There are worse sins for a mainstream film to commit than predictability — the line between “predictable” and “comfortable” can be thin, and an old story can take on new life if executed with some verve — but in The Vow, it really stings. An easygoing, airport-novel weepie, the film starts with a halfway-interesting premise: after a car accident, a free-spirited, city-dwelling sculptor named Paige (Rachel McAdams) loses all memory of her life with her recording-engineer husband (Channing Tatum) and mentally reverts back to a time when she was a suburban, conservative law student about to marry a career-bound classmate (Scott Speedman). The focus is on Tatum’s genially heartbroken Leo, who has to fight for his old life with Paige though she has no idea who the hell he is. His frustration is an engaging emotional hook — what if someone you’ve known and loved for years suddenly became the person she was before she met you? But since we know exactly where The Vow has to end up, it becomes an inexorable progression from the intriguing to the tedious. Once the film exhausts its feeble attempts to mine dramatic juice out of Leo’s plight, it just lies down and dies: the last forty-five minutes are a mind-numbing vacuum, as the various plot contrivances (the uptight parents, the former fiancee) resolve in the way you’d expect, and the movie finds a perfectly anodyne path to its inevitable happy ending.

The Woman in Black, a painterly, meticulous horror film from young English director James Watkins, boasts one of the most evocative locations in the genre’s history: a magnificently dilapidated mansion entirely surrounded by a marsh that floods at high tide. And Watkins does not play coy with the incredible scenery. His camera sweeps across it in glorious wide helicopter shots, mainlining the gloom and the beauty until we can’t tell the difference between the two. The Woman in Black is an almost total stylistic 180 from Watkins’ debut, Eden Lake: where that film was grimy and harrowing, this one is unsettling and alluring. It’s cloudy skies, candlelight peering through the murk, shapes lurking in the darkness.

It’s also a bit of a carnival ride, as these haunted-house ghost stories tend to be. In a shrewd post-Harry Potter move, Daniel Radcliffe plays a young lawyer who arrives in a remote northern village to wrap up the paperwork for the estate of a recently-deceased widow. The townsfolk are oddly unfriendly, and unwilling to direct him to where his late client lived. He persists, and soon arrives at the aforementioned mansion where he begins to unravel the mystery — and to be harassed by noises, visions, and poltergeists.

The centerpiece of The Woman in Black is a nearly dialogue-free half hour stretch of things going bump in the night with increasing intensity and determination. It’s pure atmosphere and tension, masterfully done and undeniably effective, though also (as is common) a bit arbitrary: just why do those wind-up toys all go berserk at that precise, calculated moment? The underlying story isn’t much, but it’s nice and morbid, killing off children with impunity, and ending with the deceptively grim suggestion that maybe that makes them better off. And Radcliffe, bushy-eyebrowed and convincingly adult, gives the sort of sturdy, workmanlike performance that makes me think he has a real career ahead of him. Though it’s still a bit odd to watch him down a glass of scotch.

Chronicle is magnificent pop cinema — thrilling, emotional, and fully invested in its three young, relatable protagonists. It’s high-concept, proto-superhero fun on one hand, and on the other an angry, deadly serious story about the pain of being a teenager, and the burden of discovering what you’re capable of as an adult. Its 83 minutes are filled with an enveloping dread that never dissipates, and more genuine excitement than I’ve felt at the movies since Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Halfway through, I realized I had no idea where Chronicle was headed, and let out a giddy little chuckle.

Yes, Chronicle features another found-footage gimmick; the pointless huffing and puffing involved is what keeps the film from real greatness, but more on that later. The stunt at least takes on some significance when we realize — in the very first shot — that Andrew Detmer (Dane DeHaan) has decided to start filming his life to keep tabs on his abusive dad. (Name another mainstream teen thriller with have the guts to open on the protagonist’s drunk father banging down the door and threatening grievous bodily harm.) Andrew is a pissed-off, dejected high-schooler, having executed the self-fulfilling prophecy of convincing himself that he’s worthless and everyone hates him. Bullied and desperately shy, he’s developed a sardonic wit as a defense mechanism, and barely clings to a friendship with his good-looking, kind-hearted, philosopher-quoting cousin Matt (Alex Russell).

