In his two infuriatingly good feature films, Corneliu Porumboiu prefers a docile camera to capture his ostensibly inconspicuous images. Associated with the Romanian New Wave, he films quietly, from the corners of ordinary living rooms and unremarkable kitchens. He placidly observes hallways and office spaces as though the camera had been placed in position, and left unattended. His movies utilize very few pans. It’s a stationary glimpse, a seemingly still life view, incrementally gaining momentum and meaning as one scene is laid upon another. In 2007’s 12:08 East of Bucharest, he told the slowly developing tale of the owner of a public-access television station commemorating the 16th anniversary of the fall of the Nicolae Ceauşescu regime by hosting a call-in retrospective. Eyewitnesses, both in the studio and at home, debate the genesis of the revolution in their eastern Romanian city. The camera remains as rigid as a palace soldier as the film climaxes with a flurry of animated, contentious and contradictory panelists and callers. Interestingly, unlike his longer works, Porumboiu’s entertaining 39-minute short film, 2004’s Liviu’s Dream, about a small-time criminal wannabe with an ever-increasing portfolio of schemes and personal dilemmas, roams rooftops and bedsits with a spirited, energetic liveliness. At feature length, his films become more sedate, methodical, and existential. Each is exasperating in its own way, yet both reward patience.

His latest project – the contemplative Police, Adjective – begins unobtrusively with an older teen trailed by a young man through the dissipating morning haze of a succession of Budapest streets. Like the shadow, the camera keeps its distance during the uneventful quotidian journey. As with 12:08 East of Bucharest, there’s a detached quality to the opening scenes as the film unhurriedly unfolds without immediate dramatic consequence. The cop, a newlywed named Cristi, played by the earthy and unaffected Dragos Bucur, is a diligent but unambitious police officer in his mid-20s. Based on a tip that the kid has a narcotics connection in his family, Cristi has been following the youth as he goes about his unspectacular routine: he walks to school, chats with a couple of friends after classes, smokes a joint in a playground with them, then heads home. Cristi tails the lad like this as days become a week. (Porumboiu and his longtime collaborative cinematographer, Marius Panduru, effectively concoct stakeouts where not much happens; the camera spends most of its time focused on the hunter rather than the quarry.) The conscientious but bored Cristi files daily reports, in his grey office, which smack of tedium.

With time to think during the long, quiet hours on the street, Cristi realizes the rationale for tailing the kid is flawed. The vibe he’s picking up from his bosses is that busting the kid will force him to rat out an older brother, an unseen trafficker who darts in and out of the country undetected. Cristi begins to doubt whether the student knows anything of value and questions the snitch’s motivation. And he fears that his immediate superior will tire of this fruitless pursuit, but won’t condone a larger operation focusing on the sibling. Instead, his boss may just order the easy bust.

Cristi expresses his qualms to a higher up he can trust, but this mentor can only empathize and counsel; he can’t override Cristi’s superior’s wishes. The scene gains its effectiveness from the camera shooting the two almost exclusively in profile, with both men in the frame in an office longer than it is wide. The conversation is informal but pointed, especially after Cristi shares the view that the kid shouldn’t be condemned to years of incarceration for so little. (Clearly, Romanian drug laws appear harsh enough towards even modest personal use that Doug Benson and Brian Posehn won’t be touring there in the near future.) Cristi is cautioned, not for the last time, to carry out the law, not interpret it.

Porumboiu extracts significance from the more mundane daily moments as Cristi’s frustration grows. Hunched over a soup bowl at his kitchen table, wearing the same vest he’ll throw on four days in a row, Cristi breaks off a piece of bread and swirls it around his full plate as though he’s searching for clues, or perhaps just clarity. Cristi may appear to be an unsophisticated, beat cop who wasn’t formally educated – his wife corrects the grammar in his reports – but his ambivalence and moral uncertainty define him as a scholar.

