This gamble doesn't pay off

Mark Wahlberg stars in a lame remake of 1974's The Gambler.

The 2014 edition of The Gambler is less a remake of the 1974 Karel Reisz-directed drama than a highly stylized imitation.

In trying to evoke the spirit of 1970s cinema -- if that was the intention -- director Rupert Wyatt has made a movie that seems to include as much posturing as probing.

Working from a screenplay by William Monahan (The Departed), Wyatt tells the story of Jim Bennett (Mark Wahlberg), a college professor and desperate gambler who's trying to pay off a major debt by (what else?) gambling more.

Bennett owes $240,000 to the kind of people who aren't big on forgiveness.

The gambler in the original -- the grandson of a powerful Jewish businessman who built a life from nothing -- tried to prove that he had the nerve to walk on the dark side, that, he too, could be a jungle cat on the prowl. James Caan's Axel Freed courted risk even when he knew he was being stupid about it, and Caan nailed the role.

Wahlberg isn't an actor you'd automatically cast as a college professor, but then -- in 1974 -- neither was Caan, who was still best known for playing Sonny Corleone in The Godfather.

Wahlberg works at conveying a sense of brilliance, defeat and arrogance, but he appears to be fighting an uphill battle, working a little too hard, and you may find yourself wondering whether he isn't sometimes straining to play against type.

Moving the story from New York to California and updating James Toback's original screenplay, The Gambler can't quite make its grit credible, either.

This self-conscious sense of toughness mixed with smarts is nowhere more apparent than in the portrayal of John Goodman's Frank, a bald, decidedly overweight mobster whom Bennett approaches for money.

Goodman stands out as a shirtless Jabba-the-Gangster, but his character is treated as if he were an effect, a big rock dropped into the story solely to make a splash.

The New York gambling milieu gives way to a West Coast environment in which a group of Koreans run an illegal gambling establishment. Bennett loses big money to the Koreans, and the boss of the casino (Alvin Ing) wants it back.

Indifferent to personal safety, Bennett borrows $50,000 from a loan shark (Michael Kenneth Williams) who makes it clear that he'll play rough if he's not repaid.

Bennett also has no qualms about asking his wealthy mother (Jessica Lange) for money, which she reluctantly gives him, prompting a scene at a bank that mimics a similar scene in the original.

Of course, Mom should know better. Will Bennett use the money to pay his debts and walk away? Nah, he'll gamble more.

Bennett isn't exactly Mr. Chipps in the classroom. He berates his students, finding only one of them worthy of literary study, a blonde coed played by Brie Larson. She tries to establish a relationship with Bennett. He resists -- until he doesn't.

Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes and The Escapist) certainly knows how to give a movie visual polish. Overall though, The Gambler seems soulless and synthetic, unlike what felt twisted and real in the 1970s.

I won't give anything away, but if you have the time and interest, compare the way the 1974 and 2014 movies end. That should tell you everything you need to know.

Yes, Virginia, it's really not good

The Interview now can be seen -- but should it be?

For a few minutes, I thought some of the critics I respect might have been wrong about The Interview, which I watched as soon as it became available on-line Wednesday. Sure, it's ridiculous, but for 15 or so minutes, it's also rudely funny. But silliness soon gives way to a plot that sends an annoyingly hammy James Franco and straight man Seth Rogen to North Korea for an assassination attempt arranged by the CIA. Once the plot kicks in, the movie gets progressively worse, building toward an action-oriented finale that goes way over the top, leaving a long trail of anus jokes in its foul wake. Seeing The Interview makes you realize that the absurd story that has surrounded it -- a purported North Korean hack of SONY, withdrawal of the movie and its reappearance in independent theaters and on-line -- has more satiric potential than the movie itself. Yes, Franco's Dave Skylark and Rogen's Aaron Rapaport -- a couple of tabloid TV types -- succeed in killing Kim Jung-un (Randall Park). But Rogen and co-director Evan Goldberg, who find ways to spray lots of blood around, also manage to murder any good will we might have felt toward this comedy in its very early going. I'm glad SONY released the movie and allowed the mystery surrounding it to evaporate, but if this is the best we can do for a free-speech issue, I'd say we're in trouble.