One night, outside a rave party to which Matt dragged Andrew kicking and screaming, the two of them and a third kid — a popular jock named Steve (Michael B. Jordan) — climb into a mysterious hole in the ground, camera in tow. There, they find…  something. (The film’s refusal to even speculate about its nature is a genius move.) And that something does… something to them. They find themselves suddenly endowed with a powerful and versatile telekinesis. First it lets them move small objects by will alone. Then bigger ones. Then they learn to generate force fields, and perform other, increasingly scary and dangerous feats. “It’s like a muscle,” Matt theorizes. You can tear it (overexertion causes nosebleeds), but exercise it and it gets stronger.

The part of Chronicle where the protagonists begin to discover and play with their newfound powers recalls countless superhero origin stories, but instead of attempting grandeur, it’s wonderfully playful; I admit it helps that the boys are showing off for the camera. (Despite my distaste for the gimmick, I also dug the narrative ellipses created by the fact that we only see what they choose to record.) The guys bond over the experience, and the film is touchingly assiduous about developing this plot thread; at one point we see them talking each other to sleep at a makeshift slumber party.

Near-omnipotence brings out different aspects of the protagonists’ personalities. Matt, fundamentally level-headed and sane, insists on rules: no using the power on living things, no using it in public. (“We can’t just do things, we have to think first.”) Steve’s instinct is to play mean-spirited but ultimately harmless pranks, shoving a lady’s car across a parking lot and snickering at her confusion — “Yes, it was the black guy this time.” Andrew’s response is more complicated and volatile. His new abilities stroke his bruised ego (he’s the strongest of the group, easily outclassing his friends in both raw power and finesse), and gives him a dangerous outlet to lash out. In one terrific sequence, Andrew puts on a remarkable display at the school talent show, and Chronicle beautifully conveys the thrill of the sudden and massive social embrace that follows. But the night ends badly, and Andrew’s rage is both terrifying and plausible. When you’re bitter, angry, and insecure, it’s seriously bad news if you suddenly start feeling invincible. Watching Andrew here made me imagine the moment when the Columbine killers had the epiphany that, wouldn’t you know it, there wasn’t really anything stopping them from marching into their school with guns.

The three lead actors do outstanding work. Michael B. Jordan, so good on The Wire and Friday Night Lights, has the magnetic energy of someone utterly comfortable in his skin. Dane DeHaan, whom I had never seen, is heartbreaking as a teenager tragically emerging from a world of pain and humiliation. Alex Russell, in a total about-face from his villainous  role in Wasted on the Young, turns in a performance that’s more straightforward but no less affecting for it.

The action builds to a climax that’s big, loud, and maybe a bit protracted, but it seemed earned, and it’s capped by a coda that is poignant and disarmingly direct, all while setting up a sequel. There’s a level of thought and care on display here that should shame purveyors of generic, mass-produced nonsense like The Darkest Hour.  Chronicle is held back only by its found-footage structure, which does occasionally pay dividends, but mostly requires it to go to increasingly silly lengths to justify why the cameras keep rolling. (The nadir is a crucial late-film scene in which the presence of the camera has to be pointedly explained by an off-screen voice during a quiet moment.) It’s irritating and distracting. First-time director Josh Trank is clearly a major talent, and I wished he’d just make his movie.

This is a grey wolf.

Look at it. It’s beautiful – majestic, wild, alien, and fearsome. You won’t see anything like this image in Joe Carnahan’s dreary and unimaginative survival adventure The Grey, though wolves feature prominently in the story. That’s because Carnahan conceives of these magnificent creatures as nothing more than vicious, ugly, slobbering monsters that stalk his heroes from the darkness, occasionally appearing as a mangy shadow or a growling flurry of CGI and puppetry.

