Like Snakes on a Plane, Man on a Ledge is a bluntly up-front title: a subject and a predicate, reducing the picture to the essence of its poster art. I’m all for enigmatic titles, but this approach has its allure. Why are there snakes on a plane? And why is that man on that ledge?

In Asger Leth’s debut feature, the man is Nick Cassidy (Sam Worthington), a former cop, apparent jewel thief and escaped convict who spends most of the picture perched on the ledge of a Manhattan skyscraper hotel in a state of knee-buckling precariousness. (The rest of this paragraph may contain some spoilers). But he has no intention of jumping, we soon learn. While the media and increasing hordes of bloodthirsty pedestrians watch from below, his pseudo-suicidal stunt is just a diversion for his real plan: to clear his name and prove that he didn’t steal a precious diamond by exposing the industry captain who framed him. To this end, he has sent his brother and brother’s girlfriend to penetrate the bowels of a neighboring edifice and uncover the fraud.

Nick’s other ally is Lydia Mercer (a well-cast Elizabeth Banks), a police psychologist and an “outsider” on the force who is still licking her wounds after her previous man-on-a-ledge ended up taking the plunge. She’s joined in Cassidy’s hotel room by Jack Dougherty, played by Edward Burns with the actor’s trademarked blend of bland smugness.

The film’s strongest casting is that of Ed Harris as David Englander, the film’s real estate-tycoon arch-villain. With his slicked-back remnants of hair and three-piece suits oozing malfeasance, he plays the part with memorably melodramatic menace, so unctuous his character must bathe in Pennzoil.

So these are the cards in place, twisting and turning before toppling toward a climax. Many of these twists are ludicrous, hilariously implausible even considering its disbelief-suspending parameters. As long as it feels right, the movie runs with it, logic be damned.

That said, Man on a Ledge is a better-than-average action thriller, especially in the dump month of January. It moves well, and it will please moviegoers looking for Die Hard-like escapism.

Worthington is no Bruce Willis in his prime, but the elements are similar: confined building, flustered/helpful cops, sarcastic humor, soulless bad guy. The movie is especially effective if you fear heights, as I do – my knees went weak every time Leth’s camera swooped around its immobile antihero, reminding us that one errant sneeze could send him falling.

Though it’s ancillary to the action, screenwriter Pablo F. Fenjves can’t help but insert some well-timed social commentary. When Nick wants to create a bigger distraction, he takes out a wad of bills and sends them fluttering to the street, where, naturally, civilized men and women push through police barricades and act like pigs at a trough. The obviously Caucasian-American Kyra Sedgwick is cast as shameless newscaster “Suzie Morales,” transforming into a Latina only when broadcasting her name for the camera.

And, most important, there are numerous references to the stock market crash and the Great Recession, with Ed Harris’s Englander embodying the “1 percent” that caused it. This film was surely written prior to the formation of the Occupy movement, but it’s obvious where its sympathies lie.

MAN ON A LEDGE. Director: Asger Leth; Cast: Sam Worthington, Elizabeth Banks, Ed Harris, Jamie Bell, Kyra Sedgwick, Genesis Rodriguez, Edward Burns; Distributor: Summit; Rating: PG-13; Opens: Friday at most theaters

OK, Academy Awards presenters, start practicing pronouncing the name Michel Hazanavicius.

Who says there are no surprises anymore in the movie industry? If anyone had predicted a year ago that a black-and-white, virtually silent film without name stars would be released in 2011, earn 10 Oscar nominations including best picture and be the favorite to win, that person would be shuttled off to a padded cell.

But that is exactly what has happened for The Artist, the Cinderella story of the year, a romantic comedy set in the days of Hollywood as silent films are giving way -- making and ruining careers -- to talkies.

At this morning’s nominations announcement, The Artist walked off with nominations for performers Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo (inexplicably relegated to the supporting actress category), two for director/screenwriter Hazanavicius, plus mentions for art direction, cinematography, costume design, film editing and music. If it only had more sound, it would surely have run the table with nods for sound editing and sound mixing.

