I don't know whether the insult is greater to Paris or Love in this misbegotten movie. Outside of the opening establishing shots, there is very little Paris in FROM PARIS WITH LOVE. A quick lunch at the Eiffel Tower, a couple of visits to the projects on the outskirts of town - that's about it for the City of Light. The rest of the film takes place either on rather generic highways or inside equally indistinct buildings.

Love gets even shorter shrift than Paris. Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays a frustrated diplomat who yearns to be a special ops agent. On the very night he gets engaged to his sexy French girlfriend, this wanna-be is called away to partner with the baddest of bad-ass agents, Charlie Wax (John Travolta.) And that's it in the love/romance department until the film's climax when a suicide terrorist is about to blow up a United Nations gathering at the American Embassy. Preposterously, the action comes to a screeching halt so Rhys Meyers and his French fiancee can have an urgent talk about the true meaning of love ... in the middle of a crowded room! Never mind that she has a string of bombs strapped to her chest - we need to talk!!!

Of course, the movie doesn't really care about Paris OR love - it's all just an excuse for non-stop action. Wax is one of those cartoon characters (is that name a clue?) who can slay ten thugs with a few swings of a metal pipe, and kill dozens, if not hundreds, with his assorted weaponry. All in a day's work, mind you. And he stays completely unscathed. Since there's no nuance to his character, he's presented as "a character," someone who loves to berate the French just for being French, who lovingly sings to his gun (Me and Mrs...Mrs Jones) and admits to one and only one deadly vice - a softness for a "royale with cheese." Despite the nod to PULP FICTION, this movie lacks the wit to elevate itself above the standard issue shoot 'em ups. And that's a shame since director Pierre Morel once seemed to have such potential.

Morel's first film was the astonishing BANLIEUE 13, sometimes called DISTRICT 13. Set in the near future amidst the down-and out suburbs ringing Paris, BANLIEUE 13 introduced the heady rush of "parkour" to the big screen long before the 007 franchise did in Daniel Craig's first go-round, CASINO ROYALE. Much like DISTRICT 9 did this year, BANLIEUE 13 infused the action genre with a fresh approach not only to the action but to the context as well. If DISTRICT 9 layered its tale of alien invasion with a clear political message about apartheid and the treatment of immigrants, BANLIEUE 13 used its story of the state's war on drugs as a cover to skewer France's right wing politics. (When the film's rather evil minister brands the inhabitants of the banlieue "scum," it eerily foreshadowed Interior Minister (and now President) Nicolas Sarkozy's comments about the rioters on the outskirts of Paris one year later.) Both D9 and B13 remain, in essence, genre pictures, but they manage to bring something original to enliven the shopworn.

Morel then graduated to the English-language smash hit TAKEN. A film that surpassed everyone's expectations at the box office, TAKEN stars Liam Neeson as an aggrieved father whose teenage daughter is kidnapped in Paris by an Albanian sex-trafficking ring. It's such a straight-forward action film that when I happened to catch up with it on a plane, I watched it with the sound down and had no trouble following along! Full of ridiculous one-man heroics, TAKEN works primarily on the level of a full-blown vigilante revenge fantasy. It's just lurid enough to distract us from the fact that nothing very interesting is happening on the screen. For me, TAKEN is a step backward from the ingenuity of B13, but it's hard to argue with its box-office success. Morel clearly tapped into something in the zeitgeist.

And now comes FROM PARIS WITH LOVE, yet another retreat from Morel's auspicious start. Although he stays true to both the action genre and the Parisian setting, Morel seems to have lost interest in both. To remedy the situation, I'd like to suggest he go back to France, except he never left. So instead, maybe he should just return to his native language. Who knows, maybe there's something about the English language that vulgarizes his imagination??? In any case, here's hoping he finds something that will rejuvenate his creative juices and restore the lustre of his once promising career.

From Seattle with love.

This morning's Oscar nominations set up a battle royale between a former husband and wife.

Not only are James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow up against each other in the best director category for AVATAR and THE HURT LOCKER, those two films have the most nominations as well, nine apiece.

That's something of a moral victory for THE HURT LOCKER, to be able to garner the same number of nominations as a special effects monster like AVATAR. The two go head to head for Best Picture, Director, Editing, Cinematography, Sound Editing, and Sound Mixing.

