Meet Joe Carnahan, survivalist (not pictured). Drop this guy unprotected into the lethal tundra of a January release slot and what does he do? Turns it into $20 million, last weekend’s top box-office take. Never mind that the competition should be easy prey for “The Grey.” Some hunts really are only about the force of the hunter’s will. And could any other director working now seem so right for a movie about starving freezing bruiser oil drillers led by Liam Neeson and stalked by wolves in the backwoods of Alaska?

Part Budd Boetticher western, part John Carpenter horror thriller, part douchey beer commercial, “The Grey” does seem restrained by recent Carnahan standards — temperamentally closer to his 2002 brooder “Narc” than to more recent toss-offs like “Smokin’ Aces” and “The A-Team.” It’s a stiff cocktail of violence, sentiment and introspection, and if each of those elements seems too synthetic, at least the combination is bracing.

Having been that “A-Team” leader, Neeson here again plays a human alpha male. He knows just how to put his hand on a dying wolf or a dying man, and then just what to say. Also, he’s been nursing some heavy malaise, dreaming of a lost lover (Anne Openshaw) and lamenting their apparently permanent separation.

It’s as hard not to think of the snow-related death three years ago of Neeson’s real wife, Natasha Richardson, as it is to know whether Carnahan’s sense of opportunity here is courageous or crass. But on a gut level, it works: “The Grey” gives a vaguely cathartic, wake-like sense of filmmaker and star as just a coupla big Irish lugs doing each other a favor, working through some heavy stuff in public. It’s a nice touch that Neeson’s character is a sharpshooter yet he only gets to point his rifle twice, and once is at himself.

So is anybody else in it? Well, sure, there’s Black Guy, Talk Too Much Guy, Glasses Guy, Asshole Guy, and who’s that over there in the…? Ah, never mind. Wolves got him. One Less Guy. With their numbers reduced, however, the men do come into better focus, even occasionally lending humanity to their token parts. For instance Asshole Guy, played by Frank Grillo, is the ex-con who challenges Neeson’s authority — unsuccessfully, of course, but with more dignity than the movie had seemed inclined to allow him.

“The Grey” was adapted by Carnahan and Ian Mackenzie Jeffers from Jeffers’ story “Ghost Walker,” and its literary ambitions are built in, if not fully built out. One senses a fond memory of big adolescent ideas about man versus nature, and maybe an English teacher somewhere whom Carnahan hopes to make proud. There’s a sad sweet innocence about this, like some warped old Jack London paperback in the pocket of a surplus-store-bought pea coat whose collar you turn up against an imaginary wind. There’s also a certain brand of macho bullshit that congratulates itself for deconstructing macho bullshit, as if tapping the temple makes up for thumping the chest.

It runs most smoothly as that kind of horror procedural for which characters’ deaths seem more thoroughly engineered than their inner lives. But it delivers good visceral anguish: a terrible tree fall here, a dreadful drowning there, and of course the harrowing plane crash with which the men’s ordeal begins. Interactions with their lupine predators register less strongly, but it’s tricky: You show too much wolf, it looks too computery, silly. You don’t show it, you’re stuck with the offscreen-howl cliché — here mitigated, somewhat, by being woven into composer Marc Streitenfeld’s soundtrack.

Meanwhile Masanobu Takayanagi’s cinematography collects some arresting imagery but not quite enough clarity. And Carnahan’s visual potency — a rising-clouds-of-breath motif, a shot of blood pooling in a snowy paw print — gets dissipated by his self-enthralled patter. This movie might have been sublime had he found the will to chuck out a third of its dialogue. But then it wouldn’t be a Joe Carnahan movie.

It’s not easy to turn that old suspense trope, anticipating the inevitable, into something truly philosophical. But is it any easier to get into the frigid January moviegoing wilderness and get out alive?

