tactic, to disarm us for the next, upsetting developments, which Dafoe and particularly Gainsbourg, a usually wan actress-singer whose marble-mouthed performances (as in 21 Grams and I’m Not There) I’ve never really cottoned to, bravely enact.

Von Trier is tough on women, what with the crazy plights he cooks up for them, but he empathizes with them and the performers tend to come through for him. Gainsbourg won the best actress award at Cannes, as much as anything for sheer willingness to do shocking things on camera, which helped her co-star win a spot on New York magazine’s “Ten Most Brutalized Wangs in Movie History” list; what she does to herself is equally unspeakable. The return to (groan) Eden struck the Catholic in me, however, as a mystic attempt to reverse the effects of original sin, all wrapped up in a female-centric vision that recalls the witchy mythology of Dario Argento’s “Three Mothers” trilogy. Unmoved by this, or von Trier’s ham-fisted use of subliminal imagery, stilted dialogue, and other irritants—the movie is bigger on overarching themes than scares, which annoys some genre buffs—you might just react as if bad chili had been consumed. But I hung in there, and found Antichrist difficult to dismiss, or ignore. The exasperating Lars von Trier, put-on artist, faker, and flaky visionary, had me again, the bastard.

And this:

And of course this:

A Spike Jonze short film of Maurice Sendak’s pint-sized classic Where the Wild Things Are might have been solid gold. (An animated short was produced in 1973.) But Jonze has attempted a full-length, live-action version, which makes no sense. Then again, on paper, Being John Malkovich (1999) and Adaptation (2002) didn’t make a lot of sense, either, but he and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman conjured movie magic from them. There was hope.

And there is fulfillment. Where the Wild Things Are is by no means a disgrace, like the godawful movies torn anguished and bleeding from the carcasses of How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Cat in the Hat. It’s respectful. It may grow on me. But I sympathized with the guy sitting across from me at the screening, who woke up when the end credits rolled, joined in the polite, scattered applause, and fled. Truth be told, I was a little droopy too.

I don’t think I have to tell you the story, which, besides the book and the animated version, has also been a ballet and an opera since 1963, and is only 400 words long. But I do have to tell you the backstory, which Jonze and Dave Eggers have supplied. Nine-year-old Max (played by a relative newcomer with the perfect Popdose name, Max Records) is having abandonment issues, first with his older sister, who leaves him to fend for himself in a snowball fight with the neighbors, then with his harassed mom (Catherine Keener). Max gets back at his sister by stomping all over her room in his wet snow boots. When his mother, already simmering over that episode, explodes when he dons a wolf costume and acts out in front of her boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo, severely overqualified for a minute-long part) Max hightails it out of the house, and after a tumultuous sea voyage finds himself … where the wild things are.

These are, however, fairly mild things. Crafted by the Jim Henson Creature Shop, and augmented by digitized facial expressions, they claim to need a king, but a few months on Prozac might do the trick. There’s the sorrowful Carol, voiced by James Gandolfini, who befriends Max, and becomes his consigliere when the boy assumes the throne. (Other actors stuck in the 9’-tall costumes had to tough it out in the wilds of Australia, where the film was mostly shot.) Uneasy lies the crown, though, as the wild things reveal their neuroses. Carol is hung up on KW (Lauren Ambrose), who’d rather split the scene. And no wonder: Cranky Judith (Catherine O’Hara) is always sniping at Max, as he tries to rally the beasts long enough to build the magical fort of his dreams. Her endlessly patient companion, Ira (Forest Whitaker), is no real help, nor is the rooster-ish Douglas (Adaptation Oscar winner Chris Cooper) or goat-horned Alexander (Paul Dano), whose personalities are even less defined.

The creatures rouse themselves long enough to indulge in their “wild rumpus,” then later smack each other with dirt clods, and there are a couple of fleetingly monstrous moments: one character loses a limb (which is replaced with tree branches) and Max is forced to jump down KW’s throat and hide in her stomach when the things get out of hand. The teasing suggestion that KW might actually consume Max provides the film with one of its more offbeat moments, then it’s back to lumbering around the forests, deserts, and seascapes. Cinematographer Lance Acord injects a bit of spectacle into some of the locales, so a stroll through the sands looks like Lawrence of Arabia with Muppets.

Restraint, however, is the guiding principle. Where the Wild Things Are has been analyzed to death, and Jonze and Eggers have done their homework, laying the psychological groundwork for Max’s flight from home (lots of semi-frantic handheld camerawork in the early scenes), splitting Max’s roiling id into the creatures to represent aspects of himself (dutiful, passive, pissed-off), etc. It’s all sort of therapeutic, in an Eggersy sort of way—and it misses the whimsical scariness that drew kids, the presumed target audience, to the material in the first place. Jonze’s personality seems submerged. What would Kaufman have made of this?

