The Last Emperor (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1987). Bertolucci’s masterwork probably won its Best Picture Oscar due to its effortless embrace of the epic, but its the acute realization of the most intimate portions of its story that makes it a great film. It follows the life of the last emperor of China from his coronation while still a toddler to his later years toiling as an anonymous gardener after his royal role had disappeared. The sweep of history is what the film moves through, but Bertolucci and his co-screenwriter Mark Peploe rightly realize that the intricacies of the different personality entanglements are what require the most caring attention. The make certain their portrait of Pu Yi, the titular monarch, is deep and well-rounded. It’s the sort of strong, wide-ranging role that is a gift to an actor (or, in this case, several actors who play him across the years). Certainly John Lone makes the most of it when he plays the emperor in adulthood. He does practically everything that can be asked of an actor including sing, and he does it all with consummate skill.

Blue Gold: World Water Wars (Sam Bozzo, 2008). The increasing corporate control of public water supplies is incredibly troubling, as is the widespread disregard for the critical need for conservation and efforts to keep our water clean and potable. These are the chief issues addressed by Sam Bozzo in this documentary. The work is earnest and impassioned. It’s also clumsy and occasionally self-contradictory. Bozzo builds in a few construction conceits–most notably a classroom wall he keeps returning to–that pointlessly distract from the value of the information provided. Like a lot of documentaries, Blue Gold suffers from a pronounced disparity between the value of its topic and the prowess of its filmmaking.

Despicable Me (Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud, 2010). This computer animated feature is a pleasant enough diversion, even if its not especially memorable. Steve Carell provides the voice for an aspiring supervillain named Gru (more in the James Bond vein instead of the sort who’d show up to antagonize Spider-Man) whose grand plot to steal the moon necessitates that he adopt a trio of lovable moppets. It’s intended to be temporary, but naturally they begin to chip away at his curmudgeonly heart. Even though it’s highly predictable, this is the most effective part of the film, thanks largely to the strength of characterization in the main character. It’s the surrounding bombast of the action that seems hastily conceived. When the scheme is set into motion, it should be a chance for the filmmakers to take advantage of working in a form largely free of parameters and stage something spectacular. Instead it’s rushed and flat, as if they too were bored with the excesses of their plot and wanted to hurry back to the simple pleasure of Gru reading a storybook to the girls at bedtime.

Sugar (Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, 2008). Boden and Fleck’s follow-up to Half Nelson traces the story of a young pitcher from the Dominican Republic who is recruited from a baseball academy there and given a spot on a minor league team. The dream of making it all the way to the bigs is ever-present, both as an aspiration and as something that heightens the danger of every bad moment on the diamond. A couple pitches outside the strike zone at a particularly inopportune time and all hope drains away. The directors capture this incredible pressure, and combine it with a shrewdly observed depiction of the inevitable culture clash that comes from leaping from the Caribbean to the heart of Iowa. The performances in the film, including that by Algenis Perez Soto in the title role, are determinedly unstudied. This is part of the film’s charm, even if it also damper the impact somewhat since none of the actors have the command of craft necessary to get at the inner emotions of their respective characters.

What Just Happened (Barry Levinson, 2008). Eleven years after the ingenious Wag the Dog Barry Levinson turns his camera on the movie business again, and the contrast between the two films offers a sad, clear measure of the erosion of his directing talents over the course of the last decade. The script by Art Linson, drawn from his memorish book of the same poorly-chosen title, is satire at its most toothless, but Levinson brings nothing to it. The film is utterly lacking in energy and drive. The producer character played by Robert De Niro is supposedly enduring a grinding, awful stretch, including skirmishes with ex-wives and combative directors and stars, but there’s not a bit of tension in the film. It may as well be blank film running through the projector.