Which, fine: it’s a horror movie with wolves as the villains. But sadly the brute force approach is a mere symptom of the larger problem: The Grey may be the most boring possible film about being stranded in the Alaskan wilderness. It begins promisingly enough at a remote oil drilling outpost, with a hard-boiled Liam Neeson voiceover casting the place as a noirish hellhole, a “job at the end of the world” with “men unfit for mankind.” Neeson’s character, Ottway, is a despairing drifter with a lot of history and no future; his woman has left him, and he broods that “I’ve stopped doing this world any real good.”  He walks around the plant with a rifle, which doesn’t upset anyone since his job is to keep people safe from marauding wolves. These opening scenes are effectively bleak and oppressive; I was surprised at Carnahan’s facility with mood and atmosphere.

On its way back to the Anchorage home office, Ottway’s charter flight crashes in the middle of a remote snowscape. Carnahan shoots the plane crash with style and verve, keeping the camera close to his protagonist and staying with him even as he’s yanked in and out of a dream. On the ground, Ottway is one of a small handful of survivors – a ragtag bunch of “men unfit for mankind” played by Frank Grillo, Dermot Mulroney, Joe Anderson, Dallas Roberts, and a couple of others. One of the men, pinned to his seat and bleeding out, is not long for this world; in a powerful scene, Ottway calmly talks him through dying.

Up to now, the film has been stylish and impressively downbeat, with Neeson giving his assured, no-bullshit character a compelling air of mystery. But things go downhill quickly. Any interest in the mechanics of the characters’ survival in the Alaskan wild is dissolved almost immediately, as it becomes obvious that the film is interested in little but threatening the men with occasional wolf maulings while they bicker and posture at each other. Save for a couple of creepy shots of green eyes materializing out of the darkness, the wolves are singularly ineffective as villains; the special effects are terrible, and there isn’t an ounce of inspiration in the way Carnahan stages the attacks. And the banter between the men is just brutally tedious, the same arguments and frustrations aired ad nauseam. The idea, of course, is that they ultimately build a mutual affection and respect, but you’ll wish they’d just kill each other and get on with it.

Meanwhile, not content with merely making Alaska boring, The Grey methodically neuters the enigma of the main character by revealing banal details of his life via flashback. By the end of the film, Ottway and all of his companions are tortured upstanding citizens. The film ends with a bid for significance that, in context, is simply laughable.

There’s a single interesting scene in the last 80 minutes of The Grey: a long argument set against a stunningly gorgeous vista: a thawing creek and snow-capped mountains. I stared at the scenery until the shrill, tedious dialogue receded. At least, for once, there were no wolves in sight.

The financial meltdown is the new Iraq War when it comes to pop culture metaphors, which I guess is how we ended up with Man on a Ledge, a thoroughly half-assed thriller about a group of New Yorkers gaping at an elaborate sideshow while a robbery takes place in the next building over. The context, sadly, is what might be one of the worst heist plots of all time, a ludicrously contrived potboiler about an innocent cop who escapes from prison and attempts to clear his name by actually stealing the thing he was framed for stealing the first time around.

Which he decides to do by climbing out onto the ledge of a skyscraper to… distract everyone? I guess? I’m honestly not sure. The film is machine-tooled, not to make sense, but to work in as many pre-fabricated parts as humanly possible, and who cares if they don’t fit: a negotiator wracked with guilt over losing a jumper! A fat cat villain who schemes and sneers and says things like “You lose! Again!” A daring techno-heist! A sexy Latina who must strip at strategic points so the camera can ogle her! Man in a Ledge works surprisingly well as metaphor (there’s something to the notion a real estate magnate framing a working class scheme for stealing from himself), but the screenplay is so relentlessly stupid that watching this talented cast (including Ed Harris, Jamie Bell, and Elizabeth Banks) trying to duck its idiocies is painful. Director Asger Leth, making his first narrative feature, doesn’t help matters by keeping the film in an even-keeled, polished-action-flick-101 stupor. I hope everyone was well-paid.