Records I liked; the kid’s a natural, and to the extent that the movie works it does because his energy stirs the sleepy wild things. The costumes adhere to the book but have an unenchanted heaviness to them, and everyone except the caustic O’Hara and the purring Ambrose speaks their lines in the same muted, diffident, whatever tones. “We thought of them as people the entire time,” Eggers says in the press notes. People who spend some of their time with their analyst; Carol could be a Tony Soprano who followed Dr. Melfi’s advice to the letter, and still couldn’t hack it. This is the one movie that could have used some of Jack Black’s undisciplined rowdiness. (It might have used less of Karen O’s hipster lullaby music.)

I don’t want to undersell the charms of Where the Wild Things Are. It has some. But you’ll understand why KW wants to be moving along. I’m interested to hear what children make of this sober treatment, which for all its sincerity is as much fun as an anger management class.

An Education takes place in 1961, just before London started to swing. From the start, the movie is excellent at signifiers: The period production design (Andrew McAlpine), art direction (Ben Smith), set decoration (Anna Lynch-Robinson), and costume design (Odile Dicks-Mireaux) all show a proper, if mildewed, English reserve, and the lighting, by John de Borman, has an uncanny restraint, as if it too is being rationed. Conservatively raised by parents Jack (Alfred Molina) and Marjorie (Cara Seymour), Jenny would seem to be far from the epicenter of the cultural earthquake that would collapse the fifties into the sixties. But she’s a little braver, and more precocious, than her schoolmates, to the occasional dismay of her teacher, Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams), and the institution’s headmistress (Emma Thompson), who see her as Oxford material.

However, the enigmatic businessman who gives Jenny a ride home one day in his Bristol roadster, David (Peter Sarsgaard), sees her as something else. At least twice her age, and Jewish to boot, David is enchanted by his slightly thorny rose, who is in turn captivated by his stories of Paris and his familiarity with the worlds of art auctions, nightclubs, and racetracks. That David’s business partner, Danny (Dominic Cooper, from Mamma Mia! and The History Boys) and Danny’s girlfriend, the sexy but scatter-brained Helen (Rosamund Pike), are a rougher sort, and that the nature of their business is on the shady side isn’t too worrying. Jenny’s hooked, and so, to her surprise, are her parents, who buy the couple’s white lies, figuring that her association with a worldly type who brags about his friendship with C.S. Lewis can only improve her chances of getting into Oxford.

This is a coming-of-age story where sex isn’t the main preoccupation, despite the Polanski-ish age gap. There is sex, during Jenny’s 17th birthday jaunt to Paris, but it’s not exactly earthshaking. An Education is more about the collision of youthful ideals and adult practicalities. Coping with David, who lives in a haze of Gauloise cigarettes, French movies, and romantic daydreams, is in some ways the least of Jenny’s turbulent rites of passage. There’s school, taught by nun-like teachers whose business is turning out correctly brought-up ladies with options that are ultimately as limited as theirs, and home, which buzzes with hypocrisy. This isn’t a spoiler kind of movie, but it’s a shock, to Jenny and to us, when her strait-laced parents react the way they do to one of David’s entreaties, so mum’s the word. Who can ever forget the day when Mom and Dad, the gods who walked among us, turned out to be mere mortals after all?

Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig is best known for directing Italian for Beginners, one of the best (or at least more watchable) of the stripped-down Dogma pictures that were the arthouse rage for a time. She and Hornby bring a matching his-and-hers sensibility to this more mainstream material, he supplying a rueful wit to underpin the life lessons and she staging the scenes and directing the actors simply and clearly. I wish, though, that someone had toned down composer Paul Englishby’s score, which brims with schmaltz where there might be silence, but this is the only really wrong note.

The British cinema has a deep bench of supporting players to draw from; Williams, from Rushmore and The Sixth Sense, and of course Thompson are outstanding as authority figures whose concern about her wayward behavior runs deeper than Jenny realizes. Usually cast to intimidate, and nicely paired with Cooper, Pike (the bad Bond girl in Die Another Day) is funny without playing down to her role. The movie seemed to be wrapping up and Sally Hawkins, the star of Happy-Go-Lucky, hadn’t turned up yet, but then there she was, very unhappy in a small but key role.

I resisted Alfred Molina for years. The big-boned actor was always too broad and boorish for my taste. But playing a pair of outsized roles in 2004, Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway and Dr. Octopus in Spider-Man 2, cut him down to manageable size, and I found I liked the svelte version. He’s terrific here as Jenny’s dad, conscious of his middle position in the social pecking order while quietly, then avidly, hungering for more for his family. You feel for his entrapment.

You don’t know what to feel about David. Brits and Aussies play Americans so well I no longer notice the body snatching. I feared the worst on Broadway last week when Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman bit down, hard, on their Chicago accents in A Steady Rain, but it wasn’t long before they had me. Our performers, meanwhile, rarely cross the pond for native parts. Sarsgaard isn’t as airtight as Renee Zellweger, say, in the Bridget Jones films. The slipperiness, though, and the actor’s somewhat unformed and tentative look are good for the character, a child-man for all his irresistible airs.

