Leave it to someone’s doctoral thesis to explain why this year at the movies there are two films that look back on the early days of the art form (The Artist, Hugo) and so many others also focused on the past, from biographies of Marilyn Monroe (My Week with Marilyn), FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (J. Edgar) and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher (The Iron Lady) to fictional accounts of the aftermath of 9/11 (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), World War I (War Horse) and the civil rights ’60s (The Help).

Whether or not history proves this to be a stellar year at the movies -- unlikely -- I had no problem filling a 10-best list, with such worthy releases as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Moneyball and A Separation just missing the cut.

1. The Descendants -- Director Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways) returned triumphantly with his first feature in seven years, the tale of a Honolulu lawyer who learns soon after his wife lands in a coma from a boating accident that she had been unfaithful. George Clooney brings gravitas to the role, learning to be a father to his two distant daughters.

2. The Artist -- In these days of high-tech computer graphics, this staunchly retro black-and-white, silent film (complete with text titles) about the early days of talkies delivered a very pleasurable, pure cinematic experience.

3. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close -- The emotionally loaded subject of 9/11 hovers over a quirky story of a young boy’s odyssey around New York searching for the meaning of a key left him by his dead father. Bring Kleenex.

4. The Tree of Life -- Despite a self-indulgent, dinosaur-laden prologue, director Terence Malick then uses his lyrical style to focus in on the domestic drama of a Texas family with a domineering dad (an impressive Brad Pitt). Note the exquisite available-light cinematography.

5. The Skin I Live In -- Masterful Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar reunites with one of his early discoveries, the sensual Antonio Banderas, as a plastic surgeon trying to recreate the image of his dead wife on a woman imprisoned in his basement. Then the movie gets kinky.

6. 50/50 -- Cancer becomes the stuff of comedy as Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a guy battling a rare lymphoma. The laughs are not cheap and eventually director Jonathan Levine and writer Will Reiser lower the emotional boom. Anjelica Huston and Anna Kendrick provide sublime support as Gordon-Levitt’s overbearing mother and inexperienced therapist.

7. War Horse -- Call it Steven Spielberg’s World War I answer to Saving Private Ryan, wrapped around the loyal friendship of a British lad and the war-bound horse who survives combat despite all odds. Based on a children’s book and the Tony-winning puppet show, it has been transformed again into a heart-rending, exquisitely photographed film.

8. Hugo -- As improbable as a Martin Scorsese children’s film sounds, he showed how not to talk down to kids in this tribute to the early days of cinema and its pioneer, Georges Melies. He also demonstrated how to use 3-D correctly, in a kinetic film full of his masterful camera moves.

9. Take Shelter -- It is no longer surprising when Michael Shannon (Bug, Revolutionary Road) plays an unhinged soul, but he outdoes himself in this low-budget yarn of a construction worker disturbed by a premonition that a cataclysmic storm is headed his way.

10. The Help -- A wryly comic look at the dawning of the civil rights movement, in Jackson, Miss., during the early 1960s, as seen through the eyes of the black domestic help who gain the courage to speak out about their working conditions. In an ensemble of fine actresses, Viola Davis stands out.

What kind of small watering hole in a rural zoo in a family film has a one-sheet poster for The Third Man on its wall? The kind in a Cameron Crowe movie, that’s what.

There are no cinephile characters in the film, no justification for the poster’s being there, no subtle connection between this pleasant commercial product and Carol Reed’s masterpiece.

Nevertheless, I was happy to see this infinitesimal art-direction quirk. Crowe likes to throw cultural bones to his audience for no apparent reason – remember Todd Louiso’s jazz-obsessed nanny in Jerry Maguire? Likewise, he could have picked any generic film composer to create a score of manipulative music for We Bought a Zoo; instead he picked Jonsi, the dream-evoking frontman of ambient sensations Sigur Rós, to develop the film’s lovely and atmospheric compositions.

Furthermore, Crowe proves unafraid to subtitle one of his scenes, to depict a father-son quarrel with startling verisimilitude, or to float a reference no tyke will understand: When his daughter Rosie (Maggie Elizabeth Jones) has buried herself under a mountain of stuffed animals on her bed, her father Benjamin (Matt Damon) quips: “I can’t even find you; you’re like a Chilean miner.”