It would be hard to imagine two more different films, one a science fiction spectacular, the other a gritty, intense wartime drama. One has brought in 2 BILLION dollars and counting, and the other is out on DVD after pulling in a paltry 12 million bucks.

Despite aesthetic differences and a divorce, Cameron and Bigelow are reportedly on good terms with each other. And I noticed at the BFCA awards that when Bigelow was named Best Director, the first person jumping up to applaud was Cameron.

Why are so many romantic comedies dumber than dumb? Is it because the audiences for them don't demand them be smarter?

If WHEN IN ROME does any business this weekend, that answer will be clear. Like many of the romantic comedy heroines they identify with, audiences must be so desperate they'll take anything that comes along. WHEN IN ROME is akin to "what the cat drug in."

And in case you think this is just a typical guy's attack on chick flicks, I want to assure you I love a good romantic comedy. I consider most of the works of Richard Curtis, for instance, to be top-notch, especially FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL and NOTTING HILL. They're smart, funny, and yes, romantic. With roots going at least as far back as Jane Austen, romantic comedies have a tradition as rich and satisfying as any working genre. So why are so many of them so bad????

Case in point - WHEN IN ROME.

Kristen Bell plays a young, hard-charging museum curator who's been unlucky enough in love to decide it doesn't really exist. When her younger sister announces she's getting married to an Italian after a two-week whirlwind courtship, she's convinced her sister is nuts but agrees to be her maid of honor at the wedding in Rome. The wedding is marked by a lot of bad slapstick. It starts with the best man having his cellphone pop out of his pocket while it's playing an embarrassingly frank ringtone and he just CAN'T turn it off! Not to be outdone, Bell is supposed to smash a ceremonial vase, with the number of smashed pieces meant to symbolize the number of happy years the newly married couple can expect. But of course, she can't for the life of her break it - she drops it hard on the ground, she bangs it against the altar, she throws it against a wall, she knocks over a fountain of glasses, even knocks out an old lady with it but all to no avail. The vase remains intact. Oh, so not funny.

Naturally, after a lot of this unfunny stuff transpires, Bell and the best man (Josh Duhamel) have eyes for each other, but things don't quite work out. So, in a kind of impulsive last act before leaving Rome, she snags five coins out of the Fountain of Love and heads home.

The trick of WHEN IN ROME's plot is that each of the five men who threw those coins into the fountain are now instantly smitten with Bell. I understand that movies in general, and romantic comedies in particular, require some suspension of disbelief and I'm willing to grant a lot as long as there's a payoff, some psychological insight that burbles to the surface by show's end. After all, Shakespeare's comedies are at least as outlandishly premised as WHEN IN ROME. But nothing of interest rises out of Bell's connection with these random men. Will Arnett, Jon Heder, Dax Shepard, and Danny DeVito are all funny guys but their characters are so ridiculously broad and slapstick-y that none of them registers any real laughs. The screenwriter doesn't seem to care enough to give any of them - neither Arnett's goofball painter, Heder's goofball magician, Shepard's goofball model, nor DeVito's goofball sausage king - any lines worth delivering. And without a scriptful of witty lines to distract us, we have time to notice that it makes no sense at all, that those random coins Bell grabs in an ITALIAN fountain should all be connected to men who live in her hometown of New York City. That's not serendipity, that's lazy writing.

Picking apart a run-of-the-mill rom-com is not exactly rocket science, so I'll not belabor the point too much. But among the film's idiocies is the notion that a woman who's supposedly a skeptic about matters of the heart has NO trouble believing an Italian superstition that says coins from a fountain force a man to fall in love with the coin-grabber. Again, that's just lazy screenwriting. None of this would matter, of course, if the movie dazzled us with sparkling dialogue and genuine humor, but it doesn't. And I'm simply not desperate enough to take anything that comes along. I may be in the minority but I think it's about time to start demanding smarter rom-coms. Are you with me people?

2009 was a great year for animation, with above-average traditional fare like THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG, CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS, and UP sharing screen time with the brilliantly adventuresome likes of CORALINE, 9, and FANTASTIC MR. FOX. Even the box office champ AVATAR was mostly an animated movie. And now 2010 kicks off with an even more "out there" animated offering - A TOWN CALLED PANIC.