Surviving the hardships of war

Angelina Jolie directs Unbroken, an intermittently powerful effortt.

Louis Zamperini led a large and amazing life. As a runner, Zamperini participated in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. As an Air Force bombardier during World War II, he was shot down and -- along with two others -- spent a grueling 47 days lost at sea.

One airman died at sea: Zamperini and the other airman were rescued when their craft ran into a Japanese war ship.

Additional hardship followed. Zamperini was taken to a Japanese prison camp, where he spent two years being abused, tortured and tested.

Author Laura Hillenbrand told Zamperini's story in a 2010 book she called Unbroken, A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption.

Now, Angelina Jolie has adapted Hillenbrand's book for the big screen, and the resultant movie works best in bits and pieces. Zamperini's story becomes the basis for an inspirational tale, complete with an epilogue about the importance of forgiveness.

That epilogue was inspired by the fact that Zamperini eventually returned to Japan where he met with some of the soldiers who had tortured him, something we're told with end-of-picture title cards and footage of the real Zamperini, who died earlier this year at the age of 97.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

It has taken a quartet of screenwriters (Joel and Ethan Coen, Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson) to whip this sprawling, but slightly one-dimensional material into shape.

The movie proceeds in chunks built around the major experiences in Zamperini's life -- from a mildly wayward boyhood to the end of the war.

Jack O'Connell, an actor of great avidity, gives vibrant life to the adult Zamperini, who came from a tight-knit Italian-American family.

O'Connell, who gave one of the year's most astonishing performances in the British prison drama Starred Up, again uses his physicality and spirit to create a character of near-preternatural focus.

As a young man, Zamperini (played by C.J. Valleroy) didn't begin to find himself until his older brother (John D'Leo) pushed him into track and field competitions. Zamperini subsequently became a high-school track star in his hometown, Torrance, Ca.

We learn about this after an exciting and scary opening combat sequence in Zamperini's B-24, a plane that came to be know as "the flying coffin.''

Jolie and cinematographer Roger Deakins give us a feeling for what it must have been like to fly in one those planes, how terribly exposed crews must have felt when they encountered enemy aircraft.

After his plane is shot down, Zamperini and two surviving comrades (Domhnall Gleeson and Finn Wittrock) drift at sea in a life raft, battling the elements, sharks, hunger and thirst.

The movie's prison-camp section revolves around Zamperini's on-going confrontation with brutal Japanese camp commander played by singer/songwriter Miyavi.

Throughout the torture segment, Jolie underlines Zamperini's heroic status as a man of indomitable will. Half story and half salute, the movie completes Zamperini's conversion from a character into an icon. We start to lose the man behind the symbol.

Unbroken is well-made, but it leaves one wondering precisely why Jolie wanted to tell a story that -- for all of Zamperini's trials -- doesn't really bring a new perspective to material that many other movies already have covered.

Jolie's intermittently powerful World War II drama never quite breaks the mold from which one expects it to be cast. Zamperini lived an amazing life: Jolie's rendering of that life gives us exactly what we expect.

A musical trip 'Into the Woods'

Sure it looks great, but where's the magic?

It has taken 27 years for Stephen Sondheim's 1987 musical -- Into the Woods -- to reach the screen. I wish I could say it was totally worth the wait.

But under the direction of Rob Marshall (Chicago and Nine), this megaton Disney production arrives as a mixed blessing with highlights built around Meryl Streep's performance as The Witch, Anna Kendrick's turn as Cinderella, Emily Blunt's portrayal of a baker's wife and a couple of signature musical numbers.

A mash-up of a story incorporates fragments of various, iconic fairy tales: Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, Cinderella and Jack and the Beanstalk.

Shards from these stories are united by the tale of a baker and his wife. The couple tries to gather ingredients needed to break a spell (cast by the witch, of course) that has left them childless.

Credit Marshall with getting the musical off to a rousing start. The opening introduces the major characters in lively, amusing fashion before all head for the woods on a variety of personal quests that sometimes turn sluggish.

