For anyone eager to understand Russia’s depressing 20-year slide from one version of cynical totalitarianism into another, with a brief stop-off in between for giddy, wide-open, largely dysfunctional democracy, “Putin’s Kiss” is required viewing. Of course Pedersen can’t explain all the conundrums of contemporary Russia in 85 minutes, but in profiling two singularly important young Russians — pro-Putin youth activist Masha Drokova and leading opposition journalist Oleg Kashin — she captures some essential drama in the nation’s recent political life. (If you read Russian, Kashin’s site is here.)

Born at the tail end of the Soviet era, Drokova was a fresh-faced teenage girl from suburban Moscow when she suddenly became famous in the mid-2000s after giving Putin a worshipful smooch on national TV. She assured interviewers that she could tell he was a strong, charismatic and kind man, and that whomever she spent her life with would have to follow his example. Poised and pleasant, pretty without being drop-dead Natasha gorgeous, Drokova rapidly became a major public face of Nashi, the “anti-fascist and democratic” youth organization founded by prominent Putin supporters to channel adolescent energy and quell dissent.

As opposition leader Ilya Yashin tells Pedersen, Putin’s regime grew increasingly restless and paranoid after the 2005 “Orange Revolution” threw the post-Soviet autocrats out of power in neighboring Ukraine. (Arguably, the Orange Revolution has itself been largely undone by current Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, but that’s another story.) Nashi was initially led by shadowy Putin lieutenant Vasily Yakemenko, perhaps operating at the behest of Vladislav Surkov, a guy who seems like a boring, puffy-faced Kremlin apparatchik but is widely described as the “gray cardinal” or ideological puppet-master behind Putin’s regime. (At the risk of derailing this whole review, the more you read about Surkov the weirder he gets. He may have written or co-written a satirical novel making fun of the system he helped create, and reportedly has portraits of Che Guevara and Tupac Shakur, alongside Putin, in his Kremlin office.)

As we see from Pedersen’s often chilling footage inside Nashi rallies and summer camps, Surkov and Yakemenko created a two-faced organization on a familiar and unfortunate 20th-century model, one part calisthenics and canoeing classes and ritualized teen romance, one part ultra-nationalist ideology. Older Russians of course liken it to the Soviet-era Komsomol, by all accounts one of the communist state’s more successful endeavors. Other people have simply started calling it the “Putinjugend” (a reference to the German name of the Hitler Youth). At any rate, saying that the group is pro-democratic and anti-fascist doesn’t make it so; Nashi has frequently been used to humiliate and harass opposition politicians, journalists and human-rights activists, and is at least circumstantially connected to racist violence against Chechens, Georgians, Armenians, Azeris and other minority groups.

Nobody knows for sure — or nobody who’s talking — whether it was Nashi activists who beat Oleg Kashin into a coma in the fall of 2010, breaking both his legs and both his jaws, after he wrote a series of investigative pieces critical of Putin’s business dealings. And nobody knows exactly who the two guys were who took a crap on top of Ilya Yashin’s car, right on a Moscow street. (We see both incidents, via grainy surveillance footage. Russia is just that kind of place.) The ingenuity of the political system engineered by Surkov lies precisely in the fact that orders to quash the opposition often don’t have to come from the top, and the people in power can pay lip service to freedom and democracy and wring their hands over violent incidents. Unlike in Soviet times, dissent is not illegal, and it’s tolerated as long as it stays limited to marginal political parties and elite Moscow publications. But it isn’t good for your health or your public reputation.

Nobody suggests that Masha Drokova had anything to do with the dirty side of Nashi. She was the organization’s happy face, giving speeches against official corruption, hosting a pro-Putin talk show and leading demonstrations against supermarkets that sold expired meat. But as her mentor-protégé relationship with Nashi founder Yakemenko becomes more troubled and she gets to know Kashin and other liberal journalists, this naive but likable young woman visibly begins to struggle with the cognitive dissonance of contemporary Russian political life. No one could accuse “Putin’s Kiss” of painting an encouraging portrait of Russia, but there are some signs that the opposition has been revitalized, and Drokova’s story of apostasy is one small part of that. Ilya Yashin laments the way that Nashi has turned an entire generation toward conformity and cynicism, but it was idealism that made Masha kiss Putin in the first place, and that same idealism made her walk away from him.