By the time of this morning’s announcements, of course, The Artist was already the front-runner, having picked up best picture wins from the Golden Globes and the Producers Guild. Now the public has to discover the film because, since it was released in the United States in November, it has only grossed a paltry $9.2 million domestically.

The film’s presumed closest rival is Alexander Payne’s Hawaiian dramedy The Descendants, nominated for best picture, Payne’s direction and co-written adapted screenplay and best actor George Clooney. But in one of the day’s most glaring snubs, supporting actress Shailene Woodley came up empty-handed. Still, if an anti-French campaign emerges against The Artist -- or even a backlash against its overbearing producer, Harvey Weinstein -- the top Oscar could go to The Descendants, which also won a best picture Golden Globe (for drama).

This is the year the Academy changed the rules about the number of best picture nominees, requiring a film to get 5 percent of the first place votes to make the cut. As a result, there could be between five and ten movies in the field and when the dust settled the category had nine entries. Also included are The Help, Hugo, Midnight in Paris, Moneyball, The Tree of Life and War Horse. Probably the ninth nominee in terms of vote totals is Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the quirky 9-11 aftermath film that I like a lot, but has been receiving brutally negative reviews. (See it.)

Much talked about for a best picture slot was Bridesmaids, the girls-can-be-vulgar-too comedy which had to settle for a supporting actress nod for Melissa McCarthy and an original screenplay nomination for her co-star Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo.

If I ruled the Oscars, the best picture nominees would have also included Girl with a Dragon Tattoo and the cancer comedy, 50/50. But I don’t.

No surprises for best actress, which looks like a two-horse race between Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady) and Viola Davis (The Help). Poor Meryl has only won twice, and her most recent victory was 20 years ago, probably because she is expected to be brilliant every time out. The other three nominees -- Glenn Close (Albert Nobbs), Rooney Mara (Dragon Tattoo) and Michelle Williams (My Week with Marilyn) -- have to be considered long shots.

The best actor field is more competitive, led by Hollywood golden boys George Clooney (The Descendants) and Brad Pitt (Moneyball), even though Pitt was more impressive in the less audience-friendly The Tree of Life. Also in the running are Dujardin, Gary Oldman (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) and Demian Bichir (A Better Life). Bichir is the surprise, though an admirable choice in a little-seen picture. He takes the place of such more expected nominees as Michael Fassbinder (Shame), Leonardo DiCaprio (J. Edgar) and, my choice, Michael Shannon (Take Shelter).

Nominated actors in their 80s tend to be sentimental favorites, but this year the supporting actor category has two of them. Christopher Plummer (Beginners) and Max von Sydow (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), both 82, will be vying for their first Oscar. Hoping to stop them will be Kenneth Branagh (My Week with Marilyn), Jonah Hill (Moneyball) and Nick Nolte (Warrior), but put your money on one of the octogenarians.

The supporting actress field is mostly Oscar rookies, with only Janet McTeer (Albert Nobbs) a returning nominee. If there is an Artist sweep, the award could go to Bejo. Otherwise it is wide open, with Bridesmaids’ McCarthy and two actresses from The Help (Jessica Chastain, Octavia Spencer) potentially cancelling each other out.

With nine best picture nominees and only five for best director, the only surprises are snubs. In the category are Hazanavicius and Payne, as well as Martin Scorsese (Hugo), comeback kid Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris) and Terence Malick (The Tree of Life). The most prominent snubbee is surely Steven Spielberg, whose War Horse was noted for art direction, cinematography and music.

Perhaps more puzzling is the failure of Spielberg’s other 2011 picture, The Adventures of Tintin, to gain a nomination for animated feature. They went instead to Rango, Puss in Boots and Kung Fu Panda 2, as well as two foreign-made films, A Cat in Paris and Chico & Rita. Not surprising in its absence is the Pixar dud Cars 2, though this is one of the few time since the category was created that the studio is not in the running.

