Alexander Payne’s black-and-white portrait of a geriatric mid-westerner (Bruce Dern) intent on getting from Montana to Nebraska to collect a sham $1 million sweepstakes prize is patient, lyrical and loving.  The film evokes David Lynch’s The Straight Story in its pathos, but it also contains a wry sense of humor, largely provided by Dern’s suffering younger son (SNL alum Will Forte) and his brutal, loudmouth but ultimately protective wife (June Squibb)  Lesser films would have played up the wackiness of the extended family, who now believe Dern is flush and are making their claims, or they would have provided Dern the platform to release his Korean war demons or his crushed dreams to his son on their journey.  There is none of that easy bull here.  Instead, Payne presents an authentic portrait of a stoic rural family (Dern seems to have 7 brothers, all of whom watch the NFL with nary a quiver) steeled by time and want, with the very true message that most people don’t really know much about their parents, and that their pasts grow more foreign to us every day.  This film is a lesson in restraint, and Payne (The Descendants, Sideways, Election, Citizen Ruth) has cemented his place as a writer/director with a unique, American voice.

Shorter than The Wolf of Wall Street by 41 minutes, David O. Russell’s American Hustle felt longer and more ridiculous by a good stretch. Loosely based on the Abscam bribery stings of the late 1970s, Russell introduces four purportedly colorful characters: portly, combed-over con man Christian Bale; his sexy mistress and partner in crime Amy Adams; his loony wife Jennifer Lawrence; and a hyper aggressive, curly headed FBI agent Bradley Cooper. Cooper nails Bale and Adams, forces them to entrap others (including Jeremy Renner, as a New Jersey mayor desperate for development funds), a love triangle ensues, and after countless zooms, swift pans and other frenetic camera shots utilized primarily to divert our attention from the banal, repetitive script, we reach a tacked on and unconvincing resolution.

The closest thing to a character is Bale, and his performance is the only reason to see the picture. Unfortunately, he plays a man desperately juggling knives, and it feels as if he’s doing just that masking this thin script. Lawrence plays a decent wacky shrew, and the soundtrack has a few fun numbers from the 70s (I’ve always been a sucker for Steely Dan’s Dirty Work). That’s all of the good.

The bad is really bad, starting first with the preposterous characters played by Adams and Cooper. Unlike with Bale, Russell (who co-wrote) doesn’t bother to give us any sense of where these two came from. She is an impossibly sensuous cypher, in a 70s Enjoli perfume commercial sort of way. Cooper is so manic it suggests severe chemical imbalance, as if his character in Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook got a job in law enforcement. While these two concoctions flirt, and even disco dance (because this is the 70s), the aimless story plods along.

There are other problems. Who could keep a mere fraudster imprisoned for three days without access to a lawyer just to soften her up? Why would you cast Louis C.K. in a supporting role when he’s already demonstrated in one of his sitcom episodes the silliness of having stand-up comics dramatically act? How can a script this talky lack one memorable exchange? Where is this fucking film going and will it never end? Why is Lawrence singing “Live and Let Die” to the camera as she dusts? Does Russell really think he can get by on stealing that Paul Thomas Anderson trick and his camera work, kitschy 70s fashion and hairdos, a few well chosen tunes and the same cast from his last two films?

The answer to the last question is a 93% rating on rottentomatoes and 10 Oscar nominations. Only two are deserved: Bale and Hair.

Woody Allen has remade A Streetcar Named Desire, with Cate Blanchett as Blanche Dubois and Bobby Cannavale as Stanley Kowalski. We find Blanchett, the wife of a Bernie Madoff type (Alec Baldwin), teetering on the edge, having escaped her precipitous fall in New York high society and a resultant breakdown to San Francisco, where her working class sister (Sally Hawkins) lives close to the bone with her two boys. Jasmine sweeps in with an air of condescension, driving a wedge between Hawkins and her rough-edged boyfriend, Cannavale. She comes close to regaining her stature, but her facade soon cracks, with calamitous results.

Blanchett is a lock for best actress. She is at once capricious and deluded, but her pluck is evident, and you find yourself rooting for her to regain a status that was both false and too easily won in the first place. The rest of the cast is excellent, especially Hawkins as the insecure but sweet sister swept up in Jasmine’s fantasies. But also, improbably, Andrew Dice Clay as Hawkins’ embittered ex-husband, his meager fortune having been lost by Jasmine and her crook of a husband.

This is a peculiar Allen film, with few laughs and only a couple of sentimental moments, defined more by a sense of dread as Jasmine keeps picking herself up off the canvas only to suffer another blow, more often than not self-inflicted. Ostensibly a meditation on the pretense of class, and to some dim reviewers, an indictment of Wall Street excess, this is really a film about the fine line between self maintenance and insanity. The movie’s weakness lies in its ambivalence as to what it wants to be, which results in atonality and an awkward and pitiless conclusion.

Melancholy, compelling and lyrical, one of the best films of the year, whether you like folk music or not.

Davis, a folk singer in 1961 New York City, is in crisis, his aspirations undermined by his uncomfortable and unwilling status as a solo act, a less than capable manager, and his own selfishness. The film is his journey to the realization that it is not to be (not that he lacks talent) just at the advent of Dylan. As club owner F. Murray Abraham tells him after an audition that is heartfelt, impressive and inapt, “I don’t see a lot of money here.” Davis made his way to Abraham via a harrowing trip to Chicago where he not only abandons something he has come to love, but may well have killed it. During the trip, he is harangued by a junkie jazz musician (John Goodman) whose takedown of folk as elemental is just another dagger in Davis’s ambition. Soon, Davis becomes too weary to pretend he can be successful, to flop on yet another couch, or to play local celebrity for well-meaning patrons on the upper West side.

The Coen brothers possess an attention to detail that serves the film exceedingly well. Their depiction of 1961 Greenwich Village and the folk scene feels just right, and the travails of Davis, a local Simon who has split with his Garfunkel and become more gritty, take the viewer back in time. Like David Chase’s Not Fade Away, the milieu is drab, smoky and intimate, and the music is at the forefront, but nostalgia is replaced by an elegiac feel and the Coen brothers’ signature dark humor. This is not a film about an unheralded legend, or something as corny as Chase’s paen to rock, but about art as work.

As for Davis, Oscar Isaac is anything but a character you champion. But he can sing and play and he embodies the sadness of having just enough talent. He is also loosely based on a real folkie, Dave Van Ronk.

If there is a weakness, it is Carey Mulligan as Davis’s bitter lover. She is so angry and one-note you feel pity for Davis when you should not. As she gets older, Mulligan is also strangely morphing into a replica of Katie Holmes.