In director Steven Soderbergh’s stilted new thriller, MMA poster gal and obvious nonactor Gina Carano stars as a double-crossed covert operative flitting between mutedly lethal international incidents. The various worms in her can include Michael Angarano, Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas, Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Bill Paxton and Channing Tatum. Carano looks hot and tough and attentively costumed, but her fights seem stagy and awkward, maybe because she’s not used to faking them. Her director meanwhile treats suspense as a product of boredom and the benefit of audience doubt, with his penchant for crisp slender screen titles not quite mitigating his other penchant for murky digital photography. What’s worse is the shrug-worthy script by Lem Dobbs, who also wrote Soderbergh’s “The Limey.” Unable or unwilling to make us care about its dribbled bits of blasé badass backstory, and only barely enlivened by David Holmes’ diggable fusion-groove score, “Haywire” feels vacant all around, a conference call of phoning it in.

The latest Meryl Streep showpiece of biographical impersonation is not a Marvel Comics property, mercifully, but instead a portrait of the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who took that office, as the first woman ever to do so, in 1979.

It’s also almost exactly the movie you’d expect from the writer of “Shame” (Abi Morgan) and the director of “Mamma Mia!” (Phyllida Lloyd), who seem to have agreed that the best way to describe a political career cinematically is to split the difference between an oblique expression of sordid compulsion and a peppy musical. Even if you hadn’t seen those other movies and had only their titles to go by, you might guess the general trajectory of “The Iron Lady.”

More often she seems to be made of tinfoil. Un-hugged by mum upon getting into Oxford, young “grocer’s daughter” Maggie (Alexandra Roach) borrows dad’s self-determination to hoist herself up into the middle class. As her temperament cools into reasoned rigidity, she resolves to transcend mere housewifery, and in Parliament her court shoes shine among all the sooty brogues. Decades later she’s been Streeped to the core, left mostly alone with a half-gone mind, adrift from a living daughter (Olivia Colman) and still attached to a dead husband (Jim Broadbent). This makes for much finely acted, empathetic puttering.

The in-between is rather a blur: Shrewdly framed as a series of demented reminiscences, with history reduced to a literal cacophony of undramatic bullet points, “The Iron Lady” should satisfy a certain conservative mindset. Its overall timidity, though, seems nullifying. Notwithstanding the occasional London street-corner trash heap or missile lobbed at Argentina, there’s scarcely a hint as to why Elvis Costello should ever have sung about dancing on the woman’s grave. What’s more, neither confirming nor denying the late Christopher Hitchens’ report that she once spanked him and called him a naughty boy, the film seems to have missed more than a few opportunities.

Sure, her general manner is convincingly portrayed. Even Streep’s sublingual groans are humane and authentic. But these things get so obvious after a while. And with all these unsurprisingly good performances piling up in movies that wouldn’t be much without them, it’s hard not to yearn for something even slightly more radical. Like: What if Michelle Williams played Thatcher and Streep had a go Marilyn Monroe?

Then again, for the citizens of England, “The Iron Lady” could be plenty provocative just as it is. Should we brace for them to retaliate with Colin Firth in some homely effigy of Ronald Reagan?

These droids are not the characters we’re looking for.

Executive producer George Lucas went on “The Daily Show” and quickly disclaimed the new movie he’s been developing for 23 years as “very patriotic, very jingoistic, very old-fashioned, corny,” before even saying what it’s about. That seemed telling, as was Lucas’ suggestion that because studios can’t brook a big movie with an all-black cast he bankrolled this one himself. It’s about the Tuskegee Airmen, America’s first group of black military aviators, who gallantly battled with Nazis in foreign skies and with racial segregationists on home ground. It’s also a clunky homily and a waste of talent — sodden, overlong and seasoned by weirdly lifeless, presumably post-production-dubbed dialogue right out of a “Star Wars” prequel. The cast includes Nate Parker, David Oyelowo, Bryan Cranston, Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr. The director is Anthony Hemingway and the writers are John Ridley and Aaron McGruder, who otherwise have some good credits between them, but here apparently also a mandate of mediocrity pressing down on them from on high.

Adapted from the 2005 novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” evokes the recent literary wave of self-conscious precocity probably begun with Dave Eggers’ “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.” Such titles, stacking up adjectives and adverbs like stones in fortress walls, have a common angle on grappling with grief: the will to outthink it.