For the most part, the movie is well cast. Under a ton of make-up, Streep brings life to every scene in which she appears. James Corden and Blunt are fine as the baker and his wife, and Kendrick makes for a somewhat different Cinderella, a young woman who isn't entirely star struck by the handsome prince (Chris Pine).

Pine, by the way, brings self-absorbed superficiality to the role of the prince, complementing the movie's desire to upend as many fairy-tale stereotypes as possible.

A high point arrives when Red Riding Hood meets the wolf (Johnny Depp made up like a predatory Zoot-suiter). The wolf leers after Red Riding, displaying a lecherous streak. Depp licks his chops, and then vanishes from the screen with a demonstrative howl.

Carefully designed by Dennis Gassner, Into the Woods has a lavish quality that Marshall supplements with special effects when necessary.

The singing -- a key in a musical without big dance numbers -- seems mostly up to snuff, although I have no standard of comparison, never having seen Into the Woods on stage.

The movie's screenplay -- by James Lapine -- reportedly includes a bit of compression and the filing down of a few rough edges, but I leave all that for Sondheim enthusiasts to sort out.

Into the Woods increasingly darkens as it goes against the grain of the original fairy tales. A faux happily ever-after ending is followed by a lengthy final act which goes to great pains to subvert expectations and which, alas, tested my patience.

I found myself longing for this one to conclude before it had worked its way through all of its 124-minute length, but -- in fairness - I'd have to say that Into the Woods seemed acceptable, if not a candidate for movie musical greatness.

What's missing? Goosebumps and a sustained sense that we're watching something that gets beyond its ever-present cleverness.

Little movie about 'Big Eyes' painter

With able assistance from Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz, director Tim Burton creates an offbeat amusement..

We've all seen those big-eyed paintings by Margaret Keane, portraits of angelic-looking waifs who can seem plaintive in a freakish, greeting card sort of way. They're children with the eyes of bewildered Pekingese puppies.

Leave it to director Tim Burton to bring Keane's story to the screen. Big Eyes is a fairly straightforward (for Burton) look at the woman who created those paintings and the husband who, for the longest time, took credit for them.

In addition to the terrific art direction and production design that have defined Burton's best films, Big Eyes features a wonderful comic performance from Amy Adams as Keane, a woman who looks less like a painter than the hostess of a Tupperware party, a near-archetypical '50s figure.

Burton also obtains a fine performance from Christoph Waltz, who plays Keane's rapacious second husband, Walter.

The movie tells us that Walter Keane passed himself off as a painter and took credit for the big-eye paintings, which (shockingly) caught on and began selling for major money.

Although both Keanes profited financially from Margaret's paintings, Walter received most of the credit and adulation. Beneath the movie's slightly goofy surface, you'll find real issues about authorship and exploitation.

Working in a small studio, Margaret became a kind of piece worker, turning out big-eye paintings as fast as Walter could sell them.

The big-eye paintings began to catch on after Enrico Banducci (Jon Polito), the owner of the "hungry i" nightclub in San Francisco, agreed to show some of the paintings. He hung them in a hallway en route to the rest rooms, but they were discovered anyway.

Walter Keane's deception quickly took on a life of its own. He began to feel as if he really had made the paintings. Eventually, Margaret's work was shown in the Keane Gallery, which Walter opened.

Those who fawned over the paintings also fawned over Walter. He loved the attention, something he never could achieve on his own. He also was helped by a San Francisco columnist (Danny Huston), who lavished ink on the eager Keane.

As it turns out, Walter's genius involved marketing and sales. He didn't make the paintings, but he helped Keane become famous, and he knew how to convince people to open their wallets.

In movies such as Burton's look at no-budget filmmaker Ed Wood, the director proved that he had a talent for portraying the lives of oddball figures who live on the margins of creativity. No surprise, then, that he's in fine form in this sideshow of an arena.

The plot leads both Keanes into a courtroom, where (in a pathetic attempt at defending himself), Walter serves as his own attorney.

Burton misses few chances to add offbeat humor, but he doesn't turn either character into a total joke, even after New York Times critic John Canaday (Terrence Stamp) denounces the work as spectacularly unworthy.