“Irresistible” is the word for Mulligan. Without her the film would be conceivable, but not nearly as compelling. She was in Pride & Prejudice and the Bleak House miniseries in 2005, then caught my eye in “Blink” (2007), a spine-tingling episode of Doctor Who, after which I turned to my wife and said, “She’s going places.” And she was: I next saw her on Broadway in last fall’s revival of The Seagull, where she was a shattering Nina opposite Sarsgaard’s Trigorin. In a blonde wig she was unrecognizable in two scenes early on in Public Enemies. The 22-year-old holds the screen here, getting right to the heart of the matter of Jenny’s urges, desires, and doubts. An Education does many things well, but as a lesson in star power it’s unbeatable.

An Education opens today in New York and Los Angeles, and expands nationwide next week. Here’s the trailer, which hints at its special quality.

The good times. Ed Wood at midnight. Vertigo, Playtime, and the 2007 restoration of Blade Runner in 70mm. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and numerous other movies with the creative personnel in attendance, seated feet away from me in the cheap seats (the ones closest to the stage and podium). Discovering prominent international filmmakers like the Dardenne brothers—The Son was the film of theirs that really knocked me out. Hooting at Gaspar Noe’s putrid I Stand Alone—he did stand alone, before the most hostile audience I’ve seen.

If there were an easier way to access the year-by-year festival lineups online, I’d stroll down memory lane for an entire column. (One more: My sympathy for the unemployed protagonist of the film Time Out, when I was in the same unhappy boat.) That’s one bone I’d pick with the festival, whose archiving could use work. Then again, there are memories I’d rather block out. Like the snide questioner who asked Boogie Nights writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson how much the film cost, to which he shot back a temperature-lowering “Was it worth it?” when Anderson replied $15 million. The audience questions in general tend to be migraine-inducing, particularly when asked in three parts—but I have to say that the Q&As after festival press screenings, with professional journalists raising their hands, aren’t always that much more enlightening. Then of course there are the many tepid-boring-bad movies I’ve paid an escalating price for, from $8 fifteen years ago to $20 today; I’d regret them more if I could summon them from the web and actually recall them.

The New York Film Festival is a capital-A Art event. There is no market, and no prizes—the honor is in being selected (then chosen for a more prestigious weekend slot; there is a pecking order). But it’s also intensely insular, with a taste for institutionally flavored culture-vulture programming, and it tends to cherry-pick from festivals earlier in the year rather than break new ground. Chairing the selection committee since forever is Richard Pena, the program director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Every year he gets the same questions about why the festival is so inbred, with the same filmmakers coming back year after year, even if the films are lackluster. One year I asked them, for Newsweek.com, for an article that seems to have fallen into the same dead zone where the festival archives reside. I’m pretty sure he gave the same, patient answers: It wasn’t a banner year for more commercial cinema. The committee, a selection of diverse individuals, felt these were the best ones. Who doesn’t love Hou Hsiao-Hsien?

OK, he didn’t say that. But the Taiwanese filmmaker has gotten a more-than-usual share of wet sloppy kisses from the selection committee, some of them careless. There seems to be a Hou Hsiao-Hsien slot reserved for his latest film in early fall in New York. I don’t really begrudge it; in a flat-lining marketplace for foreign-language cinema this may be the only exposure the film gets anywhere in the U.S. But there seem to be a lot of these slots, filled by the same auteurs.

Sharing this year’s Headline-Grabbing Provocation slot are three festival darlings: Lars von Trier, whose Antichrist has been churning ink since Cannes, the no-longer enfant but still terrible Harmony Korine (whose Trash Humpers is described as “a new form of freak-folk art”), and Todd Solondz, whose Happiness (which I saw on a memorable festival Friday in 1998 right after Rushmore) was truly provocative, but whose career has been less-than-happy since. (Advance word on Life During Wartime, which I’m seeing, doesn’t suggest a turnaround—and Noe’s new one, Enter the Void, must be really lousy for it not to show.) Slots are filled by countries in vogue with cinephiles, hence the Romanian slot (Police, Adjective), the China slot (Ghost Town), the Korean slot (Mother, who I’m also visiting this year), and the Filmmakers I’ve Never Liked and Don’t Know Why They Keep Returning slot (Bruno Dumont, come on down!). Again, maybe they’re all outstanding works of art. But if you keep up with the trends, you know what’s coming well before the lineup arrives in your mailbox before Labor Day. It has cohesion. It lacks sizzle.

I’ve seen three of this year’s selections, including tonight’s opener and the closing night film. They fit in nicely.