Foer’s grief was the national trauma of 9/11, and he made a bet that pathos or at least a bravura intellectual exercise could be wrung from a good-faith effort to comprehend the incomprehensible.

Well, nothing says self-conscious precocity quite like a literary-seeming, puzzle-solving boy. Here we meet Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), a socially inept pre-teen enthusiast of the urban scavenger hunts organized by his father, a Manhattan jeweler of European Jewish extraction (Tom Hanks!), to foster the boy’s innate intelligence and draw him out. After dad dies in the Trade Center attacks, Oskar finds a key in an envelope with the word “Black” written on it, and defaults to their established routine, methodically tracking down and interrogating the hundreds of New Yorkers whose last name is Black. Did his father leave him a last message?

Several, actually, on the answering machine that terrible morning. But those are beyond unsatisfying. They’re unbearable. In fact, Oskar won’t even let his mother (Sandra Bullock) hear or know about them. Instead he sticks to his mission, as recorded in a busy system of maps and file cards and calculations and industriously elaborate scrapbooks, not to mention the invasive questions he fires off at strangers. Also, he carries a tambourine around and regularly jiggles it in order to calm himself.

In short, Oskar has one of those tic-constellation personalities that work much better in prose, where they’re safe under the abstracting insulation of reader imagination, than in movies. I mean, unless we’re talking Wes Anderson movies, where the insulation is an operational sense of humor, and the warp of image-amplified literalism is exactly the ironic and melancholic idea. Alas, it is not Wes Anderson we have to thank for the movie of “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” but rather the quirk-neutralizing team of screenwriter Eric Roth and director Stephen Daldry, respectively the men responsible for “Forrest Gump” and “The Reader.”

Here it’s supposed to be a joke that Oskar’s Asperger’s test was inconclusive. From his unrelenting obnoxiousness, we may at least infer that he’s not so good on empathy. But the movie asks for patience only to try it. Must every stage of grief accommodate being a brat? That so many people tolerate Oskar’s rude impatience seems like a delusional fantasy of New Yorkers’ resiliency, and therefore a disservice to it. As is the solidarity so belabored by the literary conceit of his community-connecting quest.

It is little pleasure to report that the casting is good for the movie this is. When you trade ethnic specificity for an affable (and bankable) common touch, it should come as no surprise that what you get is unsubtle Hollywood mush. Child’s play, as it were, for Hanks and Bullock, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” marks the movie acting debut for Horn, freshly plucked from success on the “Kids Week” edition of Jeopardy! His smarts and stamina accord with the Foer mandate, just as his diminutive yet clobbering presence suits his tediously sensible screenwriter and director. Hopefully he’ll get better gigs hereafter.

The same hope also goes for John Goodman, stuck here as Oskar’s doorman, Viola Davis and Jeffrey Wright, as a fragile couple at the center of his odyssey, and Max Von Sydow, a mysterious mute helper who communicates only via Moleskine notebook. For its occasional strenuous efforts at cinematic lyricism, arguably the signature image of “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” is a weary Von Sydow dozing on a New York City bus, suddenly awoken by the straw of the kid’s juice box shoved in his mouth. In other words, an icon of European movie dignity left groggy and adrift in American public transit, facially violated by an effusion of prefabricated sweetness. No, the world is not the same as it once was.

In retrospect maybe the adverbial overstatement of the book’s title can be read as a red flag to any would-be movie adapter. We know films can’t be novels; they shouldn’t be greeting cards either.

It begins in a laboratory. White walls, quietude. The young woman enters, briskly signs a form, and lets the white-jacketed young man spray something in her mouth. Then she lifts her head and swallows his tube. “Thanks for this,” he says. He’s threading it down her throat, the camera now creeping smoothly forward. She’s hanging in there, stifling gags as best she can. “You’re doing a great job,” he says.