The 84^th Academy Awards will be telecast Sunday, Feb. 26, with popular veteran emcee Billy Crystal returning to the assignment after many years away.

I watched Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire less than 24 hours ago, and I’m already having trouble remembering exactly what the picture was about – some gobbledygook about private government contractors double-crossing one another, with one rogue special-ops agent targeted for knowing too much, or for the appeasement of her vengeful ex-boyfriend/employer, or something like that.

But I remember in vivid detail the blue light piercing through the window of a diner in the opening sequence, the urine-yellow filter over a scene of the agents planning their latest job, the crepuscular light fading toward darkness in one of the final scenes, and the director’s switch from black-and-white to color in an intellectually thrilling chase scene.

Haywire is only the latest style-over-substance success story, wherein the director’s rigorous formalism pummels every shred of distinction from Lem Dobb’s functional screenplay. Dobbs’ words essentially become the primer over which Soderbergh paints the movie in whatever dazzling hue he has in mind. The result is not as emotionally investing as Drive, but it’s cut from a similar cloth, and it’s probably more fun.

Beneath the color-coded visions lies a candy-flavored action vehicle for 29-year-old mixed-martial-artist Gina Carano as Mallory, an unstoppable secret agent whom, for whatever their reasons, pretty much every male character in the movie wants to kill. These include Ewan McGregor as an ex-boyfriend and sometimes boss; Michael Fassbender as her supposed partner with a malicious secret; and Antonio Banderas, sporting the ridiculous unkempt beard of a deposed dictator, as the apparent head honcho.

Again, I did not know, or care, what was really going on, and I don’t think Soderbergh did when he was filming it. Haywire is not Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, not by a long shot. Soderbergh’s goal, instead, is to pare down the spy film to its bare essence, avoiding the over-plotted clutter that drives everything from talky features to hour-long episodes of Burn Notice. Dialogue is at an absolute minimum, and even sound design is stripped entirely from the aforementioned chase scene, propelled only by the director’s inspired imagery and a coolly calculated score.

This is a movie infatuated with its own movieness, and spy-movie history. In Soderbergh’s stylized vision of international intrigue, names and locations – Paul, Barcelona, Dublin – are employed more for their aesthetic associations than their physical importance; it sounds hip and exotic to think of these exciting people bouncing across the globe, when in fact the entire film was shot in just two locales.

Symbols of seeming significance are breached only to be subsumed by the style: Soderbergh has a lot of fun exhibiting and then disregarding various Hitchcockian MacGuffins, such as a silver pendant and a captured Chinese whistleblower, both of them chicken feed in the grand scheme of things, which is to jettison grand schemes.

At the risk of sounding too much like a film theorist, let it be said that Haywire is an enjoyable mainstream movie even if you don’t buy in to Soderbergh’s intent. Straight men could do a lot worse than watch the sexy Carano kick ass with acrobatic aplomb; she’s not asked to employ much range, but this role will likely lead, at least, to a thriving career as athletic eye candy.

The fight scenes are simply and imaginatively choreographed, and they actually make sense from one edit to the next, something that can’t be said for a majority of fix-it-in-post actioners (the recently opened import Heir Apparent: Largo Winch comes to mind). And it ends on an ellipsis, following an essential rule of show business: Leave ‘em wanting more.

HAYWIRE. Director: Steven Soderbergh; Cast: Gina Carano, Channing Tatum, Ewan McGregor, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas; Distributor: Relativity Media; Rating: R; Opens: Friday at most theaters

Film adaptations of plays, books and even video games are as common as rain in Seattle, but a movie adaptation of a painting? That’s an undertaking so ambitious – and probably presumptuous – that it’s hard to fathom it. Polish director Lech Majewski is up to the task in The Mill and the Cross, attempting to delve beyond the canvas of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s famous The Way to Cavalry.

