Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols, 2011)

Take Shelter is not merely a gripping psychological thriller about whether a man is losing his grip on reality or his hallucinatory visions are omens. It is also a tragic portrait of that man's response to his affliction and his desire to protect his family, even if from himself. Jeff Nichols, whose debut, Shotgun Stories, displayed the clear influence of early David Gordon Green and William Faulkner, pushes deeper into that territory. He mixes naturalism with dark poetry, creating fractured views of people trying to overcome the conditioning of grim pasts and never truly succeeding.

Shotgun Stories also offered a breakthrough performance for its star, Michael Shannon, who consolidated 15 years' worth of character performances—typically as a man always on the tipping point of civility, even sanity—as the embittered son locked in a feud with his abdicated father's second family. The work Shannon does here makes that role look like a mere primer. Shannon, a character actor who has found himself in demand for a range of high-profile projects (see him now as a main cast member on Boardwalk Empire), found his first plateau with Nichols. Now he has reached the second. Even if the film around him were mediocre, Take Shelter would be worth the price of admission.

The Help (Tate Taylor, 2011)

The Help takes the obliviousness of Kathryn Stockett's 2009 hit novel and magnifies it to the level of the dangerously ignorant. The novel at least had the decency to include a modicum of ambiguity and the suggestion that Stockett could vaguely remember some of her 3rd-grade social studies lessons on the Civil Rights Era. The film, on the other hand, is erected out of pure fantasy, set in a plastic, pastel Jackson, Miss. that has all the authenticity of Lars von Trier's Dogville set. Stockett's novel dropped whiffs of the true reality of 1960s Jackson among her dialect-ridden, charmed view of social prejudice like talismans to ward off criticism, but childhood friend Tate Taylor has to condense 500 pages into two-and-a-half hours. Given the paper-thin characterization of the novel's figures, this means that the obliterated subplots and truncated, blunt dialogue serve to make the material even more farcical.

In fairness, Taylor does try to refashion Stockett's book around the African-American characters instead of a white guilt cipher. But this idea goes no farther than letting Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis), a maid who becomes the first to tell her stories of life serving whites, narrate the movie. Soon enough, focus is back on Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan (Emma Stone), a recent college grad and sort-of feminist who, despite no clear identity before leaving for school and a blindness to current events (at least in the book), decides to get the black perspective of Jackson life. In the novel, Skeeter is almost jaw-droppingly entitled and never criticized for it. Here, Taylor dispenses with nearly all of her story, which would be a significant improvement if he also cut down her screen time to match. But no, regardless of who had to go in to record ADR, this is still Skeeter's story.

The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)

[Edited 12/28/11]

"God is closer to me than others of my art."

-Ludwig van Beethoven

In 1733, Johann Sebastian Bach, born and raised a Lutheran, premiered two pieces of what would become his Mass in B minor, which he spent the remaining years of his life expanding and honing until the liturgy used for both major Christian denominations became a full-blown Roman Catholic Mass. Composed in chunks up to his final years, his Missa is disjunctive, consisting of clashing textures reflecting both the different kinds of inspiration that drove him in each writing block as well as the altered emotional state of the composer as he drifted into blindness and illness. Yet the result is one of the undisputed masterpieces of Western classical music, the apotheosis of nearly every musical style of its time in one grand, summarizing statement.

Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life may be the closest the cinema has to its own Mass in B minor: it's gargantuan, encompassing, messy and bold. It's also exquisitely beautiful and personal on a level seemingly impossible for something that feels so vast. Bach spent about two decades tweaking and expanding his mass; Malick has been collecting ideas and images for this for 30 years, and the inspirations behind it likely stretch back even further. The Missa comprises movements under four distinct sections, and The Tree of Life incorporates the themes and styles of the director's four previous features into a film that feels infinite and minute, unwieldy yet perversely whole.