I don't know whether Burton has tapped into something essential about American life or simply has introduced us to a small and very odd bit of Americana.

Whatever he's done, Big Eyes makes for an amusingly offbeat time at the movies.

'The Interview' goes indie

The Interview is coming to the Denver area.

Yes, that's the same Interview that set off an international furor when Sony last week withdrew it from a Christmas Day release.

If you want to see the movie that has caused all the uproar, you'll be able to do it at The Alamo Drafthouse Cinema beginning on the morning after Christmas -- literally.

The first show of The Interview is scheduled to take place at Alamo at 12 a.m. on Christmas night.

So if you've got any energy left after a day of presents, dinners and whatever else you do for Christmas, you can head for Alamo's theater at 7301 South Sante Fe Drive -- if the show's not already sold out, that is.

After the initial showing, Alamo plans to show the movie once a day through Jan. 1. Shows are slated to begin at either 9 or 10 p.m. -- not exactly prime time, but that probably won't stop those who are eager to experience what has become one of Hollywood's most controversial releases.

Later in the day (Tuesday), The Denver Film Society announced that it would begin a two-week run of The Interview at the Sie Film Center on Friday, Dec. 26.

The Film Center's web site currently lists four shows a day.

At one point, the Sie had planned to host a preview screening of the Interview with Rogen in attendance. That Dec. 8 screening was canceled, and took place instead at the Oriental Theater, where -- according to news reports -- Rogen poured tequila shots directly into moviegoers' mouths.

Rogen had said (via Twitter) he wanted everyone to smoke marijuana with him at the screening, but Denver's pot laws evidently precluded that kind of public indulgence..

No need to recount the whole Interview saga, but if you've somehow failed to keep up, you can recap at Variety, which reports that the movie -- directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg -- now will play in "several hundred independent cinemas rather than in major chains."

Alamo has one location in the Denver area and about 20 locations in total, according to Variety.

Another article in Variety noted that the major theatrical chains are none too pleased about Sony's decision to go indie, followed by a possible VOD release.

I haven't seen The Interview because a Denver preview screening was cancelled after SONY's initial withdrawal of its Christmas Day release.

The movie deals with a couple of tabloid TV guys who are recruited by the CIA to assassinate North Korea's Kim Jung-un, a premise that has been linked to an embarrassing hacking attack at SONY.

The controversy probably has made The Interview critic proof, but if you're interested in reviews, a quick hits:

Variety's Scott Foundas wrote that the movie was "about as funny as a communist food shortage, and just as protracted ... An evening of cinematic waterboarding awaits."

The Hollywood Reporter's Todd McCarthy called the movie "intensely sophomoric and rampantly uneven,'' and rated it well below movies such as Borat or Team America: World Police.

Relying on reviews from cities in which the movie did have preview screenings, Rotten Tomatoes -- an on-line site that aggregates reviews -- awarded The Interview a 52 percent rating.

The movie received some positive reviews, but I'm more inclined to believe those who -- like Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal wrote that the film's "remarkably dismal quality is emblematic of the mind-set that brought the movie, and its attendant crises, into being." Morgenstern evidently laughed a few times, but overall found the movie "torture from almost start to finish."

At some point, I'll see The Interview, but I don't think I'll bother to review it -- unless I happen to be one of those who find the movie uproarious.

Meanwhile, I continue to marvel that any set of circumstances could turn a Seth Rogen comedy into a standard-bearer for free speech.

If that doesn't tell you the world has lost its collective mind, nothing will.

He helped win World War II

The Imitation Game may not be the year's boldest film, but it tells a good story.

Alan Turing never put on a uniform, but his efforts went a long way toward helping the Allies win World War II. Turing, you see, was the mathematical genius who cracked the Nazi Enigma code, thereby hastening the end of the war.

If The Imitation Game -- a new movie about Turing's life -- has it right, Turing was an intensely focused man with limited social skills and no idea about how his behavior effected others. He wasn't mean. He was simply oblivious to the demands of almost any social situation.

