Le Carré’s hero is a veteran spy named George Smiley. The character is often described as anti-Bond; a paunchy, patient, middle-aged martinet, he’s more-than-anti-Lisbeth Slander. As embodied here by Gary Oldman, he’s been plucked from forced retirement to finish an internal-affairs investigation initiated by his now-deceased boss called Control (played, in flashbacks, by John Hurt—who looks ready to pull a coronary from his pocket at a moment’s notice). To say that the story is about Smiley unearthing the above-mentioned style-conscious mole is to untangle a corn maze and torture it into a straight line; but, at each twist and turn, this labyrinth is chocked full of mannered British gents pecking away at Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan’s dialogue as if it were their elevenses. The main problem confronting the filmmakers—more than paucity of action and density of plot—is the fact that most of the relationships between the characters are sketchy; by design, these Circus performers are less like acrobatic secret agents and more like lions brought in from the wild, their urge to escape all but tamed. (The irony here is wicked, but it isn’t necessarily involving.) What may be meant as reserve comes across more as resignation—as if, with the depreciation in value of British national security, everything else has gone belly-up.

That includes the patchy narrative. If you’ll permit me a SPOILER ALERT, the issue of the double-agent’s identity is dramatically null: If more attention were directed at that character, it would be too obvious; but since there’s so little attention given to him (other than the big red flag that he’s played by Colin Firth), or our hero’s feelings of betrayal—since this mole has also burrowed into Smiley’s wife—the revelation comes at the cost of anything like suspense or emotional attachment. (The celebrated 1979 BBC-TV version, starring Sir Alec Guinness as Smiley, wasn’t immune to this, either; though, strangely enough, it made a richer sound when striking its psychosexual chords.) But even if, in terms of intrigue, Alfredson can’t beat, say, the first few episodes of Homeland, he can impart a sense of imperial longing that American audiences can connect with right now—in the way I think they connected with An Education. The irony, of course, is that members of the Homeland Security department—and those that have benefited financially from its de facto privatization—are among those least likely to feel the pinch. But anyone else who was ever once assured of our national top-dog status, and now has his doubts, might be advised to watch how Smiley, after a brandy or two, recounts meeting his Soviet adversary Karla at a time when the latter’s position was politically vulnerable. Oldman—whose bullfroggy jowls make him live up to his surname—pantomimes this interaction for a junior officer, going through a tired West-is-best spiel that sticks to the Red idealist like grease on a Teflon pan. (This is much more effectively handled than it was in the miniseries, which flashed back to Guinness interrogating Karla. But since Guinness played Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Patrick Stewart (the future Captain Picard) played Karla, and, on top of that, Oldman is telling this story to an agent played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who was just cast as the villain in the next Star Trek prequel—it’s enough to coldcock the space-time continuum.) Oldman says that he saw Smiley as someone coming from a position of “moral certainty,” which may explain why his impassive stare looks vaguely pompous whereas Guinness’s seemed slightly abashed. In short, Oldman’s frowny Smiley is the kind of Brit that Sid and Nancy fought to break free from. He’s a fine mascot for the film’s mood: There are so many secrets lurking behind these spies’ wrinkled poker faces; but all that their dedicated stoicism has amounted to is their birthrights being washed away. Call it a royal flush.

The director, David Cronenberg, admits that he hews closer to Freud than Jung; and the style of this film gives credence to the value of repression. As applied to some of his out-there cult classics, like Scanners (1981) and Videodrome (1983) and Crash (1996), his sterility seemed ludicrous—more daft, in my opinion, than profound. (Sterility and surrealism can be antipathetic, with results on par with psychedelic dentistry. However, they were paired together like merlot and brie in his adaptation of Naked Lunch (1991), and were sharply contrapuntal in his deconstructive A History of Violence (2005).) In terms of violence, his last film, Eastern Promises (2007), was anything but repressed; but in A Dangerous Method—which Christopher Hampton adapted from his play, The Talking Cure, as well as a book by John Kerr—violence looms on the horizon. Once the heroes have their falling out, it’s incorporated into their politely worded missives. Freud is guardian of the past, Jung the unwitting arbiter of the future. (As an index to the trouble to come, Jung has a vision presaging the First World War; and, as we are told in an afterword, he is the only central character to have survived the scourges of the 20th century and to have arrived, peacefully, at old age.) Even if there are a couple dramatic shortcomings—Jung, for instance, has already jumped from straight-laced to loose-cannon by his second meeting with Freud—there’s a compelling and lucidly told story hidden under these potentially stagey confabs like a female figure crammed into a wasp waist.