As in 12:08 East of Bucharest, Police, Adjective culminates in a tense match of wills. In the previous film it was broadcast over the airways; here the showdown is private but fraught with more exacting consequences. The final sequence pits Cristi against his supercilious superior, Anghelache, portrayed by the impressive Vlad Ivanov – who cast such a chilling pall in Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. In a well-written scene filmed mostly from the back of the superior’s sizable office, the arrogant Anghelache methodically parses Cristi’s arguments in favor of abandoning the case against the teen. As with so many clever intellectual bullies, Anghelache purposely culls any rationale from his hypotheses which would weaken his stance. The deliberate scene, where voices are rarely raised, draws its intensity from the unwavering, minimally-edited camera and the juxtaposition to the film’s earlier, dominant focus on Cristi’s almost meditative internal struggle. Police, Adjective contains less humor and less cheekiness than 12:08 East of Bucharest, but in place of those characteristics Porumboiu creates moods rife for reflection. But perhaps given the somewhat glacial pace, many of the questions are not specifically raised by the film but by a viewer prone to rumination. In the end, Police, Adjective gives a guy time to think.

The Baltimore Sun’s Chris Kaltenbach is “Getting back to Mo’Nique’s Baltimore roots.”

A box office boffo throughout mainland Europe and a bit of a film festival sensation stateside, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo opens in the UK on March 12 and in the United States a week later. Based on the posthumously best selling novels by Stieg Larsson, the detective thriller is directed by Niels Arden Oplev and stars Michael Nyqvist and Noomi Rapace. The predictably inevitable Hollywood remake is in the works.

In his weekly The Forgotten column at The Auteurs, David Cairns is “trousering the ghost” with an appealingly florid tale about a distinctly eccentric slice of British comic surrealism, 1980’s Sir Henry at Rawlinson End.

One Film Wonder: Dalton Trumbo was an accomplished screenwriter and novelist who became one of Hollywood’s most appreciated writers in the first half of the 1940s with a succession of successful screenplays, including Kitty Foyle and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. In 1947, at a career apex, Trumbo was compelled to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee of the U.S. Congress. Trumbo refused to answer questions; subsequently, he was convicted of contempt of Congress and jailed for 11 months in 1950.

Following his release, Trumbo and his family moved to Mexico, where he continued to write screenplays during the decade, but never with his name in the credits. He used no less than six nom de plumes between 1950 and 1958. One of those pseudonyms, Ian McLellan Hunter — an actual writer of indistinct films in the 1940s and television thereafter — received the Oscar for Best Writing of a Motion Picture for Roman Holiday in the spring of 1954. The pseudonym used for 1956’s The Brave One — Robert Rich, which was simply the name of a relative of the film’s producers — won the 1957 Academy Award for Best Story. When the baneful blacklist abated, Trumbo returned to penning credited screenplays, including Spartacus and Exodus.

(Trumbo was presented with his Oscar for The Brave One in May 1975. A ceremony to honor Trumbo with his Academy Award for Roman Holiday was held in May 1993; Trumbo died in September 1976.)

In 1971, Trumbo directed his only film, Johnny Got His Gun, which was based on his 1939 pacifistic novel about a profoundly wounded WWI solider. Starring Timothy Bottoms, Jason Robards and Donald Sutherland – and including trivia-intriguing performances by David Soul and Tony Geary – the film is claustrophobic, powerful, and indelible. The 1972 Cannes Film Festival jury bestowed two awards on the movie which quickly secured cult status. Johnny Got His Gun underwent a renaissance of interest in 1989 when footage from the film was utilized heavily in Metallica’s first ever video for “One” from the …And Justice for All album.

“When seagulls follow the trawler it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.”

And with a simple “Thank you very much” following that single enigmatic sentence, the Manchester United legend stood up from his seat and left his advisors, journalists and world football to ponder what the hell he might have meant as he waited out a planet-wide ban from football through September 1995 by learning the trumpet.

