Movies

As you may have noticed, the economy has changed a bit in recent years. Our corporate overlords have outsourced our entire industrial economy to Asia — the invisible hand made them do it! — and the largest global crisis since the Great Depression has left us mired in seemingly permanent debt and stagnation. (Socks are much cheaper than they used to be, though, so it was all worth it!) Movies, along with military hardware, remain almost the only economic sector where America still reigns supreme. (The multilingual industries of India make more films and sell more tickets, but remain far behind in terms of global revenue.) Indeed, it can sometimes be difficult — as with “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” the second highest-grossing film of 2011 — to tell the difference between the movies and the military gear.

But despite producing a series of enormous worldwide hits last year, Hollywood has been badly hurt by the recession, and faces a mounting crisis with no obvious solution. Box-office results last year were not merely bad overall, they were a lot worse than they looked. In terms of actual dollars, the decline in United States box-office receipts from 2010 to 2011 was around 3.5 percent, but higher average ticket prices masked a 5 percent drop in attendance, following another 5 percent drop the year before that. That’s right: There were roughly 10 percent fewer tickets sold in 2011 than in 2009, and fewer people went to the movies last year than in any year since 1995. Given that a disproportionate amount of last year’s dollars came from franchises that have either definitely or probably played out the string — “Harry Potter,” “Transformers,” “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “The Hangover” — some people in Hollywood are forecasting a Maya-style apocalypse in 2012.

And then there are the Oscars. I don’t think you need to be Dr. Freud — or Viggo Mortensen playing Dr. Freud — to see this year’s Academy Awards campaign as the film industry’s half-conscious attempt to lick its wounds, buck itself up, whistle a cheery tune and imagine that prosperity lies right around the corner. For one thing, that’s the only way I can make sense of the best-picture nomination given to “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” which is pretty much the Ur-example of an earnest, sentimental, middlebrow Oscar-bait vehicle that nobody actually liked. Furthermore, Jesus — if only the tune were a bit cheerier. Have you ever seen such a parade of depressed, wounded and dysfunctional men and boys as in this year’s roster of best-picture nominees? During the first Great Depression, we got “It Happened One Night,” “Grand Hotel,” “42nd Street,” “Top Hat,” “You Can’t Take It With You” and a little something called “Gone With the Wind” (all of them Oscar winners or nominees). This year we get a washed-up movie star, a cuckolded and about-to-be-widowed dad, a weird kid with a dead dad (times two), a guy trapped in the past, a divorced dad running a losing baseball team, and an emasculated hardass dad with a flying wife who’s trapped in the past in a movie nobody can understand. Oh, and a horse.

Seriously, the only movie among this year’s nine best-picture nominees that isn’t a study in masculine suffering is “The Help,” simply because it doesn’t have any men in it. (I’ll grant half a point to the decidedly odd “War Horse,” whose human characters don’t matter much and tend to die rapidly.) But “The Help” can serve in its own way as analogy and salve for Hollywood’s (and America’s) current predicament, since it presents itself as a moral fable about how we all faced a Difficult Time and became stronger and better people. It, too, is an ambivalent, Gatsby-flavored tale about time (more ambivalent than it wants to be, maybe), struggling to balance the desire to rescue what is beautiful from the past — as the eponymous hero of “Hugo” and Oskar in “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” and Owen Wilson’s dazed Yank in “Midnight in Paris” all want to do — with the imperative of closing the door and moving forward, as do George Clooney’s Matt King in “The Descendants” and Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane in “Moneyball.”

Viewed through this prism, the Oscar front-runner status of Michel Hazanavicius’ “The Artist,” which seems so unlikely at first glance, starts to make sense. Last spring at Cannes, when I wrote about the possibility that a black-and-white silent with an unknown star, by a French director with an unpronounceable name (roughly: ah-ZAH-na-vee-syoose), might become a hit, the only response I got from readers was derisive laughter. I didn’t really believe it either, to be fair, but the alchemy of “The Artist” turned out to be unique: A lightweight but confident entertainment for adults, in a year virtually bereft of same, and a big wet kiss to Hollywood’s golden age, delivered by those normally snooty, snail-eating Europeans.

Even if the psychological parable in “The Artist” was unintentional on Hazanavicius’ part, it has so far proved irresistible to Academy voters. Not only is this a movie about a guy who faces a career crisis and a major economic crash and comes back, it’s also about the biggest and most traumatic transformation in the history of the film business, the transition from silent movies to talkies. One might almost say the biggest and most traumatic transformation until now; today’s Hollywood executives, embattled by YouTube, mobile devices, online piracy, HDTV home theater systems and the explosion of HBO-style television drama, may feel like they’re living through the birth of the talkies all over again.