As always, there’s a woman involved. Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) was another frontier psychiatrist, albeit one whose reputation has been buried under the avalanche of history. She’s the Mary Jane Watson in Jung’s origin story—though, rather than being the girl next door, she’s a girl in his psychiatric ward, in treatment for hysteria. In movies like Atonement and Never Let Me Go, Knightley’s high-strung hauteur has been used for bitchy ends, and maybe she’s been cast in so many period pieces because her bearing can put her at a remove from the audience. Here, she’s so high-strung that Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia looks as chill as a Phish Head. Her performance has gotten flack from some critics for being overwrought. In the grips of Spielrein’s supposedly incest-induced illness, the actress seems almost in a state of perpetual emesis; her teeth and eyeballs look like they’re about to be bowled over by whatever toxic thought is snowballing in her brain. But it didn’t seem like scene-stealing Oscar bait to me: She’s wildly physical but terribly introverted. Fassbender—one of those actors who’s appeared as promiscuously on the screen this last year as his nympho in Shame—first presents Jung as a stiff Swiss bourgeois. Pale-eyed, pasty, and afraid of his own impressionability, he’s the egghead archetype—too earnest to crack. His mentor from Austria, after their legendary 13-hour first conversation, is impressed enough to refer one of his own patients, Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), to Jung. Cassel plays this mangy sexaholic as both resigned and self-impressed; he’s dunked the strictures of the polite society Freud holds so dear into the watery grave of Lake Zurich. This bohemian hedonism, simplistically but convincingly, induces Gross’s naïve shrink into giving it a go. He has an affair with Spielrein, to Freud’s disapproval. They become the Jung and the Restless.

What is so fascinating about A Dangerous Method is that the same mind is at work here as the one behind this director’s seemingly weirder early films—which, despite their shortcomings, demand some degree of respect. Cronenberg has worked out their kinks, and their kinkiness, and has arrived at a lament for the rationality they secretly espoused. He couldn’t have gotten to this point without them. But that doesn’t mean that he’s totally forsaken the trippier terrain of his mind: Namely, he’s cast Viggo Mortensen, his muse of late, as Sigmund Freud! Even if Cronenberg was trying to be objective, it’s obvious where his sympathies lie. Mortensen is appropriately repressed as the man who coined the term; he keeps everything carefully below-board, but buoys his small twists in inflection with a sauna-dry sense of humor. We’re meant to laugh with Freud for his slyness and at Jung for his greenness—which he never completely sheds. (In the vernacular, “Jungian” continues to connote something as down-to-earth as an astrology chart.) But is it possible that the director sees something of his young self in Jung? The doctor’s seersucker suits and high-flown mysticism are as complimentary as sterility and surrealism; he’s a bit daffy, like he lives deep inside his own head. But maybe I’m wrong. Sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar.

Fincher has said that he wanted to make a “franchise movie for adults,” and that’s a noble ambition; but, at times, the film seems more like it’s part of an adult-movie franchise. All the intrigue surrounding right-wing political conspiracies (the thriller material concerns a family of reclusive industrialists, and the mysterious disappearance of one of their relatives, 40 years earlier) is a MacGuffin for the putative enigma that is Lisbeth Salander. She’s the ink-stained super-genius of the title—a bisexual bad girl who’s fluent in source code and dismal at small talk. I found her unflappable competence tiresome—more convenient than mysterious—but Mara grabs one’s attention like a teenage drama queen whose period is verging on an exclamation point; her flat voice eeks out low on the register, filtered through a pout, her tongue not enunciating at full capacity, as if it has recently been pierced—by a lawn dart. But Lisbeth’s rape-revenge number, whatever its original intentions, comes off as embarrassingly crude: Sucker Punch feminism, furnished by Ikea. Her vengeance is a perfectly designed s&m fantasy; it titillates one’s prurience and then rewards it in the form of righteousness—which is even more perverted. Lisbeth is what repressed older men must think punkish young women are like. However, I should give Larsson and his fans some credit; his readers must be more than grown-up Twihards. (Should we call ’em Dragoons?) The novel is the first in the Millenium trilogy, and must have been written long before its author’s death in 2004. Its idealism both harkens back to the 1990s—when the Internet was still the Wild West, before the likes of Google and Facebook arrived to tame it—and resonates with the Year of the Protester. For Larsson—an investigative journalist like his klutzy hero (Craig), who recruits Lisbeth as an assistant—the enemy was the “financial mafia”; and, in his vision, this ubiquitous cabal with unlimited means can be beaten by an anarchic outsider armed with technical knowhow and an appetite for justice. That alone may be compelling enough to get past page five for. I guess it’s about time.