“Putin’s Kiss” opens this week at Cinema Village in New York, with more cities and home-video release to follow.

Oldman is a reflective, soft-spoken fellow who considers questions carefully before answering them, but he doesn’t have to think about this one. “It was greatly liberating, powerfully liberating, to play George Smiley,” he says. If he plays a character who’s called upon to cry, Oldman explains, “Those are Gary’s tears. They have to be real. I’ve had to feel that grief or that anger, and then the performance is contaminated by that emotion.” With Smiley, he goes on, he didn’t have to display that emotion on the outside; the character is a profoundly melancholy, even tragic figure, but all that emotion is bottled up inside, in the classic English style.

Oldman recently made a brief visit to New York, to talk about the first Oscar nomination of a circuitous acting career that has taken him from the British indie fringe of the mid-’80s to major Hollywood roles and video games. (He is most famous among the schoolmates of his teenage sons, he says, for supplying the voice of Sgt. Reznov in the “Call of Duty” series.) I got to spend some time with him in two different settings: First as the moderator of a question-and-answer session at Manhattan’s Sunshine Cinema, following a screening of “Tinker Tailor,” and then the next morning over coffee at Oldman’s Upper East Side hotel.

A performer of tremendous, almost chameleonic flexibility, and something of a cult figure for many younger actors and film fans, Oldman has never been in exactly the right spot for an Oscar to land on top of him. As the star of “Sid and Nancy” and “Prick Up Your Ears,” he was too edgy and too English. As a memorable character actor in Hollywood movies like “JFK” and “True Romance,” he perhaps seemed too damaged and disturbing. (Oldman explains that he settled on a key detail of the “True Romance” character after interviewing a Brooklyn teenager, who told him to replace the word “titties” with “breasteses.”) His ’90s roles as a leading man (“Immortal Beloved,” “The Scarlet Letter,” “Lost in Space”) never clicked in quite the right way, although we should make an exception for Francis Ford Coppola’s flawed but gorgeous 1992 “Dracula.”

Now, at age 53, Oldman finds himself — as he ruefully puts it — almost an “elder statesman” of the film business. On “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” he says, he got to work with both John Hurt, an actor he has long idolized, and Tom Hardy, a younger actor who idolizes him. “I might like to think of Tom as a peer and a contemporary, but I’ve got almost 20 years on him,” Oldman says. “He’ll say to me, ‘Gary, I watched all your films when I was a kid.’”

As Oldman told the Sunshine audience, getting to play John le Carré’s legendary spymaster was an amazing opportunity, but one he approached with trepidation and nearly refused. He was “absolutely petrified” about taking a role so strongly identified with Alec Guinness, who played Smiley in the legendary BBC miniseries of the early ’80s. “You’ve got a knight of the realm, one of the most famous and most beloved British actors in our history. And if you asked almost anyone in the U.K., or at least anyone over a certain age, ‘Who is George Smiley?’ they’d say, ‘Oh, right, that’s Alec Guinness.’”

But just as director Tomas Alfredson’s chilly, modernist take on le Carré’s novel feels entirely different from the boxy claustrophobia of the TV series, Oldman’s Smiley is quite a different creation from Guinness’. “No doubt there are parts of the character where I wind up in the same place as Alec Guinness,” Oldman says, “but I’d like to think there are things in Smiley he didn’t find. Ultimately, I think his Smiley might be a bit more huggable. I think there’s a coldness, even a sadism to the character as I play him.”

Across these two conversations, I found Oldman to be an exceptionally thoughtful and gentlemanly person, much closer in manner to the quiet but deadly Smiley than to the unstable, violent or passionate characters he was known for in his youth. Oldman’s working-class London accent has been softened by nearly two decades in Los Angeles; he actually worked with an accent coach to make sure his performance as Smiley carried the correct upper-class Oxonian overtones. (“I was casting about a little bit to find his voice. And then I got to meet John le Carré, and said, ‘Thank you very much. I’ll take that.’”)