In other words, I think “The Artist” as an Oscar contender is a phenomenon specific to 2012. It’s a nice enough little movie, but if it wins a pile of awards later this month, people may well look back at the whole thing later with some degree of puzzlement or buyer’s remorse (as with, say, “Shakespeare in Love” or “Dances With Wolves”). The thing is, there’s no other obvious Oscar winner amid all these lugubrious films about angst-ridden heroes wrestling with the legacy of the past, and compared to this collective depresso-fest “The Artist” feels vigorous, loaded with brio and eager to please.

If we’re tempted to revert to old stereotypes of the French as a constitutionally melancholy race obsessed with their past glories, we might want to take a look in the mirror. Of the American films among this year’s nominees, only “Moneyball” and “The Help” seem essentially optimistic in tone, and both are about lonely outsiders challenging the failure of conventional wisdom and pushing forward toward a more enlightened world. (The fact that one is about massive social injustice and the other is about statistical analysis and information flow tells you all you need to know about their Oscar chances.) “The Descendants” seems to have all the basic ingredients of a surefire Oscar winner — spunky kids, a dad who cries, life lessons and beautiful scenery — but packages them together as a series of lazy teachable moments and boozy Hawaiian postcards. George Clooney’s measured, careful performance is an obvious Bill Clinton attempt to feel our pain, whereas Jean Dujardin’s performance in “The Artist” is a delightful surprise.

In both “Hugo” and “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” preteen boys try to recover from the calamitous deaths of their beloved fathers, and pursue obscure keys to the hidden secrets of the past. While I found the first quite lovely, and the second tedious, there’s little doubt that “Hugo” was an expensive folly, a personal foray into cinema history with Martin Scorsese that was too sad and strange for mass audiences. (And while Hazanavicius paid tribute to early Hollywood, Scorsese reminded us that spectacle cinema was born in Europe.) As for “Extremely Loud,” I genuinely don’t know who got anything from that movie or what it was; it’s supposed to be a tear-jerker about 9/11 and autism and growing up fatherless and contemporary economic anxiety and race relations in New York and a bunch of other so-called big topics, but ends up instead as a mildly irritating combination of Wes Anderson shtick and afterschool special.

While Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” and Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” are flawed and idiosyncratic personal works by important directors who could hardly be more different, both stick to the grand theme of Oscar 2012: the irresistible allure of the past and the forbidding uncertainty of the future. Of course, Malick is thinking about the past of the entire universe and the future in terms of our return into that vastness after death, whereas Allen’s interest in the past is limited to early 20th-century literature and music, and all he sees ahead is the final punctuation to a cruel joke. As I read the films, Owen Wilson’s Gil in “Midnight” and the Malick stand-in played by Sean Penn in “Tree of Life” arrive at similar understandings of their disparate universes: The past is in us, whether genetically or cosmologically or culturally, and it always will be. But we can’t live there.

Arguably that’s the same pseudo-Zen lesson absorbed by Matt King and Oskar and Hugo and George Valentin, the silent-movie Ozymandias played by Dujardin in “The Artist.” The days of American specialness and bigness — whether you’re talking about Cecil B. DeMille or Henry Ford or Gen. MacArthur — are pretty much gone, and just to veer into unauthorized political commentary, voting for Tweedledum or Tweedledee in November won’t bring them back. Our economy and society aren’t what they used to be, and neither are our movies. Whatever wins this month will not be remembered alongside “Gone With the Wind” and “Lawrence of Arabia” and “The Godfather.” Hollywood did not entirely bring this crisis upon itself, but to the extent that the Academy Awards can take the institutional temperature of America’s film industry, it seems to be wallowing in self-pity and lamenting its lost past, like the characters in these films as they hit bottom. At least at the end of “The Artist,” George figures out that he’s got to dance for a living.