There is sensuality at play here, albeit rather detachedly. Something about the aestheticized tidiness of the lab, the politesse, the woman’s milky complexion. Not to mention her apparent servility. And the strategy of “Sleeping Beauty,” Australian novelist Julia Leigh’s directorial debut, is not to mention that. Whether we’re to read what follows as erotic fairy-tale deconstruction, feminist provocation or inert art object, Leigh won’t quite bring herself to say.

We do learn that Lucy (Emily Browning) has several jobs — wiping down tables in a pub, making copies in an office, swallowing stuff in that lab — but apparently is not keeping up with her rent or student debt. There is an implication, possibly intentional, that really she’s more bored than broke. Lucy has one male companion, a shut-in with whom she occasionally shares stilted volleys of pleasantries. Sometimes things go a bit further, as when she fixes up a bowl of cereal for him by pouring vodka on it instead of milk, or he cuddles her and she cries a little and together they watch a TV show about tiny adorable marsupials.

Another scene, among some other men, features a sexual dalliance decided by coin toss, with the camera swiveling languidly back and forth as the ante rises. Is this a gesture of ambivalence, or one of coercion, by which the whole audience becomes a head-shaking scold? Later, it is with particularly inscrutable ambition, if any, that Lucy finally makes that call to the escort service.

Her supervisor there is an aristocratic madam (Rachael Blake) who enjoys pregnant pauses and wearily advises Lucy not to think of this as a career. That shouldn’t be a problem; unlike Catherine Deneuve’s similarly preoccupied housewife in Buñuel’s “Belle de Jour,” Lucy seems neither very curious about nor especially liberated by her new vocation.

Still, there are ropes to learn. At first the gig involves scantily clad service of luxe multi-course meals to tuxedoed geezers. Lucy’s colleagues seem more seasoned, maybe jaded, by the job; they have darker features and darker — yet more revealing — lingerie. It’s like the NC-17 version of an old Robert Palmer video. Except without the groove. Or like Kubrick: Being special, on account mainly of being our protagonist, Lucy finds herself promoted, and is soon arrayed in bed, carefully centered among symmetrical tables and symmetrical lamps and something unpleasant in the air. Here she’s subject to a drug-induced, dreamless slumber, during which the full array of creepy-old-man clients may do with her whatever they please.

Almost whatever. “No penetration” is the rule, and for Leigh that also seems to mean of the psychological sort. Only very rarely now, and from a meticulous distance, have we sensed Lucy’s inner life, and only as variations on the mourning of lost virility do the men even exist. One’s a blunt sadist; another, an archly soliloquizing windbag whose crisp eloquence surely would be enough to knock Lucy out if the tranquilizer hadn’t. Anyway, when she finally puts in a request for wakefulness, telling her boss, “I need to see what goes on in there,” the need seems inauthentic and impersonal, pressing only because the movie must progress. Not that it can, much, and so we behold a contrived catharsis, obliquely appended with an ashen coda.

As with other cultural experiments recently undertaken in adult-themed art-house fodder (see, for instance, “Shame”), the prevailing tone here is antiseptic. Maybe Leigh’s idea was for her film to seem to reek of chlorine, so as to suggest an overcompensating desperation about uncleanness. In any case, both the movie and its maker have been fittingly established by that first episode of unnerving medical research.

Notable for its avoidance of hectoring us about female agency and male gaze and all of that, “Sleeping Beauty” does not object, per se, to objectification. Casting its strange spell of passivity and pearlescent opacity, willfully indulging the predatory voyeurism that is cinema’s essence, and keeping its main character out cold most of the time, it is rather paradoxically a consciousness-lowering affair.

It’s hard to write about him because everybody already has, and because words seem so inert and abject when up against his moving pictures and sounds. How’s this? If you can only see one Robert Bresson film, see all of them. And you can: As part of TIFF Cinematheque’s touring Bresson retrospective, the full baker’s dozen of his features will be available on big screens throughout North America for the next few months. (It’s at New York’s Film Forum right now.)