Played with brilliant eccentricity by Benedict Cumberbatch (expect an Oscar nomination), Turing isn't exactly an inspirational figure. He often displays the kind of insistence that would drive most of us crazy.

The movie's psychology is handled in sketchy fashion. Turing, we learn in one of the movie's many flashbacks, carried a sense of abiding grief from the loss of a childhood love, an older schoolmate on whom he had a crush.

Clearly, we're meant to see Turing as an unrecognized groundbreaker whose life ultimately was destroyed by the British legal system. Turing's work went unacknowledged until the 1950s, and he suffered at the hands of cruelly archaic British laws regarding homosexuality.

Director Morten Tyldum does his most interesting work in Bletchley Park, the estate where Turing developed his so-called Universal Machine. Turing was certain that this early computer would be better at cryptography than any human, a view not shared by all his colleagues.

Turing's principal adversary turns up in the form of Commander Denniston (Charles Dance), an army officer who runs Bletchley with a spit-and-polish attitude that's ill-suited to supervising a bunch of chess-playing mathematicians.

In what the movie treats as an emotional turning point, co-worker Hugh Alexander (Matthew Goode) rallies support for Turing, who's on the verge of losing his position. Until then, Alexander hadn't been much of a Turing fan.

Keira Knightley plays Joan Clarke, a math whiz recruited by Turing for his project. He proposed to her as a matter of convenience, although the movie makes it clear that Turing had real feelings for her, and she for him.

The Imitation Game has been criticized for taking a middlebrow approach to its source material, Andrew Hodges's 1983 biography about Turing. Some have criticized the movie because Turing's homosexuality is more alluded to than shown.

Fair comments, I suppose, but there are interesting ethical implications in the story.

If knowledge of the broken code had been overused, the Germans would have known that the code had been cracked. As a result, information obtained from code-breaking was employed sparingly.

Sacrifices were made so that the information obtained from the Germans could be put to maximum use.

Tyldum, mistakenly I think, sets the story against an awkwardly employed framing device in which a police inspector (Rory Kinnear) questions Turing after his arrest. The misguided detective is trying to determine whether Turing spied for the Russians.

Because of his homosexuality, Turing was found guilty of "gross indecency." He submitted to hormone therapy as an alternative to prison. He committed suicide a couple of years later. He was 41.

Those familiar with the story will know that the filmmakers have taken a variety of liberties in telling it, but the core of the yarn remains intact.*

At its best, The Imitation Game stands as a fascinating look at the singular accomplishment of a strangely obsessive man.

*If you want to know more about discrepancies between Turing's real story and the movie, this article from the New York Review of Books is a good place to start. But keep in mind that movies long have valued dramatic imperatives over historical accuracy.

2014: A look back at my movie year

What kind of a movie year has it been? Let's be guided by the spirit of the season and be generous. Call it a year of small triumphs, which means that no gargantuan movie emerged to dominate the big-screen landscape. That's not necessarily a bad thing, unless you happen to be a major studio hungering for the imperial clout of a bona fide blockbuster.

The year in Colorado? That's another story. Film commissioner Donald Zuckerman helped land a Quentin Tarantino production -- with a boost from a $5 million incentive package. Tarantino began shooting his western, The Hateful Eight, in Telluride this month.

No disrespect to Tarantino, but Colorado's real 2014 triumph involved documentaries. In April, four documentaries with deep Colorado roots made their way to the increasingly important Tribeca Film Festival in New York City: Silenced (about whistleblowers), Keep on Keepin' On (about the relationship between jazz musician Clark Terry and a young blind pianist), Beyond the Brick: A Lego Brickumentary (about the Lego phenomenon) and a work in progress about endangered species from the same team that made The Cove, a 2009 documentary about the abuse of dolphins in Japanese waters.

Keep on Keepin' On has made the 15-film short list of documentaries eligible for an Oscar nomination. The five finalists will be announced on Jan. 15.

And, no, you don't have to be a jazz lover to receive a feel-good, inspirational boost from a movie that reminds us of the importance of mentorship in developing young talent and of the rewards of friendship at any age.

