Shiny and New: Samsara

If the essence of cinema is visual storytelling, Samsara is the purest cinema experience of the year. Directed by Ron Fricke, it's a documentary without narration, dialogue or central characters — offering instead vivid image after vivid image, and just enough of a score to fill the void around them. Over the course of the 102-minute film, we see the majestic ruins of Petra, the towering skyline of Shanghai, the temples of Myanmar and so much more — beautiful, startling and devastating sights from 25 countries, captured over a five year period. Many of the images, particularly the timelapses of the night sky or the white and red ribbons of rush-hour traffic, are big-picture versions of what can already be found on Vimeo, often captured by relative amateurs in stunning resolution. But Samsara is more than just a marriage of top-notch technology (filmed in 70mm) and technique. There is an artistic voice here, too, in the unmistakable social/environmental commentary that takes shape over several portions of the documentary, and in the film's infectious awe for these pictures.

Wielding a Butter Knife: Hitchcock

If you're going to direct a film called Hitchcock, you'd better have a name like Spielberg. Otherwise you're just asking for it. Sacha Gervasi might as well wear a "KICK ME" sign. His second feature film chronicles the life of perhaps the greatest filmmaker of all time, which is at least a double-whammy: first, the odds are against a Hitchcock biopic being anywhere near as good as even a modest Hitchcock movie; second, there's a strong chance that Hitchcock's many admirers aren't going to be especially generous when it comes to accepting Gervasi's artistic license, presuming they're willing to recognize him as an artist in the first place.

That includes critics, for whom cinema is religion, but it's by no means limited to them. After all, Alfred Hitchcock was more than the director of some of our favorite movies. He was a personality, playfully introducing segments of the TV show bearing his name and popping up on the silver screen in anticipated blink-and-you'll-miss-'em cameos. There's a natural tendency to want to believe that charming personalities are charming people, and that great artists have great character. But it isn't always so, as we have been recently reminded by accusations against Elmo puppeteer Kevin Clash (which might be false, but there's a lot of smoke there), or Joe Paterno before that, or, way back, Michael Jackson, and so on. Established legends aren't always honest ones, and even in cases when we know better, we rarely really know.

Passion Play: Anna Karenina

To think of Joe Wright's filmography is to think of his showy extended takes and elaborate camera movements, which is precisely how he wants it. Wright's four-minute tracking shot in Atonement — the most famous example of his bravura exhibitions — is the work of an artist who wants to challenge himself and call attention to himself at the same time. Alas, it's the wrong kind of showstopper — one that takes us out of the movie instead of into the evacuation of Dunkirk and that inspires eye rolls as much as respect. Memory of that sequence is enough to make one hesitant to fall for similar flourishes in Wright's latest film, Anna Karenina, but this time around Wright's camera acrobatics are much more effective, in large part because they blend in. Rather than reduce the energy of his cinematic trapeze acts, Wright has instead chosen to increase the frenzy of the entire circus. Clearly determined to separate his adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's saga from the many that have preceded it, Wright locates the majority of the film inside an opera house, where scene-transitioning set changes often take place as the actors continue to perform on a literal stage. The result is a film that can be as frenzied as an encore performance by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra — although it's still less aggressive than Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! And even if this showy approach is inspired by Wright's interest in flamboyant filmmaking more than a desire to dig into Tolstoy's themes, there's no denying that he accomplishes the latter via the former.

Wright announces the kind of movie he's making in the very first scene, in which a character sitting in a barber's chair on an otherwise plain stage has his thick beard shaved off in two swift razor swipes. Over the next hour or so, almost all the action unfolds on or in front of that stage, with a tone that alternates between intimately genuine and fantastically theatrical — mostly the latter. In Wright's first bit of stunt work with cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, we begin with a view of Anna (Keira Knightley) being dressed for the day, only to have that dressing room set lift to the rafters as Anna walks forward off the stage, through passersby in front of the stage (suggesting her walk through town) and then through the door of another backdrop that plops down in front of her as a desk is rolled in from the side to become the office of her husband (Jude Law). Not long after that, the office of Anna's brother, Oblonsky (a bubbly Matthew Macfadyen), is transitioned into a restaurant over a wild 90 seconds in which the camera moves through the set in the shape of a "5" and then keeps turning in a big circle until all signs of the previous set are gone and only the restaurant parlor remains. Awhile later, all the key players are seated in front of the stage, as audience to an opera that will appear on it, until the curtain lifts and chandeliers descend, and suddenly the seated crowd in front of the stage has been replaced by dancers at an after party. Wright's film, written by Tom Stoppard, delights in such stylistic feats. But there's substance within that style, to be sure.