Fittingly, in “Looking for Eric,” the latest film from the outstanding Ken Loach, Cantona becomes the mentoring guide through the existential crisis of Eric Bishop, a middle aged Manchester postman and divorcee enveloped by incapacitating depression. His two teenaged sons defy him. While his oldest, adult daughter adores him, a favor she asks forces him to confront the heady mixture of feelings he has towards the wife he cowardly left decades before. “It doesn’t really matter anymore,” his ex-wife Lilly says wearily. Eric would rather Lilly detested him than simply suffer him with indifference. Overwhelmed with regret and self-loathing, Bishop has become adrift from his family, friends and co-workers. He barely has the energy or interest to roll a spliff. But when he does, the illusory Cantona appears in Bishop’s snug bedroom, which is a shrine to the footballing enigma dominated by the iconic poster of the triumphant Cantona, with his signature upturned collar, striking an imperious stance in the moment after his immaculate goal versus Sunderland in 1996. Together, the two Erics open a trunk of mementos Bishop kept closed securely at the foot of his bed and begin the process of helping Bishop recover himself.

The film contains many of Loach’s familiar themes. Vulnerability hounds the protagonist whose natural steel has become dented. As in “Raining Stones” and “My Name is Joe,” a well-meaning working class person is sucked into trouble not entirely of their making and seemingly beyond their immediate control. (Bishop’s eldest son is the instigator.) Loach and Paul Laverty, his regular screenwriter for the past fourteen years and seven films, still imbue the story with the recognizable ebbs and flows of ordinary life while never pandering to patronizing tones. “Looking for Eric” teems with the real-life combination of humor and pathos. And the first steps of a second chance with Lilly are handled truthfully and sincerely. Like “Riff-Raff,” the film also masterfully creates a Greek chorus of a sort, with genuine camaraderie among Bishop’s fellow postal workers who are a likable blend of personalities and viewpoints.

The camerawork is furnished by another Loach stalwart, cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, a superb technician at jimmying emotion into the cramped hallways, bedrooms, and kitchen of Bishop’s home. An Oscar nominee for his work on “The Hurt Locker,” Ackroyd excels in the ambiance of confinement, where space is suffocating and intimate.

As with the vast majority of Loach’s movies, the film is centered on a beautiful central performance, and Steve Evets is a revelation as Eric Bishop. Possessing a sunken cheeked, craggy face, he handles the darker moments with absorbing sadness as his facial features are marked with shadows like looming clouds. But Evets illustrates Bishop’s passion and enthusiasm with equal depth. He exhibits great zeal, especially when he recalls the first night he met Lilly at a dance contest 30 years before. And he’s a defiant, protective dad. It’s a believable, complex portrayal. In a stellar debut film performance, Stephanie Bishop gives the present-day Lilly grace and strength. The cast of workmates are a jovial, animated, and opinionated collection, especially John Henshaw as Meatballs, his closest friend, who habitually buys self-help books so Bishop’s mates can assist their friend during his trying time. (A visualization exercise where a half dozen of his work pals imagine themselves as Sammy Davis, Jr., Fidel Castro, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Frank Sinatra and Cantona is a comic free-for-all.)

Retired since 1997, the 43-year-old Cantona in his post-football life has become, simply put, one of the coolest dudes on the planet. And he’s emerging as a notable presence as an actor; Cantona was quite good as the dashing, pretentious director in 2008’s “French Film.” In “Looking for Eric,” he’s funny, charming, sexy, and wise. (He’s also only seen when Bishop is alone.) The imaginary Cantona follows Bishop on his rounds and keeps him company during his soul searching; the two actors develop an engaging relationship. (Cantona even divulges that his most cherished moment in football was a pass, not a goal.) There’s sweetness to several of their scenes, especially when Cantona spouts proverbs in French, only for Bishop to exclaim exasperation at the English translation. Seagulls, indeed.

The film culminates with a rousing “Operation Cantona” spearheaded by Meatballs and coach loads of supporters which is anything but a fishing expedition. “Looking for Eric” is as close to a feel-good movie as Loach has made but still retains the integrity and authenticity which makes his films so powerful and clarifying.

Bob Grimm of Tucson Weekly believes “Jesus needs to step in and stop all these lame biblical films.”

Exploring themes of family and identity, the documentary “Off and Running” from director Nicole Opper has been crisscrossing North America at festival screenings for almost a year. Subtitled “An American Coming of Age Story,” the film focuses on a Brooklyn family with an inquisitive, adoptive teenaged daughter.

