So much of what Oscar hype focuses on is the hugeness of a movie—the way one restages a war and another keeps a romance alive amid death or brings a lost era back to life. And while a film like Atonement does all three, it also contains a little capsule of intimacy, a feat of imagination that lodges permanently in your mind. All the films on the short list this winter boast a scene like this—a distillation of emotion that makes the whole cinematic experience ring merely by summoning an exchange of glances, of sentiments, or of bullets.
It's pretty obvious what's most memorable from Atonement: Keira Knightley causing a ruckus in a library. When she appeared in an emerald dress with a hem split fairly high up the middle for England in the thirties, it seemed rather inevitable. In Joe Wright's World War II epic, there's much panting among the stacks as the buried feelings between Cecilia and Robbie are finally and fully expressed. For the rest of the movie—and long after you leave the theater—Knightley's "Come back to me" echoes in a lot of male brains along with the Masterpiece Theatre-set eroticism. It did appear to be the most fun to be had while fully clothed.
Plenty of movies—Almost Famous, Walk the Line, Ray—have suggested that it's not a good idea to get hitched to a ramblin' man. Enjoyably enough, it's crying time again in Control, Anton Corbijn's study of Joy Division's troubled lead singer, Ian Curtis, which manages to transcend the VH1-ready arc of an eighties band's rise and fall. The movie couldn't have succeeded without one key ingredient: Sam Riley, a lead singer himself, who mimics Curtis's iconic marching moves—until all of a sudden he can't. The crowd is rowdy, and the manager is desperate for Curtis to regain some strength and get out there, but seizures have cracked the front man's will. Had Riley not already walked the walk, the loss of a great presence wouldn't feel so real.
Just to mix up the biopic format, in I'm Not There Todd Haynes makes six different versions of Bob Dylan cohere—and would never have accomplished this feat without showing the Minnesota maestro's effect on beautiful women. In the Heath Ledger sequence, the target of flirtation (and eventual victim of philandering) is the languid Charlotte Gainsbourg. Her performance ensures that when she gets the phone call from her errant husband that leaves her abandoned with toddlers squirming around the kitchen table, at least the audience is still there with her.
A man walks into a gas station. When talking about the Coen brothers' border-country thriller, No Country for Old Men, a mere mention of the monster Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) can cause a shiver. But he proves to be much more than a killing machine: He's also a depraved sadist. As he arrives at a dusty pump-and-pay, the old-timer behind the counter has no clue of Chigurh's homicidal whimsy. Killers on a rampage have shown up in Coen comedies (the bearded biker in Raising Arizona) and dramas (the gun for hire in Blood Simple) before, but this scene maximizes the squirms. It's Russian roulette with a pneumatic air gun.