In more than a decade of writing about film for Salon, I’ve made only a few glancing references to Tarr’s work — not because anyone was stopping me, but because there didn’t seem to be much point. Most people likely to be interested in his masterfully constructed, time-stretching, profoundly enigmatic fables or allegories (even to say that Tarr’s films have stories is somewhat misleading) probably already knew about them. Furthermore, his films screened only sporadically at a handful of big-city venues — only one, “Werckmeister Harmonies” from 2000, received an official American theatrical release — and until recently were largely unavailable on Region 1 DVD or Blu-ray. But now, with the theatrical release of “The Turin Horse,” a bracing, downbeat and even devastating work that will supposedly be Tarr’s final film — he’s very much alive and only 56, but has announced that he’s shifting to producing and running a film school — and a complete career retrospective at New York’s Lincoln Center, you too can follow along at home if you’re curious.

All eight of Tarr’s previous films — from the documentary-style realism of Communist-era dramas like “Family Nest” (1977) and “The Prefab People” (1982) to “Werckmeister Harmonies” (2000), easily his best-known picture, and “The Man From London” (2007), which is, of all things, a film noir starring Tilda Swinton — can now be found on home video through the usual channels. “The Turin Horse” will play in honest-to-God movie theaters in at least half a dozen cities (see below), and it’s quite likely that the Lincoln Center retrospective will be exported to other venues as well. That leads us to the inescapable question of what it’s like to watch Tarr’s films — and if most movies are difficult to describe in words, his are trebly so. How can I possibly convince you to watch a film that features a 10-minute traveling shot amid a roaming herd of cows? (“Sátántangó” again.) Nobody can; you’re either game to try something like that or you’re not. Comparisons and parallels will do no good. Tarr’s best films are beautiful, forbidding, strange, often laced with black humor and almost always deeply pessimistic. Watching them is an experience unlike any other.

Tarr has been written about quite a bit, but I don’t think most of that writing gets us anywhere. (Here’s a 2001 essay by film scholar Peter Hames that provides a good overview of Tarr’s career to that point.) He’s been variously compared to such big names as Bergman, Tarkovsky, John Cassavetes, Theo Angelopoulos and Jim Jarmusch, but that’s such a motley crew as to be meaningless. It’s more about marking out territory and saying, “If you like those drugs, try this one too.” Tarr himself mostly rejects such comparisons, and has said his favorite filmmaker is the famously decadent and prolific R.W. Fassbinder, whose pictures could hardly be more different from his. Except, and it’s a big except, for the fact that both directors are primarily focused on the look and atmosphere of the film. Both want to show us the world as it is — or at least as they see it — and aren’t much interested in conventional psychological drama or spiritual speculation.

One way of explaining Tarr’s moral vision, I think, is to say that he grew up in the Eastern bloc learning that communism was total crap, found out after 1989 that capitalism was crap too, and knew all along that religion was crap. Mix that earned cynicism with the lushness and severity of his cinematographic vision, and his famous penchant for ultra-long, elaborately choreographed deep-focus takes — “Werckmeister Harmonies” is 149 minutes long, and consists of 39 shots — and you get some of the most beautiful and most melancholy images you’ll ever see on-screen. Tarr was never going to have a mainstream crossover moment because he doesn’t tell stories (and his attempts to do so, including “The Man From London” and 1987′s “Damnation,” are arguably weaker films). I find his films moving and involving — and much less “challenging” than, say, the most slow-moving of Tarkovsky’s or Angelopoulos’ films — but in a completely different direction from a conventional, plot-centric entertainment. They are literally “moving pictures,” paintings or photographs that move from one spectacular episode and image to another, hinting at narrative possibility or metaphysical significance but never laying it out.

In “The Turin Horse,” Tarr and his customary ensemble of collaborators — these include co-writer László Krasznahorkai (himself a prominent Hungarian novelist), composer Mihály Vig and editor/co-director Ágnes Hranitzky (who is Tarr’s wife) — use a mysterious episode from the history of philosophy as the jumping-off point for an apocalyptic saga that suggests Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” by way of Samuel Beckett. In March 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown after witnessing a cab driver whipping his reluctant horse on the streets of Turin, Italy. I can see why this story appeals to Tarr — the man who pronounced God dead, laid low by a routine act of cruelty — but if the horse and driver in this movie are meant to be the same ones, that’s only because Tarr says so.