Song of the Self: Holy Motors

Every so often a movie comes along that makes me grateful I never attempted to make my living as a film critic. Most recently, it was Leos Carax's Holy Motors, which is so simultaneously meticulous and ambiguous that it's almost impossible to tell calculating commentary from abstract zaniness. Impossible for me, anyway. Carax is clearly working on at least one big idea here, but it's hard to say how many of the individual gestures within each of the film's distinct vignettes directly serve that big idea. Put another way, Holy Motors might be a film of mostly unrelated tangents that find collective meaning only in their juxtaposition. Or, maybe not. It's a challenging movie, to be sure, and if ever there was a time in which I simply lack the analytical skills and knowledge of cinema history necessary to decode a film, this would be it. Then again, the more I've thought about Holy Motors — including breaking my usual rule by reading other reviews before writing my own — the more convinced I've become that applying a neat reading to such a boldly messy movie is like trying to wrap your arms around water and carry it like a solid. It's a disservice to Carax's method to suggest Holy Motors can be so easily contained.

So with that established, let's start with what we can be (relatively) sure of: Holy Motors chronicles a day in the life of Denis Lavant's Monsieur Oscar, who is in essence the hitman equivalent of an actor: traveling from job to job, donning disguises to support various identities, completing his assignments and then walking away as if he was never there. Where Oscar's assignments come from, we can't say. Whether his marks are aware he's just an actor, indeed whether his marks specifically ordered his services, seems to vary, and sometimes his apparent marks are actors for hire, too. His assignments run the gamut: Oscar plays an old beggar woman, panhandling on a Paris sidewalk, seemingly for no one in particular. Then he puts on a motion-capture suit, reports to a factory like any blue collar worker, and engages in various combat acrobatics before miming a sex ritual with a contortionist (also in a motion-capture suit) in front of a green screen. After that, he dresses like a troll, emerges from the sewers at a cemetery, bites off a woman's fingers, kidnaps a model doing a fashion shoot (Eva Mendes), takes her underground and then covers her body before exposing his. This is just the beginning. There are many jobs ahead, increasingly concerning death, but before we get there ... a musical interlude(!), as Oscar (or is it just Lavant?) leads a lively accordion/percussion rendition of "Let My Baby Ride," mostly captured in one long tracking shot.

A Film Divided: Lincoln

My favorite shot in Steven Spielberg's Lincoln — indeed, one of my favorite shots of the year — observes the titular president exiting the telegraph office in the still of the night, leaving behind two young, awestruck clerks who have just been a private audience to the president making one of those difficult principled decisions for which he is celebrated and beloved all these years later. Capturing the room from an elevated angle, the wide shot holds steady as Abraham Lincoln gets up from his chair, puts on his trademark stovepipe hat and walks across the room and then into the background, through a doorway and out of view, like an actor leaving the stage. It's a reverent shot, allowing the reverberations of the moment to sink in and affording Lincoln the stately grace of conviction. And yet, even here, with Lincoln's godlike aura as bright as ever, his ordinariness is also in view — in his hunched posture and feeble shuffle. This duality is at the core of our unending fascination with Lincoln — the remarkable president who was in many ways an unremarkable figure — and what Spielberg's film does best, and what that shot does perfectly, is embed the president's heroic qualities within a modest man.

In an era in which movie audiences are inundated with superhuman characters who strut through every scene with arrogance in their veins and witty one-liners at the tip of their tongue, it's a breath of fresh air to spend time with a character who is merely super and human. But it's even more refreshing to see Lincoln, specifically, portrayed with such nuance. Oh, he's still a saintly figure, make no mistake about it, and the smartest guy in any room. But Spielberg's film allows us to get beyond that, to see the father who awkwardly crawls on the ground to allow his sleepy son to climb on to his back and be hauled off to bed, to see the husband who struggles to manage the coiled emotions of his high-strung wife, to see the former Illinois lawyer who must admit to one of his black servants that her world is mostly beyond his comprehension, and so on. Daniel Day-Lewis is an actor of tremendous power, but what he does in this starring role is emphasize Lincoln's basic human qualities. We can feel his aches and pains, and through his ungainly gait and pinched voice — not to mention that scruffy beard and unruly hair — Day-Lewis's Lincoln mesmerizes not with his awesomeness but with the lack thereof. More than any portrayal I've seen, this Lincoln gives a sense of what it must have been like to be in the presence of the real man.

Sympathy for the Denzel: Flight

More often than not, when we think about cinema's great performances — from Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront to Robert De Niro in Raging Bull to Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds, from Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd. to Frances McDormand in Fargo to Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind — we don't just think of great acting but of great acting opportunities: dynamic, well-written roles, often in well-crafted movies. It would be strange if we didn't. Rising tide lifts all boats, and all that — great movies are built of great parts and great performances, and they create them, too. When looking at a single awesome character — say, Heath Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight — it's impossible to know how much power comes from acting itself and how much is due to the architecture of the character (dialogue, motivations and basic actions), the hair and makeup, the atmosphere created by the score or the craft of the director and editor. So perhaps the truest indication of acting excellence comes when an actor takes a part in a mostly mediocre film overwhelmed by hackneyed supporting roles, song cues and plot devices, and creates a character more honest and compelling than almost everything else around him (or her, or it). By that measure, Denzel Washington's performance in Robert Zemeckis's Flight is one of the best of the year.