If anything, Oldman comes across as an intensely private person who isn’t terribly comfortable with the glare of celebrity, which may partly account for the fact that his leading-man career never quite took off and he’s never previously been nominated by the Academy. He talks about film, theater and literature with obvious passion and knowledge, and never seems to give rehearsed answers. For instance, he says he’s enjoyed playing Sirius Black in the “Harry Potter” series and Commissioner Gordon in the “Dark Knight” films, but also makes clear that those roles have been personally and financially beneficial. In the 2000s, he found himself raising two sons after a divorce, and didn’t want to be an absentee dad. “I didn’t want to be away from home all the time, and then I also didn’t want to be the kind of father who dragged them all over the world. Doing those kinds of roles in those kinds of movies, you’re making the most amount of money for the least amount of time.”

Oldman is a genuine movie lover, a connoisseur of cinematography, costuming and music — which makes him a particularly gratifying interview subject. While we were standing backstage waiting for the closing credits of “Tinker Tailor” to wind up, he talked about the piano theme, spreading his fingers on an imaginary keyboard: “Listen to that, so lovely. Then it goes all Russian!” When I meet him for coffee the next morning, we begin talking about the American movies of the 1970s that he likes best, starting with Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown.”

You were talking last night about your relationship with Los Angeles, and it struck me that you don’t view the city as an outsider or a visitor, at least not anymore. It sounds like you love the place, and have complicated feelings toward it.

It’s a shame about California, and particularly about L.A., where they’ve demolished so many landmarks. It’s a bit of a disease there, where if anything is over 30 years old, they sort of knock it down and replace it. It’s a strange town, it’s this sprawling suburb, and then there’s a city, the old town. It’s as if someone wanted to build a New York or a Chicago, they got only so far and they gave up. They just abandoned it. I’ve lived there for 17 years, and I’ve grown rather fond of the place.

I’m guessing you must like “Chinatown,” both because it’s your kind of movie and also because it captures so much of that urge to destroy and rebuild.

Oh, yeah, “Chinatown.” Sometimes it takes an outsider. If you look at Schlesinger’s “Midnight Cowboy,” it’s such a microcosm of New York life at that time. He captured something about New York that was extraordinary. Polanski did much the same. Or a native can do it, a real native — Scorsese or Woody Allen with New York, P.T. Anderson with L.A. and the Valley.

Here’s another thing: These films, like “Chinatown” — these movies were mainstream! You try to say to a younger generation, who are watching these movies on DVD, and getting their sense of history through that: “The Conversation,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Network,” “Chinatown,” “All the President’s Men,” “Marathon Man,” “Taxi Driver.” They were the movies you went to see at the cinema! They weren’t particularly art-house movies. They played everywhere.

Sure. I went to see “Taxi Driver” with my dad at the mall, in suburban California. It’s a little bit hard to imagine that particular movie playing there now.

Yeah, that’s right. It’s “Puss in Boots.”

I feel like the early part of your career, from the late ’80s to the early ’90s, almost belongs to that era of movie history. I can’t imagine Coppola’s “Dracula” being made now, or not the way you did it.

Well, I certainly think that — “Dracula,” for instance, it’s such a romantic movie. If you made it now, it would be a whole different animal. First of all, you’re competing against the market that has movies like “Paranormal Activity.” You’d have to deal with the scare factor. It was such a romantic take on the genre, and the book. This sort of tragic love story. I don’t know if people would want that now.

They could turn it into a “Twilight” movie. You guys were a couple of decades ahead of the curve on that one!

Right. I mean the people that write checks might not want it. I’m not talking about an audience. And then there was that slump in my career. People say to me, “Oh, there was a while where you disappeared.” There were many factors. I took a bit of a back seat, I had kids and I wanted to focus on them. There’s that period in the late ’90s, the early 2000s, where I didn’t do a great deal. People say, “Oh, you had a slump in your career.” And I say, “Really? Name me a movie. Name me a great movie from those years that I’d have wanted to be in.” That was a real strange seismic shift in the industry. That was when it all really started to change.

