This is very elegant advertising for a movie about grief that, if Ford had chosen a different star, might also feel like advertising. Ford has worked as an art director and a fashion designer (for the houses of Yves Saint Laurent and Gucci), and in those fields, his aesthetic sense has proved to be extremely well-turned. But as a piece of moviemaking “A Single Man” — based on the 1964 Christopher Isherwood novel in which a middle-aged literature professor mourns the death of his lover — is static and sterile. Ford knows something about composition and lighting, perhaps a bit too much. If it weren’t for Firth, its star, “A Single Man” wouldn’t amount to much more than a series of meticulously art-directed stills, less a movie than a lavish 10-page promotional insert in Vogue.

But Firth is the great disruption in Ford’s design scheme; he brings a distinctly human touch that nudges the movie over the line from window dressing to drama. Firth’s George isn’t a flashy mourner. There are no histrionics here, no melodramatic breakdowns. Instead Firth does something much more difficult: He limns the negative space of grief, giving it a distinctive shape and heft. Early in the movie, he learns of the death of his lover, Jim (Matthew Goode), via a telephone call. He’s also informed — with as much kindness as the caller can muster — that he isn’t welcome at the funeral; Jim’s family doesn’t wish to acknowledge him. (The movie, like the book it’s based on, is set in 1962 Southern California.)

As George processes the information, there’s no immediately visible change in his expression; if his eyes show a flicker of sadness, it’s hardly detectable. Firth pulls off one of the most difficult feats for an actor, drawing his character’s feelings to the surface in increments you could measure in microns. That is to say, he shows emotion without expressing it.

Firth’s supple sense of reserve is one of the more delicate aspects of the picture: Even in the early part of the 21st century, when we’ve all come to recognize that it’s OK for a man to cry, there is still something deeply moving about a man who won’t, or can’t. And throughout the movie, Firth builds upon that unwillingness to show emotion, which is itself deeply emotional. It’s not that George wears his sorrow as a badge of traditional manhood; instead, it’s something that’s taken root deep inside him — it’s become a component of his lifeblood, and of his sexuality. When he flirts with one of his young students (Nicholas Hoult), a last-ditch effort to extract some joy out of life, the undertow of his grief pulls him back. But his anguish also seems to give him a sense of belonging to something greater — perhaps more a sense of belonging than a middle-class, middle-aged gay man in early-1960s Southern California, living among neighbors whose identities are locked up in the mom-dad-kids equation, would be likely to feel in everyday life.

Ford’s filmmaking is pretty to look at, but it’s cold. It’s Firth who radiates all the warmth here, and his performance is all the more remarkable for the way he wraps that warmth inside his dignified reserve, like a protective blanket. He flirts mildly with his best friend, Charley (Julianne Moore), a woman who knows him almost better than anybody else does and who hints that she’d like their relationship to work in the “conventional” way. He humors her, to a point. But his frustration with her ignites into a flash fire when she hints that his relationship with Jim was somehow less meaningful, less real, than a heterosexual relationship would be. It’s one of the few moments in “A Single Man” when Firth’s George loses his cool, albeit in a characteristically restrained way.

And let’s not forget the look of him: Ford, whatever his faults as a filmmaker may be, sure knows how to dress a guy, and Firth slips into George’s dapper-academic wardrobe with ease. We see him in trimly tailored suits, with those narrow, slightly too short (by today’s standards) pants and vaguely boxy jackets. The look is modern but not yet mod: In a few short years, free love — not to mention Stonewall — will change everything, particularly for men and women who are younger than George is. But for this moment Firth’s George, in his grief, has everything and nothing. He is, as Elvis Costello once sang, a man out of time, and Firth makes that painful nowheresville feel desperately real.

But of the two most attention-grabbing performances in “Precious,” the one that goes deeper, and ultimately has more resonance, is Gabourey Sidibe’s turn as Precious, the Harlem teenager whose life is essentially a catalog of the horrors that can befall a young black woman in the inner city.

Precious’ life seems hopeless, but she’s saved by a few people who refuse to let her fall through the cracks in the system, among them a teacher named Blu Rain (Paula Patton) and a tough-cookie social worker, Mrs. Weiss, played, superbly, by Mariah Carey. As directed by Lee Daniels, the picture unfolds like a comprehensive brief on the worst horrors that might befall black Americans, and while moviegoers have largely embraced it as an inspirational, if calculated, story, the film has also been criticized (by New York Press film critic Armond White, among others) for fostering the misguided idea that these problems are typical of black America. The fear, as voiced by some of the movie’s detractors, is that it only reinforces clueless white people’s ideas about how “typical” African-Americans in this country think, live and behave.