Occupying the Morose Intellectual Director, or maybe the Heavygoing Thesis, slot is Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, an initially intriguing film that sputters over 145 minutes. No, I don’t much like Haneke, not either version of Funny Games or even the highly regarded Cache, but I have a grudging respect for his insinuations. Told as a mystery, The White Ribbon unfolds in a rigidly cloistered German community in 1914, where a series of misfortunes seeds a cloud of suspicion over the townspeople. The villain is fascism, which is practiced in various ways, some more petty than others but all of them leaving a stain, particularly on the younger generation that will inherit the soon-to-be-shattered country. The sheer beauty of Christian Berger’s black-and-white cinematography is meant to show how ugly things can take root in pastoral surroundings—but the snowfall and fields are so pretty it’s impossible to believe anything bad could actually happen. The bleak message is continually undercut by its bountiful look.

Occupying the Pedro Almodovar slot is…Pedro Almodovar, whose Broken Embraces closes the festival. As usual the plot is a tangle of fateful intersections, at least one of them literal, but as Almodovar turns 60 the tone is more introspective (and the splashy sex and violence of “the early, funny ones,” to quote Woody Allen’s equally self-reflexive Stardust Memories, toned down). It’s hard to dislike one of his pictures, especially one where his vivacious good luck charm, Penelope Cruz (pictured above), wears a bunch of wigs and outfits and has a ball in the movie-within-the-movie, which is a lot like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Trouble is, you’ll want to stay in that movie, or on the beaches of the volcanic island locale of Lanzarote, rather than spend the excessive time given over to its blinded director-turned-writer (Lluis Homar). The somewhat-noir, sort of-comic film has its compensations, but they’re spread a bit thin over 128 minutes. After the sturm-und-drang of the preceding two weeks, though, the overcast Broken Embraces is likely to feel downright sunny.

The Old Master slot, a fiercely competitive one each year (the festival, to its credit if not always to its credibility, respects its elders), is claimed by the 87-year-old Alain Resnais, who is determined not to go gentle into that good night with the opening night film, Wild Grass. It’s wild, all right, as the filmmaker who bent time and space with the classic Last Year at Marienbad uncorks his inner David Lynch. A daffy non-sequitur ending caps a series of misadventures set in motion by a purse snatching. My best guess was that the lovelorn lead, played by Andre Dussollier, was suffering from dementia as the dead ends, coincidences and absurdities piled up around him and the dentist-aviatrix (Sabine Azema) he thinks he loves. But there’s no guessing—I don’t know what brought X-Files composer Mark Snow together with Resnais but it’s the sort of merger that catches you off-guard. This is a poker-faced romp, not the usual pomp-and-circumstance opener…and, yes, quelle surprise for a festival that could use more of them.

Sandra, I loved you once, peaking somewhere around 1995, but girlfriend, you’re not growing. And I know you know it. And you know your audience knows it, too. You fooled them once this summer. But having to discover All About Steve, at your age, is as much a chore for them as it is for you. (“This finding-out-about-love shit again,” I imagine you muttering as you report for duty.)

How you, and all the other gals—and all the other guys, for that matter—must envy Meryl Streep. At age 60, with an astonishingly flab-free 32-year career in film, TV and theater behind her, and Katharine Hepburn-type longevity clearly ahead of her, Streep is at the top of her game, as an actor and as a genuine movie star, that rare performer who can get butts into seats without gimmicks. How does she do it? It’s simple—she plays real people uncannily well, and we respond to that knowingness.

I caught up with Julie and Julia, her latest hit, the other night. Writer-director Nora Ephron was correct to split the movie’s structure between her Julia Child and the blogger (rising sort-of star Amy Adams, her co-star in Doubt) who’s emulating her. Child was pretty much a happy, unconflicted personality, and happy, unconflicted personalities don’t make for good biopics. The critics were wrong—while I wish the movie weren’t as shapeless as it is in places, and that Adams’ scenes didn’t smack of manufactured crisis, I didn’t want more of Child. I got what I wanted, and that was Streep busting through Dan Aykroyd’s infamous parody (which Child loved, and which is shown in its entirety in the film) and the subject’s peculiar mannerisms to get at the marrow of the matter. The way Child responds to later-in-life husband Stanley Tucci’s declaration of love on Valentine’s Day, the way she masks her pain when sister Jane Lynch writes that she’s having a baby, the unstated heartache of her life (“I’m so…happy,” she exhales), her quiet whoops at finally having her cookbook published…that’s what I wanted to see, and I saw it so clearly through her acting. Wisely, Ephron doesn’t make a big deal of Child’s prowess in the kitchen and indulge in food porn—the point is that if you apply yourself, like Julia and Julie, you, too, can master the art of French cooking. It’s not Iron Chef. It’s a discipline, and Ephron knows we’ve come to see her star practice her craft.

The beauty of Meryl Streep (other than the fact that she’s strikingly lovely, with little evident tinkering) is that she’s transcended craft, by which I mean she’s no longer about the externals. Critics rapped her for this, and the accents and the mimickry made her an ice princess with viewers, admirable but intimidating. Whereas today’s stars-in-training go through a strict regimen of commercial fare to establish a boxoffice base—an effects movie, a superhero movie, a chick flick, an indie for critical cred, the whole Ryan Reynolds/Megan Fox thing—Streep had the good fortune to mentor with directors like Woody Allen and Robert Benton, which gave her a taste for finer, meatier roles. She’s startlingly opaque in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), not giving an inch to Dustin Hoffman in a difficult, unlikable part.