“Understated” is the most frequent of the grasping Netflix tags — also “cerebral” and “dark.” That gets close, in a manner apropos of a rental. But you don’t want to rent these. You need a safe space for clarity and urgent quietude (set against, say, church bells in the distance, or a train whistle, or a firing squad), which is what Bresson’s films provide and what they deserve. There are reasons people can be brought to tearful, quasi-religious fits just through whispers of scene-summarizing phrases, like, “Mouchette rolls down the grassy slope,” or, “The donkey lies down in the field of sheep.” Watch the movies in a dark room full of strangers and you’ll see.

A few necessary biographical details: French, Catholic, originally a painter, briefly a prisoner of war, eventually a titan of the artform, permanently an enigma. How to parse the “transcendental style” ascribed to him by the guy who went on to write “Taxi Driver”? Filmmakers use Bresson to wake themselves up. Any auteur you admire likely has had to reckon with him, or is “still coming to terms,” as Scorsese put it. “Lapidary” was Tarkovsky’s word, and indeed Bresson seemed to go beyond directing into engraving. In Godard’s estimation, “Bresson is to French cinema what Mozart is to German music and Dostoyevsky is to Russian literature.” That probably would seem true even if Mozart and Dostoyevsky didn’t figure so indelibly into the master’s films.

Visit or revisit them if only to tap into that that burning purity of creative purpose. Discover how “A Man Escaped” obviates all your movie Stalags and Shawshanks and Alcatrazes. Recall how well “Au Hasard Balthazar,” the one with the donkey, works as a modern update of Apuleius’ “The Golden Ass,” or a pet-sitter selection test, or an antidote to our new on-screen saturation of animals digitally manipulated into grotesquely adorable monsters.

The care Bresson took not to anthropomorphize could be said to have carried over to people. It became his custom to have no use for actors, only “models.” His notes to self are forthright: “Radically suppress intentions in your models” just about sums it up. Yet also this: “Between them and me: telepathic exchanges, divination.” He certainly knew how to look at, and into, human faces. Teenagers, especially. And if the enclosures he built for them seem governed by a forcible placidity, with people periodically trampled by aesthetics, that must be par for the rigorous course of his pretense aversion — not to mention the correlation between suffering and saintliness. The ladies of the Bois de Boulogne, the pickpocket at the racetrack, the country priest at his diary, Joan of Arc at the stake — they all just seem so definitively in their elements.

Now, if “Four Nights of a Dreamer” seems at first like an ill-advised detour into the diaphanous moods and clothes of the early 1970s, bear in mind that it begins with a suicidal impulse and ends with inevitable romantic disappointment. If that whole Peugeot-and-Jordache thing going on in “L’Argent” feels a little weird, just remember it was the commercially corrupted early ’80s; soon enough a spiral of half-accidental criminality leads back into the familiar territory, culminating in a confession that’s all the more striking for its Bressonian blankness: “I just killed an entire family.”

“It is with something clean and precise,” Bresson wrote to himself, “that you will force the attention of inattentive eyes and ears.” He had that right, and hence his enduring gallery of stoic self-sacrificers — repeatedly degraded by their experiences yet forever exalted by his attention, and ours.

[h/t, kqed]

His name is George Smiley, and he works for the Circus. It’s less fun than it sounds. The time is the early 1970s, the place is London, and the color is brown — or it was once, until being leeched into a sort of gloomy beige-gray. The Circus is what Smiley (Gary Oldman) and his colleagues (including David Dencik, Colin Firth, Ciarán Hinds, and Toby Jones) call the British Secret Intelligence Service, within whose upper ranks somewhere lurks a suspected Soviet double agent.

This won’t do for Smiley’s boss (John Hurt), who is called Control, and who dispatches one agent (Mark Strong) for a quick peek behind the Iron Curtain. When that doesn’t go well, Control and Smiley both find themselves nudged into retirement. Soon enough, however, Control has expired, and a strange little toast-munching government functionary (Simon McBurney) wants to put Smiley back to work. There is still the matter of the mole. A rogue agent (Tom Hardy) has resurfaced with a new lead on that front, and Smiley enlists a young assistant (Benedict Cumberbatch) to do some spying on his fellow spies. Others become involved, if only obliquely. It’s safe to say there isn’t a lot of trust going around. All the while our conspicuously bespectacled Smiley, peering through reflections, refractions and retrospections, doesn’t say much. He makes a weapon of watchful silence.

