Mickey Rourke’s bruising performance, some crazy wrestling matches and a kick-ass ’80s metal soundtrack — Rourke and Marisa Tomei even do an onscreen singalong to Ratt’s “Round & Round”! — are three big reasons to love Darren Aronofsky’s new film The Wrestler. What with the holiday movie avalanche already bearing down upon us, we’re celebrating all the things that rocked us in our other favourite — and not-so-favourite — flicks in this holiday season’s new bounty. (Don’t worry, all this yuletide goodwill toward movies isn’t making us go soft; for more accolades and potshots see our year-end review in the Dec. 25 issue of EYE WEEKLY.)
The Dance Sequence in Slumdog Millionaire
Danny Boyle’s exhilarating Indo-British crowd pleaser constantly flirts with Bollywood cinema’s most beloved tropes, especially in the romantic love story at this fable’s core. But not until the final moments — actually, not until after the story itself is over — is the cast allowed to cease their frantic running around and get down en masse on a train-station platform. What gets ’em moving is a suitably spirited song by A.R. Rahman, the Tamil composer much worshipped by M.I.A. (she guests elsewhere in his score for the movie). How’s that for ending on a high note? (Out now.) JA
Cate Blanchett in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
If there’s one word you probably wouldn’t use to describe technophile David Fincher’s cinema, it’s “sentimental” (unless you get choked up watching gliding, CGI-assisted camera movements or imagining Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in a box). Nor would you likely deem his films to be “sexy”. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is, accordingly, an unconvincingly sentimental, faux-Zemeckian failure. But the scene where Cate Blanchett — as the red-headed dancer who acts as Jenny to Brad Pitt’s backwards-aging Forrest Gump — performs a seductive ballet-inflected solo in an outdoor gazebo has genuine allure. And, given, the film’s underlying themes about the simultaneous grace and frailty of the human body, it’s actually pretty moving, too. Fincher, you old softy…. (Out Dec. 25.) AN
Ronny Dayag's Story in Waltz with Bashir
This stunningly inventive animated doc draws upon the sometimes unreliable memories of not just director Ari Folman but several other Israelis who served during the war with Lebanon in the early ’80s. Much of what they recall in their narration is harrowing, but strangest of all might be Dayag’s tale: the only survivor of an attack on his tank unit, he hides from Lebanese soldiers before spending six hours swimming to safety. The memory, like so many others in the film, was repressed for decades, Dayag having deemed himself a coward for failing to save his comrades. As presented here in animated form, it adds another note of unease to Folman’s provocative examination of the legacy of war. (Out Dec. 26; see Interview with Folman.) JA
War of the Cloth in Doubt
John Patrick Shanley’s fence-perching gaze into the moral abyss, set at a Catholic parish and grade school in The Bronx in late 1964, is so authentic you can practically smell the incense, pencil lead and damp galoshes. But it’s Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep, as a priest and nun squaring off over a painfully ambiguous scandal, who typically submerge into their cassocks to bring the story to vivid life. As Shanley’s play-turned-movie takes nothing for granted and prompts us to alternately distrust and believe in these fascinating characters, Hoffman and Streep transcend simple issue-film clichés and cast a shadow that looms off screen. Come to think of it, you can smell the doubt too. (Out Dec. 12.) KG
Mathieu Amalric’s face-plant in Un Conte de Noel
Arnaud Desplechin’s cinema is one of sudden impact, so it’s not surprising that the first great moment in the madcap holiday melodrama Un Conte de Noel finds the director’s usual muse Mathieu Amalric tipping from a 45 degree angle into the curb. It’s our first glimpse of a character who, we learn, was conceived under questionable circumstances (nothing helps a kid’s confidence like learning he was supposed to be a blood marrow donor for his terminally ill older brother). And it’s not the last time in the film that that he’ll go down. Amalric has gotten physical for Desplechin before, but this spectacular pratfall beats his Kings and Queen pop-and-lock dance number by a broken nose. (Out now.) AN
Frank Langella and Kevin Bacon's Secret Bromance in Frost/Nixon
OK, maybe we’re reading too much into the relationship between Richard Nixon and his devoted right-hand man Jack Brennan in Ron Howard’s entertaining adaptation of Peter Morgan’s Tony winner. Even so, Bacon — whose unshowy approach to supporting roles often makes him a big movie’s best asset (see: Mystic River) — is generous with the approving, even worshipful glances as Brennan watches his boss toy with Michael Sheen’s preening David Frost. Those looks grow more protective and distraught when Brennan realizes (long before Langella’s Nixon does) what they’ve gotten themselves into. (Out now.) JA
Emile Hirsch in Milk
From starving himself to play Christopher McCandless in Into the Wild to turning into a live-action cartoon in the semi-disastrous yet somewhat underrated Speed Racer, Hirsch has proven to be unusually versatile. No wonder Sean Penn’s Harvey Milk is never sweeter than in the scene when he tries to interest a cute young hustler from Phoenix in matters other than good times, matters like civic politics. Though unconvinced at the time, the kid in the big glasses and curly hair becomes one of Milk’s most loyal lieutenants and one of the anchors of Gus Van Sant’s big-hearted biopic. And thanks to Hirsch’s sensitive, energetic turn as Cleve Jones, it’s easy to understand how Milk was capable of inspiring so much in the people around him. (Out now.) JA