A great deal of it was being exported, suddenly, and the kind of movies that they were making was very different. I was lucky — I caught the very tail end of the indie thing, coming out of the late ’70s and going into the ’80s. With “Sid and Nancy” and “Prick Up Your Ears,” those were the last of that. Then there was the Merchant-Ivory phenomenon, that happened for a while. And then Tarantino, with that voice, that great marriage of action and dialogue, the like of which we’d never seen before.

But if you go back to those ’70s movies, you can’t imagine those being made today. I watched “Network” recently, funnily enough — I was on an Air New Zealand flight. Do you know there’s not a note of music in that film? Not a note. And it holds up. It just works. Those stunning performances from people, especially Robert Duvall, who is marvelous in it. You think of Finch, of course, and Faye Dunaway. But for me it was Robert Duvall and, of course, Ned Beatty. You remember him? When he gets him into the office, and they do that scene down that long table, gives him that speech?

I’m sure we could talk about ’70s films for a couple of hours, but why don’t you tell me about the moment when you found out you’d been nominated for the Oscar.

I was in Berlin, rather fittingly. I was in the middle of what I thought would be my last interview for “Tinker Tailor.” We were opening the movie there, and it was around 2:30 in the afternoon. My manager was watching the announcements in the hotel bar, and he came in looking flustered and a little teary-eyed, and said, “You’re an Academy Award nominee.”

We were already having anticipatory disappointment and anger. “Let’s just get angry early” — you know what I mean? Before we heard, I asked him, “Are you all right?” And he said, oh, he was just getting pissed off in advance. Tomas Alfredson, the director, went out for a walk. He couldn’t take it. So he was out walking around at the Brandenburg Gate. If one had taken the temperature for the last month, with the SAG Awards and the Globes, we weren’t part of it. So I wasn’t expecting anything. It was quite a shock.

I think I said this last night: You can let it overwhelm you and stress you out, give you anxiety. You can be cynical about it, or you can be, I think, overly modest — “I am not worthy,” that kind of thing. Or you can enjoy it. And I’m just having a great, great time, riding in the front cabin. It’s nice up there!

People in my position spend a lot of time fretting about whether the Oscars still mean anything to the culture at large, whether they mean what they used to, and so on. I wonder how that question looks to you. Do you feel like you’ve finally been accepted as a son and brother in Hollywood, after all these years?

I mean, I’ve never felt excluded, exactly. I am a participating member of the Academy and all that. But I think the answer is yes. You become an elder statesman, don’t you? A veteran. I’ve put the years in, I’ve got quite a body of work. And it’s particularly nice for me that it happened with this film and this character. I know some people who’ve been in this situation who have not had a good time. They get nominated, and they didn’t have a particularly good time on the movie, or they might not like the director. That’s got to be bittersweet, because you’re excited for yourself that you’ve been acknowledged, and yet you have a taste in your mouth from the experience.

This was a Rolls-Royce from the beginning, with Tim Bevan and Working Title, Robyn Slovo, the producer, Tomas Alfredson, the director — and this cast of actors! You know? So I’m very happy that it happened with this one. And we’ll see, who knows. It’s an achievement to make the top five.

And then, what you mentioned about the Oscar — where it is culturally, does it still mean the same thing, all of that. It certainly feels like it does from the inside, that’s for sure. It’s a big deal from where I’m sitting. What it means to the public — it’s a question I’ve never really asked anyone, you know? It’s never really come up. As an insider, you can take it or leave it, you can be cynical, you can dismiss it. It’s easy to be on the outside and criticize it. To me, the Golden Globes — that one is a puzzlement. There’s not one journalist I’ve spoken to who hasn’t had a comment or made a remark. Or rolled their eyes, as you are doing now. [Laughter.]

As you say, you’ve got quite a body of work, but this role feels quite distinct. Smiley is so quiet and calm, and you have a reputation for playing exaggerated, emotional characters. So much of the film is you being impassive, or at least seemingly impassive, underreacting rather than overreacting.

