Where last weekend was a creative wasteland for filmgoers – Valentine’s Day and The Wolfman were both terrible – you have much better options this time around. I’ve reviewed the terrific Shutter Island elsewhere, but in my latest Consumables column I want to focus on the other great movie of the weekend: The Ghost Writer.

The Ghost Writer (Summit)

Ever since Roman Polanski beat out Martin Scorsese for Best Director that fateful night at the Oscars March 23, 2003, it’s seemed as if the two directors’ careers have been mirror images of one another’s. So it’s probably fitting that both men have new movies out this weekend – and that they so perfectly complement each other.

But before I get into that, here’s a quick overview of The Ghost Writer’s plot: Ewan McGregor plays a professional ghost writer who’s been hired to clean up the cluttered memoir of Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), the former British prime minister. Traveling to a protected compound on the East Coast to work with Lang on the book, the writer begins to suspect that the memoir’s former ghost writer, who apparently killed himself, might have uncovered something sinister in Lang’s background.

Like Scorsese’s Shutter Island, Polanski’s The Ghost Writer is an adaptation of a suspense novel, and both filmmakers seem perfectly content to deliver movie-movies of a very high caliber. Naturally, because these are esteemed titans of cinema, some will complain that they shouldn’t be dabbling in B-movies. But once Scorsese decided to give up on his need to make “prestige” pictures – like his Gangs of New York, which lost to Polanski’s The Pianist for the Best Director prize – he settled into some of the most vital work of his later years: The Departed, Shine a Light and now Shutter’s Island. The irony that The Departed ended up winning Scorsese his Oscar is not lost on me, but I think it’s one of those cases when the Academy decided to honor the year’s most freakishly entertaining movie rather than the most “important.”

In the same way, Polanski’s The Ghost Writer is a welcome corrective to The Pianist’s sometimes-suffocating sense of significance – every film the man has made since his legal/moral problems of the 1970s will always be examined through that lens, but his new film’s utter lack of deeper meaning is one of its great strengths. There’s always a risk when a renowned director decides to make “just” a B-movie – if the filmmaker betrays any sense of smug superiority about the source material, you’re in for a pretty insufferable viewing experience. But Polanski – with his co-writer Robert Harris (who also wrote the book) – just about perfectly walk the line between pulpy fun and expert thrills. Just as David Mamet’s puzzle films are exponentially better once you realize that he realizes that the audience is there to enjoy the genre conventions, so too does The Ghost Writer feel so elegant precisely because Polanski understands that the book’s page-turning thrills should be both honored and deeply enjoyed.

If the plot’s superb execution wasn’t pleasure enough, the performances are just another treat. McGregor nails his character’s cynical, bitterly humorous streak, while Brosnan has a lot of fun playing the oily, temperamental Lang – we’re never quite sure if his blank handsomeness is his way of distracting us from his possibly nefarious acts or just proof that he’s too dimwitted to have actually committed them. Plus, Olivia Williams, Tom Wilkinson, Kim Cattrall, and even James Belushi are also excellent in small parts.

Because of Polanski’s past transgressions, there will always be those who think his movies should in some way address his alleged crimes – and that making simple entertainments that don’t have any deeper meaning is somehow a blithe disregard of those past sins. Me, I’m thrilled that The Ghost Writer is blessedly free of such complexities. This isn’t a movie to compare to Chinatown or Rosemary’s Baby, but it’s grownup entertainment that’s clever and very funny and largely unpredictable all the way to the end. When’s the last time you saw anything like that?

The Yellow Handkerchief (Samuel Goldwyn)

Sometimes a little low-budget film can be a small gem. And sometimes it can just be little. Director Udayan Prasad’s The Yellow Handkerchief is lovingly rendered and contains two very good performances, but alas, it belongs squarely in the latter category.

Based on Pete Hamill’s story, this slight drama introduces us to Brett (William Hurt), a recently released Southern convict who hitches a ride with two young people (Kristen Stewart and Eddie Redmayne) and travels to New Orleans in the hopes of reconciling with his wife (Maria Bello). 

Prasad’s film is about small things – the calm beauty of nature, the worries of middle age, the promise of new love – but it only really resonates when Hurt and Bello are on screen. (Their scenes are presented as flashbacks as Brett tells his young traveling companions about their eventful love affair.) “Chemistry” is always the word used to talk about two actors’ romantic interactions in a film, but what Hurt and Bello do is beyond that – it has a weathered naturalness that feels timeless and unhurried. Long-term couples will probably recognize something of themselves in these two.

If that’s all The Yellow Handkerchief was, it might have worked, but unfortunately the conventions of the road movie (not to mention mediocre performances from Stewart and Redmayne) are just too much for this tiny little romantic drama to bear. Despite all the sad twists and turns in the central love story, the movie’s most heartbreaking element is that Hurt and Bello do such good work in a fairly negligible movie.

Fish Tank (IFC Films)

With this film and her previous one, Red Road, writer-director Andrea Arnold has demonstrated that she has a talent for portraying hard-luck women with an unvarnished, cold-eyed stare. That doesn’t mean she’s not unsympathetic to their plight – she just thinks that they have to get themselves after their own messes. But some of the techniques that felt so fresh and raw with Red Road – hand-held camera, an ear for picking the right song for the right moment, intensely sensual and dangerous sex scenes – are starting to feel like tricks this time around.

Mia (Katie Jarvis), the 15-year-old girl at the heart of the film’s story, lives with her drunken mother and nagging younger sister, and then a roguishly handsome man (played brilliantly by Michael Fassbender) starts dating Mom. He’s trouble, but he’s the only positive influence the young girl has. But eventually, Mia’s interest in him starts turning into something more romantic, and pretty soon Fish Tank goes the way you expect it to.

Though she gives a sympathetic performance, Jarvis is playing a character who could be the younger version of Kate Dickie’s lonely adult from Red Road – both of them are teetering on the edge of oblivion. In Fish Tank, Arnold pushes Mia off the cliff, and the film, despite its many merits, feels like the work of a director who wants to force her characters toward unhappy endings because she can’t and won’t think of any other way out for them. Arnold’s too skilled not to surprise you with the unexpectedly graceful moment, and she has a feel for the downtrodden milieu she loves exploring. But a coming-of-age tale that’s bleaker than the norm doesn’t keep it from fully escaping the conventionality of its genre.
 
Bronson (Magnolia Home Entertainment)

The Clockwork Orange comparisons are obvious and inevitable, but in the true-life drama Bronson, director Nicolas Winding Refn isn’t interested in the criminal mind for the same reasons Kubrick was. Unlike that misanthropic cautionary tale, Bronson’s portrait of total psychopath Michael Peterson (who dubbed himself Charles Bronson in honor of the American action star) doesn’t want to critique the way prisons “rehabilitate” violent offenders or treat its protagonist as a cockeyed example of free will. No, Bronson is about how stylishly well-made it is – not to mention it sorta gets off on Charlie’s blasé disregard for polite society. The filmmaker is helped enormously by Tom Hardy, who gives a lumbering, darkly comic performance as Bronson. We’re not meant to be horrified by the man’s capacity for evil, we’re supposed to chuckle at his guile, and Hardy is such a force of nature that you accept this raging bull for what he is and even enjoy his journey through Britain’s worst prisons. Bronson doesn’t have much to say, but it’s a very fun exercise in bad behavior that’s neither glamorized nor bemoaned. Really, it’s just an excuse for pulpy filmmaking, which is hardly a crime.