To add to the continued aura of importance surrounding Colorado documentaries, two of Colorado's Oscar winning documentarians -- Denver's Daniel Junge and Boulder's Louie Psihoyos -- will have films at 2015's much-watched Sundance Film Festival next month.

Both Junge's Being Evel (about daredevil Evel Knievel) and Psihoyos's Racing Extinction (the film that showed in rough form at Tribeca) will be in competition for best documentary.

A quick reminder: Junge won an Oscar for the 2012 short film Saving Face, and Psihoyos took home Oscar gold for The Cove.

The ascension of documentaries aside, most moviegoers still judge the movie year by what's available at the nation's multiplexes and art houses.

Let me say something about what my 10-best list (see below) isn't. It isn't a slam at movies that aren't on it. I very much admired the work done by Eddie Redmayne (as Stephen Hawking) and Felicity Jones (as his wife) in The Theory of Everything.

Along with just about everyone else, I thought that Benedict Cumberbatch was exceptionally good in The Imitation Game, the story of the gay mathematician who helped crack the German Enigma Code during World War II.

I was swept away by the austere, black-and-white imagery of the Polish film Ida, about a nun who learns she's Jewish before taking her final vows, and I'm still thinking about the performance given by Agata Kuleza, who played Wanda, the nun's Jewish aunt and a fading Communist big-shot.

I wouldn't say that Get On Up was a great movie, but I can't believe that Chadwick Boseman, who played James Brown, didn't get a Golden Globe nomination in the best actor category. Perhaps the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will rectify the situation, but I doubt it.

It's difficult for me to think of a movie that had more visceral charge than Whiplash, the story of an aspiring jazz drummer (Miles Teller) tormented by a driven but sadistic teacher (J.K. Simmons). Director Damien Chazelle gave the movie's musical segments the drive of an action movie.< I loved the work done by James Broadbent, Lindsay Duncan and Jeff Goldblum in Le Weekend, a clear-eyed look at love and failure.

Mathieu Amalric's The Blue Room might have been the most adult thriller of the year. Both James Gandolfini and Tom Hardy were fine in The Drop, an underrated adaptation of a Dennis Lehane short story about men and the mob.

I'm eager to re-visit Listen Up Philip. This look at the life of an arrogant young novelist featured fine performances by Jason Schwartzman and Jonathan Pryce, as well as strong supporting work from Elisabeth Moss as Schwartzman's increasingly independent girlfriend.

Julianne Moore will break the hearts of those who see her as an Alzheimer's afflicted college professor in Still Alice.

The following two movies are likely to turn up on lots of people's year-end lists. Not mine. I remain in a minority as far as Birdman is concerned. It failed to make a believer out of me. I often have trouble relating to Wes Anderson's movies, but The Grand Budapest Hotel was a visual treat and deserves praise for the way Anderson embedded wit in the movie's engaging cascade of images.

When it came to big-ticket, mainstream fare, I had decent enough times at Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Edge of Tomorrow.

Keep in mind that there's nothing a critic does that's more personal than a year-end list, and that not every movie on the list qualifies as perfect.

These are the movies that I remember fondly and, in some cases, am still thinking about or (heaven help me) regard as "important" for one reason or another.

Here, then, the list:

1. Boyhood

Director Richard Linklater's 12-year portrait of contemporary childhood offered the best depiction yet of the fragmented lives that define more and more American families. Linklater focuses on Mason -- played by Ellar Coltrane -- from ages six to 18. Linklater obtains great work from Coltrane throughout, as well as equally rich contributions from both Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke as Mason's estranged parents.
Linklater shot the movie in 39 days over 12 years, employing the same cast throughout. As a result, we watch young people grow and mature until time deposits them -- uneasily, I think -- on the cusp of adulthood.

2. A Most Violent Year

The third film from director J.C. Chandor (Margin Call and All is Lost) casts Oscar Isaac as Abel Morales, an ambitious and emotionally controlled man who's trying to make his mark in the heating-oil business in New York City. Abel's wife Anna (Jessica Chastain) keeps the books. Unrecognizable after playing a folk singer in the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis, Isaac gives a singularly focused performance as a businessman who's trying to be as straight as he can in an industry rife with corruption. Chastain makes a major stretch as a Mafia princess who sometimes wishes her husband would play dirtier, and Albert Brooks gives an admirably understated performance as Abel's attorney. A slice-of-life movie set in 1981, A Most Violent Year never resorts to melodrama as it assays the meaning of ethics in a morally compromised world.