I’m excited and happy about the nomination precisely because of that. It’s not so showy, so extroverted. There’s a lot going on, but it’s like a simmer, isn’t it? It’s a small flame. It’s ironic, I suppose. There have been a few in the repertoire that have been more bombastic and showy, but I have to say this feels right. I don’t know — does that make sense? It’s a more mature piece of work.

I agree. I get such a powerful sense of depression or melancholy from Smiley. From the whole movie, actually, but especially from this tremendously still and quiet performance you give at the center of the movie. It’s like all the anxiety and sadness of post-war England compressed into one guy.

Well, he’s a romantic. A disenchanted romantic, one of the last. And he’s having to deal with these people, these new people in this new war, where it’s God versus Marx. There are suddenly all these questions, all these philosophies to deal with. I thought when I was working on it, “What would a psychiatrist, a therapist, say to Smiley in this day and age?” Look at that relationship [with his constantly unfaithful wife], it’s very dysfunctional, it’s very inappropriate. Someone might say to him, “Why don’t you feel that you deserve more than Ann? Why are you happy with scraps from the table, and not a full meal?” Those are the questions I asked myself; that’s what I was playing. That sadness that he carries around. I think, also, that he knows that the mole is Bill Hadon [played by Colin Firth] before I let you know it’s Hadon. So there’s this double betrayal.

When he talks about meeting Karla [the legendary KGB spymaster], and I have that monologue …

Yeah, about meeting Karla and figuring out his weakness. Which is such a great scene.

Smiley feels a little bit responsible for creating Karla, because he was the one person Smiley couldn’t crack, and he got away. And subsequently Karla became Karla — you see, I’m not being cuckolded by Bill Hadon, I’m being cuckolded by a man who’s thousands of miles away, this is how clever he is. But Smiley invites Peter Gwillam [Benedict Cumberbatch] up and they have whiskey, and then Smiley says to him, indirectly, don’t have a relationship. You want to be successful in this business? Don’t be involved. It’s his way of saying, I let him go, you see? Maybe you should tidy up your own affairs. [Long pause.] It’s fucking brutal, it gets me every time. The casualties of it.

I also found it chilling when Smiley says he has found Karla’s weakness, and that’s the fact that he’s a zealot, a true believer. Which raises the question of what Smiley believes in, or if he believes in anything. It’s the great mystery of the character.

Well, he’s become cynical, and the cynicism is there in the writing. I think it’s there in great writing. I think Arthur Miller has it, Tennessee Williams has it. I don’t even think great writers are even conscious of it, but there is that thing: Are we any better than you, when we think about it? Aren’t we really the same? What’s it all about?

Now we’re lucky. We look back at that period and we wonder: Should we have been as paranoid as we were? Perhaps not. What was all that about? But at the time, you know, it all felt very different. It’s an extraordinary piece of writing, a terrific creation. I’m very fortunate to have gotten to play it.

Still, you know what I’m talking about. Generally speaking, in recent years only certain kinds of movies have been serious candidates for the major Oscar categories, and in particular for best picture. While it’s impossible to lay out a precise description, it’s like Justice Stewart’s famous definition of obscenity: You know it when you see it. Earnest, middleweight dramas that teach life lessons and feature major emotional climaxes always leap to the forefront. They should make you laugh before they make you cry, or vice versa. Classic three-act structure; a major star playing slightly against type; at least one odd or gruesome or humorous supporting performance from a name actor. (Notice that I have just precisely described “The Descendants,” a tailor-made Oscar-winner if ever there was one, which for both extrinsic and intrinsic reasons is likely to fall short this year.)

Even Oscar winners that appear to violate some of these rules hew to the overall pattern. “No Country for Old Men” is an open-ended, nihilistic, ’70s-style American drama, but also one that alternates dark and light, features identifiable stars and a classic Western landscape. “The Hurt Locker” has no name actors, but offers an archetypal tale of courage in warfare that straddled the nation’s ideological divide. (It was also the least successful best-picture winner in history.) “Slumdog Millionaire” also had no stars and was set in a foreign country, but was essentially an old-time Hollywood drama filtered through India and then through canny stylemonger Danny Boyle.