Nietzsche is nowhere to be found in this movie (although you could argue that his spirit is all over it, I guess), and neither is Italy. An elderly man, apparently named Ohlsdorfer (János Derzsi), and his battered but somewhat young daughter (Erika Bók), live in a miserable stone hut on some blasted, windswept Thomas Hardy-style heath, which seems more like the surface of Mars than the outskirts of Turin. They eat potatoes, struggle out to the well for water, drive the recalcitrant horse out of her stall for another futile effort to harness her, lock her up again, go back inside and eat more potatoes. (Tarr, who can be quite genial in person, told New York Film Festival audiences last year that the real-life horse was unharmed, and had recently given birth to a foal.) The only sound is the incessant howling of the wind, with intermittent interruptions from Vig’s haunting, minimalist musical score. The man and woman hardly speak, and indeed the sheer brutality of their struggle for survival requires no explanation. The silence is broken when a drunken neighbor stops by, unleashing a bitter monologue about how everything good and decent and noble in the world has been destroyed. A band of gypsies pass by in a cart, bringing a moment of vivacity but trailing chaos and darkness in their wake. The horse stops eating, the well dries up, and the last points of light in the world seem to go out.

A laugh riot, as you can tell. But I left the theater oddly exhilarated — to see daylight again was so great! — and, odder still, eager to see it again (although perhaps not today). Tarr’s films can be arduous, even wrenching, but they’re not boring. Watching them is something like visiting the world’s most fantastic art museum and taking an ice-cold shower, both at the same time. Tarr claims never to watch mainstream movies and to despise Hollywood, but he has more in common with, say, Martin Scorsese than he’d like to admit. He wants to dazzle us and hypnotize us while we sit there in the dark; he doesn’t care about whether we search our souls for deeper meaning. In his own deep, dark, post-Nietzschean, post-Marxist and post-Christian way, he’s a showman, and he has rung down his own final curtain with a bang. I’ll let him have the last word, from a fine interview he did last year with Peter Sbrizzi of Hammer to Nail:

I remember when I did my “Sátántangó,” this seven hour, 15 minute-long movie, everybody said, ‘You are totally crazy, nobody wants to see this stupid movie,’ and I didn’t care, and you know what is happening? This movie is still running around the world since 16 years — and I do not remember the movies that were started and released at the same moment that we did this. [Note: The top grossers of 1994 were "The Lion King," "Forrest Gump" and "True Lies."] I don’t remember that because you forget them; after two months they are finishing in the garbage and nobody remembers this because it’s just simple, stupid storytelling. If you have a real movie, you can watch it 20 or 25 years later or 50 years later; the time will judge it, OK? And by the end now we have more audience than this stupid box office hit.

“The Last Modernist: The Complete Works of Bela Tarr” plays through Feb. 8 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York. “The Turin Horse” opens Feb. 10 at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center in New York; Feb. 17 at Webster University in St. Louis; March 2 at the Laemmle Music Hall in Los Angeles and the Miami Beach Cinematheque; March 9 at the Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge, Mass.; March 22 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; March 30 at the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville; April 6 at the UWM Union Theater in Milwaukee; and April 20 at the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle, with more cities to follow.

Wheatley’s debut feature, “Down Terrace,” was a bizarre, bleak and hilarious blend of genres, starting out as a Mike Leigh-style working-class family drama and ending up as an especially gruesome “Sopranos” episode, transported to the south coast of England. Let me introduce “Kill List,” Wheatley’s highly touted second film, by admitting that I’m infinitesimally disappointed that it’s not as funny as “Down Terrace” (though it definitely has its moments) and also that he’s gone so deep into the tradition of creepazoid British genre movies. (Rather than, you know, making the kind of depressing, no-audience films I like better.) But there’s no disputing the ingenuity and even the brilliance of this mind-bending mashup, which begins as a gritty recession-era marriage drama — the opening scene features a couple arguing about whether they have the money to get the Jacuzzi fixed — and then descends into ominous violence and finally total insanity.

I suppose you could say that the way Wheatley splices incompatible kinds of movies together into one story, like some demented mad scientist, has an Internet-age flavor to it. But that’s not something entirely new, and he actually comes off more as a hardcore fan of British independent and low-budget cinema, who loves the kitchen-sink realism of the ’60s and also loves a bunch of well-known horror movies and thrillers that I’d better not mention right now. Love it or hate it, “Kill List” is a definite widescreen cinematic experience loaded with delicious details, from the hotel clerk who holds a conversation without really listening to the sound of someone getting his brains beaten out against a concrete wall. He’s like a faux-Cockney Quentin Tarantino, passionate about the things he loves and also dedicated to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of “taking the piss” — and believe it or not, I mean that as a compliment.