This should sound familiar. Before “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” was a movie by the Swedish director Tomas Alfredson, who last made “Let the Right One In,” it was a 1979 BBC miniseries, and before that a 1974 John le Carré novel. Alfredson and screenwriters Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan had a lot to live up to. So did Oldman; Smiley in the miniseries was played, perfectly, by Alec Guinness. But Oldman the impassive beholder is quite something to behold. Facing down not just the ghost of Guinness but also his own huge presence, he now, somehow, makes nothing look like everything.

The miniseries stretched itself out for more than five hours. The movie, a bracing distillation, is rigorously concise. On purpose its pace feels thick and slow, but in fact what’s happening here is a succession of almost brutally economical scenes, some of them reduced to the presentation of a single detail. With all this setup and scenery sliding by — rather beautifully, thanks in particular to Hoyte Van Hoytema’s cinematography, Maria Djurkovic’s production design, and the modernist open voicings of Alberto Iglesias’ score — we’re left just about baffled. To mitigate any anxiety about not quite knowing what the hell is happening, we focus on the ostensibly pressing dramatic question. Could the mole be that one guy who’s played by an unfamiliar actor and really doesn’t seem to be doing much here at all? Or that other guy who’s played by that much better known actor who won an Oscar last year? Or maybe it’s the officious guy with the beady eyes? Wait, are we even sure it’s any of these guys?

There’s no time to fully delineate the men, but the film makes a good show of playing that potential deficit to its own advantage. At first we’re only able to gather that they’re all nonentities, as is part and parcel of the spy trade, and that they’re all suspects. Then, as Smiley’s investigation swells, every possible outcome seems too obvious, and we sink into a mild malaise of anticipating anticlimax. Accordingly, the reveal finally comes…and goes.

It’s not just mistrust that lingers in the air here, it’s resignation. Hence the visual equivalence of drab bureaucracy between Smiley’s London and the entirety of the Eastern Bloc. This is not by accident; it informs the whole moral framework. The great challenge for Alfredson is to make weary cynicism feel lively. But he is a practiced specialist of sly tension and playing against sensationalism. As his improbably revitalizing vampire movie of a few years ago already proved, he knows how to find the ghoulish in the everyday; here he has the actor who once went way over the top as Dracula now subdued nearly into oblivion. “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” isn’t so much a throwback thriller as a cautionary tale about the soul-sucking espionage machine — immortal, apparently, yet dead inside.

Where biography is concerned, movies are eminently unreliable. Portraiture is another matter — more beholden to personal expression than to fact, and maybe also inherently more movie-conducive. “My Week With Marilyn”  is not the place to go for a credible biography of Marilyn Monroe, but didn’t we already know that, and don’t we want something else anyway?

Adapted by Adrian Hodges from Colin Clark’s books, TV veteran director Simon Curtis’ film feels slight in a familiar way, as if seeming pitiably shallow were the consensus-mandated Monroe-bio boilerplate. The movie lacks plausible narrative tension — its conflict is readymade and perfunctory — but powers itself by the different kind of tension that arises from watching Michelle Williams sustain so finely detailed an impression for so long. Best to see it as simply a showcase for one more portrait of the alluring screen icon.

The framework is this: While working for an increasingly exasperated Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) in 1957, Monroe gets a brief tour of England from an eager young production assistant (Eddie Redmayne) who happens also to be our discreet first-person narrator. It is he who summarizes this as the case of a great actor and a great movie star wanting to osmose each other’s gifts but struggling together in a film that won’t do that trick for either of them. (It is called “The Prince and the Showgirl,” after all.) As for our anecdotist’s relationship with Monroe, that develops expectedly: he’s helplessly smitten, she’s inadvertently a tease. Touchingly, they manage to treat each other with kindness.