Stephen Daldry’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is relentless in the worst way. Every moment, every line of dialogue presses its themes and metaphors with a mulish determination. Each shot is an emotional appeal. Not for a second does the movie breathe; never does a character say or do something not perfectly on all fours with the film’s designs. When he feels too much slack on the rope, Daldry cranks up the musical score, or launches an overwhelmingly emotional montage, or just has his precocious protagonist start yelling. The movie is furiously obsessive, hell-bent. It will wear you down or die trying.

I can construct a theory of why it should be this way. Extremely Loud is, after all, a story of a young boy toward the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum (Thomas Horn), trying desperately to make sense of his father’s death in the September 11th attacks in the only way he knows how: by throwing his entire being into an elaborate, compulsively-formulated plan to search for something he believes his dad (Tom Hanks) meant for him to find. It makes a certain kind of sense that the film would be as meticulous and purposeful as its main character.

But even if this works as a conceit, what we have in execution is unspeakably pushy and obnoxious. It is not enough that young Oskar Schell must canvas a traumatized city with a business card reading “Amateur Entomologist and Pacifist” looking for the lock that fits a mysterious key found in his late father’s closet. He must also tow along with him an old geezer who is (a) mute; (b) wise; and (c) clearly a long-lost relative of some sort. And he must tell his long-suffering mother (Sandra Bullock) that he wishes it was her in that tower. And if all of that is not enough, there are at least three maudlin plot twists, each calibrated for maximum sob extraction. It’s frankly shameless.

The film deserves credit for featuring an autistic character as a bona fide protagonist, rather than a subject of curiosity and pity as in, e.g., The Black Balloon. But I note that Daldry and his screenwriter, Eric Roth, rather cynically turn this to their advantage. Oskar speaks (and narrates the film) in elaborate, verbose declamations, a fact that the screenplay implicitly ascribes to his Asperger’s, but that in practice allows Roth to repeatedly verbalize the film’s themes: how sometimes bad things happen and they don’t make sense no matter how hard you try to figure them out, or how Thomas’s quest is his attempt to cling to his father’s memory. A weird sort of exploitation.

To be clear, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is earnest, and mostly good-hearted, and I found it hard to hate. It moves pretty well, and is too slick to be boring. I certainly did not have the same virulent reaction as Scott Tobias, despite harboring many of the same complaints. But if you want a movie that genuinely grapples with the effect of 9/11 on New Yorkers who lived through it, look elsewhere (perhaps to Spike Lee’s 25th Hour). This is, if you can believe it, maybe the first mainstream example of 9/11 kitsch.

Contraband is a very silly thriller about a famed smuggler who’s departed The Life, but who must undertake One Last Smuggle to pay off his brother-in-law’s debt to a lunatic gangster. It stars Mark Wahlberg in the kind of earnest good-guy role that always exposes the actor’s weakness playing characters who aren’t aggressive or larger-than-life. (See also: The Happening.) Running 110 minutes, the film takes almost an hour to get going, at which point it finally offers a striking action scene or two, and some amusing logistical complications for its protagonists to overcome. Oh, and J.K Simmons as an ornery ship captain stalking around inspecting shipping containers.

I kind of liked it anyway. Baltasar Kormakur, the Icelandic filmmaker who made the well-received Jar City six years back, directs with a meticulous eye and a nervous intensity. Set in Louisiana and Panama (and occasionally on a boat), the movie looks interesting, and has a jittery rhythm that draws you in. Wahlberg aside, the cast is uncommonly committed and fun to watch; Ben Foster, playing the main character’s friend and confidant, is particularly good. Contraband is engaging enough, indeed, that I merrily blew right past a classic Law of Economy of Characters feint and let myself be surprised by a canny plot twist two-thirds of the way through. The film ultimately implodes somewhat with a cop-out ending so idiotic, it simply must have been dictated by terrified executives. Still, in the middle of January, you could do a lot worse than this easygoing little genre flick.