Dunno Y . . . Na Jaane Kyun promises Bollywood’s first gay kiss, reports The Times.

One Film Wonder: One of the most illustrious acting teachers of the 20th century, whose students are a roster of Hollywood’s greatest movie icons — James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, Paul Newman, et al.– Lee Strasberg appeared in only 8 films as a credited cast member during a film career spanning 44 years. A foremost exponent of “Method Acting,” he co-founded the Group Theatre in 1931 and became director of the Actors Studio in 1951. In 1974, at the age of 73, he played Hyman Roth in “The Godfather: Part II” and received an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor. Following his unexpected success, he made several films in the decade, including “…And Justice for All,” “Boardwalk,” and “Going in Style.” But Strasberg’s delicate performance as the intelligent and honor bound Roth resonates most strongly, especially as he counsels Michael Corleone, played by former student Al Pacino, that “this is the business we’ve chosen.”

Bingham (George Clooney) works for a company, Career Transition Counseling, which is hired by businesses too scared to do their own firing. It’s his dream job; Bingham is, eerily, perfectly suited psychologically to his profession; he has an almost Zen-like ability to sit serenely across the table from the crushed and wounded. (Withering outbursts are delivered by both professional actors, and non-actors who lost their jobs in the recession and were hired by Reitman for these roles.) Bingham appears to have a personality which can experience the wrenching angst without taking it onboard; he’s like an emotional Sky Miles loofah.

A bachelor in his 40s, he loves his itinerant life. Bingham dashes through a pampered life soaking up daily thanks at ticket counters and checkout desks. Contrary to the vast majority of sane individuals, he adores airports. He logs 322 days on the road and “43 miserable days at home” in an Omaha apartment so antiseptically unscathed it appears to be inhabited by the world’s dullest monk. During one of his Admirals Club layovers, he meets a fellow addicted business traveler, played by Vera Farmiga. They engage in a high-stakes card game, flinging credit cards and reward cards of ever increasing status in a sassy and flirtatious riposte. They’re turned on by this elite game of Snap. Farmiga plays Alex Goran with bravado reminiscent of Rosalind Russell.

But perhaps this is apropos as Clooney is as close as we have in modern American film to the Hollywood star of the 1940s and 1950s; he’s like William Holden, but with more sincerity. With charming crow’s feet creasing his face with every rakish smile, Clooney is so consummately good looking that he appears to have a full mouth even though his upper lip has the slim definition of a cigarette case. In a year when he’s produced outstanding work – the wicked comic mania of Lyn Cassady in the unfairly maligned “The Men Who Stare at Goats” and crafty voiceover work as the titular “Fantastic Mr. Fox” – his performance as Ryan Bingham rounds off the decade in style.

The tranquility of Bingham’s nomadic modus vivendi – which could be dubbed “Ryan Air” — is jettisoned by the influence of a tightly-wound upstart named Natalie Keener (the commendable Anna Kendrick), who impresses her CTC bosses with a radical company overhaul combining cost cutting with modern technology. A recent Ivy League graduate, Natalie has devised a business plan with the painfully forced amalgamation of the words global and local: “Glocal.” This means that the firings will be done remotely from Nebraska. Desperate and defiant, Ryan takes Natalie along on a road trip. Natalie’s presence initiates in Ryan a slowly gestating process of reassessment. (In a nice touch, it’s not Natalie’s example which directly leads to Ryan’s contemplation.) He begins to think about relationships and family. He ponders the hollowness of his life and a facile side gig as a motivational speaker. The treatment of his predicament is believable and bolstered by Clooney’s strong bearing, even if, at times, the scenes, especially during a visit to his hometown for his sister’s wedding, feel cursory. As his protégé, of a sort, Kendrick delivers a nicely nuanced performance. Natalie is driven professionally, but retains a likable innocence, admitting to Ryan and Alex during a confessional conversation in an airport terminal that she desires the type of man who the “only thing he loves more than me is his Golden Lab.” But the character of Natalie is too young to be sympathetic. Feeling sorry for her, especially in this economy, doesn’t seem appropriate. And the film bears the smooth sheen of a James L. Brooks film. “Up in the Air” is worth checking out even if Reitman fashions a movie whose title could very well sum up a viewer’s ambiguity.