But by Sophie’s Choice (1982, pictured) and her second Oscar, we thought we had her number. The performance has aged well. But at the time awe at the achievement was tempered with a certain disdain for all the obvious effort that went into it. She wasn’t faking it, exactly, but she wasn’t living it, like Hepburn or Bette Davis or the great stars, who may not have had the same facility but burned with soul. The terror and eroticism of the part seemed to be all on the surface, at a remove. She’s more comfortable, I think, in Out of Africa (1985), and completely in her element playing another troubling and unknowable woman in 1988’s A Cry in the Dark—you’re less aware of the machinery. But as the Oscar nominations (15 and counting) piled up so I think did a useful dissatisfaction, which allowed her to move on.

Her Yale School of Drama classmates thought it funny that Streep became a great tragedienne, when her brightest student roles were comic. So did she: As Garbo talked, Streep laughed. Clad from head to toe in pink she’s the only outstanding element of 1989’s She-Devil, and perfectly at ease laughing at Albert Brooks’ jokes in Defending Your Life (1991). There were two great roles in this necessary loosening-up phase. According to legend the 41-year-old Streep was sought for the mother part in 1990’s Postcards from the Edge; the producers, aghast when Streep requested the daughter role, were let off the hook when Shirley MacLaine accepted it. That’s a funny story about ageism in Hollywood, but she laughed last as she embraced the contradictions of a struggling showbiz survivor with a nosediving career arc the opposite of her own. And she brought out the best in everyone; I’m not sure Dennis Quaid has ever been as good as he was when cheating on her.

Made before Robert Zemeckis went all Gumpy, 1992’s Death Becomes Her (pictured) is a personal favorite. It could be looked at as a concession to the effects-driven mentality that started to overrun Hollywood in the early ’90s. Whereas the flawlessly lacquered Angelina Jolie seems like an extension of the workstation when she’s running amuck, Streep and Goldie Hawn, another trooper in one of her last good parts, make the technology work for them. They’re hilariously mean-spirited in their physical and moral decay. I never thought Streep had such lowly rowdiness in her. The makeover was working; she was successfully upending expectations.

Part of Streep’s star quality is that she’s restless. She works a lot harder than her nominations-less brethren, with a handful of parts every year or so. Not always wisely: A good liberal, she probably felt obligated to wade into the quicksand of 2007’s war-on-terror duo Rendition and Lions for Lambs. 1994’s The River Wild, while a modest hit, was action territory she’s left to Jolie and a younger generation. But whatever she’s doing she never condescends. 1995’s The Bridges of Madison County is an “accent part” that grafts flesh-and-blood longing onto a role drawn from a potboiler, and she and the unlikely Clint Eastwood harmonized. It broadened the base, just as 2002’s Adaptation put her on the cutting edge with Spike Jonze and Charlie and Donald Kaufman.

Then came the rainmaker. I’m completely captivated by 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada (pictured), where from the ground up Streep reinvented a Joan Crawford part for a new audience that hadn’t seen such a finely tuned portrayal of malice and professionalism. It’s a fascinatingly clear-headed study of workplace politics swaddled in chick flick clothes, which I blogged about at length. And there were no longer any doubts: In her late 50s, Meryl Streep was an A-list movie star, which she consolidated with last year’s monster hit Mamma Mia!

Not such a surprise, that one. I’ve heard her sing onstage and in several movies, maybe predating 1987’s Ironweed. If only more of the cast had equivalent pipes. But there she was, Meryl Streep, fronting a full-fledged movie musical. There was nothing she couldn’t do.

The only problem with it is that it’s blotted out contemporaries like Jessica Lange, who haven’t been so fortunate. Everyone wants Meryl Streep, for mothers, daughters, what have you. Eat your heart out, Sandra; this Christmas brings a romantic comedy, It’s Complicated. But Streep, celebrated as one of the New Establishment 2009 in this month’s Vanity Fair, makes it all look easy, and on her own terms: Jolie’s ranked above her on the same list, but only as one-half of Brangelina. If Hollywood wants to get its star power back, I suggest cooking up a script that pairs her with Will Smith.

Actually, as you well know, Popdose has been on the leading edge of the new Beatlemania. I’m just bitter: When I misidentified Mae West’s version of “Twist and Shout” as a “Beatles cover” I was thrown under the bus as our magical mystery tour meandered through all the hoopla. But no Blue Meanie can stop me here.

This week we look at Beatles movies. No, not A Hard Day’s Night, Help!, or Yellow Submarine, which by Popdose law you have to watch at least once per year. Nor Let It Be, which I haven’t seen in its entirety. Has anyone since before those DCs, I mean CDs, were introduced? The boys won Oscars for their song score, beating out the fearsome competition of The Baby Maker, A Boy Named Charlie Brown, Darling Lili, and Scrooge. Did recipient Quincy Jones hand-deliver the statuettes, or simply put them in the mail to the fractured four? Whatever—speaking words of wisdom, this is the time to free Let It Be.

