In the rush of LAFCA end-of-the-year voting and holiday merriment, I never got around to publishing my thoughts on several recent films. So, consider this a guide to your New Year’s weekend moviegoing options. See you back here in 2010.

The Lovely Bones (Paramount/Dreamworks)

If I can help it, I don’t read the book before I see the film. The movie’s the movie, the book’s the book, and they ought to be their own separate worlds. But curiosity at the time led me to pick up Alice Sebold’s 2002 novel about the murder of a teenage girl in the 1970s and the slow-motion havoc that roils her family in the ensuing years. It’s been quite a while since I read the book, but when I watched Peter Jackson’s adaptation, it all came back to me – much to the detriment of the film.

It’s 1973, and Susie (Saoirse Ronan) is living with her parents (Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz) and younger siblings in suburban Pennsylvania. As the film begins, Susie is narrating from the future – she’s already been murdered and is looking back at her time among the living. We watch her interactions with her family, the boy she likes at school (Reece Ritchie), and the neighbor (Stanley Tucci) who will kill her. As in the book, The Lovely Bones introduces Susie’s murder very early on in the story, and the film proceeds from there to show her adjustment to the fantastical purgatory plane she must inhabit before ascending to Heaven. Simultaneously, the film depicts her family trying to cope with her death and find the killer.

As I now recall, Sebold’s book was about two tragedies – the first, and obvious, one was the teenager’s murder, but the second, and in some ways the more painful, was her family’s self-destruction in the face of their anger and grief. I remember this because that second tragedy is badly truncated in Jackson’s film, and as a result the movie is a terrible muddle. Jackson is superb when he sets up Susie’s world – she and her family feel believable, and he doesn’t fuss over the ‘70s details – but once she’s killed, just about nothing works well afterward. Specifically, the chasm that develops between Wahlberg and Weisz seems to happen off-screen, and Susan Sarandon’s boozy grandmother never transcends “boozy grandmother” clichés. Perhaps most critically, Sebold’s ability to show how the cruel march of time plays tricks on grieving is largely absent from Jackson’s version. (This is the sort of movie where one character tells another that it’s been six months since an earlier event occurred, and it only feels like it’s been two minutes.) Sebold’s book is far from perfect, but its timeliness in the wake of 9/11 made its themes of murder, forgiveness and acceptance resonate in a way that maybe they wouldn’t now. Or maybe that’s just the way I feel after seeing Jackson’s mediocre film.

Invictus (Warner Bros.)

As his late-career comeback rolls along, director Clint Eastwood continues to divide people, especially people like me. Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters From Iwo Jima, and Changeling are films any director would be proud to have made, and if some of them are more than a touch overrated, none of them are terrible. Well, that is except for Gran Torino, his weakest during this stretch, recycling his last-man-standing shtick that worked better with Unforgiven. Not that most people cared – it turned out to be his most commercially successful of his recent period.

So where does Invictus fit in among this group of films? Probably near the top, although it, too, has all the trademark Eastwood limitations. Too literal, too sincere, but still intensely effective, Invictus recounts the story of how the recently freed Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) became president of South Africa and helped inspire national pride in a divided, post-apartheid land by encouraging the country’s rugby team (captained by Matt Damon) to win the 1995 World Cup.

Though Eastwood can be faulted for how he underlines his movies’ messages, you have to admire Invictus for the times that it doesn’t. Clearly, Freeman’s charismatic, thoughtful performance is meant to echo President Obama’s inspiring, hopeful persona, but I was glad Eastwood didn’t waste a lot of time spelling out those parallels. And I can’t say the film’s feel-good tone didn’t work on me – driving home after the movie, I found myself bubble up with excitement for the 2010 Soccer World Cup and America’s prospects in the tournament. These aren’t things that usually occupy my mind, so I think Eastwood deserves the credit for rousing such sentiments in me.

Ultimately, Invictus is a showcase of basic human decency. I’ve already heard enough about the real-life individuals portrayed in the film to know that there’s the usual amount of creative license taken, but Freeman and Damon both do a superb job of making honorable behavior seem heroic. In some ways, Freeman is just doing his noble-voice-of-gravitas routine, but his Mandela is also very likeable and personable without making it seem like an act. And I think that’s another thing Invictus gets right – it understands that even charismatic politicians are still politicians, and the movie is at its best when it shows how Mandela knew how to work the angles while remaining high-minded. As for Damon, the range between this film and The Informant! is impressive – this year, he's capably played both a quiet, confident leader and a deranged, inveterate liar. Eastwood’s austere direction is always this close to tumbling into dullness, but he’s got two strong leads to keep Invictus alert and alive.