I loved 2011 at the movies, in part because it brought a change in philosophy, namely: an unwillingness to waste time on films that were certain to waste my time. It’s a rewarding approach; I recommend it. The other day I read my friend Eric Snider’s typically terrific year-end piece and, upon realizing that I had only seen one of his bottom ten (Sucker Punch, which frankly wasn’t that bad), wiped away happy tears at the thought that I didn’t waste 1/365^th of the year watching Bucky Larson, New Year’s Eve, Mr. Popper’s Penguins, and Jack and Jill. Two or three years ago, I think I would have done, but it’s stupid — life’s too short, and no one’s paying me.

And there was plenty of good to occupy my time. The year’s genre slate was particularly strong, kicked off by a remarkable SXSW slate and capped by a surprisingly fruitful holiday season. At long last, there’s a horror movie on my top 10 list – a truly great, once-in-a-decade one – obviating the need for a “special mention.” The lack of a foreign film in the bunch does pain me (though there would have been one at number five had its release not gotten kicked to 2012), but otherwise it’s an eclectic list, representative of the diversity of the year’s best offerings – indie, Hollywood, franchise, genre, et cetera – and I’m quite taken with it. Happy New Year, and thanks for reading.

The Worst Movie I Saw

Due to my delightful new reluctance to sit through obvious garbage, I don’t really feel qualified to make a “worst of the year” list, but the most painful thing I sat through was Gary McKendry’s Killer Elite, a chintzy and wholly phoned-in piece of spy/secret agent/assassin idiocy starring Jason Statham and extremely bored-looking Clive Owen and Robert DeNiro. Not aggressively awful so much as ceaselessly dull and lacking any reason to exist, which is far worse.

A Small Sampling of Overlooked Films You Should Maybe Check Out Sometime Despite Bad Reviews or General Indifference

I was apparently the only one who really enjoyed The Art of Getting By, which seemed to me to be a lovely coming-of-ager with a terrific performance by Freddie Highmore.

People really had it in for Sanctum, a silly but nicely claustrophobic and detail-obsessed adventure flick about Aussie cave-divers.

The Farrely Bros.’ Hall Pass isn’t good enough to call “overlooked,” really, but it’s not nearly as bad as everyone says. Ditto Your Highness.

I don’t care what you think, The Hangover Part II was better than Bridesmaids. Yes, it’s a total retread, but Todd Phillips is at least an actual director who wants to make actual movies with, like, pacing and tone and stuff.

Winter in Wartime is a cool kid-centric war movie that should have gotten more attention than it did.

I liked Robert Redford’s The Conspirator, but see everyone’s point about Redford’s tendency to wield his politics like a sledgehammer; at least it’s better than Lions for Lambs in that respect.

If you dig almost purely conceptual art films, seek out Le Quattro Volte.

Our Idiot Brother is very funny and surprisingly smart.

A few of the entries on my Honorable Mentions list, below, could have appeared here as well.

My Favorite Performance of the Year

Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation is getting lots of attention on top 10 lists in screenplay and foreign film categories, and deservedly so, but I wanted to call attention to supporting player Shahab Hosseini, so powerful as the humiliated husband who goes on the warpath to defend his family honor.

Ineligible Films I Should Say Something About

I arbitrarily decided to limit my top 10 list to 2011 commercial theatrical releases, which leaves off some great stuff.

The Kid with a Bike, from the Dardenne brothers, is – even more than their other films – wise and heartbreaking and great, and I can’t wait to see it again; it comes out spring 2012.

How to Die in Oregon is an astonishing documentary about the hugely important and difficult subject of assisted suicide; unflinching, compassionate, and sometimes nearly unwatchable. After playing Sundance and SXSW, it premiered on HBO and can now be seen through various HBO-related avenues.