I really wanted to include a clip from the 1976 curiosity All This and World War II, which sets Fox-owned footage of the conflict to Beatles covers in a desperate bid to win over the kids and the “nostalgia” audience that was hungry for the next That’s Entertainment! Only in the 70s, folks. But the movie is presumably such a seething mess of rights issues that not even the copyright banditos want to touch it. With a little help from my friends at YouTube, then, my focus is the non-Beatles movies JPGR worked on.

Perhaps wisely, John refrained from feature filmmaking following 1967’s How I Won the War, a scattershot satire directed by the Beatles’ mate Richard Lester (whose acolyte, Steven Soderbergh, is said to have directed his new film The Informant! in Lester style.) The movie’s innovative color scheme was bungled in the lab, which is one reason that despite flashes of greatness it doesn’t entirely hold together. There’s a montage of Lennon’s scenes in the movie on YouTube, but this wry and more affecting (and shorter) clip will do:

John’s not hearing the siren call of the silver screen hasn’t stopped others from playing him. Ian Hart did it twice, in The Hours and Times (1991) and Backbeat (1994). Aaron Johnson will play the Quarrymen-age John in the upcoming Nowhere Boy. (I was one of the few to see multiple actors play him in the unfortunate Broadway flop Lennon in 2005.) Outside of short films with Yoko, though, he was nowhere man.

The cute one, Paul, has also been content to stay behind the scenes. He certainly gave a boost to 1973’s Live and Let Die:

Roger Moore’s debut as James Bond doesn’t get any better than those three minutes. (His last, 1985’s A View to a Kill, is similarly challenged once Duran Duran has done its thing.) McCartney’s theme to 1985’s Spies Like Us is another picture-saver. When he did step in front of the camera, for 1984’s self-penned Give My Regards to Broad Street, disaster. “About as close as you can get to a nonmovie, and the parts that try to do something are the worst,” raved Roger Ebert’s one-star review.

“No More Lonely Nights” was the film’s signature song, but there were plenty of lonely nights in theaters stuck showing Give My Regards to Broad Street. Its nominal director, Peter Webb, vanished from the Internet Movie Database following its icy reception, and I’ve completely blocked it from memory. Nor has there been any rush to remaster it for its 25th anniversary.

Where movies are concerned, George had the most illustrious career, as a producer. His HandMade Films gave us some of the best British films of the late ’70s and ’80s, notably its debut, Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), the excellent gangster movie The Long Good Friday (1980), with Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren, Hoskins again in one of my very favorites, Mona Lisa (1986), and the hilarious, endlessly quotable Withnail and I (1988), with Richard E. Grant acting out.

I won’t hold Madonna and Sean Penn’s honeymoon gift Shanghai Surprise against his track record. But really—what the hell was he doing as an uncredited “guest of Heartland” at the very end of the infamous Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978), as an unbelievable cross section of ’70s talent recreates the album cover? Did producer Robert Stigwood have something on him, and the briefly glimpsed Paul and Linda too? HandMade Films may have been his penance.

Even Ringo sat out Sgt. Pepper’s, which is saying something. Until he found his niche as a children’s entertainer on TV he bumbled amiably from one odd credit to the next, backing Paul and George in their various endeavors (including Broad Street) and adding cachet to all-star fiascos like the leering Candy (1968), the 85-year-old Mae West’s stupefying comeback vehicle Sextette (1978), and the Badfinger-fueled Magic Christian (1969).

Call me incorrigible, but I’ve always wanted to see 1974’s Son of Dracula, with Harry Nilsson in the title role, Ringo as Merlin the Magician, and Keith Moon, Peter Frampton, and John Bonham caught between gigs. But given a chance Ringo could do better than “the first rock and roll Dracula movie!”. He’s very good in a rare dramatic role in 1973’s That’ll Be the Day, offering streetwise advice to budding rocker David Essex.

And, unlike his bandmates, he had a genuine hit in 1981’s Caveman, playing to his clownish strengths along with stars-to-be Dennis Quaid and Shelley Long and animator Dave Allen’s goggle-eyed dinosaurs. He also got the girl, marrying super-babe co-star Barbara Bach offscreen.

While not a total bust for the Beatles as they went their separate ways, the movies weren’t as happy a home for them as when they were together. We’ll always think of them in unison, in their prime, capturing audiences as few entertainers could. So now they’re back, sonically spruced up and ready to supply that transporting feeling that Robert Zemeckis’ 1978 debut I Wanna Hold Your Hand nailed.

And, oh, OK, I blew it on “Twist and Shout.” To atone, here’s Mae performing “Day Tripper.”

You’re welcome.