The woman shrieking about the Jacuzzi money in the opening scene is named Shel (MyAnna Buring), the blond-bombshell Swedish wife of Jay (Neil Maskell), an unemployed ex-soldier who’s kicking around their suburban house outside Sheffield, in north central England. Jay at first seems like a hundred other unappealing husbands in British movies of this ilk — he’s a bit of a whiner and a bit of a drinker, he’s put on some weight around the middle, he’s much too hot-tempered and has a laddish London accent that seems halfway affected for a guy who has a Jacuzzi and a garage full of garden chemicals. It takes us a while to figure out that he doesn’t have some vague freelance I.T. gig, as he tells a friend’s visiting girlfriend. He was a private-security Mafioso during the Iraq war and is now a hit man, evidently suffering from the after-effects of a job that went wrong in Kiev a year ago.

Maskell is a well-known presence on British TV, and gives a fearless performance here, in the sense that Jay is the protagonist of “Kill List” and neither the actor, the director nor the screenplay (credited to Wheatley and his partner, Amy Jump, “with contributions by the cast”) ever tries to make him seem even remotely likable. As with “Down Terrace,” how you feel about this is likely to determine whether you can stand this movie or not. As you go deeper into the swirling maelstrom of “Kill List,” you’ll identify more and more with Jay’s struggle to remain afloat amid the bloodshed, madness and general atmosphere of malice. But you’re never going to admire the guy, and you’re always likely to conclude that whatever horrible fate befalls him is one he’s brought upon himself.

After eight months away from the game, Jay and his shaggy Irish partner in crime, Gal (the delicious Michael Smiley, who was also in “Down Terrace”), have received a mysterious commission from a sinister, leathery little man (only identified as The Client, and played by Struan Rodger) who seems to know way too much about what happened in Kiev. From the very beginning, this assignment seems loaded with mysterious significance, and wrapped in a feeling of unspeakable dread. Gal and Jay are sent to assassinate a Catholic priest in his church, and then a “librarian” who curates an especially repellent collection of pornography. What connects these two people — and why do they seem so eager to thank Jay, just before he kills them? And then there’s Gal’s ex-girlfriend, a wide-eyed brunette named Fiona (Emma Fryer), who keeps turning up in unexpected places — and who may not be the clueless corporate drone she appears to be.

Oh crap — I’ve almost told you way too much! But not quite. Here’s the key thing to understand: Every craft element of “Kill List,” from the acting to the cinematography (by Laurie Rose) to the cracked but seemingly inevitable downward progress of the narrative, is absolutely terrific. This movie is yet another testament to the thriving creativity of the British indie-film scene. It’s also the kind of movie designed to mess up your mind, like some unseen Nicolas Roeg or Ken Russell picture out of 1981, and it will. As Gal and Jay descend further into mayhem and madness, uncertain whether they’re going crazy or being lured into a dreadful trap, you may want to consider the surprise ending of “Cunning Stunt,” and to get ready for something even worse here.

Whether the shocker final scene of “Kill List” has been earned — and whether it can survive a logical interrogation — is a conversation we’ll have to have after you’ve seen the film. I have my own questions about that matter, but to think in fatalistic terms, Jay’s odyssey can only end badly, and without question there’s a terrible karmic justice to what happens. This is the kind of movie you’ll want to work over with friends after you see it, unless you want to go straight to bed and vow never to take my recommendations ever again. I halfway want to get Ben Wheatley on the horn and have him explain the ending, and halfway suspect that it’s supposed to stem from an evil logic so deeply rooted in human society that it defies all explanation.

“Kill List” opens this week at the IFC Center in New York and the Cinefamily in Los Angeles, with more cities to follow. It’s also available on-demand from many cable and satellite providers.

Viewed through a long lens, “Windfall” is about much more than the hidden costs and unexpected side effects of wind-power generation, or about a citizens’ uprising in the tiny town of Meredith, N.Y., in the Catskill region 150 or so miles northwest of Manhattan. (Mind you, both are gripping stories.) It’s about the American tendency — and very likely the human tendency — to look for magic-bullet solutions to complicated social and economic problems, where none are available. It’s a microcosmic version of the political divisions — between left and right, environmentalists and free-marketers, corporations and citizens — that have virtually paralyzed our republic. It’s a reminder that whenever a virtually unregulated industry (as in this case) offers capitalists a chance to defraud the little guy and make a bundle, they’ll do it. It’s a tantalizing case study that suggests ordinary people still have the power to steer a course between faceless bureaucracies and greedy capitalists, but only just — and only if they can find a way to overcome their differences and work together.