I think we all understand that the 6,000-plus voters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are a peculiar and self-selected group, and that they aren’t selecting the winners based on criteria that are important to anyone else. They aren’t picking movies the public likes. Indeed, over the last two decades the Academy’s taste has wandered increasingly far from that of the mass audience. And while artistic merit is an inherently nebulous and subjective concept, I don’t think that’s what they’re using either. Seriously, Academy members — let’s go out for coffee, and then you can sit there and look me in the eye and tell me that “War Horse” or “Midnight in Paris” or “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” (for the love of Jesus!) is a better movie than “Melancholia” or “Take Shelter” or “Coriolanus” or “Drive” or about 30 other things I could come up with.

For that matter — and this one’s just as important — try to convince me that those nominated films are a better example of what Hollywood does best than such big, spectacular and hugely popular films as “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2,” or “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1″ or “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol.” Sorry, but no. The thing is, Oscar voters are picking the movies that make people who work in the film industry feel better about what they do, for reasons that perhaps a highly-paid shrink could puzzle out. When we get involved in obsessive horse-race coverage of the Oscar campaign, we’re using voodoo and amateur psychology and meaningless statistics and other forms of hokum to try to get inside the heads of those 6,000 voters. I say the hell with it.

OK, I don’t quite say the hell with it. I’m as professionally interested in the outcome as anybody else who covers this business for a living, and as my editor recently observed, the Oscars are quite a bit like the Republican presidential contest. Just because the whole thing’s a charade doesn’t mean that nobody cares, or that we can ignore it. But my proposal for an Alternate-Dimension Oscars tries to imagine what the awards might be like if they didn’t disqualify, de facto, almost every kind of movie that people like to watch.

Believe it or not, I’m not envisioning an awards show geared toward the artsy-fartsy films that pointy-headed intellectuals like me tend to favor. If the best-picture race were between “Melancholia” and “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” and Nick Cave were getting ready to rip open that envelope and announce the winner, wouldn’t that have America on the edge of its sofa? Please, no. I think the “Dark Knight” problem is a much bigger one, by which I mean the Academy’s propensity to ignore large-scale, well-crafted, ambitious entertainments — the kind of movies at which Hollywood excels, like it or not — if they seem too violent or too pulpy or too fanboyish or too free of tedious message-delivery.

This isn’t exactly breaking news, but most popular genres of film are de facto ineligible for Oscar consideration: superhero movies, thrillers, crime dramas, romantic comedies and franchise pictures of any kind. On the other side of the coin, despite a recent reputation for indie-ness, the Academy largely steers away from the kinds of serious art-house dramas that play film festivals and keep upscale big-city audiences excited about the possibilities of the form. Instead, the real-life Oscars find themselves hopelessly trapped in the middle, endorsing calculated middlebrow pablum that everybody involved knows is a big pile of unmemorable meh. If the aim of the entire organization and its awards show is to present the best face of the American film industry to the world, then this whole situation is ridiculous and self-destructive.

Hence my proposal for an Alternate Universe Academy Awards, an unholy blend of the MTV Movie Awards and the Indiewire critics’ poll that will get people excited, lead to considerable fighting and weeping, and produce some genuinely unexpected moments on Oscar night. This is my alternate universe, at least for now, so I’m announcing the best-picture nominees. I hope you’ll play along, with your own lists, emendations and angry deletions. In recognition of the fact that there’s at least a little Venn-diagram overlap between my manufactured universe and the real one, I’ve kept the unlikeliest of this year’s Oscar nominees on the list.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 I’m not a big fan of the series, or the books, but that’s not what this is about. A tremendous technical accomplishment and a huge worldwide hit, managed with considerable dramatic chops and without selling out the source material.

The Lincoln Lawyer We can talk about the best-actor category later, where I think Matthew McConaughey’s underappreciated comeback role should be a strong contender. But from its ’70s-style L.A. noir vibe to its combination of sleaze, humor, emotion and violence, “Lincoln Lawyer” was arguably the year’s best Hollywood genre film.

