Sherlock Holmes (Guy Ritchie, 2009). I fully expected that Ritchie’s first real stab at crafting a blockbuster entertainment would be an over-directed mess. Instead, it’s fairly drab, a generic exercise in filling the screen with bigger, louder, grander nonsense at every turn. Of course, it’s still a mess, a clumsy attempt at making the most famous detective in literary history relevant for a modern audience that’s more interested in quipping tomfoolery than feats of logic. Robert Downey, Jr. plays the title role with the sort of chomping fussiness that’s too often the defining characteristic of his acting, and Jude Law is downright spiritless as Watson. They still fare better than poor Rachel McAdams as Irene Adler. She’s given practically no character to play, and, in turn, has no seemingly no idea what to do with herself from scene to scene. It’s elementary, all right.

Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg, 1971). A teenage schoolgirl and her youthful brother are left stranded in the Australian outback after their geologist father introduces his temple to the business end of a firearm right after setting their car aflame. Their hard walk towards civilization is helped when they encounter an Aboriginal boy whose naturally more adept at traversing the hostile terrain than they are. Roeg’s directing has a drifting, unreal quality, like a damaged dream quietly infesting a sun-baked mind. All of the relationships carrying a gripping weight, even though (or perhaps because) they’re sketched in with so little dialogue, such a dearth of shared information. Roeg is more interested in the feel of interactions than the details of it, and he allows things to remain mysterious without becoming so inflated as to become actual mysteries. It is about mood more than incident, and has a burrowing, haunting quality.

Invictus (Clint Eastwood, 2009). This well-meaning drama about shared pride in the Rugby World Cup helping to heal wounds in South Africa after the end of Apartheid is a prime example of way artistic nobility can drain all the energy from a film. Eastwood’s workmanlike approach as a director has its uses, but its particularly ill-suited to a driving sports epic. His best attempt at conveying the tension of a tight contest is to present the action more and more slowly as the game clock ticks down, as if the film is approaching the edge of the universe and time is grinding to a halt. Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon do yeoman’s work in roles that are more symbol than character. In fact, Freeman is strong enough as the new installed president Nelson Mandela that it seems a missed opportunity that the film isn’t a biopic more clearly focused on the former political prisoner turned inspiring head of state.

The Young Victoria (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2009). It’s the sort of costume drama filled with castle intrigued that sets certain hearts aflutter. It’s a harder sell for me, I’ll admit. Vallée’s direction is finely structured, luxuriating in the elegant art direction and costume design without getting overburdened by it. He mostly focuses of the woman rising to the throne, played with refinement by Emily Blunt. She manages to make the period dialogue feel nicely natural, playing each moment honestly, keeping even the biggest scenes free of deadening pomposity. However, she doesn’t manage to dig especially deeply into the role either. It’s as much fine presentation as earthy performance. Most of the supporting turns are suitable in a Masterpiece Theatre mold, although it’s quite fun to watch Jim Broadbent pivot from his usual geniality into a thundering declaration of authority as the faltering King William IV.

Jennifer’s Body (Karyn Kusama, 2009). Of course, the primary curiosity is the screenplay by Academy Award winner Diablo Cody, following her breakthrough tale of brightly sarcastic teen pregnancy with a metaphor for high school misery that ups the body count. Megan Fox plays the title character, a posturing wild child whose flirtation with a painfully cool band gigging in her backwater town leads to an unfortunate demonic infestation that has her taking big hearty bites of her classmates. The difficulty many of the actors have with the tumbling dominoes of aggressively slangy dialogue simply proves what a splendid thespian magic act Ellen Page pulled off as Juno MacGuff. Fox actually does fairly well playing Jennifer before the monster movie conventions take over, nicely hinting at the vulnerability and shaky self-esteem behind her mean girl exterior, which unfortunately doesn’t mean that her friendship with the pretty nerd played by Amanda Seyfried makes a bit of sense. It’s a mere contrivance in a movie that eventually is nothing but.