The movie’s single-shot prologue beautifully organizes its concept: Bruegel (Rutger Hauer) walks through a multi-dimensional landscape of human figures frozen in time, Last Year at Marienbad-style. These are his painted subjects in The Way to Cavalry, and in a performance of pure pensiveness, Hauer will exhibit an almost invisible control over them, like a conductor organizing a symphony or a film director supervising a production.

Majewski’s camera tracks slowly across the tableau, like the eyes of a museum spectator might do along a wall-length fresco. It’s a sequence that would play spectacularly in 3D but, like the preamble of Melancholia, it’s also the movie’s artistic zenith, having nowhere to go but down.

Most of The Mill and the Cross is presented without dialogue. Only Hauer, Michael York (as Nicolaes Jonghelinck, a wealthy patron of Bruegel’s) and Charlotte Rampling (as the Virgin Mary, convincingly expressing grief and suffering even in the thinnest of roles) have speaking parts, even though most of the action takes place in the landscape of Bruegel’s mind – specifically Flanders in 1564 (when Bruegel actually lived), where red-tunicked Spanish occupiers raid, pillage and crucify to their heart’s content.

Much of the “plot” is an experiential and ethnographic study of a village; children frolic, animals meander, musicians play folksongs, a horny man pursues a woman who fights off his advances until she doesn’t. When the Spaniards invade, they bring savagery to the bucolic land. Flagellation, living burials and the inevitable crucifixion of Christ are presented with matter-of-fact realism, and it couldn’t be a farther cry from Mel Gibson’s Passion movie, or even Scorsese’s or Pasolini’s. I would go so far as to say The Mill and the Cross is 2011’s least manipulative film.

In this case, such detachment brings with it a paucity of emotional connection. There’s no denying the power of Majewski’s images, most of which are imbued with a painter’s scope and precision. The film was shot in four countries and even includes a 2D rendering of The Way to Cavalry painted by the director. Ordinary objects are filmed with reverence and resplendence.

But these are surface pleasures. Absent anything like character-building, the film generates no compassion toward its victims and inspires no hatred for its marauders. As choreographed by Bruegel’s hand, it’s a bloodlessly subjective history lesson. What’s worse, Majewski’s screenplay (co-written with Michael Francis Gibson) is ponderously dense. The mill in the painting isn’t just a mill, we’re told; it’s “the axis around which people circle between life and death,” an admission that comes off like a bit of Cliff’s Notes embedded into a text.

But that’s just the beginning of this spiritual decoder ring of a movie, whose procession of symbols suggest that its target demographic is semioticians, not movie audiences. The film’s portent knows no end, and it has an awfully inflated sense of its own self-worth.

Throughout the running time, my mind drifted to a 2007 episode of Showtime’s This American Life, in which an artist attempted to create a live-action tableau of Christ and his companions, which he would then paint as part of a mural series. This half-hour study of the creation of a painting was far less ambitious than The Mill in the Cross, but it was ultimately richer and, it goes without saying, infinitely more entertaining.

THE MILL AND THE CROSS. Director: Lech Majewski; Cast: Rutger Hauer, Michael York, Charlotte Rampling; Distributor: Kino Lorber; Opens: Friday at Lake Worth Playhouse, Mos’ Art Theatre, Miami Beach Cinematheque and Bill Cosford Cinema in Coral Gables.

As Brian De Palma and Stanley Donen understand all too well, there can come a time in every reverential filmmaker’s oeuvre when loving homage devolves into shameless mimicry.

For these aforementioned filmmakers, features such as Dressed to Kill and Charade followed various Hitchcock blueprints so faithfully that the directors’ own voices risked being swallowed in a quicksand of referentiality.

Likewise, Hong Sang-soo’s strangely sprawling Night and Day (Zeitgeist, $26.99, release date Jan. 10), the eighth feature from the respected South Korean filmmaker, feels cribbed wholesale from the universe of Eric Rohmer, where the shifting tides of romance are investigated with exquisite delicacy and patience. Like Rohmer’s films (A Summer’s Tale comes to mind most overtly), it follows a man’s blossoming relationship with several young women over a contained period of time.

