This week’s big movie can be found on TV. Arch-independent filmmaker Todd Haynes makes a characteristically sidelong move toward the mainstream with his five-part miniseries Mildred Pierce, which starts this Sunday on HBO. Haynes, the most academic yet mass-culture-minded of U.S. indie directors, began his career in the late Reagan…

Cheerfully diffident, garrulous yet uninflected, blithely self-absorbed, the mumblecore brand proliferates: Last year’s star vehicles Greenberg and Cyrus introduced the concept of mega-mumble. The low-budget musical Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench pioneered mumble-chord; Tiny Furniture was part psycho-drumble, part sit-cumble. Premiering with the latter at last spring’s South…

The Eagle, directed by Kevin Macdonald and adapted from Rosemary Sutcliff’s 1954 historical novel, The Eagle of the Ninth, a best-selling tale of second-century Roman legions and youthful derring-do on the far side of Hadrian’s Wall, is a thunderous boys’ adventure of the old-school type: There’s not a female speaking…

Fresh from Sundance, Miguel Arteta’s amiable Cedar Rapids is a mild comedy of embarrassment, set in the dark heart of Middle America and starring sitcom secundario Ed Helms (The Office’s obnoxious, angry salesman Andy Bernard) as Tim Lippe, a prematurely middle-aged man-child. Taking an airplane for the first time in…

Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist breathes life into a celluloid fossil, lovingly animating an unproduced script by the great filmmaker Jacques Tati. Chomet sets The Illusionist on the cusp of the ’60s, around the time Tati wrote the script as a followup to his hit Mon Oncle. The title character, a…

A quasi-documentary portrait of young non-actors striking poses, walking around Boston, hanging out and playing or listening to music, Damien Chazelle’s Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench is a giddy and cannily frugal avant-musical. Beginning when Chazelle, now 25, was an undergraduate at Harvard, and evolving over a period…

Many of my favorite films of the year are still awaiting wider release, so although this top-ten list wraps up my 2010, it can also serve as a guide to your 2011. My number-one film, in fact, sneaks into New York just three days before the year ends: The Strange…

A picnic for Anglophiles, not to mention a prospective Oscar bonanza for the brothers Weinstein, The King’s Speech is a well-wrought, enjoyably amusing inspirational drama that successfully humanizes, even as it pokes fun at, the House of Windsor. The story — shy young prince helped by irascible wizard to break…

Boldly reanimating the comic Western that secured John Wayne his Oscar 41 years ago, the Coen Brothers’ True Grit is well-wrought, if overly talkative, and seriously ambitious. Opening with a strategically abbreviated Old Testament proverb (“The wicked flee when none pursueth”), the film returns the Coens to the all-American sagebrush…

The late George Hickenlooper’s Casino Jack is an improbably blithe cautionary tale, recounting the rise and fall of D.C. super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. “You’re either a big-leaguer or you’re a slave clawing your way onto the C train,” the avid antihero (Kevin Spacey) tells his mirrored reflection in the pre-credit sequence;…

Jeff Bridges is God and, as image-captured from the original 1982 Tron, also the devil in Disney’s mega-million-dollar reboot, Tron: Legacy. The notion of a tragically split persona might have been scripted to give the new movie a measure of emotional gravitas, but why bother with writing when Tron: Legacy…

Winner of last spring’s SXSW festival and current indie darling, Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture is a comedy of youthful confusion that gets its kick not only from evoking a world of unromantic hookups, casual BJs and iPhone porn, but from satirizing New York’s bourgeois bohemia. Newly graduated with a degree…

A near-irresistible exercise in bravura absurdity, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan deserves to become a minor classic of heterosexual camp — at the very least, it’s the most risible and riotous backstage movie since Showgirls. Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake has had a spooky quality at least since Tod Browning appropriated a few…

Comely, independent, willful young lass returns to collect family inheritance in rural England, drives the local men wild, makes several misalliances, and inadvertently precipitates a catastrophe before nature finally takes its course. Adapted from Posy Simmonds’s excellent graphic novel, Tamara Drewe knowingly updates Thomas Hardy’s gloomy pastoral Far From the…

Inside Job, Charles Ferguson’s followup to his Iraq War gut-twister No End in Sight, is a documentary that inspires less shock and awe than sickening ire. The movie opens with the cautionary tale of little Iceland, an idyllic nation so stable that, as put by one local, it enjoyed “almost…

As suggested by its title, Allen Ginsberg’s game-changing poem “Howl” is essentially performative — and so is Howl, the Sundance-opening quasi-biographical movie by Oscar-winning documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. Howl the movie — which, in addition to touching on Ginsberg’s early life (and successful coming out), dramatizes the poem’s…

The Social Network is a wonderful title, at once Olympian in its detachment and self-descriptive in its buzz. Everyone will opine (and Tweet) on this Scott Rudin-produced, Aaron Sorkin-scripted, David Fincher-directed, universally anticipated tale of Facebook’s genesis and founding genius — at least until something sexier comes along. The main…

Published five years ago, Kazuo Ishiguro’s massively praised Never Let Me Go is set in an alternate universe where life has been extended and catastrophic illness eliminated, thanks to an evolutionary advance, namely the harvesting of vital organs from specially bred human clones. But that’s backstory. Despite its lurid premise,…

Opening with a deeply sincere “I don’t give a fuck!” Austin filmmaker Ben Steinbauer’s investigative doc Winnebago Man sets out to prove the contrary. Steinbauer’s mission is to find Jack Rebney, the hitherto-anonymous pitchman whose fabulously profane tantrums during the course of making a 1989 RV infomercial — amid a…

Lebanon, written and directed by Samuel Maoz, is not just the year’s most impressive first feature, but also the strongest new movie of any kind I’ve seen in 2010. Actually, Lebanon hardly seems like a debut, perhaps because it’s based on a scenario Maoz had been replaying in his head…

Elegant opening credits, written as if calligraphy on a wedding invitation, yield to a couple in blunt close-up — unhappy, interracial, tearfully celebrating their anniversary in a shopping-mall restaurant. After an unfathomable exchange, he presents her with an antique bowl found on eBay and, after reciting a guffaw-worthy litany of…

Alain Resnais’s Wild Grass has plenty of fans — it copped an award at Cannes in 2009 — but I don’t see what they see. The 87-year-old filmmaker’s latest is an insufferable exercise in cutie-pie modernism, painfully unfunny and precious to a fault. Adapted from a novel by Christian Gailly,…