On the other hand, Fightville, Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein’s thoughtful and beautifully-made look at the world of workaday Mixed Martial Arts hasn’t been released at all, and I’m not sure if or when it will be.

There were two films co-written by and starring Brit Marling on the festival circuit this year, and the wrong one made it into theaters. Another Earth mostly just flushed a nifty premise down the toilet, but Sound of My Voice was a pretty terrifying exploration of the cult mentality, and a great high-concept companion piece to Martha Marcy May Marlene. Fox Searchlight bought it, but appears to have shelved it.

Ben Wheatley’s Kill List will be available on demand in the next few weeks. Get everyone out of the house, turn off your phone, hit the lights, make some tea, and watch it.

Honorable Mentions, in Alphabetical Order

Absentia, Attack the Block, Crazy, Stupid Love., Drive, Heartbeats, Insidious, Horrible Bosses, Margaret, Meek’s Cutoff, Melancholia, Moneyball, NEDS, One Day, Rango, A Separation, Source Code, The Tree of Life, Vanishing on 7^th Street.

The Top Ten

10. Black Death (Christopher Smith) – I wrote a little bit about Black Death at the end of last year; I saw it again in 2011 and it’s almost perfect, a precise, airtight meditation on the relationship between fear, loss and religious fervor. And while bleak stinger-type endings are de rigueur in horror these days, Black Death offers the only recent one that’s truly, down-to-the-bones disquieting.

9. Weekend (Andrew Haigh) – Before Sunrise has been the popular comparison, and it seems right; Lost in Translation may be another good one – all are stories about transformative but tragically fleeting connections between two people.  Weekend is less constrained than Sunrise (its lovers have longer than just a night, and get to spend some time apart) but also more complete:  we get a sense of their past and future, and some context for their heartbreak and joy.

8. Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt) – The difference between Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and Rise of the Planet of the Apes is the difference between a good action film and a great one. Ghost Protocol is “awesome” in the most basic sense – it’s viscerally overwhelming and incredibly cool to edge out the window of the Burj Khalifa with Tom Cruise, in 70mm IMAX. Rise is awesome in a bigger, more profound way: for two hours, it convinces us – with matchless storytelling chops as well as cutting-edge effects – that the future of humanity is at stake.

7. The Ides of March (George Clooney) – This year’s Social Network:  riveting, intelligent adult entertainment. The kind of straightforward, expertly constructed, edge-of-your-seat drama we don’t see nearly enough.

6. War Horse (Steven Spielberg) – This is not a movie about a horse, and it’s a shame that so many are perpetuating that illusion. The horse is a plot device, and War Horse is one of Spielberg’s trickiest films since A.I., exploring the same themes he tackled in Schindler’s List – viz., humanity enduring in the most inhuman circumstances – through sentimental, typically Spielbergian means. Maybe the biggest compliment I can pay the film is that I didn’t realize I loved it until two-thirds of the way through, when it suddenly became apparent what Spielberg was doing.

5. Win Win (Thomas McCarthy) – It’s becoming apparent that McCarthy is a national treasure, a mainstream storyteller with an ear for authenticity and an eye for great drama. Win Win weaved universal, instantly sympathetic characters into an effortless narrative about how hard it can be – and how important – to do the right thing. Like McCarthy’s The Visitor, one of my favorites of 2007, it’s hugely entertaining, profoundly moral, and deeply compassionate.

4. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (David Yates) – Simply the best major franchise blockbuster since The Return of the King – the most artful, assured, exciting, and beautiful.

3. Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin) – A lot of the movies on this list are frightening in one way or another, but Martha Marcy May Marlene may be the most insidiously scary. It’s a cold film, not particularly personal – it doesn’t give a shit if you identify with or like anyone in it, for one thing – but it may be the year’s most formally impressive, a merciless dissection of the mechanics and effects of indoctrination.