Based on a cult Belgian cartoon series, A TOWN CALLED PANIC uses intentionally primitive stop-motion animation to relate the crazy adventures of a plastic cowboy, a plastic Indian, and a plastic horse, all of whom happen to live together under the same roof in a small rural village in Belgium. Adopting a "puppetoon" animation style, in which the characters for the most part remain rigid, the film derives much of its humor from its necessarily clunky movements. The Indian and Cowboy, of course, have plastic bases, so they have to waddle whenever they move and the Horse can't move his legs so rather than galloping anywhere, he mostly just hops. That holds true for all the other characters as well - including humans like their neighbor farmer, his wife, the postman and the policeman AND the other creatures like the cows, sheep, and the pointy-headed alien fish-bats. That's right, I said pointy-headed alien fish-bats. More on that in a bit.

Despite its obviously limited movement possibilities, A TOWN CALLED PANIC is nothing if not ambitious. It may start out on a simple village farm but it journeys far and wide and deep - down to the center of the earth, then up again over an arctic wilderness, and even to an undersea world peopled by those aforesaid fish-bats who guard their upside-down habitats with vicious and well-trained barracudas.

In case it hasn't already become clear, this film has the quirkiest sense of humor imaginable. Many of the laughs simply come from the disconnect between the crude movement options and the outrageously outsized adventures the characters take part in. Cowboy, Indian, and Horse may not be able to move much, but that doesn't keep them from "walking" along the ocean floor, complete with snorkels. In fact, these supposedly limited characters constantly surprise us with their capabilites - Horse brushes his teeth, drives a car, reads the newspaper, and plays the piano. He even takes his horseshoes off before he goes to bed. Cowboy and Indian watch a lot of TV, use cellphones and computers, and play a mean game of ping-pong with oversize paddles.

The film's outlandish discrepancy in scale garners more than just a few guffaws. My favorite? The farmer's wife makes a piece of morning toast five times bigger than she is, and pours coffee out of a pot that towers over her into a cup that also dwarfs her. When her equally small husband then comes in and devours the entire toast in practically one gulp, you can't help but laugh. Other laughs come from the simple absurdity of the story ... and the endless imaginative leaps it forces us to make.

I'll grant you that as one farfetched tale grafts itself on to another and then another, it begins to feel as if the storyline is just one damn thing after another. But ultimately I see its arbitrariness as more purposeful than aesthetically sloppy. A TOWN CALLED PANIC ultimately reminds me of the kind of stories kids make up when they're playing with a random bunch of plastic toys: Let's see. What do I have laying around? Here's an Indian, a cowboy, a horse, a policeman, some cows, a tractor, a couple of houses, two beds, a pond with fish, some fences, a piece of toast, a broken down piano, three or four aliens and a bunch of toy bricks. Okay, so let's start by pretending the Cowboy and Indian live with the Horse and they forget to get the Horse a birthday present. In a last-minute rush, they decide to build him a barbecue out of bricks, but they end up ordering way too many bricks, so many in fact that it destroys the whole village ... Thus begins A TOWN CALLED PANIC, a beginning I would venture many an imaginative eight-year-old would recognize.

The stories kids tell themselves are arbitrary, preposterous, frenetic, and often out of scale, but they're always, always fun ... just like A TOWN CALLED PANIC.

This is a big weekend in Hollywood, with the two biggest pre-Oscar Awards show strutting their stuff. After a month's worth of various small, albeit prestigious, critics groups weighing in, it's now time for the higher profile, and televised, CRITICS CHOICE AWARDS and the GOLDEN GLOBES, on Friday and Sunday night respectively.

One of the perks of being a film critic is having a say on some of these year-end awards. As a member of the Broadcast Film Critics Association, I get to vote for the CRITICS CHOICE AWARDS, for instance. I get a kick out of knowing I had some small role in selecting the various nominees and eventual winners. Almost as much fun, though, is getting to bitch about what kind of "idiots" would have voted for this lame picture or that lousy actor as the best anything.

It's in that spirit that this idiot offers his CRITCS CHOICE AWARD ballot and tries to explain the sometimes convoluted reasoning that went into his various votes.