If we now can agree that celebrity itself is a laudable and costly talent, we must consider Monroe’s career among the first tests of that axiom. The makers of “My Week With Marilyn” might have been more adventurous, abandoning the pretense of plot altogether, but old-fashioned movie storytelling also is their given milieu, a tolerable if trite concession.

Redmayne is a gracious cipher, just as Judi Dench and Emma Watson are generously forgettable in peripheral supporting roles, along with Julia Ormand and Dougray Scott as variously vexed famous spouses Vivien Leigh and Arthur Miller, respectively. Branagh, shrewdly aware of the generational baton-passing that keeps movie glamour going, clearly enjoys himself. But as someone says, “When Marilyn gets it right, you just don’t want to look at anyone else,” and all that really matters here is how well Williams plays that.

Bodily beauty is not the first association we might make with Williams, who has seemed twiggy and swaddled in recent films. Did she steal this job from a curvier actress? In any case, she has earned it: In good time and in good proportion, we glimpse both the effort required to maintain the Marilyn persona and the reasons why a woman — perhaps any woman — might endure such effort. It’s a good performance not just because it transcends mimicry but also because it seems like a personal and self-justified investigation. Appealingly, it’s as if Williams is doing this not just for us, or for Monroe, but for herself.

1. The great directors whose names sound similar and whose great movies are set in the Mediterranean even though said directors are not from there

A Finn in France, an Iranian in Italy: Aki Kaurismäki’s “Le Havre” and Abbas Kiarostami’s “Certified Copy” (pictured) are two of the year’s loveliest films, whose makers found a new fluency beyond the borders of their native lands.

2. The totally Teutonic 3-D

For “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” Werner Herzog went spelunking among 30,000-year-old cave paintings in southern France, the earliest known human artifacts. For “Pina” (pictured), Wim Wenders took his camera dancing with the legendary late choreographer Pina Bausch and her Tanztheater Wuppertal ensemble. Both made use of contemporary 3-D technology — not to beg for the attention of spoiled distracted loutish children, but instead simply to achieve the profundity of spatial and philosophical depth.

3. The very stealthy Swedish invasion

As Stieg Larsson bestsellers kept becoming international movie sensations and remakes thereof, Swedish filmmakers calmly excelled at probing other countries’ more obscure and complex political machinations. Göran Hugo Olsson’s “The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975” (pictured) is a knowingly incomplete outsider’s portrait of African-American cultural history. Tomas Alfredson’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” is the definitively English Cold War espionage thriller — formerly a 1974 John le Carre novel, then a 1979 BBC miniseries, now a showpiece for a masterfully recessive performance by Gary Oldman. Both films draw power from reticence bordering on evasiveness: It’s about not just what’s said and shown, but also what isn’t. Is Nordic nondisclosure, like, a thing?

4. The little indie film as de facto Canon camera commercial

It seems worth noting that Andrew Haigh’s “Weekend” and Drake Doremus’ “Like Crazy” both were photographed using the same (relatively) inexpensive Canon digital camera, the EOS 5D Mark II. Both are movies about young people in tentative relationships (“Weekend” features Tom Cullen and Chris New; “Like Crazy” has Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones). Both are narratively slight but intimately striking — as befits the mesmerizing shallow focus that apparently is this camera’s specialty. By next year it will of course be highly irritating.

5. The ineffectual parent played by John C. Reilly

In “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” Lynne Ramsay’s adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s novel about the perpetrator of a high-school massacre and his guilt-racked mother (played by Tilda Swinton), Reilly plays the malefactor’s too-credulous father. In “Carnage” (pictured), Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s play about two pairs of parents (including Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz) processing a playground fight between their boys, Reilly plays the victim’s too-credulous father. Weird.

6. The refreshing San Francisco disaster (movie)

“Contagion” dared to do without the historically obligatory havoc-on-the-Golden-Gate-Bridge scene. “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” (pictured) dared to revitalize the historically obligatory havoc-on-the-Golden-Gate-Bridge scene. To those of us who live in San Francisco, or at least to some of us who do, these things matter.