3. Leviathan

You'll see the Polish movie Ida on many 10-best lists, and there's no question that director Pawel Pawilkowski's drama -- shot in beautifully composed black-and-white images -- is worthy. Look for it to win an Oscar as best foreign-language film. For me, though, the work of Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev (The Return) stood out more. In Leviathan, Zvyagintsev immerses us in a small Russian coastal town that serves as a microcosm of a faltering society. Kolya (Aleksey Serebryakov) works as a mechanic in a fishing village in northern Russia. A corrupt mayor conspires to take Kolya's property. The land grab sets the stage for an unvarnished portrait of a society in which no amount of vodka can still the pain inflicted by a boundless corruption and betrayal.

4. Selma

Watching director Ava DuVernay's Selma recreation of events in Selma during the Civil Rights era proved moving and evocative, a reminder of a time when moral lines were drawn with unshakeable force. DuVernay builds her movie around David Oyelowo's portrait of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but reminds us that we needn't canonize King in order to admire him. DuVernay also doesn't flinch from portraying dissension within the civil rights ranks, either. The performances -- notably from Carmen Ejogo as Coretta Scott King -- are memorable, and the bravery of those who lived in or traveled to the South to rid the nation of Jim Crow proves incredibly stirring.

5. Snowpiercer

South Korean director Bong Joon-Ho (The Host) whips up one of the wildest and weirdest movies of the year, a dystopian adventure that turns a speeding train into a metaphor for a class-bound society. Finally, an action movie with starkly powerful political overtones, a wild sense of humor and an unrecognizable and ferociously funny Tilda Swinton. Alfred Hitchcock made the classic Strangers on a Train. Bong has made a movie that might be called Strangeness on a Train, and moviegoers are better off for it.

6.Nightcrawler

Those who were looking for a Network-style criticism of the sensationalized approach to TV news probably were disappointed, but Nightcrawler was about more than a crime-hungry media. Writer/director Dan Gilroy created one of the year's most memorable characters, a frightening autodidact who gave Jake Gyllenhaal an opportunity to find his inner freak -- and to give his best performance to date. Gyllenhaal plays a freelance TV news photographer who seems to have been assembled from all the worst elements in contemporary society: the bromides of self-help manuals, the instant knowledge provided by heavy Internet browsing and coldhearted ambition. Credit Rene Russo with one of the year's best supporting performances as a news director desperate to boost her station's ratings.

7. Starred Up

Not many performances could come close to challenging what Tom Hardy accomplished in the 2008 movie Bronson, the story of a notorious British prisoner -- at least not until Jack O'Connell hit the screen in Starred Up. O'Connell found himself as the center of a scorching drama about Eric, a 19-year-old prisoner who survives by smashing just about anything and anyone in his path. Ben Mendelsohn plays Eric's father, another prisoner. Psychologically astute and entirely gripping, this prison drama hits home with the force of a cold shiv in the ribs. I'm of course, speaking metaphorically, and not from experience.

8. American Sniper

It's astonishing that Clint Eastwood -- now in his 80s -- would even want to direct a movie as sprawling and difficult as American Sniper, a tautly realized war movie that rips its way through Navy SEAL training and winds up in Iraq. There, Chris Kyle becomes the war's most dangerous sniper with more than 160 kills. The war footage is tense, but Eastwood also explores the impact killing and repeated tours of duty had on Kyle, who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. A bulked-up Bradley Cooper -- certainly not the actor I would have imagined in this role -- gives his strongest performance yet as Kyle. Working from a real story, Eastwood doesn't lecture us about the horrors of war, but lets us draw our own conclusions about war, SEAL culture and the toll of combat.