Let's start with the top category - BEST PICTURE. Like the Oscars this year, the BFCA chose ten nominees for BEST PIC:

Nominees:
• Avatar
• An Education
• The Hurt Locker
• Inglourious Basterds
• Invictus
• Nine
• Precious
• A Serious Man
• Up
• Up In The Air

This was a slam-dunk for me. THE HURT LOCKER was a near-perfect blend of the action-thriller with documentary-like boots-on-the-ground realism. As for the others, AVATAR was pretty but empty, AN EDUCATION was clever and well-acted but a little too pat, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS was a masterstroke of cinematic derring-do but a little too out of control, INVICTUS was history at its most wooden, NINE was frenetic but dramatically and musically limp, PRECIOUS was emotionally powerful but more raw than artistic, A SERIOUS MAN felt too slight to be provocative, UP was another fine Pixar film that ran out of imagination in its final third, and UP IN THE AIR was a slick and smart adult comedy that had too few surprises to be as profound as its proponents maintain. As a voter, I went with what felt like the most complete success as a movie - THE HURT LOCKER. That's not to say I don't wonder if I'm undervaluing both Tarantino's and the Coen Brothers' films. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is clearly the most daring of the films ... and with A SERIOUS MAN, I admit I'm a bit non-plussed by some of the critical raves the film is garnering. I need to see it again, I suppose, but for right now - there's nothing that comes close to Kathryn Bigelow's Iraq movie.

BEST DIRECTING - as with the BEST PIC category, this vote was easy too ... and for all the same reasons: KATHRYN BIGELOW, THE HURT LOCKER.

Nominees:
• Kathryn Bigelow - The Hurt Locker
• James Cameron - Avatar
• Lee Daniels - Precious
• Clint Eastwood - Invictus
• Jason Reitman - Up In The Air
• Quentin Tarantino - Inglourious Basterds

BEST ACTOR - as easy as the above two categories were for me, this category was that hard. I finally went with JEREMY RENNER, THE HURT LOCKER. I would love to see Jeff Bridges win an Oscar this year or any other year. He's been a great underrated actor for ages, and very well may be the frontrunner for this year's Academy Award. But I felt his performance as an over-the-hill, down-on-his-luck country singer was overly familiar. "The Wrestler" with a guitar, anyone? George Clooney plays detached but charming- gee, where have I seen that before? Colin Firth is actually very good as a suicidal gay professor but his performance eventually gets swallowed up by the art direction. Morgan Freeman manages to sap all the charisma out of Nelson Mandela! Viggo Mortensen is earnest and intense but otherwise unremarkable as a desperate father in a post-apocalyptic world. JEREMY RENNER, it could be argued, is merely a cog in Bigelow's expertly devised machine of a movie and I wouldn't strongly disagree. It's certainly not a showy performance but since none of the candidates stands head and shoulders above the rest, I decided to go with the actor in the best movie.

Nominees:
• Jeff Bridges - Crazy Heart
• George Clooney - Up In The Air
• Colin Firth - A Single Man
• Morgan Freeman - Invictus
• Viggo Mortensen - The Road
• Jeremy Renner - The Hurt Locker

Here comes another slam-dunk category: BEST ACTRESS. My vote goes to MERYL STREEP in JULIE & JULIA. Every time she came on the screen as Julia Child, I involuntarily would break out in a big grin. So perfectly did she capture Child's peculiar joie de vivre that it seemed to emanate off the screen and infect the audience. I can't think of a more winning performance, basically a brilliant comic turn that on occasion would give us a glimpse into the depths of her soul. As for the other nominees, Emily Blunt looks a little out of place in Victorian costumes and Sandra Bullock is, well, as perky as you'd expect her to be. Carey Mulligan is my runner-up choice; so layered is her performance as a precocious teenager who learns some valuable lessons about life that it's hard to imagine this is her first leading role. Saoirse Ronan is excellent as the murdered girl who hovers over her family (and her murderer) but she gets a little lost in Peter Jackson's cheesy afterlife. And Gabourey Sidibe is a powerful presence as the put-upon teenage daughter of anabsolute haridan of a mother but, for me at least, she can't quite pull off her big emotional speech near the end.