If she had specified that she be resuscitated, the film might’ve been about a future Schmidt. Matt calls himself the “backup parent”; his 10-year-old daughter Scottie (Amara Miller) bullies schoolmates for having premature pubic hairs (an unverified accusation); his suburban-Honolulu villa is a mess; and so is his 17-year-old daughter Alex (Shailene Woodley). Or at least she’s perceived to be more of a mess than most girls her age; it’s unclear whether being hauled off to boarding school was something Alex’s behavior warranted or whether it’s a sign of negligent parenting. Either way, she seems to be the wisest member of the family. Alex uses drugs to take the edge off the benign blandness that seems to emanate from her busy-body father, rather than from the idyllic archipelago. She uses drugs the way her mother was unfaithful. In About Schmidt, the melancholy of being clueless, and being too old to change that, was lyrically cogent; Schmidt played by the rules his entire life, and still couldn’t score a goal. Matt says that his father-in-law (Robert Forster), who looks like a living memorial—weathered enough to have fought in every war since the invention of gunpowder—has decked him now and then; and it’s easy to see how a rule-abiding softie like Matt could get on a hard-ass’ nerves. There’s something protean about him; he reeks of old affidavits and older coffee. Clooney gives a fine performance, but, beyond the expected range of feelings, Matt’s inscrutable—aloof to his own midlife crisis. He’s Ozzie Nelson struggling to get by in the alliterative age of Don Draper and Walter White. In the beautifully understated end, when the Kings flock around March of the Penguins on TV, it’s clear that they’ll spend more quality time together; but he looks like he’ll still push papers in his skull.

As the title implies, Payne—who adapted Kaui Hart Hemmings’s novel with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash—gives the theme of putting family first, as it were, a very macro view. The queen has other descendants, and not all of them are Kings; as a lawyer, Matt oversees the trust that contains her bequest in Kauai: seafront property that’s been pristine since the 1860s. Cousins like Beau Bridges’s beach-bum—a lifer in Margaritaville—show how little a drop of royalty can do for a bloodline; they want to do the expedient thing and sell each breathtaking acre of Granny’s dowry. Mainly, this is good as a mechanism for comedy: Matt seems to have cousins everywhere—the sort of family reunion one only expects at the reading of a will. But there’s also the unbidden gleam of Chekhov’s gun in this sitcommy set-up: You know which decision Matt’ll make from the moment the problem is introduced, and why. And since a woman with more direct Islander lineage condones of his keeping the land in the buff, and thus free from Rum Diary-esque real-estate swindles, there’s no P.C. unpleasantness about this essentially whitebread clan keeping Arcadia as their own. (I say this with all due deference to the screenwriters; their own inheritance seems to come with a few riders. A more P.C. solution, like donating the land to the Park Service, would’ve come off as phony.) Reverse Shot says that “The Descendants almost dares you to take it seriously,” and in such details as Alex’s paleolithic surfer-dude companion (Nick Krause), I was on the verge of selecting “truth” instead.

Fortunately, even in Hawaii, Payne—who co-produced Cedar Rapids—still seems to be grounded by the flyover states. Pretty-postcard scenery doesn’t bely pain; the Kings’ inground pool is dusted with dead leaves. When Alex dips in and screams upon hearing that her mother’s to be unplugged, and then swims toward the camera like a wounded animal, the usual womb imagery is inverted. (Woodley looks too healthy. The “bad” girls I knew tended to self-transmogrify—though they didn’t live as close to the beach as Alex does. However, this is transcended by the raw, bitter clarity of her performance.) Another filmmaker in Payne’s mold, such as Jason Reitman, might bring moralism to the fore and give it the stamp of “tragedy”; but Payne nudges the audience’s collective shin like a kittycat, winning our assent with a gentle accretion of details—like the kiss that Matt lands on the lips of his wife’s lover’s blissfully ignorant spouse (Judy Greer). In interviews, Payne speaks of being “a comedy director … doing dramatic material”—as if his earlier movies, high comedies, weren’t similarly configured. In some ways, it’s disheartening to see him place such limits on his work. But, more than anything else, his rhetoric points to how respectful his direction is. Decency is Payne’s M.O.—and this wouldn’t necessarily be a virtue if he didn’t have the talent to back it up. He cites Yasujiro Ozu as another comedic director-cum-dramatist; and The Descendants has the grace and fluency of Tokyo Story, another multigenerational saga that subsumes some questionable plotlines.

So are all those shots of sand and gentle surf and sunsets that Phedon Papamichael’s camera lustily lingers on meant to undercut Matt’s assertion that life in the tropics is as quotidian as it is on the mainland? It’s a jump in temperament from the ironist who rigged Election, probably the best high school movie ever made. But even if it’s a leap I’m less willing to take—at least when I’m not on holiday—it isn’t a deal-breaker. A touch of irony remains, after all. Payne’s sensibility is still attracted to undercurrents of ordinariness; and I respect his respect for those.

Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s 3-D début, is Grand Central Station in the age of L.A.X. Take this for an opening shot: Starting amid the snowflakes, above the 24-karat twinkle of the City of Lights, Robert Richardson’s camera bears down on a train-station platform, perks up like a groundstroke, and glides parallel to the rush-hour hustle like a hawk piercing the locomotive steam. It’s a bravura use of technology: The extra depth lends a heightened tension to the people and luggage so narrowly averted; and yet the motion is deifically smooth: Like a 3-D-simulator ride at Universal Studios—or riding shotgun on God’s road test. I prefer the latter because the shot pairs grandiosity, and mammoth cinephilic self-consciousness, with a thwack of surprise. We’re aware of the trick, but still fall for it: as if in the sway of an illusionist who’s eroding our skepticism. Considering that this is a movie about magic, it makes sense that, after this first wave of his wand, the flashy Scorsese we all know and love virtually disappears.

For a film of its scale, Hugo is remarkably small in scope. And despite being a movie about thaumaturgy, there’s nothing in it that can be classified as fantasy: Orks and aliens need not apply. The idea of an orphan squatting at a Victorian-gothic railroad station in 1931—an invisible waif among inattentive masses at a gilded gateway to the world—matches these ironies like P.B. with J. Having lost his clocksmith father (Jude Law) to a fire, the title character (Asa Butterfield, with eyes blue enough to blind Yves Klein and a name that conjures images of Oz under a dusting of Land O’Lakes) became the ward of a krunky uncle who looks, and probably smells, like the carny who hocked the Elephant Man. When the uncle, in turn, clocks out, he bequeaths to Hugo a responsibility more consequential than the boy knows: to keep the clocks ticking at a Parisian gare—the rafters of which he calls home—like a renegade intern without college cred to recoup. If Hugo can dodge the station’s Dickensian inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) artfully enough, he noshes on unguarded croissants, lifts tchotchkes and curios from the shop kept by mysterious Georges (Ben Kingsley)—he of the gloomy demeanor and bristly white chin—and tinkers with an equally enigmatic automaton that his dad didn’t live to fix. Georges gives Hugo a shoulder cold enough to melt Frosty, but his god-daughter Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz)—wearing a beret in 1931 but maybe Wayfarers in 2011—has a book-bred thirst for adventure too sharp to typify nerdiness. And Hugo’s totally crushing on her!

Especially as a family film, but even compared to a spectacular movie in roughly its same class—such as The Fall—Hugo is a remarkably complex work: Form, content, and theme are more tightly stitched together than a pair of designer jeans. It’s almost a living organism. But unlike most “self-aware” pomo schmorgasboards, it seems refreshingly unaware of its self-awareness, and even this seems thematically driven. In order to explain, I’ll have to raise the spoiler-alert flag—but since you’d have to be both a.) a complete film-history geek and b.) living deep underwater, sleeping with the fishes, for it to matter, I’ll fly the flag at half-mast. Georges is short for—wait for it—Georges Méliès, the magician and film pioneer behind the iconic A Trip to the Moon (1902). Embittered by the post-World War I disaffection with whimsy and what was yet to be branded “surreal,” he’s all but scrubbed away the accomplishments of his past. (For the record, I found this reveal to be weak tea when I expected a taurine jolt—not because it’s slightly ahistorical, but because, despite a cornucopia of evidence to the contrary, it makes Méliès seem like a selfish, small-minded jerk.) He’s unaware that his work is pored over by scholars like Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg, that fun cheekbone contortionist whose Grampa Munster mug on Boardwalk Empire recalls the Emil Jannings posters strewn about the movie palace here)—having faked his own death, he’s unaware that any of his work still exists. The only non-cellulose nitrate relic from the old days is the automaton, which turns out to be a literal key to the plot, the linchpin to a Méliès revival. (It’s also a masterstroke of production design, somewhere between the cool-countenanced King Tut’s sarcophagus and the mad scientist’s humanoid appliances in Edward Scissorhands.) I’m with David Edelstein in thinking that Scorsese’s film-restoration plea, set to Satie and Saint-Saëns, takes one out of the movie a bit—it’s a little Jehovah’s Witnessy. But that’s like caviling the birthday card a third-grader slips to the teacher who first sparks his sex drive.