They have a point. “Precious” does come off more as a clinical, exaggerated case study rather than as a nuanced drama; Daniels has no qualms about turning Precious into a symbolic victim. But I do think Sidibe’s face counteracts much of the film’s aggressive calculation: She plays Precious as a guileless but watchful presence, a girl who’s afraid to let the world in but who also can’t resist reaching out to be a part of that world.

This is Sidibe’s first film role. Her previous acting experience had included some college theater, but she’d had no formal training. She met the film’s casting directors when she attended an open call. And while it’s hard to speculate about what kind of future she might have as an actress, her instincts in “Precious” are good ones. Scene after scene, she underperforms instead of pushing this adamantly melodramatic material even further over the top.

Sidibe’s face is closed off for a good half of the movie — she’s almost impossible to read. We learn much of what she’s feeling through voice-overs (a technique that’s wearyingly overused these days, although that’s certainly not Sidibe’s fault). As she ponders the possibility that she might be able to change her life for the better, we hear her explain in voice-over, “I’m lookin’ up — I’m lookin’ for a piano to fall! Desk, couch, TV, Mama maybe — always something in my way.” Sidibe manages to make that forced street-poetry dialogue sound relaxed and natural. She laughs a little in the middle of it, as if tickled by her own capacity for dark humor, her own ability to extend a metaphor. (She knows what a metaphor is, even though she doesn’t know she knows.)

As the movie opens, Daniels clues us in to Precious’ painful past — and sets the stage for her not-much-happier present — by showing, in flashback, how her father raped her. She escapes the horror by drifting into daydreams of stardom and fame — fame for doing what, she has no idea. But she can picture herself flouncing around for the paparazzis’ cameras, dressed in red satin and feathers, and she escapes from her pain by temporarily Photoshopping herself into that vision of glamour. (She also, highly improbably, imagines herself and her mother as characters from Vittoria De Sica’s “Two Women.”) No wonder Precious is closed down, shut off. And later in the movie, when we see her looking more relaxed and happy — joking with the friends who have come to see her in the hospital after the birth of her second child, or flirting shyly with Lenny Kravitz’s Nurse John — her smile is still a little reluctant, a sun that’s afraid to come out from behind its cloud.

Sidibe’s reticence — her recognition that Precious may never feel comfortable with all-out happiness — is part of what makes the performance so touching. Monologues are often the thing that net awards for actors, even though they’re never the best test of an actor’s skill, chiefly because they involve talking rather than listening. And in “Precious,” Mo’Nique is the one who gets the movie’s big, show-stopping monologue. But Sidibe, who is far less experienced as a performer, holds her own in “Precious.” She’s a receptive presence but not a passive one, playing a character who can’t hide from the horrors swirling around her, but who also has to fight to keep from getting swept away by them. The cautious hope that steals across Sidibe’s face is the best thing about “Precious.” Her performance is more about listening than it is about talking, a part of the job that more experienced actors often forget.

“Up in the Air” — which was adapted, loosely, from Walter Kirn’s novel of the same name — is a cannily crafted picture about the dangers of soullessness. Like the line of goods its lead character, Clooney’s Ryan Bingham, is paid to sell, it is itself a kind of glib sales campaign. Ryan is hired by big companies to do the dirty work of firing employees. His spiel involves dropping the bad news and then reassuring the newly jobless that this is really the first day of the rest of their lives: They are in fact lucky that the organization to which they’ve been so loyal is giving them the gate. Ryan doesn’t have any qualms about the ruthlessness of his job because he has so few attachments himself: He’s only marginally in touch with his family (including his sweet, about-to-be-married sister, played by Melanie Lynskey), and he wouldn’t dream of having a regular girlfriend. And so when he meets satiny-smooth fellow business traveler Alex (Vera Farmiga), who’s great in the sack and has no interest in long-term commitment, he thinks he’s struck gold — until he decides that maybe he really does want more.

I find “Up in the Air” distasteful: To me, the movie’s ending, which features nonactors providing testimonies about how losing their jobs changed their lives for the better, actually reinforces the corporate-speak bullshit Ryan Bingham is paid to sling, instead of contradicting it. Even so, I found that Clooney’s performance went down like a shot of bourbon after a hard day on the road — it’s just the slippery-smooth performance a movie this facile demands. For much of the movie, Clooney is Danny Ocean, selling a line of goods that smells a lot like charm. That’s something Clooney is extraordinarily good at, perhaps too good.

Clooney does everything right here: He’s suitably swoony as he first falls under Alex’s spell. And in his finest moment, when he realizes Alex isn’t the person she’s so aggressively advertised herself to be, the look in his eyes can only be described as a kind of bereavement. The romantic dream he’s barely had time to nurture has just been killed off in him, and the pain of letting it go seems unbearable.