Nominees:
• Emily Blunt - The Young Victoria
• Sandra Bullock - The Blind Side
• Carey Mulligan - An Education
• Saoirse Ronan - The Lovely Bones
• Gabourey Sidibe - Precious
• Meryl Streep - Julie & Julia

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR is another category I mulled over quite a bit before I went with CHRISTOPH WALTZ, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. Waltz is front and center in Tarantino's movie and dominates every scene he's in. As the diabolically clever Nazi "Jew-hunter," Waltz is a terrifying figure who ends up as the comic butt of a wartime joke. His performance may be mercurial but he's always in control. Besides, he speaks four languages in the film! My hesitation in selecting him has nothing to do with the quality of his performance but rather a reflection of the quality of his fellow nominees. Matt Damon's South African soccer star is the least impressive work in this category - like Morgan Freeman, Damon is wooden. Woody Harrelson is very convincing as a troubled soldier whose job is to inform loved ones their beloved son or daughter or father or mother has been killed in action. Christian McKay is spot on as a young Orson Welles. Alred Molina is good ,albeit slightly cartoonish, as the overbearing father of a precocious teenager. And finally, my runner-up choice, Stanley Tucci who is so unnerving as the obsequious serial killer. That in the same year he winningly portrays Julia Child's sweetest of husbands and a dastardly murderer of children was almost enough to snatch my vote away from Waltz. Almost.

Nominees:
• Matt Damon - Invictus
• Woody Harrelson - The Messenger
• Christian McKay - Me And Orson Welles
• Alfred Molina - An Education
• Stanley Tucci - The Lovely Bones
• Christoph Waltz - Inglourious Basterds

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS - As far as I'm concerned they might as well just go ahead and give the Oscar to MO'NIQUE right now. I mean it, skip all the preliminaries. No one deserves an award this year more. Not since Daniel Day Lewis eviscerated his adult son in THERE WILL BE BLOOD has there been such a ferociously dark performance. Mo'Nique manages to portray evil without becoming cartoonish, a tricky proposition. Her character's humanity manages to shine through despite the most abusive of exteriors. The other nominees are respectable also-rans: Marion Cottillard is the best thing in NINE, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick are perfect foils to George Clooney, Juliane Moore is entirely believable as a desperately lonely socialite, and Samantha Morton is so true as a grieving war widow. But this should be Mo'Nique's year.

Nominees:
• Marion Cotillard - Nine
• Vera Farmiga - Up In The Air
• Anna Kendrick - Up In The Air
• Mo’Nique - Precious
• Julianne Moore - A Single Man
• Samantha Morton - The Messenger

So this entry doesn't go on too long, I'll just mark my votes on the rest of the categories. And feel free to let me know when I am being a complete idiot with my vote.

BEST YOUNG ACTOR/ACTRESS

Nominees:
• Jae Head - The Blind Side
• Bailee Madison - Brothers
• Max Records - Where The Wild Things Are • Saoirse Ronan - The Lovely Bones --- MY VOTE • Kodi Smit-McPhee - The Road

BEST ACTING ENSEMBLE

Nominees:
• Inglourious Basterds
• Nine
• Precious ---MY VOTE
• Star Trek
• Up In The Air

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Nominees:
• Mark Boal - The Hurt Locker ---MY VOTE
• Joel Coen & Ethan Coen - A Serious Man
• Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber - (500) Days Of Summer
• Bob Peterson, Peter Docter - Up
• Quentin Tarantino - Inglourious Basterds

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Nominees:
• Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach - Fantastic Mr. Fox
• Neill Blomkamp, Terri Tatchell - District 9 ---MY VOTE
• Geoffrey Fletcher - Precious
• Tom Ford, David Scearce - A Single Man
• Nick Hornby - An Education
• Jason Reitman, Sheldon Turner - Up In The Air

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Nominees:
• The Hurt Locker --- MY VOTE
• Nine
• Avatar
• The Lovely Bones
• Inglourious Basterds

BEST ART DIRECTION

Nominees:
• A Single Man ---MY VOTE
• Avatar
• Nine
• The Lovely Bones
• Inglourious Basterds

BEST EDITING

Nominees:
• Up In The Air
• Inglourious Basterds
• The Hurt Locker --- MY VOTE
• Avatar
• Nine