If one looks too closely at its posthuman conflation of men and machines, the movie becomes a little creepy. For instance, Hugo dreams that he lifts up his shirt and finds the automaton’s iron ribcage where his chest should be. It’s a cyberpunk vision of puberty: a correlative to Méliès’s insistence that films are an iteration of dreams. (The urchin has another nightmare in which he’s nearly creamed by an oncoming train, and that one almost comes true—it’s based on a wreck that happened in real life—implying some kind of sixth sense on Hugo’s part or black magic on Méliès’s.) At the end, the cast is united in clinking cocktails at a party. But the camera tracks its way into the adjacent room, empty save for the automaton, which—yet another illusion—looks to have molded its mien to something like proprietary pride. And then there’s the full title of the Brian Selznick book on which John Logan’s delicate script is based: The Invention of Hugo Cabret—a sort of high-meta double entendre. However, taken as a metaphor for life—and, by extension, le cinéma—the notion that everybody has a function, like parts in a machine (i.e., a clock or camera), and Hugo’s function is to fix things (i.e., like a craftsman or artist—or filmmaker, who is both), is satisfying on a simple, atavistic level: akin to the clown’s even-this-pebble-has-a-purpose pep talk in Fellini’s La Strada (1954). Some of the imagery in Hugo—and this is a stretch—might be alluding to Welles’s The Stranger (1946). Since Welles, a noted magician, directed that thriller to show the studios that he could sell out with the best of ’em, his clocktower stood for style for its own sake. For Scorsese, as for the concourse clock at Grand Central, style has a function. Style is magic: It’s what makes a movie in which everything that happens could happen in real life feel like a fantasy epic. He’s pulled a $170 million dime out from behind our ears.

As a showman, with style to burn, Scorsese’s always been one of Welles’s aptest pupils; and he indeed includes some woozily Wellesian high-angle compositions that really pop in 3-D. But, aside from the opening and closing shots—and at least thrice, during Thelma Schoonmaker’s blood-pressure-boosting montages, when I reached, in vain, for a rewind button, to dissect them—the director vanishes into the mise-en-scène (for lack of a better word; honestly) like an old-timey studio-system ghost. That doesn’t mean his work isn’t splendid. Not just technically, but also with the cast: One upswing of Moretz’s eyebrow is worth a million frames of your average child prodigy; and Baron Cohen is a one-man Vaudeville duo. Happily, for a film with sequences that took nearly three months to digitally render, each coffee ring—from day one to day 89—shines forth, each tannin aglow. It’s easy to see why James Cameron talks up the 3-D in Hugo as if he were spinning a glowing Gizmodo editorial in his head: Scorsese doesn’t simulate real life, he enhances it. The depth of focus, especially in the exteriors, isn’t always tactile, in a naturalistic sense; it’s like a pop-up book: a marvelous yuletide fairy tale in Autochrome indigo and gold.

Hugo is, in sum, an authentic celebration of artifice. There’s something fully-trimmed-tree beautiful about it—transporting, even, since it manages to do this with the sort of generosity that a Quentin Tarantino would’ve hoarded for himself—and something that feels like a cold draft intruding on the Kahlua-and-hot cocoa toastiness that accompanied my egress from the theater. This auteur has successfully made the supreme Lionel toy-train set—with lots of money, and language suitable for children. But Scorsese’s message is not merely that life needs art; it’s that life and art cannot be disentangled. That fiction and reality, in this context, are inseparable. (“Happy endings only happen in movies,” Méliès, in one scene, avers; and then his life, in a movie, ends happily.) Usually, as in Synecdoche, New York, this is writ large. But Scorsese’s caméra stylo writes in invisible ink. It’s a kind of stylistic voodoo: a magic trick. Maybe I’m overreaching; maybe it’s a vibe that naturally results from a gaga hyper-proficiency that can itself only result from what I blushingly call love. Maybe Hugo carries the same message that Scorsese’s style conveys in all of his work, even when it’s expressed for different ends. Fantasy needs be nothing more than reality imaginatively experienced. Grand Central Station could be the end of the line.

The lineage is so obvious and well-established—the director, Michel Hazanavicius, has cribbed from A Star is Born and Singin’ in the Rain—that plot explication is nearly irrelevant. But here goes. It’s 1927, and movie star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) basks his adoring public in a smile broad enough to sprain his jawbone. Enter Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) who—thanks in part to George’s tutelage—becomes the new It Girl, just in time for sound to come into play and dethrone the king of silents. Her meteoric success is in direct variation with his career’s demise; but she pines for him, and he’s got a hankering for her, so George’s John Gilbert grows up and becomes the Fred Astaire to Peppy’s Ginger Rogers. In sum, the plot’s as thin as George’s mustache—and light as a communion wafer: Although it stretches only as far as the early ’30s, the storyline is pure Post-Code morality. Peppy would be a contemporary of Jean Harlow, Marlene Dietrich, and Mae West—but she’s the kind of gal who makes whistles look filthy. Perhaps she’s kinkier on screen—we aren’t shown the source of her star appeal; her career isn’t elaborated on beyond the titles of her vehicles. But Peppy the civilian is selfless, sexless, and one- dimensional enough that a more opprobrious critic might find the film’s sexual politics reactionary. Even this less opprobrious critic thinks it odd that we become as easily inured to the movie’s antique attitudes as we do to its antique format, itself a surprisingly easy sell. Maybe, because of the medium, we tolerate the message?