It’s dialogue-heavy in an intellectually Rohmerian way; as the man grapples with the moral considerations of sleeping with another woman while his wife waits for him in another continent, few words are left unsaid and few thoughts left unexpressed through voiceover narration. The movie is even set in Paris, with Hong’s characters walking and talking along the boulevards, galleries and cafes where Rohmer’s young hipsters might have treaded.

The film follows the point of view of Sung-nam Kim, a married, fortysomething Korean painter exiled to France to avoid a prison sentence for smoking marijuana. He doesn’t speak a word of French, but he finds lodging in a hostel of like-minded expats and eventually falls in with Paris’ apparently vibrant South Korean subculture. He bumps into an ex-girlfriend by chance, and is eventually introduced to a lovely painter and her lovelier roommate, slowly falling for at least one of them and sharing none of this in his nightly phone calls to his wife, who is constantly thinking of ways to bring him home.

At one point, Night and Day becomes something of a love quadrangle, with Kim choosing from a buffet of potential sexual partners. It’s a pleasant problem, to be sure, but Hong paints his protagonist as an unenviable, growth-stunted horndog displaced in a foreign country, his moral confusion exacerbating a definitively male helplessness that transcends borders. He’s best viewed as a pathetic slave to his lust, with Hong expressing a deeper fondness for the women in Kim’s life. The only Hong film I’d seen prior to this, 2004’s sublime Woman Is the Future of Man, reinforces the director’s worldview in its title.

The characters say and think some strange things – Kim’s “I had been thinking about oysters for several days” being one of them – and there are cultural roadblocks in the film’s translation that will leave English speakers scratching their heads at some of the movie’s bizarre interactions. But part of Night and Day’s peculiarity lies with director’s frequent meanderings into esoteric symbolism, his camera lingering on a dying bird, a tai chi class, sludgy river or an abandoned hair scrunchie. The strangeness of Hong’s visual signature extends to his use of amateurish zooms, often for no apparent reason (I’ve always considered zooms to be an offensively unsubtle device, lacking the poetry of the slow dolly).

Ultimately, there’s no justification for the 145-minute running time of Night and Day, given that Rohmer’s movies are just as rich at 90 to 110 minutes. When a movie’s tone is this breezy, the result should never feel like a slog; like Kim’s Parisian sojourn, the movie itself overstays its welcome.

DVD Watch

Jan. 10: Jean-Luc Godard is back with what we can probably assume is a vengeance in Film Socialisme (Kino, $31.49 Blu-ray, $26.99 DVD), a film so alienating that only one theater in South Florida (Miami Beach Cinematheque) proved bold enough to screen it last year. Like most of Godard’s post-millennial output, this inscrutable treatise is stubbornly anti-entertainment and more difficult than Chinese algebra – especially because Godard translated the French language into what he calls “Navajo English” – a few choice words from each portion of dialogue, as if transcribed by laconic Native Americans from old, offensive Westerns (the home video version also provides the full English translation, which I recommend).

Part of the movie takes place on a European cruise ship, which for Godard symbolizes capitalism’s fatuous excesses; a second part follows a news crew attempting to interview a local political figure in trouble; and the final stanza is an essay film a la the director’s Histoire(s) du Cinema, reviewed on this site a couple of weeks ago. The images rotate between stock footage, shimmering HD photography and pixilated cellphone shots that capture the diminished expectations of modern shutterbuggery. All in all, Godard touches on World War II, communism, economic inequality, Hollywood, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the news media, AIDS and the history of time itself. What it all means is beyond my grasp. It’s either one of the best or worst films of 2011 – I’ve yet to decide which.

Among other unheralded works by challenging auteurs, Zeitgeist unveils Bela Tarr’s The Man From the London ($26.99), a slow and mesmerizing black-and-white tranquilizer about a lonely railway worker who witnesses a crime and finds himself the owner of a suitcase full of money. Art-house noir at its precise, truthful finest, with the multilingual Tilda Swinton again proving her world-cinema bona fides.