Melancholia No need to repeat all the praise I and other critics have lavished on Lars von Trier’s hybrid of Chekhovian wedding comedy and apocalyptic masterpiece, with terrific performances from Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Cinematic accomplishment of the year.

Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol Tom Cruise back in his borderline creepy, control-freak comfort zone, and a dynamite live-action debut from director Brad Bird added up to an enormous hit and the year’s most satisfying action flick by far.

A Separation Yeah, it’s a real-world nominee in the foreign-language category, but Asghar Farhadi’s continually surprising Iranian domestic drama, with its hidden stories about class conflict and its tense, involving portrait of life inside the Islamic Republic, is the year’s best example of global realism.

Take Shelter For my money this apocalyptic weather thriller — or is it a private tale of madness? — captured the American national mood better than anything else I saw all year, with a shattering lead performance by Michael Shannon and terrific supporting work by Jessica Chastain.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Gary Oldman actually is nominated as best actor for his disturbing, ultra-quiet role as George Smiley, and deservingly so. But Tomas Alfredson’s chilly, modernist period piece is a witty and brilliant reimagining of John le Carré’s most famous spy novel.

The Tree of Life I was as surprised as anybody to see Terrence Malick’s long-brewing history of humanity and the universe on this year’s real-world best-picture list, and I think that’s largely due to the performances by Brad Pitt and Chastain in the more comprehensible Texas-childhood scenes. Given its reputation among critics (not necessarily including me) and Malick’s near-godhead status, it belongs here too.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 Go ahead and laugh, superior-minded Salon readers. Laugh, I tell you! This is a strongly crafted pulp movie, so pretty you want to bite it. Director Bill Condon fully satisfied the worldwide Twihard base while also hinting at some of the genuine perversity that underlies the saga. I won’t indulge my Twilight-vs.-Harry Potter riff right now, except to restate my view that the best of the former (this one) is probably superior to the worst of the latter.

Well, I’m here to tell you that the niche for “Chico & Rita” includes you, if you are interested in music or art or movies or love. Or, for that matter, in Havana or New York or Las Vegas or Hollywood or Paris, the cities captured with such verve, passion and style by Javier Mariscal, the well-known Spanish designer and artist who crafted this film’s visual universe. (Mariscal and Trueba co-directed “Chico & Rita” with Tono Errando, who is Mariscal’s brother.) Balancing the tropical primary colors of pre-revolutionary Cuba with a wintry, neon-flavored vision of bebop-era Manhattan, “Chico & Rita” is an ecstatic musical and visual celebration, taking its cues from Gauguin and Picasso in one direction, from Dizzy Gillespie and Tito Puente in another.

I should tell you straight out that “Chico & Rita” isn’t for kids, unless your kid is a sophisticated character who has the birds-&-bees stuff down, and a worldly view of human passions to boot. That’s almost too bad, because there’s so much 20th-century cultural history, and so much pure delight, packed into this 94-minute package. But this is an animated movie that features abundant nudity, sex, betrayal, moral cowardice and heartbreak, along with a supremely romantic conclusion that left me weeping in the dark. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t alone, because the press screening I attended broke into spontaneous applause during the closing credits (and that pretty much never happens).

There’s another creator of “Chico & Rita” who’s just as important as the three directors, and that’s Cuban pianist and bandleader Bebo Valdés, a major figure in Cuban pop and Latin jazz whose career was recently revived after a long exile from both music and his homeland. (His son, pianist Chucho Valdés, is arguably even more famous.) Still vigorous and still working at age 93, Valdés has composed and arranged a dynamic soundtrack that embraces the rhythmic Cuban pop music of his youth — especially the mambo and the batanga, which was his invention — and also the extraordinary moment of fusion when Afro-Cuban music entered the New York-centric, African-American world of jazz.