Hazanavicius doesn’t just replicate the texture of silent films with camera angles and lenses, or from the boyish spring in Bejo’s Charleston step, or the craggy facial canyons of the ever-abiding stock-character chauffeur (James Cromwell); he recreates a context in which we accept the conventions—some may say inanities—of an earlier era of storytelling, with a minimum of irony. This produces some wonderful moments, such as when Peppy’s hand caresses her thigh from the sleeve of George’s unoccupied jacket, or George’s nightmare—synched to glaringly artificial sound effects. But The Artist is imitative rather than innovative; its dramaturgy and camerawork aren’t interesting beyond the fact that they are convincingly old-fashioned. It doesn’t have the insatiable ambition of the German Expressionists, or the intricate stunts of Keaton and Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, or the show-stopping song-and-dance numbers of Singin’ in the Rain. And when he threatens to stray beyond the pale of nostalgic novelty, in an allusion to Vertigo—30 years, and about as many genres, off—Hazanavicius cops out completely. The Artist is winsome but negligible. But if the blue-haired ladies who were applauding in the audience keep clapping as loudly as they did for The King’s Speech, giving the Oscar to this silent may be a sound choice.

Pace the Occupy Sesame Street camp, I think the movie’s flaws have less to do with depriving children of their oil-soaked brainwash than depriving adults of some of their favorite celebrity sock-puppets. (For the record, the principals never state their position on fossil-fuel consumption; Kermit knows how hard it is to be green. And don’t the filmmakers get credit for making Gonzo a job-creator: a toilet tycoon? If you’re blue, it’s easy to make the green.) Gonzo, Fozzie, Rowlf, and the others get relatively short shrift—even if it’s justified, more or less, by a very Muppety montage: a little bout of self-awareness in which the characters order the film editor around. Which gets to my overarching point that, even if Segel and Nicholas Stoller’s screenwritten portrait of their childhood idols is crooked, it’s crooked at the right, sweet-but-silly angle. So there’s little use in getting too worked up about how some of the musical numbers—the director, James Bobin, has previously plied his trade on Flight of the Concords—seem a pinch half-assed, with fine songs like Adams’s “Party of One” (when she’s doing a little Kristen Wiigling at Mel’s Diner) and Cooper’s gangsta rap ending a bit too early. Or how Segel, a rubber monument to schlubbiness, has a smile that looks forced, even if it isn’t, and like it’s always struggling to conceal despair. I’ll even forgive the ad hoc framing story, about blandly uncompelling Walter, because its purpose—introducing the younger generation to the troupe their parents have brought them to see—is evident, if less essential than feared.

It’s my impression that these weaknesses indicate that The Muppets was explicitly not conceived in terms of focus-grouped Disney shapeliness, and that the sentimentality—nostalgia is sentimentality—is at least of the genuine sort. Just as the sentimentality embedded in the question that both the movie and the media have asked—are the Muppets still relevant?—is also genuine. It answers itself and begs for a “yes.” I don’t remember half as much fuss over the Smurfs being cinematized last summer, or the Chipmunks and their ear-piercing squeakquels. Relevance is not a germane factor in attaining precious P&A. But the Muppets hold a special place in the hearts of people in the same age bracket as those who wrote this movie and its attendant barrage of think-pieces, and who enlisted in its army of cameos. (Except for a dim walk-on by Selena Gomez, the guest stars are 30 and up.) Although he donned their duds, Henson wasn’t a hippie; but he was very invested in the generation gap that grew in the 1960s. The Muppets came to represent a compromise between the variety-show values of yore and a counterculture that strove to break down formal and artistic conventions as part of its purgative program. The Muppet Show didn’t just pioneer this formula, it fed it to the young—to children who went on to make The Simpsons and the Pixar movies and Modern Family. Its impudence can be blamed for making legions of kids think they’re cleverer than they are, but it was a gateway drug to a type of comedy that’s now pervasive: virtually the only style that brings the critical class and the hoi polloi (if the two can still be distinguished) together. The experiment was a success. And I can objectively prove that the filmmakers’ intentions were sincere because, in the segment in which Gonzo’s poultry-fetish girls sing a cover of Cee Lo Green, they resist the refrain “Cluck you.”