2.  Stake Land (Jim Mickle) – Here’s a near-masterpiece that flew almost completely under the radar, perhaps because this brand of horror isn’t currently in style. Stake Land is far from soft – it’s perfectly capable of being brutal when called for – but nor is it cynical or particularly edgy in approach; it likes its characters, cares about them, and doesn’t get any jollies from hurting them. This is a moody, melancholy film about living in America – about dealing with desperate setbacks, hanging on to hope as the world goes to shit, trying to raise children and take care of the people you love. Oh, and vampires. I love this movie to death – it’s my favorite horror film in many, many years.

1. Shame (Steve McQueen) – One would have thought the title would give people a clue about what this movie’s actually about, yet people keep going on and on about sex addiction, as if that were the alpha and the omega of this amazing movie about the impossibility of connecting with others when you can’t stand to be with yourself. Amidst all the hysteria over the nudity and the NC-17 rating, I keep coming back to the simple scene with Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan talking on the couch, with him throwing up every emotional barrier he knows and her trying desperately to bulldoze them. Devastating.

And Some Moments That 2011 Burned Into My Retinas:

The final shot of Melancholia, summing up the entire movie in a few unforgettable seconds.

Shame: Fassbender, Mulligan, Looney Tunes, couch.

Jeannie Berlin throwing Anna Paquin out of her apartment for using the word “strident,” in Margaret.

Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill orchestrating a player trade in real time, in Moneyball.

Insidious’ cold open, followed by the year’s best title card.

Absentia: Courtney Bell taking the policeman’s hand to keep walking, but he stops.

Steve Carell trying to defuse an explosive parent-teacher conference in Crazy, Stupid, Love.

Enemy soldiers briefly laying down their guns in War Horse.

An impromptu wrestling match in a forest in Heartbeats.

Drive, in the elevator.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s pre-op collapse in 50/50.

An indie rock number morphs into “Tainted Love” in David McKenzie’s tragically underseen You Instead.

The incredible footage that opens How to Die in Oregon.

Midnight Son’s defiantly triumphant ending.

Emma Roberts tormenting Freddie Highmore at a restaurant in The Art of Getting By.

Elizabeth Olsen climbing into an occupied bed in Martha Marcy May Marlene.

That fucking catfish in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

This year’s obligatory Christmas counterprogramming is The Darkest Hour, director Chris Gorak’s follow-up to his clever low-budget curiosity Right at Your Door. Filmed almost entirely on location in Moscow, the sci-fi thriller follows a group of young Americans (played by Emile Hirsch, Max Minghella, and Olivia Thirlby) as they try to survive in the aftermath of an alien invasion. If that sounds awfully intriguing, you’re not alone — when I first read roughly that logline more than a year ago in some 2011 movie preview, the film rocketed onto my must-see list. I now sadly report that The Darkest Hour is terrible, and not just the ordinary kind of terrible that accompanies incompetence or laziness. Instead, the flailing, jittery film suggests extensive corporate meddling, and an overall lack of confidence in the enterprise.

There’s still a bit of pleasure to be extracted from the movie’s no-shit use of Moscow locations, and its small trove of fun ideas — the characters are terrorized by invisible alien creatures who kill on contact but give themselves away by activating any electric appliances in their vicinity. But The Darkest Hour quickly proves almost comically inept at navigating  beyond its own set-up. The plot mechanics are among the klutziest I’ve seen in a while, simultaneously dependent on ridiculous coincidences and laboring mightily to convey tedious exposition and haul the film to its next also-rans action set piece. There’s a “romance” that’s such a ludicrous afterthought that it can only have been inserted post-haste after someone demanded a love story. Emile Hirsch, typically a fine and intensely physical actor, is listless and unenthusiastic in the lead role. The extensive access to Moscow seems to have come at the price of inserting a heaping dose of weird Russian patriotism. Much of the film takes place at night and in darkness, yet the characters’ faces are somehow always brightly lit, like they’re on a game show. There are obviously two distinct endings, one tacked on after the other, like Gorak couldn’t pick between two concluding zingers.