No, you’re not like me. But I’ve got news for you: I’m not like me, either. Drag me to hell: I’m not gonna sit on my ass in some multiplex when the best weather of the season has arrived at the 11.5th hour. I’m going to sit outside and taunt the kids who have to go back to school on Tuesday—man, I hated Labor Day Weekend when I was a kid, knowing that the school bus was going to pull up like Charon the ferryman to escort me back to Hades.

Summer. It was good, now it’s dead. And it’s time to reflect on the corpse.

Boxoffice-wise, the top five films of the season were the Transformers and Harry Potter sequels, Up, The Hangover, and Star Trek. I saw the last three. (In a simpler time in my life, say any day before Aug. 25, 2008, I would have seen them all. The franchises got the boot.) And they were good. Well, The Hangover and Star Trek were good; I can’t say I got down with Up, which struck me as minor Pixar, not out-of-gas Pixar like Cars but a little thin. Still, I’ll buy the DVD—except for Cars, I have them all, even Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo—and give it another spin.

The best movie I saw all summer, and maybe all year, was The Hurt Locker. Nothing else came close. In dire times for the indie/foreign-language/anything- without-fighting-robots market it wilted in the heat, which was a real shame. Look for it again at awards time. It deserves another shot.

I don’t worship at the altar of Michael Mann but I was enthusiastic about Public Enemies, a distillation of a great book (by Bryan Burrough) that should have been done as a miniseries. What made it to the screen, though, had choice bits. For once Christian Bale’s boring remorselessness, pitted here against Johnny Depp’s dapper brutality, made sense. The digital cinematography, a grainy mess in the Miami Vice movie, was arresting. In a thick haze of notable character actors Stephen Lang dominated with a hard gem of a performance; indeed, that last scene he has with Marion Cotillard was the finest of the year.

I lucked out this summer. I didn’t have to go all that far to see some of the best movies, I just had to wait for them to open at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a five-minute walk from me. High on the list—and again brought down by the ailing “specialty” market—was the extraordinarily biting British comedy In the Loop, the other great film inspired in some way by the Iraq War. I savored the profanely funny dialogue that results from a slip of the tongue that edges Britain and the U.S. to conflict in the Middle East. Peter Capaldi (pictured) brilliantly whipsaws the gears of the plot into motion. There were complaints that the film was too abrasive in nailing bureaucracy bumbling to the wall, to which I say, war is hell.

I laughed a lot at the micro-sized Humpday, in which two straight friends agree to make a gay porn flick together for a (real-life) Seattle video event. Jitters, regrets, and one-upmanship ensue as the day of the “beyond gay” shoot approaches, while the wife of one of the would-be fuck buddies looks on with mystification. The improbable situation is a good front for a more, umm, penetrating look at middle-aged male friendship.

After my snit over the portrayal of Nigerians in District 9, I was primed for the Jew-hunting Nazis and Nazi-hunting Jews in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. I found myself sitting next to two Orthodox guys, who would be a litmus test for outrage. I needn’t have gotten myself so worked up; they seemed to have a good time, and so did I. As usual Tarantino has nothing to say about the real world; this is as far removed from the fact-based Defiance, or anything connected to World War II or the Holocaust, as possible. The constant shout-outs to his latest batch of favorite movies are however amusing, if limited, and the soundtrack kills. (We really need to have all of 1967’a Dark of the Sun available in digital form, and not just its main theme.) I could go on—the film is conceived for going on, which is a plus—but I’ll conclude by saying that if anyone is moved to seek out an UFA, Emil Jannings, or Danielle Darrieux movie because of this one Tarantino has done his job as a cinema scholar.

As for the flops, Larry David’s osmosis of Woody Allen in Whatever Works didn’t work. Better, though still a letdown, was the undercooked Bruno, whose unlikable narcissist was a dick with a dick. Warning: Don’t let anyone take you to The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 or Taking Woodstock. They’re taking you for a ride.

A confession. On Broadway there’s something called second-acting. You wait for the doors to open at intermission and, as no one’s paying attention to ticketing, just walk into the theater, scan for an open seat and enjoy the second act of Hair or whatever. I don’t condone this practice but there it is. (See all of Hair. It’s a solid revival.) But I second-act movies all the time now. There’s no one checking attendance at the multiplexes so I cruise in and get a taste of what’s playing next door to the movie I paid to see. And I can say that I spit out the hour or so I suffered through Hugh Jackman in the morose and poorly mounted Wolverine, with the bulk of Terminator Salvation leaving the same pukey aftertaste. But you know what? I enjoyed the 10 or so minutes I caught of G.I. Joe. He’s one doll I might check out on DVD.

So here we are: The beginning of the fall, as the leaves start to brown and the movies glisten with Oscar gold. It can be a frustratingly slow process, though, with a lot of dead spots till the main events arrive. To quote Green Day, wake me up when September ends…or sooner, if the crop arrives early.