Dunst’s performance aside, the movie itself seems a little sealed off. In Dancer in the Dark (2000), Trier juxtaposed Björk’s bleak existence with the escapism of Hollywood musicals; here, Justine’s Pre-Raphaelite princess fantasies hardly contrast with the jet-set profligacy of her “real” world. Even though the limousines have Pennsylvania plates, John’s ancestral castle, where Justine’s wedding reception is held—judging from the the topiary, Marienbad has been retrofitted as a driving range, though its one-percenter clientele is still in zomboid circulation—was shot in Sweden. (In Vladimir Nabokov’s slim, wonderful novel Pnin, a pompous nonconformist—read: Vladimir Nabokov—calls melancholia a “bourgeois” affliction. Here, it seems, depression comes with a much heftier price tag.) The delocalized setting, the faceless guests in their Armanis and ice, the Bruegel and the Wagner, the casting of Charlotte Rampling and John Hurt as the bride’s—thank God!—separated parents, are all so foundational to the European art house that Trier’s attempts at contemporary realism, viz Rachel Getting Married, resonate unevenly. All the more so because they’re thinly conceived. There’s no way to accept Justine as a whiz at advertising; or Stellan Skarsgård, as her boss, bullying her into inspiration in the midst of her holy matrimony; or her blank-slate groom (Alexander Skarsgård), whom she immediately cheats on with a random pischer—she’s too fickle to consummate her vows. And for all the cheddar he cheesed on these nuptials, couldn’t John have hired a better band? In air this refined, how could “La Bamba” on a keyboard even exist?

I should probably mention that Melancholia is not only the title, but also the name that some cutup at NASA has given to a planet on an improbable course to collide with Earth during the film’s second half. (This sapphire bulb has, if nothing else, a more metal name than Pandora.) We get a glimpse of it early on, in a prelude—or, maybe, premonition—that precedes Part I, the wedding sequence, which is named after Justine—whose own name is somewhat tackily lifted from de Sade. The hypnotic lentor of this preview is astounding—dead fowl fall from the heavens and, in the heavens, two C.G. globes perform an interstellar waltz, neither of which certain if the other is leading. (It’s almost too astounding, because its intensity goes unequaled until the end.) We can tell this is the tempo that Justine perceives life to be playing at because she’s hitched to a smog of gray yarn, which she later describes as her figurative ball-and-chain. And, since we see serpents of electricity flutter from her fingertips, we know she’s got the power. Not the power to zap enemies, like the emperor in Return of the Jedi, but to face the impending apocalypse. John, swaddled in silk suits and faith in reason, denies it; the scientists say, or so he says, it ain’t gonna happen. But Justine intuits the end, accepts it, and claims “The Earth is evil … We don’t need to grieve for it.” Claire, for whom Part II is named, is as damaged as her sibling, but in a different way; she wants to ring in the end-times as one would the new year, with a glass of wine on the balcony. Maybe a round of Cranium. Her indulgence in the worldly and material seems to be, in Trier’s view, a lethal form of repression. Fatalism is pragmatism: Trier’s trying to convert us. As Claire whimpers, Justine, still as the Buddha, embraces the blaze.

Like The Tree of Life, its Cannes competitor—and, in terms of self-absorption, its sister work—Melancholia isn’t primarily concerned with human interactions. (Although it gets points for a few of its fripperies: scorned Stellan Skarsgård lobbing a plate for the second time—because the first throw didn’t shatter it—certainly made me smile. It’s probably as old as the chicken crossing the road, but it breached the somberness in an unexpected way. Plus Trier stalwart Udo Kier as the wedding planner seemed to me like a good bad omen.) For Terrence Malick, the universe came into being in order to produce a sand-lot childhood; for Trier, its destruction is prefigured by a single individual’s suffering. Art-filmmakers have been looking to the stars for guidance a lot lately: not only Malick and Trier, but Miranda July; and the Coen brothers have done their share of cosmic fist-shaking as well. Science and fantasy have been encroaching on religion. This isn’t just an aside: Melancholia can be read as more than a primer on pessimism, as it has widely been. It may also be a good-faith tool for teaching acceptance.

The flipside of that lesson is it’s not one a lot of people want to learn, at least not outside of seminaries. But parts of the movie have a gravitas, vested in it by some pool of credibility that manhood-mashing Antichrist, a Cthulhu Pink Flamingos, tried but couldn’t dip into. My own reaction hasn’t quite congealed. But I can say this: A cue from Wagner—from Tristan and Isolde—provides the film with a minimalist soundtrack of maximal romantic grandeur. As the Earth was engulfed in flames, and all of life and art were exiled to kingdom come, I waited for the music to reach its quenching climax, when the liebestod washes over you like waves embracing a jagged shore, and then retreats into the shoals of melancholia before reminding you that it was worth it after all. And it did not.