In the abstract, wind power sounds like a good thing to nearly everybody. It relies on an essentially infinite resource, carries little or none of the obvious environmental downside of coal or oil, and presents no Fukushima-style doomsday scenario. Wind generation has become a major focus of venture capital; Israel includes video of a hearing a few years ago at which T. Boone Pickens told a congressional committee that he could imagine, in the relatively short term, 20 to 25 percent of the country’s electricity demand being fulfilled by wind and other renewables. I have no way to evaluate that claim, but the experts Israel consults in the film think it’s hokum. Given the inherently inconstant nature of wind, they argue, it’s not a stable or permanent solution to our energy crisis, and is unlikely ever to amount to more than a drop in the bucket.

Setting aside the discussion of whether it’s worthwhile to pursue wind power in the first place — and we shouldn’t really set that aside — there might be locations in the Great Plains states, the Southwest and the high western deserts where wind farms, even on the enormous scale imagined by Pickens, would do no great harm. But as people in Meredith and numerous other communities in the wind-friendly rural Northeast and Great Lakes region have discovered, living anywhere near those gargantuan wind-harnessing engines is quite a different matter. These days, the typical industrial wind turbine is around 400 feet high — the height of a 40-story building, or twice the length of a jumbo jet. The blades alone can weigh upward of 35 tons, and the entire assembly anywhere from 150 to 400 tons (resting on a platform of concrete and rebar, which itself may be 30 feet deep and weigh several hundred tons). It’s an enormous construction site, culminating in a high-voltage electrical device, that emits a 24/7 whoppa-whoppa-whoppa noise and incessant low-frequency vibration, and is topped with a brilliant flashing light. By daylight, there’s the nightmarish strobe effect — the vast rotating shadow that falls across an entire neighborhood when the turbine is between you and the sun. (While the question of whether it’s actually unhealthful to live near a turbine is unresolved, it’s definitely unpleasant.) If your neighbor put one up in her backyard without asking permission, how would you feel?

As it happens, I have a personal interest in the events and location of “Windfall,” because I spend summers in a town just a few miles from Meredith. But nothing about the town or its surrounding area (in Delaware County, N.Y., one of the poorest and least populated counties in the Northeast) is untypical of rural America. Meredith has a mix of longtime residents and big-city emigrants, and its longtime dairy-farm economy has largely collapsed in recent years, partly replaced by an unstable mixture of tourist-oriented businesses, craft initiatives and boutique organic farming. These social tensions came to the fore, predictably, during the wind-power debate, with the major landowners and dairy farmers on one side — hoping for the rather skimpy royalties paid by the corporate investors in wind — and many “recent” New York City arrivals, convinced that the region’s economic future depends on its unspoiled landscapes, on the other. (I use the scare quotes because anyone who’s lived in Delaware County less than 30 years is often viewed as a newcomer.)

People on both sides of the issue in Meredith assumed at first that the anti-turbine forces were an elitist minority, partly because the town board had always been dominated by the same landowning families, and partly because wind-power companies had signed people up to secret agreements that forbade them from discussing anything about the relationship. What ensued was a fascinating lesson in democracy (and a version of the same lesson the Tea Party and its supporters may learn later this year). After 826 people — more than half of Meredith’s total population — signed a petition opposing the town board’s pro-development policy on wind turbines, it turned out that the people who thought of themselves as the “real” residents were in the minority, and the jig was up for the wind industry in this one tiny corner of America. Yet as one newly elected board member reflects at the end of the film, nobody came out of this fight feeling good. A formerly harmonious community is now bitterly divided, and the Mitt Romney-style venture capitalists of wind power will just move on to the next town and sell their pseudo-green poisoned chalice to somebody else.

“Windfall” opens this week at the Quad Cinema in New York and the Facets Cinémathèque in Chicago. It opens Feb. 9 at the Art House Cinema 502 in Ogden, Utah, Feb. 24 at the Clinton Street Theater in Portland, Ore., and March 2 at the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle, with other cities and festival screenings to follow. It’s also available on-demand from cable, satellite and online providers, including Amazon, iTunes and VUDU.