BEST COSTUME DESIGN

Nominees:
• Nine ---MY VOTE
• Bright Star
• The Young Victoria
• Inglourious Basterds
• Where The Wild Things Are

BEST MAKEUP

Nominees:
• Avatar
• District 9 --- MY VOTE
• Nine
• The Road
• Star Trek

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

Nominees:
• Avatar --- MY VOTE
• District 9
• The Lovely Bones
• Star Trek
• 2012

BEST SOUND

Nominees:
• Avatar
• District 9
• The Hurt Locker ---MY VOTE
• Nine
• Star Trek

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

Nominees:
• Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs
• Coraline --- MY VOTE
• Fantastic Mr. Fox
• Princess And The Frog
• Up

BEST ACTION MOVIE

Nominees:
• Avatar
• District 9
• The Hurt Locker --- MY VOTE
• Inglourious Basterds
• Star Trek

BEST COMEDY

Nominees:
• (500) Days Of Summer ---MY VOTE
• The Hangover
• It’s Complicated
• The Proposal
• Zombieland

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

Nominees:
• Broken Embraces
• Coco Before Chanel
• Red Cliff
• Sin Nombre
• The White Ribbon --- MY VOTE

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

Nominees:
• Anvil
• Capitalism: A Love Story
• The Cove
• Food, Inc.
• Michael Jackson’s This Is It --- MY VOTE

BEST SONG

Nominees:
• "All Is Love" - Karen O, Nick Zinner - Where The Wild Things Are
• "Almost There" - Randy Newman - The Princess And The Frog
• "Cinema Italiano" - Maury Yeston - Nine --- MY VOTE
• "(I Want To) Come Home" - Paul McCartney - Everybody’s Fine
• "The Weary Kind" - Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett - Crazy Heart

BEST SCORE

Nominees:
• Michael Giacchino - Up
• Marvin Hamlisch - The Informant! --- MY VOTE
• Randy Newman - The Princess and the Frog
• Karen O, Carter Burwell - Where The Wild Things Are
• Hans Zimmer - Sherlock Holmes

Michael Cera has a mighty impressive resume for an actor so young. Still in his early twenties, Cera has more quality projects to his credit than most actors twice his age.

In ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT, SUPERBAD, JUNO, and NICK AND NORAH'S INFINITE PLAYLIST, Cera perfected what has now become the Michael Cera character type: the shy, hesitant, earnestly decent guy whose hilariously deadpan line delivery endears him to audiences everywhere. His appeal is reminiscent of the young Jimmy Stewart, who first pioneered the "virginal man" model in Hollywood. Cera himself sees the roots of his character type in an actor of more recent vintage: Anthony Michael Hall. No matter the derivation; it is clear Cera has the market cornered ... at the moment.

His latest film, YOUTH IN REVOLT, gives Cera the opportunity to break out of the Cera mold. In the dual role of Nick Twisp/Francois Dilllinger, Cera both confirms and defies character expectations. Twisp is your standard Cera prototype - a young man who's convinced he's going to die a virgin since no girl will look at him twice. Dillinger is Twisp's alter ego, a know-it-all Frenchman with a pencil-thin moustache and a penchant for seduction. It's a great role for Cera but in my interview with him, he denies any specific interest in wanting to play against type. He says he just happened to liked the role (and the book the film is based on.) In fact, he says he doesn't feel typecast in any way and resisted my suggestion that all his characters seemed but a variation on his "George Michael" character in ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT.

Here's my interview with Cera and his YOUTH IN REVOLT co-star Portia Doubleday.

With the end of the year now at hand, here's my list of the best films of 2009:


10. A four way tie: "Every Little Step", "Hunger", "Adventureland", "Fantastic Mr. Fox"

9. "Precious" - The knockout performances give this dark urban tale a luminous humanity.

8. "Antichrist" - Lars von Trier's gorgeous outrage is tough to watch and tougher to look away from. A grieving couple on, and then over, the brink.