Robinson—who hasn’t directed a feature since 1992, but indicated comic mastery of Thompson-friendly boho indigence in Withnail and I (1987)—has made the fanboy mistake of replacing his hero’s forms of amateurishness with his own, telescoping both. With the book’s most active character excised, and its antagonists marginalized, there isn’t a personality on screen that can’t be classified as schizophrenic. But the director had in him at least one indelible image—a Looney Tune gendarme, framed at a Gilliamesque angle or like a peasant in Potemkin, flames working their way up his mustache—and he’s got Giovanni Ribisi playing a welcome Withnail figure, by way of Charlie Day. (Michael Rispoli, more-or-less the skeezy sensei for Depp’s Thompson-to-be, would be a natch to play Perkus Tooth in an adaptation of Chronic City; but his voice is dangerously close in timber to Benicio del Toro’s.) What would the O.G. [Original Gonzo] Dr. Thompson have thought had he seen himself at the center of a Shakespeare in Love? He’d fear and loathe the messianic truther that Depp, distant and introverted when barbs are in short supply, devolves into. But the one-liners might’ve had him grinning under the brim of his fishing hat.

The title refers to the venue in which McKinney became a bonafide celebrity. A native of North Carolina who commanded the pageant circuit from an early age, she somehow finds herself, by the mid-1970s, in Utah—and, so she claims, ignorant of Mormonism and its customs. In what might have been a wet dream for legions of other eligible bachelors, she aims her obsessiveness at Anderson, a virginal evangelist who, by her account, punked out on her—leaving Salt Lake City for London to fulfill the same obligation that the young Mitt Romney did when he sought to make Mormon converts in France. (Anderson declined to participate in the making of this movie.) McKinney soon comes into money, by means which are not altogether verifiable and which I will leave to the film to disclose, and uses it to kidnap him; tie him to a bedpost at a cottage in pastoral Devon; and, depending on who you ask, rape him. Repeatedly. When Anderson, who has been freed from his cage like a canary into the dubious solace of smog, testifies against her—she thinks due to doctrinaire bullying from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—McKinney ends up behind bars. But also on the front page. An innocent abroad, with a gift for gab that overlaps with the poetry of romantic incoherence, McKinney’s antics make her the golden girl of the piss-yellow press—which, as is its wont, micturates on her image as soon as it becomes expedient to.

Like a police dog’s nose, one’s mind automatically slides to the ignominious News of the World scandal from last summer; and, by interviewing two representatives from rival papers that profiled the “Mormon sex-in-chains case” back in the ’70s, Tabloid gives the American viewer a little insight into these thankfully alien, and hopefully moribund, institutions. But I couldn’t bring myself to hate those two crusty old gents, whose intentions probably differ—but overlap—with Morris’s. And though that’s not the most enviable piece of real estate within the Venn diagram, it’s partly exonerated by another recent affair that this movie reminded me of: the Pyrrhic “winning” of Charlie Sheen. He carved his sick self up and stuffed it down our throats. For the paparazzi, it was a veritable free lunch—for weeks—so, as contemptible as their exploitation of a mentally ill man was, he was literally asking them for it, and at what seemed to be a mostly conscious level. He profited from his own breakdown, so all parties were parasites: perfect symbiosis. McKinney’s strange tics may be the product of an imbalanced mind, but she seems to have used her eccentricities to seduce the tabloid reporters, just as she seems to be performing for Morris. Next to Sheen, her self-exploitation seems sweet, even quaint. To some degree, she still sees herself as an innocent, which probably can’t be said for the minus one of Two and a Half Men, who seems to relish in his raunchy guilt.

Self-exploitation—as au courant as the new iPhone—gives the confessional documentary its gray gleam; but in its pervasive perversion, it has made the entire media horizon overcast: a melancholy cloud coalescing behind the artificial sunlight of reality television and its inbred ilk. For generations now, we’ve been living on the fault line between the real and fictional—and the farther we fall into the crack, the darker it gets. When reality-TV stars whore out their intimacy for the sake of publicity—when Snooki confesses her infidelity to her boyfriend or Kim Kardashian’s mother tells her daughter that she’s her only child who cared enough to visit her at the hospital after the most recent rhinoplasty—we can laugh because this so-called reality is designed to look fake. (By falsifying real people, these shows inspire cheap derision in viewers—which Morris, to his credit, never does.) But, with the advent of social networks, we can now—and within an all-too-convenient rubric—edit our own personal reality shows and broadcast them to the world. As we snigger at the self-exploiting celebs, we mask a desire to be them: a human desire to become rich and famous by the easiest of means: by being “ourselves.” And yet so many of these selves seem stuck behind sanitized job-interview grins. We like to think we’re savvier than the bobby-soxers who absorbed Greta Garbo through Photoplay, but are we? Since our chuckles at the stars’ expense help pay for their houses in Aspen, who, exactly, is being exploited? McKinney, who’s now protesting Morris’s movie, sees herself as having been. But perhaps she’s exploited her fair share, too. And perhaps it’s a sign of the times that the tabloid subject of this film has been conveyed in respectable broadsheet form—as if the two can no longer be told apart.