But most of what Clooney does in “Up in the Air” is exactly what we’d expect him to do. There are no real surprises wrapped up in this performance, though Clooney certainly delivers the base level of actorish likability that we’ve come to expect from him: Awarding him the Oscar would be like giving him a bonus for his efficiency.

Clooney was far more soulful and complex in “Michael Clayton.” That role demanded more, and drew more, from him; it was one of the great performances of 2007. And even though we can’t see his face in “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” I find that performance far more vivid than anything Clooney does in “Up in the Air.” When he and Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep, in another fine “invisible” performance) argue bitterly over a matter not just of love but of life and death, she corners him, and he concedes: “I’m a wild animal.”

There’s real remorse in the way Clooney offers that line: It’s not just an excuse for bad behavior, but a painful admission of self-doubt, possibly self-loathing. I recently found some blathery chatter online about how providing a voice for an animated character is inherently less significant than a live-action performance because it requires less from an actor in physical terms. But that logic demands that we grade a performance according to how much toil and suffering went into it — how much time an actor spent perfecting an accent, or how much weight he or she gained (or lost) to play a character — instead of assessing how deeply the performance affected us. Clooney may have worked hard in “Up in the Air,” but the seemingly casual savoir faire of “Fantastic Mr. Fox” burrows much deeper, and is much harder to pull off. Lending your voice to a puppet demands humility. Clooney surrenders himself to an armature of wire and fake fur, and still finds the truth of the character. That’s what you call acting; everything else is just salesmanship.

I’ve watched “The Last Station” twice, the first time as part of a rushed, drive-by flurry of pre-Christmas viewing, the second in a more leisurely capacity, to focus specifically on Mirren’s performance. The picture hasn’t much grown on me, I’m afraid: It could be that in trying to keep this period piece lively and modern, Hoffman (“Restoration,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) instead nudges it too far into slapstick territory. Its notes of gaiety feel forced, its moments of sorrow even more so.

But my second viewing did make me realize that Mirren’s performance is more slippery and more complex than I’d originally thought it to be. Mirren just is, and always will be, a sexy actress. Although an individual guy will often claim to be attracted to a certain type — one may like brunettes, another blondes; some like ‘em skinny, others prefer more ballast — I have never met a straight man who didn’t find Mirren hopelessly sexy. (I’m sure there’s someone out there, but I have yet to meet him personally.) Mirren’s role in “The Last Station” is, on the surface, about as unsexy as it gets: Her wardrobe consists largely of high-necked lace-trim blouses; she’s often swaddled in cozy but nondescript shawls, the Russian turn-of-the-century equivalent of Eileen Fisher; and her demeanor, as a demanding, difficult wife, is often hard to take, and not just for us, the audience. Paul Giamatti’s Vladimir Chertkov, the rather conniving Tolstoy disciple who’s doing his damnedest to get that new will into action, hurls these words at her in a fit of frustration, loathing and barely disguised misogyny: “If I had a wife like you, I would have blown my brains out. Or gone to America.”

We can see why he feels that way. At times Sofya surveys her husband — Plummer plays him as a still-sharp but somewhat doddering presence — with suspicious feline eyes. She’s driven by practicality; she knows she has to look out for her own best interests and those of her family. But there are times you wonder if she isn’t somewhat motivated by greed as well. Mirren vests the character with unrepentant haughtiness: Sofya carries herself like a princess, with the attendant expectation that she naturally ought to be treated like one. Her movements are precise and businesslike; she has the resolute, straight-backed gait of a once-great beauty who has had to adjust, graciously if reluctantly, to the realities of aging.

Sofya simpers and coaxes, complains and cajoles. She drives her husband nearly to madness. And then, just when you think you, let alone he, can’t possibly take any more nonsense from this infuriatingly high-strung creature, Sofya turns kittenishly tender. And that’s the secret power, the double whammy, of Mirren’s performance here. Her Sofya is a manipulator all right: We can see how sometimes she might act perplexed and fragile as a means of getting her way. But Mirren shows her character from both sides of that mirror: At times Sofya really is confused and vulnerable, and with just a coquettish glance or a hint of a weary smile, Mirren somehow defines the difference between the reality and the manipulation — or, more accurately, shows how they blur into a maddeningly human whole.