9. Two Days, One Night

Belgium's Dardenne brothers (Jean-Pierre and Luc) are cinema treasures, having given us movies such The Child and Rosetta. Two Days, One Night may not be the brothers' most powerful movie, but it continues the Dardenne's unwavering commitment to telling stories about ordinary people. Marion Cotillard plays a woman who has been laid off from her job after her employer asks his employees to vote: Either they all give up bonuses or one of them will lose a job. Desperate and worried, Cotillard's character asks her fellow employees to reconsider. Once again, the Dardennes have made clear the agonies of people facing difficult situations, crises they did nothing to create.

10. Locke

One man alone in a car? Sounds like a formula for cinematic disaster, but Tom Hardy helped make director Steven Knight's movie into a small treasure by giving us a telling portrait of a British construction manager trying to behave honorably. Hardy's Ivan Locke takes a drive he doesn't want to make -- from Birmingham to London. He abandons his family and the most important job of his career in an effort to do the right thing by a young woman with whom he had an affair. During the trip, Hardy makes and takes calls from his character's BMW's hands-free phone, and Knight and cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos defy the odds by keeping the story visually alive.

More to the point: I couldn't let 2014 pass without acknowledging Locke in a significant way. He's capable of embodying ferocity and tenderness into a single character, and he's not likely to win any awards this year. He should.

So that's my story, and I'm sticking to it -- at least until I change my mind. Some of the movies on my list won't be making their way around the nation until January. So stay tuned, and have a happy New Year.

'Annie' again? Yes -- and updated, too

A wobbly version that too often falters..

The 2014 big-screen edition of the over-exposed musical Annie seems to have been intended as an urban fantasy that's meant to combine the joys of the original with an updated story and a few new songs.

This Annie only occasionally does justice to the original material and, at the same time, fails to stake out enough turf of its own. It's like a third-rate comedy with musical numbers and a spunky 10-year-old kid who wanders through a Manhattan that's imagined with lollipop sweetness.

Annie (Quvenzhane Wallis) now lives in a Harlem foster home. She believes that the parents who left her at a restaurant when she was an infant someday will return.

But Annie isn't only about the need for a girl to shed a harsh Dickensian childhood. It's about the way a plucky waif becomes the instrument by which an ambitious businessman turned politician (Jamie Foxx) can be humanized.

Thanks to some glaring plot contrivances, Annie's taken under wing by Foxx's cellphone billionaire, a corporate baron who also happens to be running for mayor of New York City. Foxx's Will Stark crosses paths with Annie when he keeps her from being hit by a speeding car. Filmed by a bystander, Stark's rescue goes viral.

Why not, asks the billionaire's crass campaign manager (Bobby Cannavale), lift Annie from her hard-knock life and let her live in a gleaming, aggressively modern apartment with a billionaire? Surely, voters will swoon.

The super-rich Stacks has political ambitions, but he's not much of a people person. He keeps himself emotionally isolated, and has a Howard-Hughes-like obsession with germs.

In this version, Wallis takes over from the red-headed dynamo type that usually plays Annie, something the movie accomplishes in an energetic opening sequence that finds Annie pushing a red-headed schoolmate off center stage so that she can present a lesson on FDR to her classmates.

Wallis impressed just about everyone by playing a Louisiana six-year-old named Hushpuppy in Beasts of the Southern Wild. Here, she may be working a little too hard.

Director Will Gluck makes room for the adult cast members, but saddles them with material that's straining to shed its Depression origins.

Cameron Diaz does everything she can to overact as Miss Hannigan, an embittered show-biz reject who takes care of foster children -- for the money, of course.

Both Diaz and Cannavale give the kind of out-sized performances you might expect to see in a children's theater production, and, at times -- though not consistently -- the movie seems to be aimed at the youngest audience segment.

Rose Byrne never quite finds a niche as Stack's assistant.

Look, I like the idea of a multi-ethnic Annie. And why not update material that's been done to death? It's just that Gluck hasn't been able to do it in a truly meaningful and exciting way.

You know the filmmakers have run out of imaginative gas when, toward the end of the movie, they add a helicopter chase sequence. It saves Annie, but not a movie that's too wobbly to ensure that it finds a place in the sunshine -- either today or (as Annie optimistically promises) tomorrow.