7. "Inglourious Basterds" - Like Von Trier, Tarantino's talent seems too big for the screen. Full review

6. "District 9" - A perfectly realized sci-fi thriller with strong political overtones. Full review

5. "In the Loop" - A whip-smart British comedy about how we decide to go to war. Full review

4. "Coraline" - The best of a great lot of animated films this year, a child's fantasy dreams morph into beautiful and cautionary nightmares.

3. "Summer Hours" - Family squabbles over an inheritance provide the context for some fine French distinctions... about loyalty, history, and art.

2. "Lorna's Silence" - A brilliant Belgian film about the literal and figurative costs of humanity in the arcane underworld of illegal immigrants. Full review

1. "The Hurt Locker" - A searing boots-on-the-ground look at a bomb-disposal squad in Iraq. Both an action-thriller and a meditation on what drives men to fight. Full review

"Relax and let your mind go blank." That's the advice the top scientist gives our hero as he's about to become an avatar for the first time but it's also great advice for how to approach this movie. AVATAR is a rip-roaring good yarn, full of resplendent visuals , that also feels overly familiar. Director James Cameron unleashes upon his willing audience a full-on shock and awe campaign with the best-looking 3-D, the highest-grade performance- capture technology, and a seamless integration of computer-generated imagery and "real" life. But, this being Cameron, a fair degree of hokum slips in between the dazzling effects. Fortunately, the adrenaline rush of the visuals overwhelms the hokiness just enough to keep our minds blissfully blank until movie's end.

The story starts out a little complicated but then becomes simpler and more obvious as it progresses. In the distant future (2154), mankind needs a vary rare mineral to solve its energy crisis, a mineral found primarily on the planet Pandora. The problem is Pandora's native population, the Na'vi, are nature-worshippers and don't take too kindly to visitors who want to tear up their world to get at some underground substance called, ridiculously, unobtanium.

The humans adopt a two-pronged approach to their problem: the scientists propose diplomacy, the military prefers direct intervention. The scientists' avatar program fuses human and Na'vi DNA to create look-a-like Navi creatures (10 feet tall, blue, etc) who are psychologically embodied by humans. The plan is to win the Na'vis' trust with these avatars and then convince them peacefully to move elsewhere. The military, of course, can't be bothered with all this namby-pamby coddling. It just wants to start the strafe-bombing and be done with it. This eventually becomes a very black-and- white kind of moral issue - the men in uniform are blood- thirsty killers and the Na'vi are noble savages of the highest order. It comes as no surprise that our hero ends up siding with the indigenous people. And guess what? He also falls in love with a beautiful Na'vi native.

If this sounds a lot like DANCES WITH WOLVES, that's because it is. It's also got a lot of THE MATRIX, JURASSIC PARK, APOCALYPTO, POCAHONTAS, even Disneyland's Electric Light Parade, in it. It's as if the more derivative and familiar AVATAR's story is, the more Cameron can focus on what really intrigues him - the look of the film.

So rather than belabor the obvious and complain about the heavy-handed script, let's focus on what Cameron is most proud of in AVATAR. He's famously been quoted as bragging that AVATAR will "change the way we watch movies." Is that true? Not even close. There are very few original images in AVATAR. The film doesn't really break any new visual ground as much as it perfects the visual ground that we've been standing on for quite some time. Yes, it's got the best 3-D, the best performance-capture work, and the best CGI that money can buy. But Cameron has none of the genius of, say, Stanley Kubrick in his film 2001. That monolith was but one of many startling and original images conjured up by Kubrick in the 1968 science-fiction classic. Instead, Cameron concocts a beautifully familiar landscape that startles us with its abundance rather than its singularity of vision. He creates an "ahh"-inspiring world, rather than an awe-inspiring one.

That being said, it's a world I'd be happy to dwell in for hours on end. The swooping flights of the pterodactyl-like creatures are especially glorious to behold. And the shimmering, electric-lit plants of all shapes and hues cast a pleasantly magical spell. Even the lanky, ethereal, blue Na'vis seem impossibly appealing and alluring. And that's the secret to Cameron's success.

With AVATAR, James Cameron may have been aiming for a visual revolution but what he ended up with was visual "comfort food" of the highest order. And that's nothing to sneeze at, especially when you're hungry.