The entire thing feels retooled and endlessly tinkered with; both overcooked and not ready for prime time. Right at the Door was good enough that I’m reluctant to blame Gorak, and it seems vanishingly unlikely that the film made it to the screen in anything like the form in which screenwriter Jon Spaihts initially conceived it. The Darkest Hour mostly plays like a failure of management.

If the source material for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo holds any interest at all, it’s because of the titular girl: abandoned, beaten down, raped, an outcast; yet brilliant and fearless, calling the bluff of charming rogue heroes everywhere. Because let’s face it: the male lead, disgraced investigative reporter Mikael Blomkvist, is largely a dullard, and the mystery he has to solve, unraveling the secrets of Swedish aristocracy to find the killer of an innocent girl who vanished decades ago, is almost totally uninvolving. It’s Lisbeth Salander, pierced, inked, and brooding, who commands attention. That Steig Larsson’s story more or less sidelines her is unforgiveable.

David Fincher, the great American filmmaker who was handed the English-language adaptation of the first of Larsson’s megahit books, understands this – and that’s one of the reasons his version of Dragon Tattoo works so well. Though there’s only so much he can do with Larsson’s awkward story construction and clumsy pacing, Fincher fights for Lisbeth. Against the screenplay’s will, he drags in her point of view immediately after a brief and moody cold open, with a spectacular opening credits sequence that seems to plunge us into the depths of her dark, abused psyche. Dutifully intercutting bits of her backstory with the main mystery plot that doesn’t involve her until the second act, he works with actress Rooney Mara to give Lisbeth a wounded vulnerability that lurks just under and amplifies her vicious, steely coldness. When she takes her revenge on the state-appointed guardian who raped her, hers is not the cold-blooded torture that Noomi Rapace’s Lisbeth exacted in the Swedish version of the film.  What she does emerges from a lifetime of hurt and fear and a desperate need for safety. Fincher is smart enough to know that this makes her no less fearsome.

The mystery, though still kind of boring, also benefits from Fincher’s determined, meticulous commitment to his craft. Scenes of tedious, narrated flashback exposition become lovely, flowing montages that concisely convey undercurrents of nostalgia and regret along with information. The soundtrack, by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (who worked with Fincher on the incredible The Social Network), whirrs and buzzes and turns entire sequences into tone poems of terror and menace. (At one particularly thorny point, Fincher mixes the score with the insistent sound of someone using a floor buffer outside, to deeply unsettling effect.) And Fincher whips the climactic scenes, so absurdly sensationalistic in the Swedish film, into crisp, efficient shape – no one seems to do anything more than the story and characters dictate at that moment.

The film is grim but not poker-faced; it has a sense of humor, as in the wonderful scene when Mikael and Lisbeth meet for the first time, with him booting her one-night stand out of her apartment. Nor does it confuse figurative darkness with the literal kind. Shot by Jeff Cronenweth, Dragon Tattoo isn’t grey or murky, it’s beautiful, with Fincher’s trademark yellows and browns popping off the screen, and the snowswept outdoors taking on the eerie quality of an alien landscape.

Though she competes against the likes of Daniel Craig (as Blomkvist), Christopher Plummer (as Blomkvist’s apparently kind-hearted employer), and Stellan Skarsgard, and has to speak with a vague Scandinavian accent (the film still takes place in Sweden, but everyone speaks variously accented English; it’s actually quite weird), Rooney Mara owns the film. It’s a spectacular performance, at once offputting and open-hearted; we know Lisbeth and instinctively like her despite the many obstacles the screenplay places in the path to that response. And Fincher, along with his screenwriter Steven Zaillian, finds the perfect grace note on which to end the film, at once tough and tender and impossibly sad. It’s one of the many ways he transcends fairly banal material to make what is probably the best possible movie version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.