“Invictus” is a solid film from the prodigious Clint Eastwood mounted on a stunning central performance from Morgan Freeman. The story scans the brief time between Nelson Mandela’s release from prison on February 11, 1990, to the summer of 1995, when South Africa won the Rugby World Cup. The vast majority of the film covers the even more narrow period between Mandela’s inauguration as president in May 1994 to the final match in June 1995. The new leader envisions South Africa’s hosting of the illustrious sporting event as an invaluable component towards the “reconciliation” of the new “Rainbow Nation.” Eastwood quickly captures the simultaneous moods of expectancy and trepidation in a land of fractious race relations. Into this unenviable, volatile cauldron, Mandela steps with graceful determination.

The film is firmly centered on the phenomenal performance by Freeman as Nelson Mandela. Freeman avoids caricature, which would have been occurred if he’d adopted Mandela’s distinctive, pinched speaking voice. Instead he provides the audience with an experience more impressive and profound than mimicry. It’s not an impersonation, it’s an embodiment. His Mandela, as appears to be the case in actuality, is strong and humble. Freeman portrays Mandela as regal but approachable, opinionated but free of haughtiness. He is inspirational and influential but not dominating, let alone domineering. Mandela gains esteem from both supporters and opponents through the sincere melding of actions and words. (One of the films best sequences chronicles how Mandela appeals to a newly created South African sports council to support the Spingboks, the national rugby side historically symbolic of the apartheid system. To attest to the cultural resistance, in June 1994, black South Africans avidly cheered for England in a match held in South Africa.) When he utters “Forgiveness liberates the soul” to a revolutionary comrade in his integrated security detail, it doesn’t sound like new age twaddle but as a reasoned belief bred by 27 imprisoned years, years counseled by the words of the poem by the late 19th century poet William Earnest Henley which Mandela kept on a scrap of paper during his incarceration and from which the film takes its title. “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul,” the poem concludes. As presented by Freeman, the extraordinary Mandela does not come across as a mythic figure. Instead he exemplifies an honorable, heroic everyman. (As befitting a self-effacing everyman, he is fallible: the film hints at the difficulties that the father of a country faces in his own family life.)

For a sports film, the thrilling match reenactments are well constructed. Matt Damon bulks up admirably to authentically play Francois Pienaar, the triumphant South African captain whose own father initially despises and mocks Mandela. Damon, looking nothing like his pudgy pencil pusher in “The Informant!,” compliments Freeman in a decidedly secondary, but crucial role. The script by Anthony Peckham from John Carlin’s non-fiction account avoids cliché. The soundtrack, however, is not so lucky. In several instances, a scene is undercut by a hideous pop song. But the soundtrack is the only contentious element in a proficient motion picture propelled by a history lesson modern and eternal.

The superb style binds a fast paced adventure. Mr. Fox is a smooth talking canine, stealing chickens, turkeys and cider from the region’s three most powerful farmers –Boggs, Bunce and Bean – even though the thefts feed his vanity, not mouths, and he has already promised his wife that he has ceased his filching ways. As voiced by the velvety-toned George Clooney, Mr. Fox is sly and resourceful, and as persuasive as a barker. He’s a tad too sure and a half-step ahead of danger. The farmers’ collective revenge exacted by terrible tractors and a cider flood uproots not only his family, but forces the entire animal population to become bunkered in an underground warren from which the fantastic one vows to free them.