There are places where the performances in “The Last Station” — even Mirren’s — feel oversized in a faux-Russian way, the acting equivalent of a cartoonishly furry Cossack hat. (Plummer is a consistently fine actor who at last has his own supporting-actor Academy Award nomination for his role in this movie. It’s a perfectly adequate performance, but not nearly as stunning as the one he gave in, say, Michael Mann’s “The Insider.”) But Mirren is always pleasurable to watch, and though this role perhaps qualifies as one of her more stately roles (à la her Oscar-winning turn in “The Queen”), as opposed to a sexy one (this is no “Calendar Girls”), it does offer a sense of her complexity and her range. When Sofya, hoping to coax her grumpy, frowning husband into bed, reaches out to him from amid the bedclothes, the curve of her bare arms suggest the freshness of a young ballerina. “I’m still your little chicken!” she implores, momentarily shrinking the distance between the eagerness of young love and the resigned negligence that aged couples too often settle into. And in that moment Mirren, who is 64, is a sex symbol once again.

After you’ve played God — twice, as Freeman has done in Tom Shadyac’s “Bruce Almighty” and “Evan Almighty” — and been God, there’s not really much left to do, except play Nelson Mandela. Which is what Freeman does in Clint Eastwood’s “Invictus,” in a performance that starts out plodding and ends up sly. “Invictus” tells the story of how Mandela, after being elected president of South Africa (following a 27-year prison stint), decided to try to unify his deeply damaged country by getting all its citizens — black and white — to rally behind the national rugby team, the Springboks. The country’s black population, the majority, sees the Springboks as a relic of apartheid; the National Sports Council even thinks it might be time to abolish the team. But Mandela, recognizing that you can’t change a country’s future by erasing its past, instead opts to change the nearly all-white team’s image in an effort to get the whole country behind it. To that end, he enlists the help of the team’s captain, François Pienaar (Matt Damon), who accepts his mission with earnest enthusiasm. Among other things, Pienaar gets the team — grumbling at first — out to play ball with the black kids who live in the townships. In the end, it’s not just the team’s image that changes, but the team itself, and as the nation responds in kind, Freeman’s Mandela — seeing that his nonstrategic strategy has worked — loosens up himself. Freeman’s performance actually becomes smaller — more pointed and more focused — instead of bigger, the idea being, perhaps, that this is a man who recognizes that great strides comprise many small steps.

Mandela, who served as South Africa’s president until 1999, is one of the most charismatic and respected modern-day world leaders, the kind of figure plenty of actors would love the chance to play. That’s where the danger lies: It’s easier to play greatness than it is to play a human being, and Freeman, at first, seems to have stepped right into that trap. It doesn’t help that Eastwood, not a particularly subtle director to begin with, can’t seem to forget he’s making a worthy tale of renewal and hope with a massively significant world figure at its center, instead of just telling a good story. The movie’s first third is stiff and dull.

And through that section, so is Freeman. He speaks slowly and solemnly; his brow is furrowed with worry befitting a man who’s just become the leader of a historically troubled nation. It’s not that this isn’t a realistic or believable approximation of Mandela himself; impersonation alone doesn’t make a good performance. A performer has to cut to something deeper.

And eventually, Freeman reaches that something deeper, not by clamping down on the performance, but by loosening his grip on it. Performances are shaped just as narratives are; although scenes aren’t shot in the order in which we see them in a finished movie, a performer still has to bring his character from point A to point B (even if the “point B” scenes are the ones being shot first). What Freeman injects into the second half of “Invictus” is a sense of mischievousness and curiosity: Suddenly, instead of just seeing Nelson Mandela as a great man, we get an idea of how a guy could survive 27 years of unjust imprisonment and, instead of becoming embittered and broken, emerge with a better sense of what makes human beings tick. He has a sense of humor as well as sense of responsibility. At one point we see him learning the names of all the Springboks so he can greet them as if he’s been familiar with them all along — that’s a diplomatic necessity, not a nicety. But when Mandela actually meets the men on the team, he has a little joke or an unspoken moment of connection with each of them. Maybe what Freeman is channeling here is simply the fact that Mandela has the common touch, the ability to make the person he’s speaking to feel like the only one in the room. But Freeman gets the idea across by playing a moment, as opposed to displaying a characteristic. As he chats with those guys — whose life experience couldn’t be further from his own — we see pleasure and duty merge. His smile is cautious but impish. He’s a fan talking to a bunch of sports stars, not a deeply respected world leader.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment in “Invictus” when Freeman lets go of playing qualities — dignity, affability, fortitude — and starts playing a person. When he invites Pienaar to tea — it’s their first meeting — he breaks his conversation to greet the older white woman who arrives with the tea tray. “Mrs. Bliss!” he says, in that rolling, velvety voice, “You’re a shining light in my day.” He then introduces her to the rugby star, because she, also, is a person who matters. Bringing that idea home is just one of the many little triumphs Freeman pulls off in “Invictus,” making it a performance of casual warmth instead of a treatise on the idea of greatness.