The Opera Scene in Quantum of Solace
Though director Marc Forster has taken plenty of stick for his largely unsatisfying efforts to tweak the Bond formula in the latest outing for 007, one sequence points to what might have been — it’s also the only moment that matches the visual bravura of the parkour set-piece in Casino Royale. At the coolly austere location of a lakeside opera house in Bregenz, Austria, the climactic gunshots during a performance of Tosca synch up with a nearby shootout between Bond and baddies. Presented in a daringly fragmentary fashion with Puccini’s music cranked up to 11, the crosscut sequence has an almost hallucinatory quality and is about as vanguard as a modern blockbuster can get. If only Quantum of Solace had more of its spectacular combination of sound and fury. (Out now.) JA
Brandon Walters in Australia
A first-time actor playing the kid at the centre of Baz Luhrmann’s burly but overburdened epic, this 12-year-old aboriginal youngster performs a sometimes thankless role with a minimum of the simpering or whingeing required of so many kid actors. It doesn’t hurt that he has eyes that could make a Margaret Keane poster cry with envy. In fact, he’s far more fetching than co-star Nicole Kidman, whose various cosmetic enhancements have now left her appearance with an eerily synthetic sheen that will be well-utilized if she’s ever cast in a remake of Barbarella. (Out now.) JA
Jane Lynch Tries to Keep It Together in Role Models
David Wain’s sweetly crude comedy about a couple of slackers (Paul Rudd and Seann William Scott) who learn about responsibility by becoming court-appointed bigger brothers contains more laughs per capita than any American comedy this year. A good many of them come from the ever-inventive Jane Lynch as the pair’s recovering coke-fiend boss. The key to the performance is that Lynch’s squirrelly demeanor and barely suppressed mania seems appropriate to her character’s troubled rehabilitation process, rather than simply grafted on for effect. And her demented non sequiturs (“you’re going to the slammer like MC Hammer”) are perfect fodder for Paul Rudd’s trademark snarky incredulousness. (Out now.) AN
The Vampires Play Baseball in Twilight
Catherine Hardwicke’s box-office champ — you know, the one about the moony teenage girl who falls in love with the big vampire on campus — is too wan to classify as a camp classic. Except, of course, for the pivotal scene in which we learn that the living dead like to unwind by donning pinstripes and playing a little pepper. The giggle-inducing details are courtesy of Stephanie Meyer’s novel (they play during thunderstorms so as to distract attention from the THWACK! sound their super-powerful hits make!), but no amount of young-adult-novel prose can do justice to the image of two rival bloodsucking clans (one Gothy and mean; the other so wholesome they suggest vampire Flanderses) suspiciously sniffing at one another on the (baseball) field of battle. (Out now.) AN
Nazi Tailors in Valkyrie
The judgement has been handed down: Tom Cruise is as exciting as a boiled kartoffel as Hitler’s would-be assassin, Claus von Stauffenberg. But, c’mon, what a field day Valkyrie must’ve been for the wardrobe department. Despite Cruise’s wooden-soldier routine and the movie’s overall flimsy feel, director Bryan Singer manages to cook up a modestly tense depiction of a coup gone awry, his efforts propped up by the sight of some of the finest players Britain has to offer (Terence Stamp, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Eddie Izzard) decked out in the finest finery the Wehrmacht had to offer. And it’s OK: there’s nary an SS uniform in sight — the movie never forgets to remind us that these were the good Germans. (Out Dec. 25.) KG
The Nanotech in The Day the Earth Stood Still
Big swirling orbs dominate the handsome FX design in the remake of the 1951 science-fiction staple but the biggest threat facing our planet is a high-tech variation on a plague of locusts. The critters in question are tiny and highly voracious mites that combine all the best traits of the mechanical spiders in Runaway (Michael Crichton R.I.P.), the titular stars of The Swarm and the slug they stick in Chekhov’s brain in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. (Out Dec. 12.) JA
Yule Log: Also out this season
YES MAN
Jim Carrey plays a guy who decides to agree to everything for a year and see where it takes him. Carrey, meanwhile, decides it’s time to say “yes” to mugging for the camera again. Out Dec. 19.
GRAN TORINO
Director-star Clint Eastwood dusts off the tough love as a salty Korean War veteran straightening out the foreign kid who tried to steal his car. Out Dec. 19.
THE SPIRIT
Frank Miller directs a relatively un-Christmassy tale about a crime-fighting ghost. Out Dec. 25.
MARLEY & ME
Jennifer Anniston and Owen Wilson taunt their critics playing opposite a lovable pooch who teaches life lessons. Mitigating factor: Alan Arkin’s in it. But then, he was in The Jerky Boys movie too. Out Dec. 25.
SEVEN POUNDS
Will Smith revisits his Pursuit of Happyness mode as the kind of IRS agent you might actually want to see at your door. Out Dec. 19.
THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX
Misfit mouse Despereaux and his castle-dwelling, CGI-critter pals get caught up in courtly matters in this (voice) star-studded adaptation of the children’s fantasy book. Out Dec. 19.
NOTHING LIKE THE HOLIDAYS
That title’s total bullshit, man! Out Dec. 12