In the midst of this upheaval, the animal characters are familiar Anderson personalities; a collection of complicated, delicate, hesitant and proud souls. Even the confident, titular fox is momentarily conflicted. (Included in a large ensemble of voices are Bill Murray as the agitated Badger, Mr. Fox’s attorney, and an almost unrecognizable Willem Dafoe as the scurrilous Rat.) Anderson and co-writer Noah Baumbach pepper the script with constantly clever and funny moments. In a comic highlight, Owen Wilson delivers, in his delicious, inimitable twang, a witty cameo as Coach Skip explaining the wild cricket-baseball hybrid known as Whack Bat. But the film is unafraid to be poignant as well. Anderson continues to explore his recurrent theme of dissection, the subterranean world here peeled back like the hull of the Belafonte in “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.” In “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” he burrows deeper still into lives rich and untidy. Jason Schwartzman brings a vulnerable and perturbed flavor to Ash, Mr. and Mrs. Fox’s insecure adolescent son who is intimidated by the presence of his no-effort, over-achieving cousin, Kristofferson. And the film contains perhaps the tenderest scene in an Anderson film yet when Fox and his long-suffering (even in fox years) wife engage in a moving and honest dialogue about their relationship on a thin platform in front of a shimmering waterfall. As they stand before the brilliant sheet of water, Mrs. Fox, voiced by Meryl Streep, releases a bitter truth which pricks his self-assurance and swipes at his swagger: “I love you too, but I shouldn’t have married you.”

“Fantastic Mr. Fox” is an intrepid physical and emotional experience with a great escape by motorcycle ending, as you might expect from an Anderson flick, with a quirky dance right out of a Charlie Brown special. Like Spike Jonze a few months ago with “Where the Wild Things Are,” Anderson is a dynamic director who risked adapting a hallowed author’s children’s book and succeeded in making a remarkable film which retains his artistic sensibility while beautifully complimenting the original source

She’s just sixteen years old
Leave her alone, they say
Separated by fools
Who don’t know what love is yet
But I want you to know

If I could fly
I’d pick you up
I’d take you into the night
And show you a love
Like you’ve never seen, ever seen

It’s, charitably, an unsettling ode. Because I was entering high school as the tune moved up the charts, the song’s refrain was particularly ominous. As a teen, it was hard enough vying with my peers for the attention of our female classmates; it was made an all-the-more daunting task when girls would be escorted to dances by mustached dates who owned their own cars, had their own apartments and whose yearbook photos were already becoming musty. Youth was sufficiently disconcerting without house parties being crashed by Keith Hernandez clones in Girbaud jeans.

It was Benny’s track looping in my head when I saw “An Education” the unevenly toned tale of a preternaturally composed and sophisticated 16-year-old’s romantic relationship with a flash, older man in early 1960s London. Based on Lynn Barber’s memoir, director Lone Scherfig’s fair yet unsustaining film follows the bright and mature Jenny (Carey Mulligan) as the Oxford hopeful embarks on a dubious courtship during a whirlwind last year of secondary school.

At home, Jenny is harried by an unyielding father (an arch Alfred Molina as Jack) who is obsessed with having his daughter gain entrance into Oxford. He insists on Latin and cello lessons as resume stuffers. One rainy day, after compulsory cello practice, she’s offered a ride in a slick car by a smooth man who must be nothing less than in his md-20s, even though his exact age is not revealed in the film. (In an illuminating interview, Barber told The Guardian this summer that the actual man who picked her up “was –he said – 27, but was probably in his late 30s.” The well-bred David (Peter Sarsgaard, adopting a more than passable English accent) begins to court the teen with the awareness of her parents. He treats Jenny to classical concerts, takes her to nightclubs, ushers her to a selective auction and introduces her to his wealthy friends Danny, (played ably by Dominic Cooper) and his dim girlfriend, Helen (a resoundingly good Rosamund Pike), who contorts her face into an assortment of befuddled expressions. Against this competition, Graham, a skittish but sweet classmate who pines for Jenny, doesn’t stand a chance. The film at this point doesn’t seem terribly concerned that it’s a school night every night for our teen.

Due to her father’s desperation to get his only daughter into a specific university — and her mother Margaret’s acquiescence (Cara Seymour, in a dutiful but thankless role) — Jenny is allowed to dash away with David for a weekend at Oxford, under the fabricated excuse that she’ll meet one of David’s former tutors, C.S. Lewis. Enveloped in this adult world of bon vivants and rapscallions, she becomes, predictably, bored with her high school life; in turn, the school’s headmistress (Emma Thompson, doing yeoman’s work) and her literature teacher, Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams) are cast as parochial for their disapproval.