Valdés has made two previous films with Fernando Trueba, the Latin jazz documentary “Calle 54″ and the concert film “Blanco y Negro,” which captured Valdés’ collaboration with flamenco singer Diego El Cigala. It’s reasonable to assume that the character of Chico (voiced by Eman Xor Oña), whom we first meet as an elderly Havana shoeshine man who hasn’t played piano for years, is drawn from his biography. (Valdés has actually lived in Europe since the early ’60s, but only resumed his musical career in 1994.) From there we leap back to the late ’40s, when Chico is a brash and handsome young piano player from the hinterlands who arrives in Havana planning to set the town on fire. When Chico and his best friend Ramón (Mario Guerra) first lay eyes on fast-rising singer Rita (voiced by Limara Meneses) they understand right away that she’s the musical talent, as well as the eye candy, that they need to strike it rich. Chico is obviously smitten on a more personal level as well, but Rita — a city girl used to, um, “dating” visiting Yanks –wants nothing to do with this small-town hick. Until she hears him play.

Chico’s piano playing is handled by Valdés, of course, and Rita’s singing is done by the marvelous Cuban singer Idania Valdés (no relation, I believe), who turns the schmaltzy Mexican pop hit “Bésame mucho” into a smoldering torch song. Bebo Valdés really was the house bandleader at Havana’s swanky Tropicana Club during the years before the Cuban revolution, and I think we can assume that the wide open, musically fertile and almost Darwinian atmosphere captured in the film is true to life. The night when Chico and Rita become lovers is one of the steamiest, and most romantic, sequences in the history of animated cinema, and the pain of young love improperly nurtured is acute.

If the screenplay by Trueba and Ignacio Martínez de Pisón follows a familiar “Star Is Born” trajectory — boy gets girl, boy loses girl; their careers take off in different directions yet we know they will meet again — the images are so inventive and the music so magical that it all feels new. You certainly don’t have to be a jazz aficionado to appreciate “Chico & Rita,” but fans will find treasures inside treasures here: Jimmy Heath playing tenor sax “as” Ben Webster, Michael Philip Mossman playing Dizzy Gillespie, Germán Velazco playing Charlie Parker, Amadito Valdés as Tito Puente and Freddy Cole impersonating his far more famous brother, Nat.

Lured by the almighty Yankee dollar, and by the musical revolution known as bebop, Chico, Rita and Ramón all make their way from the vibrant, horizontal warmth of Havana to the forbidding, vertical and almost monochromatic landscape of New York. As famed percussionist Chano Pozo — whose recordings with Gillespie launched the Latin-jazz fusion — warns them, Cubans in New York faced a double whammy, being both blacks and Spanish-speaking immigrants. There were other hazards too; Pozo himself died in a Harlem bar fight in 1948, supposedly after buying a bag of low-grade marijuana from his assailant.

While Chico becomes a prominent pianist on the jazz circuit, Rita becomes something much bigger and less stable — a celebrity, a Latin bombshell packaged to the public as a star of Broadway and Hollywood and Vegas showrooms. (Like Sammy Davis Jr. and Harry Belafonte and other black stars of the period, Rita discovers that she can perform at the big Las Vegas hotels, but can’t stay in them.) How long can a black girl from Havana keep on driving pink Cadillacs and dating rich white guys? And when fate throws Chico and Rita back together, and they set a date for a Vegas wedding, why doesn’t he show up?

I don’t think Rita is based on any one real-life figure; it’s true that Valdés spent several years as pianist and arranger for Tropicana headliner Rita Montaner, but she was almost 20 years older than him, and died in 1958. Valdés emigrated from Cuba in 1960 along with singer Rolando La Serie, his friend and frequent collaborator, and married a Swedish woman after moving to Stockholm. Arguably the film’s Rita is a fantasy woman, but it’s a fantasy of the best and most beautiful kind, infused with the passion and tragedy of the Cuban experience. “Chico & Rita” is a big and glorious love story, with only a few glancing allusions to politics. But along the way it argues that Cubans have given the world — and American culture — so much, and have only suffered for it. Isn’t it long past time for Americans to end our bizarre policy toward that beautiful island?

“Chico & Rita” opens this week at the Angelika Film Center in New York, with wider national release to follow.

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.