Stephen Frears’ “Lay the Favorite,” with Bruce Willis and Rebecca Hall, is a lightweight sub-Hollywood farce; Julie Delpy’s “2 Days in New York,” starring herself and Chris Rock, is a halfway agreeable mess; Nicholas Jarecki’s “Arbitrage,” with Richard Gere and Susan Sarandon, is a decent corporate-world thriller. And while I’m delighted to defend Spike Lee’s “Red Hook Summer,” it’s a rough and rugged ultra-indie production that disappointed many viewers. If none of those films is life-changing, none is even half as bad as Rodrigo Cortés’ “Red Lights,” a moronic paranormal mystery featuring the latest dispiriting Robert De Niro performance.

That wasn’t where the action was at Sundance 2012; indeed, in this downsized era I suspect that the festival’s customary mode of programming around a handful of star-studded, audience-friendly premiere screenings doesn’t work anymore. By the end of the week, festival director John Cooper looked a bit fretful introducing those big Eccles screenings, as if realizing he was about to underwhelm a thousand strangers. On the other hand, this was an exciting festival for documentaries and more challenging dramatic fare, and quite a few of this year’s movies have been picked up for distribution, mostly at discount prices. (With one major exception: Ben Lewin’s “The Surrogate,” a would-be Oscar contender starring John Hawkes and Helen Hunt that I haven’t seen yet.)

Sundance will award its own proliferation of prizes this weekend, and honestly there are so damn many of them they don’t have much impact. So what should you be looking forward to seeing over the next several months? In keeping with past years, I’m awarding my own much-coveted grand prizes, just one each in the narrative and documentary categories, along with a list of five more especially hot titles to watch for in each division. Please note that the normal level of subjectivity is exaggerated here by an epic level of entropy and randomness — I could make an alternate list of Sundance movies I heard were terrific and haven’t yet seen. (That list might start with Rick Alverson’s Brooklyn-hipster satire “The Comedy,” which isn’t exactly a comedy, Alison Klayman’s documentary about the most prominent dissident Chinese artist, “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry,” and the LCD Soundsystem concert doc “Shut Up and Play the Hits.”)

If Sundance 2012 produced few obvious box-office hits and awards contenders, it strikes me as an important year of transition, with lots of movies that got people arguing and should keep on doing so. Times of turmoil and crisis, after all, tend to produce the most exciting art. If they also produce unintentionally hilarious movies in which Robert De Niro plays a blind, self-levitating psychic (“Do you doubt my powers? DO YOU DOUBT MY POWERS?”), I guess we’ll live with that.

NARRATIVE GRAND PRIZE: “Keep the Lights On”

I’ve already reviewed this breakthrough work from New York indie-film veteran Ira Sachs, which is both a fearless autobiographical examination of a drug-fueled long-term relationship and a delicate, almost anthropological examination of American gay life at the turn of the millennium. I fervently hope that “Keep the Lights On” can reach beyond the traditional limitations of the gay-cinema audience (which is pretty large, to be fair), because it’s a beautifully made American film anchored in a mesmerizing central performance by Danish actor Thure Lindhardt, who’s now ready for his crossover moment.

FIVE MORE TO WATCH

Kirsten Dunst unleashes her inner bitch as the supremely mean protagonist of writer-director Leslye Headland’s “Bachelorette,” an exceptionally smart character drama masquerading as “Bridesmaids”-style raunch. Lizzy Caplan, Isla Fisher and Rebel Wilson — playing the overweight bride formerly known as “Pig Face” — round out the superb, female-centric cast. This movie will play even better in big cities than it did at Sundance.

I will admit that I’ve only seen the trailer for New York-to-New Orleans transplant Benh Zeitlin’s “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” — I kept passing it up for another mediocre, semi-mainstream comedy — so I have no idea whether I’ll personally like it. But this allegorical, apocalyptic fable about a 6-year-old girl’s odyssey through the hallucinatory swamplands of southern Louisiana still belongs on the list, since it played to nearly universal acclaim and was clearly the biggest surprise in the entire festival lineup. (It was acquired for release by Fox Searchlight.)

Screenings of Craig Zobel’s claustrophobic “Compliance,” which is based on a real-life case in which a prank caller masquerading as a cop convinced a fast-food manager to detain and abuse an employee, turned into a participatory sport. Some viewers accused Zobel and his cast of exploiting the episode or inflicting more abuse on both the cast and the audience, while others leapt in to defend him. I’ll discuss my reservations and convoluted response some other time; suffice it to say you should decide for yourself.