Despite a first-rate ensemble and attractive visuals – with pleasing cinematography by John de Borman, production design by Andrew McApline and set decoration by Anna Lynch-Robinson — “An Education” doesn’t have much novel to say about those gap years between adolescence and adulthood. Surprisingly, for a Nick Hornby script, the dialogue doesn’t sing; this is Hornby’s first screenplay since 1997’s “Fever Pitch.” Jenny doesn’t narrate the story, or keep a diary, or have a best friend in whom she confides. Mulligan provides a strong performance but the film feels episodic and it too often lacks emotional specifics. After David whisks her away to Paris for a weekend, Jenny sighs with almost forced naivety “I never did anything before I met you,” with the innocence of a gold medal winning teenaged gymnast breathlessly saying that “I’ve dreamt of this moment my whole life.” When the movie does confront the more serious consequences of the relationship, it skims over them. “An Education” even falls back on a musical montage of Jenny studying. Admittedly it would be quite boring to film a person reading in real-time, but the sequence feels like a replacement for insight into her attitudes and thoughts as she prepares for college life. And when her father undergoes a change of heart, it’s an example of how a movie can deliver an epiphany unearned. (But it does give him a chance to leave three biscuits and a cuppa at her bedroom door as an apologetic gesture.) At one point Jenny exclaims, “Silly schoolgirls are always getting seduced by glamorous older men.” Even silly schoolboys know that.

Jack Stevenson at Bright Light Film Journal uncovers the story of “Porno to the People –The Danish Revolution That Liberated America.”

Based on the book by Steve McVicker, “I Love You Phillip Morris” stars Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor as cell mates and soul mates. With a February 2010 release date, the film is the first directorial effort from “Cats & Dogs” and “Bad Santa” screenwriters Glenn Ficarra and John Requa.

One Film Wonder: Born in Nova Scotia, Harold Russell was a U.S. Army instructor at Camp MacKall in North Carolina when he lost both his hands from a TNT explosion in 1944. Afterwards, Russell appeared in an Army training film which was seen by director William Wyler, who cast the non-professional actor in “The Best Years of Our Lives” in the role of Homer Parrish. The 1946 film — which chronicled the adjustment of three American soldiers (including Frederic March and Dana Andrews) to post-war life upon their return to their Midwestern hometown — won 7 Oscars, including Best Picture. Russell earned the Best Actor in a Supporting Role accolade and also received an Honorary Oscar “for bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans through his appearance in ‘The Best Years of Our Lives.’” He is still the only person to win two Oscars for the same performance. With a university business degree earned following his appearance in the film, Russell became immersed in advocating for veterans’ groups. After a 34-year gap, Russell appeared in his second film, 1980s “Inside Moves.” He had roles in two other films: 1990s “Payback” and 1997’s “Dogtown.” Russell died in 2002.

With eyebrows like a swan’s unfurled wings, Romy Schneider plays the restless Anne, a bored Parisian housewife in her early 20s, with a coquettish flourish. (Schneider, who was on her way at the age of 24 to forging a reputation as one of Europe’s most coveted actresses, possesses a seductive allure which suggests Simone Signoret’s younger sister.) Anne has been married for just a few years to Clément, a cinched-up, dour, industrialist’s son just a tad older than her who quits the family business to covertly scheme for a violent anti-communist, anti-democratic extremist group. Jean-Louis Trintignant portrays Clément with his signature placid, inscrutable face (which he’d use to magnificent effect later in the decade as The Examining Magistrate in 1969’s “Z”).

When the couple does venture out to places which enthrall Anne, like smoky jazz clubs, the former actress is back in her element while hubby seethes. A bubbly persona with a penchant for champagne, her flirting may be inconsiderate but his reaction is brutish; Clément treats governments and love interests by a single authoritarian mantra: “power must be seized.”

The film provides no back story to their relationship, so it’s hard to imagine how they met. Yet Schneider and Trintignant are such strong presences that they intensely convey the way seemingly mismatched couples can become concatenated. This ill-fitting union possesses its own personal kinesis so that even steely eyes can seduce. But those seductive moments are fleeting.