Other curiosities this week include 1971’s The Hellstrom Chronicle (Olive Films, $26.99 Blu-ray, $22.49 DVD), a Swedish documentary, grounded in science, about insects taking over the world. Its histrionic tagline reads like a collection of Peter Travers blurbs: “Shocking. Beautiful. Brilliant. Sensual. Deadly ... and only they will survive.” It must be seen to be believed. This week also marks the DVD debut of one of 2010’s most critically acclaimed films, Aurora (Cinema Guild, $26.99), a three-hour revisionist murder mystery from the Romanian director Cristi Puiu. On a far more commercial front, When Harry Met Sally premieres on Blu-ray (MGM, $17.99), though I have to say this is a movie that can be appreciated at the same level on a VHS transfer on TNT.

Jan. 17: If you have a good five-plus hours to spare this month (and who doesn’t?), I can’t think of a better way to spend it than with Raoul Ruiz’s 266-minute Mysteries of Lisbon (Music Box Films, $39.49 Blu-ray, $31.49 DVD). The final film of more than 100 titles Ruiz completed before his death last year, the film (which also aired as a six-episode miniseries) is an adaptation of a book by Camilo Castelo Branco, one of Portugal’s most celebrated writers. Following three people across three decades and four countries, it alludes to Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens and is one of 2011’s most acclaimed films. The box set is loaded with extras, including a half-hour interview with Ruiz and a roundtable discussion recorded for French television.

Equally exciting is Criterion’s reissue of Belle du Jour ($27.99 Blu-ray, $19.99 DVD), the jewel in Luis Buñuel’s crown and a title most deserving of a Hi-Def treatment. This edition is tricked out to the nines, including new interviews with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere, a video piece narrated by a film scholar and a sexual-politics activist, an audio commentary by British film scholar Michael Wood and an excerpt from a French television program about the movie. Also making Blu-ray debuts this week are Steven Soderbergh’s ensemble classic Traffic (Criterion, $27.99), Kim Ki-Duk’s downbeat antiwar character study The Coast Guard (Palisades Tartan, $11.99, also includes DVD) and, to meet some inexplicable demand, the Ed O’Neill comedy clunker Dutch (Anchor Bay, $12.99), whose out-of-print DVD has exceeded obscene amounts on eBay.

Jan. 24: Criterion steps out of its Janus Films art-house comfort zone for a more populist classic in 1954’s Godzilla ($27.99 Blu-ray, $21.99) – which may rank among the most exciting home-video packages of the year. Godzilla has been a mass-market science-fiction touchstone for so long that it’s about time the film received an intellectual critical evaluation. Included in this two-disc bundle is the 1956 American reworking of Godzilla, starring Raymond Burr, along with featurettes, interviews, an illustrated audio essay, a new print essay by J. Hoberman and audio commentaries for both films. I must say, this one is worth owning for the kick-ass cover art alone.

Elsewhere, MGM has gone all out this week, reissuing Blu-ray titles by two of the greatest American filmmakers of the past century: Alfred Hitchcock and Woody Allen. From the latter, we get his twin ‘70s masterpieces Annie Hall and Manhattan ($16.99 each), and from the former, three of his ‘40s classics, Rebecca, Notorious and Spellbound ($16.99 each). Both of these directors are under-represented in Hi-Def; hopefully there’s a lot more where these are coming from. This week also marks the Blu-ray debut of William A. Wellman’s silent war drama Wings (Paramount, $19.99), notable to trivia buffs as the first movie to ever win Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

Jan. 31: This week features nothing particularly rare and unusual, but its bounty of Blu-ray debuts will allow fans of many vintage and modern prestige films to view them anew. Titles include The Piano (Lionsgate, $14.99), To Kill a Mockingbird (Universal, $27.99, includes book, DVD and digital copy), Malcolm X (Warner, $29.99) and Grand Canyon (Anchor Bay, $15.99).