A Single Man (The Weinstein Company)

This time of year, we tend to get a film or two that’s less of a full cinematic experience than it is just a platform for a very good performance. The best of the bunch from this Oscar season is A Single Man, director Tom Ford’s adaptation of the Christopher Isherwood novel.

A Single Man introduces us to George (Colin Firth), a literature professor living in Los Angeles in the early ‘60s. His buttoned-down life has been irreversibly destroyed after the death of his partner Jim (Matthew Goode), but he’s trying his best to stumble through his days without revealing his grieving heart. But his pain is almost over – he’s already made secret plans to kill himself at the end of the day.

Since this is more of an actor’s showcase, A Single Man doesn’t tell a story so much as it creates a mood and lets Firth dominate its center. Usually, that approach eventually runs out of steam for me – I love spending my time in the company of an interesting person, but I like a little forward momentum, too. But while A Single Man sputters a bit before its nicely-turned ending, Firth embodies the movie’s themes so completely that the story’s internal combustion engine consists of simply watching George’s seemingly unalterable path toward suicide. (In this way, A Single Man resembles Leaving Las Vegas, another film about unfathomable hopelessness.)

By trade, Ford is a fashion designer, so naturally his directorial debut has been knocked for its glossy-magazine aesthetic, but I think that criticism misses part of what he’s after with this approach. Unlike few films I’ve seen, A Single Man excellently visualizes what depression feels like – the glittering, sun-soaked Los Angeles around George is so gorgeous, and yet he is so sad and so lost that the beauty around him seems almost tragic. In a recent interview, Firth said this about the character he plays: “I really like George. I haven’t been able to shake him. I keep thinking he’s out here in the world, for real. I’m hoping I run into him.” It’s funny – that’s the way I think about him, too. Beyond being a story “about” homosexuality or grief, A Single Man is about we all live with the regrets that drag down the corners of our day. The movie spends a lot of time dealing with death, so naturally it’s actually a movie about being alive. In our darkest hours, we could do a lot worse than to conduct ourselves like George ultimately does.

The Blind Side (Warner Bros.)

There’s no reason to pile on to this movie, which has received a lot of vitriol in certain quarters – and rightfully so. But I’ll simply say that I wouldn’t have minded The Blind Side if it was just a fantasyland Hollywood fable or just a tough-minded look at inner-city crime and poverty – the problem is that it tries to be both. Writer-director John Lee Hancock (working from the book by Michael Lewis) wants to say something meaningful about racism, but he can’t even get the football parts of his film right. (His staging of game action won’t feel credible to anyone who wastes his Saturdays or Sundays watching the sport.) And although it’s lazy critical shorthand to accuse the film of being yet another example of a noble white person saving the poor, oppressed black person, well, that is what it is – Sandra Bullock is appropriately spunky, but The Blind Side makes it clear that she doesn’t have to really change as a character since all her high-society friends are the real racists. And as for the scenes involving Quinton Aaron’s “gritty” home life on the bad side of the tracks, ugh. For the people who are legitimately inspired by this story, I don’t mean to be an obnoxious grinch about it. But when I want a sports film that’s honest about the intersection of athletic ability and economic/racial disparity, I’ll stick with Hoop Dreams.

The Headless Woman (Strand Releasing, DVD)

Lucrecia Martel’s films make me sleepy, which is not to say they’re boring. Rather, their elliptical, humid atmosphere lends a drowsy, almost surreal quality to the proceedings. The Headless Woman is her best work, partly because it contains her most accessible plotline, which helps give her smoky musings real urgency. Maria Onetto plays Veronica, a middle-aged woman who hits a dog (and maybe a boy as well?) with her car and spends the rest of the film piecing together what happened while seeing her world through new eyes (perhaps because of a head injury?). Martel has always been interested in the class structure of her native Argentina, but what resonates stronger in her films is their sticky, casual sensuality. (There’s something sexily inappropriate about her characters’ lazy, carnal relationship with one another.) That quality makes Martel’s films feel frank and realistic in a way other people’s films don’t, and since she doesn’t shape The Headless Woman like a traditional getting-away-with-the-crime drama, her sharp observations on aging, femininity and guilt need to captivate the audience in lieu of standard thriller conventions. I think that Martel’s at-a-distance style still has its limitations, but even if I was never fully captivated by Veronica’s existential journey, I was happy to get lost in it for the length of the film’s running time.