As personally instructed by Spike Lee, I’ve already told readers that “Red Hook Summer” is not a sequel to “Do the Right Thing.” But to my taste, Lee’s journey back to the streets of Brooklyn — and to low-budget production values — produces his most heartfelt picture in years. This shaggy-dog, discursive fable of an Atlanta boy sent to spend the summer with his preacher granddad (the terrific Clarke Peters) may be flawed on various technical levels, but it’s a passionate and painful tribute to black Brooklyn, black America and the black church that will resonate with many viewers and profoundly irritate many others.

Speaking of irritation, I’ve already aired my grievances about Antonio Campos’ “Simon Killer,” a marvelously crafted Parisian nightmare starring Brady Corbet as a Yank drifter who falls in love with a hooker (French actress and filmmaker Mati Diop, simultaneously vulnerable and tough as nails). But I have to admit that “Simon Killer” stuck with me, visually and thematically and emotionally, through a whole week of watching other people’s movies. Like it or hate it, it confirms Campos’ status as an extraordinary talent who’s doing it his way.

DOCUMENTARY GRAND PRIZE: “Detropia”

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, the documentary dynamic duo behind “Jesus Camp” and the powerful abortion film “12th & Delaware,” have created an elegy to the Motor City that transcends statistics and sociology and reaches closer to poetry. With a population that has shrunk by more than half in 50 years, and almost 40 square miles of empty land inside the city limits, Detroit is the test case of America’s deindustrialization, and a laboratory for what might come next. “Detropia” isn’t a social-issue film and doesn’t advocate for particular policies; rather, it’s a gorgeous and tragic tribute to the immense symbolic power of Detroit and to the people who still live there.

FIVE MORE TO WATCH

Both inspirational and tragic, David France’s “How to Survive a Plague” is more than another testimonial to the worst years of the AIDS epidemic (although if you lived through that period in New York, the evocation is immensely powerful). France specifically tracks how the activist movements ACT UP and TAG — primarily composed of sick and dying gay men — worked to force science, business and government to pay attention to them, and ultimately became insiders who helped drive innovative discoveries that transformed HIV infection into a manageable disorder. As the film makes clear, this wasn’t just about AIDS and gay people, but a wide-ripple political movement that permanently reoriented the relationship between those in power, sick people and their advocates.

If your immediate response to the idea of a movie about the controversial performance and installation artist Marina Abramović — and her plan to sit at a table in the Museum of Modern Art all day, every day, for three months — is to snort with derision, then you’re completely ready for Matthew Akers’ documentary “Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present.” More than a retrospective portrait of an eclectic art-world pioneer and her influential work and ideas, Akers’ film is also a moving and masterfully constructed exploration of what makes art — or anything else — worth doing in the first place.

Making a film about an idea, rather than a political issue or a specific historical incident, is devilishly difficult, but the ingenious Canadian documentarian Jennifer Baichwal (“Manufactured Landscapes”) pulls it off in “Payback,” which explores the concept of debt through many of its juridical, environmental and moral ramifications. Baichwal bounces from an essay by Margaret Atwood through a blood feud in rural Albania, a remorseful Canadian prison inmate, the disgraceful conditions faced by immigrant tomato pickers in Florida and numerous other people and places — and if the combination feels ungainly at first, it’s ultimately haunting, beautiful and strangely optimistic.

Photojournalist turned filmmaker Lauren Greenfield turned an assignment to shoot a couple who were building the largest house in America into the hilarious and upsetting film “The Queen of Versailles,” which played on opening night at Sundance. You can’t feel too bad about Florida time-share king David Siegel, whose collapsing empire has left the couple’s 90,000-square-foot MegaMcMansion sitting unfinished in the swamp, but his likable wife, Jacki — she of the modest middle-class background and extensive cosmetic surgery — becomes the heroine of an intensely symbolic Recession-era saga that feels like an updated Russian novel on steroids. (I do blame Jacki for the pet lizard, though.)

While Rodney Ascher’s profoundly strange “Room 237″ will no doubt appeal most to film critics and other hardcore movie buffs, it was an absolute sensation at Sundance and could easily inspire a widespread cult following. (Especially because it may prove to be unreleasable in theatrical form.) As 1.3 percent of you will already have figured out, this is a movie about another movie — Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” — and the outrageous, often demented conspiracy theories that have sprung up around that misunderstood masterpiece and/or overcooked horror farrago. (You take your pick.) Composed principally of copyright-challenging clips from “The Shining ” and numerous other Kubrick movies, this is an ingenious trip down the rabbit hole into the alternate universe of movie-geek paranoia, some of which — I’m not telling! — may just be borderline not-crazy.