What, though, was Focus Features smoking when it decided to open Taking Woodstock two weeks after the 40th commemoration of the actual event? Maybe I’m wrong, yet I’d say the buzz has faded, man. Or what buzz there was—due to a combination of our fragmented media culture and my lack of much media at all while on vacation earlier this month, I pretty much missed it. Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, and the main stage was crowded with other golden oldies from the summer of 1969, among them the moon landing, the Manson murders and Chappaquiddick, which has been churning up headlines again. Director Ang Lee and writer and co-producer James Schamus, the co-president of Focus, aren’t quite striking while the iron is white-hot.

Then again, the film is more Woodstock-ish than Woodstock, a pot brownie with some Capra corn mixed in. My memories are purple hazy, but I recall sitting through Woodstock the documentary once, perking up for the best bits. (Last man on Earth Charlton Heston, an unlikely viewer even under the entertainment-deprived circumstances, sat through it hundreds of times in 1971’s The Omega Man.) Taking Woodstock, a sort of making-of the event, is the same way, though the choice moments are few. Most of them come from the real-life anecdotes sprinkled in: the organizers ordering lots of brown rice to “keep the hippies from shitting in the fields,” or the mild electrification of metal surfaces after a lightning storm, which crimped the performance schedule. It’s the fact-based stuff that’s a bummer.

Taking Woodstock is taken from a recent memoir by Elliot Tiber, who brought the festival to his hometown of Bethel, New York. Tiber, the youngest president of the local chamber of commerce, was always looking to class up the sticks with culture imported from New York City, where he worked as a fledgling interior designer during the week. Nothing worked: Not the rock festival he sponsored, not the “underground cinema,” not the avant-garde acting troupe who lived in the barn of the El Monaco, the mildewed motel run by his parents. Deliverance came from the sky, as Woodstock organizer Michael Lang flew in by helicopter to scout Bethel locations once the neighboring town of Wallkill passed on the opportunity at the 11th hour. Tiber had the necessary permits, and the connection to Max Yasgur and his bountiful fields. As the exclusive ticket agent for the event he then acquired his share of the headaches as the show swamped all projections. At festival time the teetering El Monaco (given a reprieve by the organizers, who bought it for the summer and paid in cash) and the slumbering rural community were benignly besieged by the never-ending parade of 500,000 long-hairs, freaks, peaceniks, artists, and tokers who hoofed it to Woodstock Nation when the local roads choked with cars and became endless parking lots.

The story has numerous possibilities for multi-character comedy-drama, but Lee, who took the Incredible Hulk as seriously as Robert Oppenheimer or Sir Thomas More, isn’t exactly Mr. Laughs. He and Schamus seem to have left their sense of humor on Brokeback Mountain. The funny people in the cast (a formidable cross-section of New York theater and indie talent) are given material that’s at best mild, and at worst caricatured. The chief offender is the gifted Imelda Staunton, as Tiber’s shrill, penny-pinching Russian mother, a Jew so money-grubbing and disapproving the inglourious basterds wouldn’t lift a baseball bat to save her from the Nazis.

More promising characters, like Eugene Levy’s flintily folksy Yasgur, drop from view once Tiber starts meandering through his own personal journey during the proverbial weekend that changed everything. He meets the likes of a motherly, two-fisted transvestite (Live Schreiber) and re-encounters a Vietnam veteran friend (Emile Hirsch) who finds a measure of peace in the chaos of the concert. On the outskirts of the event he drops acid with a hippie couple (Paul Dano and Kelli Garner), cuing split screens and modest “psychedelic” effects. None of this terribly illuminating—about the only person who’ll be amused is Lang, who, having failed to get a 40th anniversary Woodstock event off the ground, will be happy to see his younger self portrayed as a dashingly enigmatic figure trotting around on horseback. (He’s played by Jonathan Groff, a Tony nominee for the hit musical Spring Awakening. Meryl Streep’s actress daughter, Mamie Gummer, plays his equally inscrutable arm candy.)

A movie that’s kind of about Woodstock is also a roundabout coming-of-age story, with Tiber, a closeted gay man partially liberated by the Stonewall riots earlier that summer, finding the strength to open the door at Woodstock. (That reads more dramatic than it is; like everything else in the movie it’s tepid, muted.) But there’s a weird disconnect involving the lead. Tiber is played by the comedian Demetri Martin, who was chosen, says Schamus, for his “non-assaultive” personality—and gives the kind of abashed, what-am-I-doing-here-at-the-center-of-this-movie performance we’re seeing too much of lately, in the collected works of Michael Cera and Jesse Eisenberg. Martin, who probably gets carded in bars, plays Tiber like a guy in his early 20s, but Tiber was 34 at the time of Woodstock and the actor is 36. Knowing this only in retrospect, I wonder now if it was intentional, to hook a college-age audience with a surrogate for an experience long past. If so, it didn’t work; Martin shoulders Tiber’s burdens too passively to interest an audience with two horror sequels to choose from this weekend.

It’s depressing to declare a new film from an Academy Award winner as respectable and conscientious as Ang Lee a bad trip, and worse to have to do it twice in a row, following the too cautious Lust, Caution. But lava lamps have more energy and momentum than Taking Woodstock.