Anne may be looking for excitement, but a search of a hallway closet unearths an entirely unexpected discovery, a carefully-wrapped bazooka. Clément passes off the weapon’s importance; Anne seems less distressed by the munitions than the fact that despite the sparing moments of consuming passion, her husband is a dud. Soon after, Clément carries out a heinous, politically-motivated terrorist act.

Fleeing from Paris after his nefarious crime, the couple hide out at the country house of Clément’s childhood friend, Paul (Henri Serre, fresh from his role as Jim in “Jules et Jim”), who knows nothing of Clément’s actions. (Anne doesn’t make any connection either.) A young widower, Paul is a printer immersed in a bucolic life with a friendly, grounded disposition as warm as the fisherman’s cable knit sweaters he favors. With his round eyes, pronounced nose and full lips, Paul has the oversized features of a sculptor’s model. Expressive without being flamboyant, Paul is the political and physical antithesis of his distant chum. As the three linger after dinner on the first evening listening to the radio, Cavalier delivers a clever and riveting scene as the targeted politician reveals to a national audience a double cross among the perpetrators by playing a surreptitious tape recording; this is where the full extent of Clément’s barbarity is revealed to Anne.

Found out, Clément dashes off to South America alone, but not before he is unequivocally condemned by his childhood friend; Anne, though, is still, strangely, emotionally entangled. As Anne and Paul remain and begin their own relationship, “Le combat” takes on a hurried pace. The gestation of the new romance feels comparatively rushed to the earlier sequences. Like the untold history of Anne and Clément, Paul’s past is touched upon but not examined to the depth that a film as robust as “Le combat” could have handled. (Clément’s journey to the Americas is told in a few solitary images.) The film is interspersed throughout with quickly shown images, almost like photographs, with the camera shuttering brief, enigmatic glimpses. It’s an interesting technique but with so much happening to the new couple – including Anne falling ill, the two of them moving to Paris, Paul setting up a print shop, Anne reborn as an actress with the unveiling of a new play, and a quietly intense roundtrip drive out of the country for a decidedly private matter – these snippets seems incidental. The condensed movie could have prospered from more detail and exposition being focused on these challenging and instrumental episodes.

“Le combat” is bolstered by the evocative black and white cinematography of Pierre Lhomme. Scenes in both the urban settings and the countryside are shot through diffused light, as though set in misty daybreak or dusky sunset. Lhomme wonderfully incorporates shadows throughout the film, but especially effectively in the Parisian milieu.

When Clément returns, one act of revenge in Argentina has hardly sated his lust for retribution. With his skewed sense of honor as the focal point, the plot takes on a vibe that you believe will submerge the film in noir fatalism. Cavalier’s first directorial effort avoids this fate but concludes with a melodramatic climax and a lingering sensation that a very fine film could have been richer still with another reel on the projector.

Bill Nighy reveals to Patrick Barkham of The Guardian that “I am not suddenly the greatest actor in the world.”

Willem Dafoe, Chloë Sevigny, Brad Dourif and Michael Shannon appear in Werner Herzog’s “My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done.” Inspired by a true crime event, the film reaches theaters in North America beginning next month.

Min Lee of The Associate Press writes about Lou Ye and his latest film, “Spring Fever” as “Banned director brings romance film to Hong Kong.” Strand Releasing will present the film in the United States.

One Film Wonder: The exceedingly influential French director Jean Vigo had a brief film career totaling only four projects. He directed his first short film, “À propos de Nice” at the age of 25 in 1930. The following year he shot an experimental film recording the movements of French swimming sensation Jean Taris in the water. In 1933, he made “Zero for Conduct,” a 41-minute boarding school drama. The next year, he released his only feature-length film, “L’Atalante,” the cinematically important tale of a jealous canal barge captain and his new bride. (The film’s cinematographer was Boris Kaufman, who twenty years later would begin a Hollywood career which included filming “On the Waterfront,” “12 Angry Men,” and “The Pawnbroker.”) In October 1934, a month after the release of “L’Atalante,” Vigo died, aged 29, of complications from tuberculosis. Both France and Spain bestow annual directing awards in his name. In France, the Prix Jean Vigo has been given to directors such as Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard and Olivier Assayas.