Clint Eastwood has had a remarkable run of films of late. Starting with the great MYSTIC RIVER in 2003 and continuing at an impressive one-film-a-year clip with MILLION DOLLAR BABY, FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS, LETERS FROM IWO JIMA, CHANGELING, and GRAN TORINO, Eastwood has proven himself to be a surprisingly durable and resilient director. His recent movies may not all be masterpieces, but they do represent a consistently high level of quality work. So I suppose it may be just the law of averages coming to the fore with INVICTUS, clearly the weakest of the lot.

INVICTUS tells the story of how newly elected South African President Nelson Mandela used his country's nearly all-white rugby team to help unify his divided state. This tale sets up two distinct tracks for the movie - the political and the sporting. And although he wrings excellent performances out of his two leading men - Morgan Freeman as Mandela and Matt Damon as the rugby captain Francois Pienaar - Eastwood botches both tracks.

The national rugby team, named the Springboks, had always been the pride and joy of the Afrikaaners and the scorn of black South Africans. Like most of the latter, Mandela grew up cheering for whomever the Springboks were playing against. When the blacks finally reached power, with the election of Mandela, the green-and-gold-clad rugby team was on the verge of being abolished. But then the new President stepped in and saved the team. Most black South Africans were outraged but Mandela astutely realized the power of sports to inspire and unify and so he persevered. In fact, he actively encouraged the team to strive to win the World Cup of rugby that year (1995.) The surprise success of the rejuvenated Springboks on the world stage garnered a lot of positive attention for both the newly refurbished country and its charismatic leader.

That sounds like a great idea for a movie, so what went wrong? For starters, it's too damn reverential. Morgan Freeman is a great choice to play Mandela. He has the president's halting eloquence down pat and shows enough charisma to convince us he could charm a nation. But the screenplay doesn't give Freeman anything to work with beyond Mandela's public persona. In fact, nearly every utterance he makes is a platitude.

"Forgiveness liberates the soul. It removes fear. That's what makes forgiveness so powerful."

"How can I not change when circumstances change, if I expect others to do the same?"

"We must build our nation with all of our bricks, even if some are wrapped in green and gold."

"We must all exceed our own expectations."

He even talks this way to his own daughter. When she objects to his shaking hands with the captain of the rugby team because he looks just like the brutes who nearly destroyed their family while Nelson was in prison, Freeman/Mandela reprimands her: You think only of your selfish needs. You must think of the needs of our nation.

At one point, a secret service guard scolds another guard for asking Mandela a personal question. "He's not a saint; he's a man, with a man's problems." But we get almost none of that in INVICTUS. Instead, he's every inch a saint, and a very public saint at that. Mandela in this movie is little more than a GREAT MAN WALKING and that robs him of his humanity. So does all of his pontificating.

But that's nothing that a rousing inspirational sports story can't fix, right? Matt Damon, like Morgan Freeman, has mastered the South African accent and is very convincing as an Afrikaner rugby player. But once again he's hampered by the formality of the script. We never get a glimpse into what makes this son of a racist Afrikaaner tick. Instead he sits around stiffly discussing philosophies of leadership with the President. And at the end of the biggest match in the history of South Africa, when Mandela thanks him for what he has done for the country, Damon's rugby player actually says, "No, Mr. President, thank YOU for what you have done for our country." Sheesh.

But even all these script troubles might have been overcome by a few exciting rugby games. Sports in movies are nothing if not easy emotional grabbers. But Eastwood can't even get that right. Admittedly, rugby is a tougher emotional sell, since most of us don't understand the rules of the game. But still, you'd think he could wrench out a few more thrills than he does with the three of four odd games he depicts in INVICTUS. (Rugby on screen looks about as compelling as Quidditch, and that's not even a real game.)

It's entirely possible that Eastwood intentionally downplays the excitement of the matches because he wants to make sure the sports component is kept subservient to the political. But if that's the case, I think he miscalculated. Just as South Africa needed the emotional lift of a World Cup victory to help the country fulfill its destiny, so too does INVICTUS need the emotional lift those games could have provided to fulfill its promise.

The word "invictus" means "unconquered" but I'm afraid this time out the material defeated the director.

Tom Tangney talks to Michael Cera and Portia Doubleday about their new movie "Youth in Revolt."

Tom wondered if Michael Cera is channeling Jimmy Stewart last year after seeing Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist.