OUTSTANDING BRITISH FILM
TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY

OUTSTANDING DEBUT BY A BRITISH WRITER, DIRECTOR OR PRODUCER
TYRANNOSAUR -- Paddy Considine (Director), Diarmid Scrimshaw (Producer)

DIRECTOR
Michel Hazanavicius, THE ARTIST

LEADING ACTOR
Jean Dujardin, THE ARTIST

LEADING ACTRESS
Meryl Streep, THE IRON LADY

SUPPORTING ACTOR
Christopher Plummer, BEGINNERS

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Octavia Spencer, THE HELP

FILM NOT IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
THE SKIN I LIVE IN

DOCUMENTARY
SENNA

ANIMATED FILM
RANGO

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Michel Hazanavicius, THE ARTIST

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan, TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY

ORIGINAL MUSIC
Ludovic Bource, THE ARTIST

CINEMATOGRAPHY
Guillaume Schiffman, THE ARTIST

EDITING
Gregers Sall and Chris King, SENNA

PRODUCTION DESIGN
Dante Ferretti and Francesca Lo Schiavo, HUGO

COSTUME DESIGN
Mark Bridges, THE ARTIST

MAKE UP & HAIR
Marese Langan, Mark Coulier and J. Roy Helland, THE IRON LADY

SOUND
Philip Stockton, Eugene Gearty, Tom Fleischman, John Midgley, HUGO

SPECIAL VISUAL EFFECTS
Tim Burke, John Richardson, Greg Butler and David Vickery, HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS – PART 2

SHORT ANIMATION
A MORNING STROLL

SHORT FILM
PITCH BLACK HEIST

THE ORANGE WEDNESDAYS RISING STAR AWARD (voted for by the public)
ADAM DEACON

###

[Top photo of (L-R) Artist star Jean Dujardin, producer Thomas Langmann and director Michel Hazanavicius via AFP/Getty Images]

We can attribute part of the buoyant mood to the reception of the screening of Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Caesar Must Die on Saturday morning. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the Taviani Brothers rode high, on an internationally cresting wave, with pictures like Padre Padrone and The Night of the Shooting Stars. But in recent years, mentioning their name would be likely to elicit a blank stare or a “Taviani Who?” Even though the brothers have been steadily making films in Italy since then, they’ve dropped off the map in the United States, and even at home their profile hasn’t exactly been blazing.

But Caesar Must Die may reignite the fortunes of this octogenarian directing team. The picture is stark and alive in its simplicity; rendered mostly in black-and-white, it’s gorgeous to look at -- you could practically use it as an illustrated textbook on framing and composition. Caesar Must Die is a sort-of documentary that tells the story of a group of prison inmates -- incarcerated at Rome’s maximum security Rebibbia -- who mount a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Footage from the actual performance frames the picture: In the opening scene, we see a bunch of stubbly, rough-looking guys, wearing simple, stylized costumes that give the whole affair the aura of a children’s holiday pageant, doing some pretty interesting things with Shakespeare’s language. Not all of those things are, in the strict sense, good. But even the “bad” actors among this bunch -- and remember, they’re not just nonprofessionals but convicted criminals, for Christ’s sake -- contribute to the intense, quiet power of the final work.

Most of Caesar Must Die is devoted to watching these men work their way through the material during rehearsal, learning its ins and outs, its dips and dives, and teasing out nuances and details that mean something to them. Sometimes the Tavianis draw the parallels between art and life a little too starkly. We don’t really need to hear the inmates reflecting on how Julius Caesar speaks to them when we can see how, in their proto-method-acting way, they bring every scrap of their experience to rehearsal: They touch each other warily but tenderly; when it’s time for a character to draw a knife, you can tell the actors respect it as both a weapon and a symbol, even though it’s presumably made out of plastic. You can bet these guys know a lot about duplicity and betrayal and power struggles, and they bring all of that to bear as they tangle with this challenging material, and with each other.

The most wonderful sequence in this overall very fine picture may be the montage of the actors’ auditions, as they meet with the play’s director – a professional brought in from the outside – and try to impress him with their swagger and capacity for pathos. Many of them have both in spades. Some are awkwardly touching; others come off like they’ve spent too much time channeling Robert De Niro; and some are simply naturals, able to summon that deep-rooted whatever-it-is that makes magic happen in live performance. The picture also features a lovely, haunting Bernard Herrmann-inflected score -- in places I could hear shadows of Taxi Driver. When Caesar Must Die eventually shows up in American theaters -- and it will -- it’s going to be easy as pie for marketing people to sell: An uplifting story about prison dudes finding meaning in art can pretty much sell itself. But even though that line essentially describes what happens in Caesar Must Die, it doesn’t come close to capturing the simultaneously joyous and mournful resonance of the picture. Caesar Must Die is really just about the way art lives on through people, sometimes in unlikely ways. There’s no way to keep it behind bars.

Saturday’s press screening of Barbara, from German director Christian Petzold, didn’t draw the same kind of rapturous audience affection that Caesar Must Die did. But then, it’s a very different type of movie. In Barbara, a beautiful but rather blank-faced young doctor – played by the superb German actress Nina Hoss -- arrives in a small East German town to take a new job at a tiny hospital. She doesn’t seem too happy to be there, though clearly the doc in charge – Ronald Zehrfeld, who somewhat resembles Brendan Fraser and is equally charming -- takes an immediate shine to her. It’s 1980, as the movie’s press notes tell us, though if you go in cold, you probably won’t be able to immediately discern when and where the action is taking place. That’s probably intentional, and the approach works. This isn’t The Lives of Others, where the East-West divide is practically a major character; instead, it’s just a story about people living in constrained (and at times dangerous) circumstances and yearning for something more.

Barbara is a drama and a romance, and it’s also laced with dry, delicate humor. There were times when the German members of the audience would laugh at a joke that I couldn’t quite get, and yet Petzold -- the director behind the 2007 drama Yella, also featuring Hoss -- is such a master of tone and mood that I could feel the vibrations of the movie’s subtle humor, even if I’d be hard-pressed to articulate it. Barbara starts out slow and then moves even slower -- but by the end, somehow, it got me in its gentle clutches.

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Does every programming choice, particularly among the films in competition, measure up in significance to those two examples? Hardly. But every year at the Berlinale I discover at least a film or two or three that I’m grateful for, and that wouldn’t have crossed my path otherwise.

This year, the programming choices are perhaps particularly un-glitzy, and they’re certainly low in Hollywood star power -- not necessarily a bad thing. The festival opener this year was Benoit Jacquot’s historical drama Farewell My Queen (which I arrived too late to see), starring  Diane Kruger, Léa Seydoux and Virginie Ledoyen, lovely actresses, all of them, though hardly household names. The festival is also featuring, out of competition, Stephen Daldry’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which has already fallen with a thud Stateside. (I felt sorry for my English friends as they traipsed off to see it. Once was more than enough for me.) Possibly the most high-profile of the films in competition, at least by Hollywood standards, is Billy Bob Thornton’s Jayne Mansfield’s Car, which screens later this week. (It stars Thornton, Robert Duvall, John Hurt and Kevin Bacon.) Thornton’s ex, Angelina Jolie, is also here with her directorial debut In the Land of Blood and Honey, being shown here as a special presentation.

But there’s still plenty to look forward to: I can’t wait to see Tsui Hark’s 3-D  Wuxia The Flying Swords of Dragon Gate, screening out of competition later this week. And though I’m not sure I can swing it, schedule-wise, I have a hankering to check out Timo Vuorensola’s Finnish-Australian-German (and crowd-funded) Third Reich/sci-fi thingie Iron Sky -- because who can resist a pitch like this one: “In 1945 the Nazis went to the moon. In 2018 they are coming back.”

Space-traveling Nazis will have to wait, I’m afraid. So far, the two Berlinale films I’ve seen have been more... potato-like. The less impressive of these two -- and yet not dismissible by a long shot -- is Alain Gomis's Aujourd'hui, in which American musician-actor Saul Williams plays a Senegalese man, Satché, who, it appears, has been doomed to death: The film follows his last day on earth, which begins when he awakens and is greeted by his family and close friends, some of whom lament his impending demise and others of whom take him to task for his shortcomings. Satché might have escaped this terrible fate: He left Senegal to be educated in the United States, and then decided to come back, which, as the movie spells out in metaphorical terms, seals his fate as a human sacrifice.

Aujourd’hui is a languorous film, or, rather, a film that makes you use a word like “languorous”  when what you really might mean is “boring.” But Williams is a charismatic presence: His performance is largely wordless, which means we’re able to absorb the details of his world through his half-curious, half-cautious eyes. He’s an actor I’d like to see more of, leading to yet another reason a festival like the Berlinale is invaluable: Even flawed movies sometimes bring us the pleasure of discovering a new actor.

Between the last installment of Cannes and this year’s Berlinale, a microtrend in European cinema appears to be taking shape: In the past 10 months I and some of my fellow critics have seen two movies about creepy adults who abduct children and hold them prisoner in a basement for months if not years. The first of those movies was the Austrian film Michael, by director Markus Schleinzer, which screened at Cannes (and which is opening in New York on Feb. 24). Michael follows the day-to-day life of a pedophile who keeps a 10-year-old boy locked in his basement; it’s an austere, chilly little picture -- Schleinzer has worked as a casting director for Michael Haneke, which tells you something -- though glimpses of grim optimism do occasionally break through its storm clouds.

Frédéric Videau’s A Moi Seule (or Coming Home), screening in competition here, tells a similar story: An opaque but clearly unhinged French construction worker, Vincent (Reda Kateb), abducts a girl, Gaëlle, at the age of 10, though he doesn’t violate her sexually. Some eight years later, she’s still a captive in his basement, only she torments him to the point where you wonder why he doesn’t just turn her out of the house already. (She sasses him, teenager-style, with sardonic observations heralded by phrases like “Earth to Vincent!”)  The teenaged Gaëlle (she’s played by Agathe Bonitzer, a lanky actress with a sullen but penetrating gaze) escapes early in the picture -- we get a sense of the texture of her relationship with Vincent via flashbacks.

Unlike Michael, this isn’t a picture built on an ultra-manipulative sense of dread. And A Moi Seule raises some interesting questions about the nature of victimization: Gaëlle’s self-possession is a scary kind of life force, suggesting that even people who truly are victims can talk themselves out of that state by sheer force of will. This an unusual, thought-provoking picture, perhaps less daring than it thinks it is -- but then, its sense of measured calm is part of what keeps it ticking. If there’s room in your life for only one movie about kids triumphing over loser sickos who turn their basements into prisons, make it this one.

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And with Meyer so intrinsically linked to the film franchise, a sixth Twilight film would necessarily have to involve Meyer writing a fifth story (her fourth and final Twilight novel, Breaking Dawn, was split into a two-part film adaptation, the second of which hits screens this year). But even if Meyer agrees to a fifth book and sixth film, the motivation of continuing an otherwise concluded series might seem terribly transparent, and opportunistic, to a fanbase that adores the author as much for her vampire fantasy as for her openness with them over the years. Would Twilight fans eat up another chapter of Bella Swan's life? Without a doubt, especially given the events that conclude the series in Breaking Dawn. But would it somehow cheapen the billion dollar franchise and the dedicated fandom that drives it?

The question becomes less about the studios chasing sequels and more about how much Meyer is willing to risk signing off on, and how much her fans will care about the integrity of the franchise if it means they get another Twilight book and film. For many, I'm sure, the series could happily go on forever, manga-style, until the end of time. But as much as Lionsgate could conceivably milk Twilight for years and years to come, I'd like to think Twi-hards, who've had to defend themselves from global scrutiny for years and have been gleefully marketed to and squeezed of cash by savvy suits ever since 2008, would draw the line at some point.

It's a debate that J.K. Rowling faces, too, now that the Harry Potter saga has ended, on page and screen. But just as Daniel Radcliffe and Co. are moving on with their careers, so too do the Twilight kids seem ready to spread their wings. The end, it's seemed for a while, is welcome in many regards. Their time with the franchise has been good -- and has made stars of them all, considering that even previously unknown actors like Ashley Greene, for example, are now fronting their own films -- but you get the feeling even the actors might dread another go-round (not to mention the fact that some of them are aging past the point of believable onscreen immortality).

And so there are new franchises ready to follow the Twilight pattern of success, which brings us to The Hunger Games. Suzanne Collins only wrote three novels in her dystopian bestseller series, and yet, as confirmed last summer, Lionsgate plans on making four films from the series. Unlike Breaking Dawn, which contained a fairly obvious plot break at which the story could be divided, the third Hunger Games book, Mockingjay, seems less conducive to being split into two parts. I'd rather see it all go down in one part, personally, but here Lionsgate's thinking is more conspicuous.

Now that Summit has been slurped up by Lionsgate, I'll be even less surprised if that cash-grabbing thought process is applied to Twilight. (Incidentally, Breaking Dawn Part 1 hits DVD and Blu-ray tonight.) Let's just hope someone up there shows some restraint, sooner or later, whether it's the suits, the stars, or Stephenie Meyer herself.

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Ah, yes. Rewatching this film (for me, the first time since it opened in theaters over a dozen years ago) really makes you admire the gutsiness of returning to one of the most beloved franchises of all time only to open with stalled galactic taxation negotiations. It takes you back, like some three dimensional Proustian sci-fi madeleine, to that feeling of slow deflation shared by so many back in 1999 as they fought to keep up their levels of enthusiasm as Episode I herked and jerked along. As an admirer of select Star Wars films but no serious devotee of the series, I don't have quite the complicated relationship with George Lucas experienced by some fans, the emotional complexity of which is generally only otherwise seen in memoirists writing lyric essays about their loving but abusive fathers. And from a business perspective, the Star Wars films are a great candidate for the callous but surely profitable enterprise of transferring classics to 3-D and dumping them back into theaters with pricier tickets. But The Phantom Menace, in any number of dimensions, is an exercise in disappointment, a film filled with enough callbacks to the first trilogy to remind you about what you loved about them without adding much of note in all the new material.

The 3-D looks fine, if subdued enough that you forget about it for long stretches. A few sequences do get a boost -- the fraught journey through a planet's sea monster-heavy core, for instance, and even more so the podracing sequence, which look particularly great in the Anakin's-eye-view shots as camera darts through the rock formations. But 3-D tends to highlight spectacle, and much of The Phantom Menace is anything but: Senate or Jedi council debates, wooden exchanges between Jake Lloyd and Natalie Portman that are meant to indicate some deep (and future romantic) connection, and the parade of bizarrely racialized aliens, including freakin' Jar Jar Binks.

The film features some greatly imaginative worlds and scenarios, from watery Naboo's hidden bubble-encased Gungan cities to the insectile droidekas to Tatooine's ludicrously dangerous sport of choice ("Looks like a few Tusken Raiders have camped out on the canyon dune turn!" as the crowd cheers). Darth Maul (played by Ray Park and voiced by Peter Serafinowicz) still makes a major impression, pacing like a caged tiger during a force field-mandated pause in his duel with Liam Neeson's Qui-Gon Jinn and Ewan McGregor's Obi-Wan Kenobi. Queen Amidala's outfits are still ridiculous and awesome, and Portman's trade-offs with Keira Knightley as the royal bodyguard/stand-in are easier to spot now that the latter's face has become just as familiar.

The rest of The Phantom Menace tends toward the dull -- not always the terrible (though early in the film a lot of the dialogue sounds like a badly dubbed Google translation of something originally written in a language other than English), but the legitimately wan and colorless. The film serves as a feature-length extrusion of exposition for what's to come in later installments, with a few livelier sequences inserted as payoff for sticking around this space opera. It's both a shame and unavoidable that Episode I was re-released first in this planned 3-D roll-out of the entire series, but if you're going to splurge on the extra for a 3-D ticket you might as well wait for A New Hope in 2015. Even if the conversion doesn't add all that much overall to the experience, as is the case here, that one's going to be much more fun to see on the big screen and with a crowd.

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Because another defining characteristic is that, as opposed to superheroes with mental powers that are very obviously beyond human capabilities, like Professor X, whose telekinesis is basically supernatural, the sort of film genius I’m talking about is grounded in plausibility. Their abilities are mythical but not supernaturally so. Film geniuses do what everyone else does, using recognizable materials, only they do it much, much better. Still, after a point somewhere off in the horizon, that which distinguishes the genius from the rest of us isn’t a measure of degree, but of type. These films take great pains to “other” their subjects, or make them seem different even above and beyond their achievement. It isn’t enough that they can think better or create more beautiful things. They have to be kind of weird, too.

It’s no wonder that, while we have films about total non-geniuses like Abbie Hoffman, or genius peripherals like Edie Sedgwick, Hollywood has yet to produce an Oscar-winning film about someone like, say, Jonas Salk. Because while Salk was no doubt a genius, he also seems to have been a fairly nice, conventional person in his everyday life and, thus, not great fodder for the Hollywood machine. Nobody wants to watch a movie about someone who goes to work and pays his taxes and gives exact change at the grocery store.

This will happen. The rules for portraying difficult ideas on film, which seem to profit from a certain graphical fleshing out for the general moviegoing public, don’t really apply to the construction of a compelling character arc, which thrives in danger and conflict. For example, in one film about genius, A Beautiful Mind, we see the concept of governing dynamics explained very succinctly and transparently by way of a scene about a bunch of guys hitting on a girl in a bar. (Visually, it’s a good scene, though the dialogue sounds like everyone’s reading straight from Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.)

However, when director Ron Howard employs a similarly graphical rendering of the schizophrenic delusions of the genius main character, mathematician John Nash, by revealing that people he had been interacting with throughout the film were actually only in his head, the technique seems totally inappropriate. A helpful graphic as filmic teaching moment for a difficult concept, sure. But a descent into madness, or in this case the retrospective unveiling of a madness into which one has already long descended, require a somewhat more emotionally charged visual than the director indicating, “Shucks, those guys aren’t actually there…”

In contrast to such transparently clear filmic infographs, a character whose personality is meant to fill the screen and hold interest should be sort of messed up, harder to figure out, and certainly not party to the kind of M. Night Shyamalan-ian reveal employed in A Beautiful Mind. That said, I still liked the film -- in part because of how it portrays the descent into madness as an actual hindrance to the production of important ideas. A lot of other movies merely portray such pesky foibles of personality as inevitable side effects of genius itself, easily overcome with a few cathartic moments and liberally applied theme music. Obviously, some of this just has to do with biographical information where applicable, because the particular genius in question actually experienced schizophrenia’s debilitating effect and, lo and behold, wasn’t helped along in his career by having it.

But judging by the middle section of the Venn diagram for most films about geniuses and biopics, where the stories are roughly “based on a true story,” one could easily conclude that social ineptitude or mental instability are prerequisites to having great ideas. Never mind that there are quite a lot of brilliant people who don’t display any kind of odd behavior at all. And so the biggest flaw in the films about genius genre seems to be a sort of lopsidedness in execution concerning the relationship between a genius and his or her ideas, despite the fact that formal guidelines would seem to dictate that these two aspects be treated with equal attention.

One film that gets this relationship right is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in which the visuals very closely relate to the ideas of the subject, writer Hunter S. Thompson. * Director Terry Gilliam inhabits the perspective of Thompson in relating the story of his drug-fueled ride through the Nevada desert, and we see the world through the lens of Thompson’s inimitable manner and, thus, understand what his ideas amount to, in spite of the fact that no helpful infographs are provided. There is only one scene in which the Thompson character actually explains anything -- where he gives context to his nihilistic fervor as cast against the idealism of the '60s peace movement -- and this is probably the least successful scene in the whole film. Hearing Benicio Del Toro’s Dr. Gonzo scream the lyrics to “One Toke Over the Line” while driving through the desert, his face a grotesque mask in Gilliam’s skewed frame, is pretty much all the audience needs to understand the point.

One lesser example of the genre is Pollock, a film about the artist Jackson Pollock, which doesn’t really treat the actual art with enough care. The performance by Ed Harris in the central role is excellent, and the story is actually pretty interesting: We see the most fruitful period of Pollock’s life, his relationship with artist Lee Krasner, his problems with mental illness and alcoholism, and, most interestingly, him at work in his studio. But the problem is that getting an up-close view of how Pollock’s art is made sort of deflates the effect it’s supposed to produce.

Much of the fascination people have with Pollock’s art is wrapped up in what those paint splatters don't represent. One would want a portrayal of Pollock that grows in mystery as it grows in scope, but the "un-abstracting" of how the paintings were made in this film, even by way of a story about a fairly abstract human being, seems to detract from the artist's original vision, if only because it employs a representational aesthetic. This is an example where learning the backstory of the ideas actually detracts directly from the ideas themselves.

The problem isn’t that films about genius tend to highlight people with world-changing ideas who have no power to change their own complicated, messed up lives. Basically all strong characters start at this point, whether a genius or not; that's the basis of a character arc, a problem that initially seems unsolvable. The real issue is that a lot of filmmakers don’t seem to get that, while a conventional plot might necessarily rely upon a messed up, complicated central character, that character’s viability relies on whether or not his or her ideas are actually interesting independent of that complication. And oftentimes, if there is a conflict of interest between the portrayal of a brilliant character and that character’s world-shattering idea, the idea gets short shrift for the purposes of “character development,” and the whole structure falls.

And so, the real mark of quality for these movies has to do with inhabiting difficult ideas through aesthetic forms, like in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, as opposed to the popularization of difficult ideas in favor of a less interesting biographical story, like in A Beautiful Mind and Pollock. Good films about genius embed the relevant concepts within the film medium itself, allowing them to animate the filmmaker's own aesthetic impulses. Less good ones tend to water down the ideas and focus on important biographical stuff like how geniuses have a hard time talking to people at parties. In any case, it must be a very difficult thing to make a film about a person whose achievements are more important that can really be expressed creatively, and many times, which are actually more important than the film -- or any film -- itself.

* I’m not interested in arguing whether Thompson was actually a genius. He was portrayed as such in the movie, and that’s all that matters. [Back]

Nathan Pensky is an associate editor at PopMatters and a contributor at Forbes, among various other outlets. He can be found on Tumblr and Twitter as well.

The story follows Dusty, a yoga instructor from Colorado, who is on a desperate rescue mission to save her crazy brother Derek, a conspiracy theorist who is convinced Osama Bin Laden is still alive, despite having been buried at sea. In Afghanistan, Dusty falls in with a team of NATO Special Forces on a secret assignment. Turns out Derek is not so crazy after all, and that Osama has returned from his watery grave and is making an army of zombie terrorists. When the group crashes headlong into the growing zombie apocalypse, Dusty and the troops must find and destroy the root of the zombie insurgency before it infests the rest of the world.

More info on Osombie and its Kickstarter campaign here.

All in all, the Osama hook should give Osombie a bit more exposure than your average B-movie independent genre flick, but still expect it to fare best on DVD. Even so, it raises an interesting question: With other dramatic retellings of bin Laden's death in the works, are we ready to see the al-Quada leader come back to life in the movies -- at least, with comedy paving the way first?

[via MSNBC]

Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson), the bad, bad beat cop -- the self-proclaimed "one cop who gets it" -- at the film's center, wields far heavier artillery than a canister of spray and regularly crosses major lines of corruption and brutality, but the psychological core stands -- there's room to hide or rationalize away almost anything in the name of maintaining authority, upholding order, us against them and any means necessary.

Both enthralling and draining, Rampart is a claustrophobic account of Brown's downward spiral, or at least an accelerating chunk of it -- things haven't been going quite right for him for a while. Brown is, as his teenager daughter tells him caustically to his face, a "dinosaur," a would-be mix of Dirty Harry and John Wayne who's at least half as smart as he's convinced he is. It's a dream of a role for Harrelson, who's the camera's constant quavering focus, and who keeps us torn between being drawn in and repulsed by this disastrous, magnetic character. And we're not the only ones -- Brown may not have many friends, but he gets applause when he strolls back into the station after being suspended for nearly beating a man do death on camera, and he's able to temporarily charm the ladies against their better judgment. "Oh, well," a one-night-stand sighs in the afterglow of their assignation, as if only then coming to terms with the type of man she just slept with. He lives with an unlikely brood of women who are growing increasingly sick of his presence -- his two ex-wives (Anne Heche and Cynthia Nixon), who happen to be sisters, and their two daughters, caustic teen Helen (Brie Larson) and the younger Margaret (Sammy Boyarsky).

The threat of his family dissolving and leaving him alone is shaking Brown's universe, but not as much as the thought that he'll be fired or forced to retire from the LAPD. Being a cop is his everything -- the film tracks him cruising the streets in a black-and-white, chain-smoking in his mirrored aviator sunglasses, his preening self-image projecting so strong it basically becomes fact. But being a cop doesn't mean the same thing it did when he started. "This used to be a glorious soldiers' department," he tells a female rookie (Stella Schnabel, daughter of Julian), "and now it's you." Not long after, he tells her, "This is a military occupation, kid, emergency law," and just how much he buys into the bullshit he's spouting becomes the film's central question. Any sliver of serious self-awareness, any betrayal of his own one-man-against-the-world ideology could bring everything tumbling down, though an examination of his recent actions by a D.A. investigator (Ice Cube) promises to force the issue.

Moverman, whose previous film, 2009's very good home front drama The Messenger, also featured Harrelson, co-wrote Rampart with crime laureate James Ellroy, and the latter's nihilism and feel for the grimy side of L.A. are all over this film. While it provides a watchable, nuanced portrait of man in crisis, it's an insistently one-note affair, repeated until it induces a splitting headache. Brown is one hell of a difficult person to spend a hundred minutes with, and though his desperation grows over the course of the film, as the likes of Sigourney Weaver and Steve Buscemi show up to try and manage the PR disasters he's sparked, as he begins an affair with a criminal defense lawyer (Robin Wright) he seems drawn to primarily because of what a terrible idea it is, as his shady retired source on department goings-on (Ned Beatty) presents him with questionable info, he doesn't change. He's consumed with the concept that he's being set up, but the trouble he's in is all his own fault -- he's calcified into the kind of man the world would happily use as a half-deserving scapegoat.

The film's loose camerawork aims to capture Brown's growing disorientation on his path toward oblivion, but it often draws distracting attention to itself, the seams showing -- one conversation is deliberately staged so that you can only see the back of the listener's head, and another is shot upwards from under a table so that it obscures half the screen. As Brown lurches toward self-destruction, we start to long for him to find it. He's obviously not interested in fixing anything, and that leaves only his sad but utterly earned solitary trudge toward some form of closure that neither he, nor we, will find in the film.

[Editor's note: This review was previously published, in slightly different form, during Rampart's awards-qualifying run in Nov. 2011.]

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A lofty bar, to be sure, but "Rebecca from the makers of Eastern Promises and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (not to mention just about every Coen brothers movie)" already sounds way more promising than "To Catch a Thief by the guys who made xXx," no?

• DreamWorks to remake Hitchcock's 'Rebecca' [Variety]