It’s a genuinely funny and hip line, and there are enough moments like this in We Bought a Zoo to compensate for its lesser moments of unfettered emotionalism, cardboard characterizations and implausible twists. Damon’s Benjamin is an investigate reporter specializing in thrill-seeking adventure narratives, but his life is in flux. His wife died six months earlier – it’s the second film in a row, after Contagion, that Damon plays a grieving widow – and he’s about to quit his job at a foundering newspaper (you can hear the faint echo of Jerry Maguire’s dramatic, story-inciting exit from his employer).

Ripe for a fresh start, he hires a realtor (Curb Your Enthusiasm player J.B. Smoove, in a funny cameo) to show him some properties, only to fall in love with the house with the most “complications:” It’s on the site of a once-successful zoo, full of hundreds of live animals, all of whom desperately need a new owner with deep pockets to save them from being put down. Benjamin, who has spent his career covering other people’s adventures, finally has an opportunity to live his own, despite the attitude of his son Dylan (Colin Ford), a brooding-artist cliché with whom he has been unable to bond.

Benjamin’s family is assisted by what can only be described, without irony, as a ragtag band of lovable eccentrics who work on the zoo ground. They include the impossibly hot, impossibly single 28-year-old zookeeper Kelly (Scarlett Johansson) – a self-professed shut-in who lives with her mother and devotes every free second to the animals – as well as Patrick Fugit’s monkey-carrying maintenance man and Angus Macfadyen’s short-fused daredevil.

Crowe’s scripts ooze precious gestures and lofty platitudes, and We Bought a Zoo is no exception. The screenplay, based on a true story and co-written with Aline Brosh McKenna, becomes little more than a succession of calamities and resolutions, some of them conjured out of thin air. There is never a sense that the lives and work of these damaged but well-intentioned people will end in disappointment; you can tell that from the poster alone. And there is really no excuse for John Michael Higgins’ one-note villain, a zoo inspector who apparently finds perverse glee in seeing businesses die.

But I walked out of the film in a mood that can best be described as stupidly happy. I wasn’t ready – at least not yet – to break down the movie’s weaknesses, preferring to revel in the director’s well-honed craftsmanship. He takes great care in the way the sunlight illuminates Damon’s tortured face as the twinkly refrains of Jonsi ascend on the soundtrack. His films, and We Bought a Zoo especially, are the bubbles at the top of a champagne glass, imbued with an effervescence that sparkles and goes down easy.

WE BOUGHT A ZOO. Director: Cameron Crowe; Cast: Matt Damon, Scarlett Johansson, Thomas Haden Church, Colin Ford, Maggie Elizabeth Jones, Angus Macfadyen, Elle Fanning, Patrick Fugit, John Michael Higgins; Distributor: Fox; Rated: PG; Release date: Friday at most commercial cinemas

Amy Glazer made her directorial debut as a teenager at Miami Beach Senior High School, where she directed another student named Mickey Rourke in his first play.

Now a playwright, independent filmmaker and a professor of film, television, radio and theater at San Jose State University, she’s returned to South Florida this month to screen her new film, Seducing Charlie Barker, which opened earlier this month in Miami and screens Friday at FAU’s Living Room Theaters.

The film is based on the play The Scene, by Theresa Rebeck, and stars Daphne Zuniga, Stephen Barker Turner, Heather Gordon and David Wilson Barnes. Seducing Charlie Barker is a dark satire about a talented but out-of-work New York actor (Turner) whose disenchantment with the surreal contradictions of show business leaves him vulnerable to the charms of a narcissistic party girl, Clea (Gordon).

The film won Best American Indie at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival in 2010.

“It’s a sexy, dark satire and a bit voyeuristic. There’s something so wonderful about watching people behave badly. It’s something we can’t do, but when you see other people doing it, it’s deliciously horrific,” Glazer said.

Glazer said she’s happy that the film is finally reaching audiences.

“It’s rewarding that after three years of hard work, people will actually come out and see the film,” she said. “I always have this dread that it will be like a home movie – only my father will watch it. Having a real audience is extremely gratifying.”

Glazer, 57, lives in the San Francisco Bay area with her husband of 33 years, James Connolly, a publisher, and her 17-year-old son, Liam.

I spoke to Amy in New York City where she was attending the screening of her film at the Quad Cinema in Greenwich Village and taking in as many plays as she could, including Seminar and The Understudy, both by Theresa Rebeck, and Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities starring Stockard Channing and Stacy Keach.

PBAP: As a Miami Beach native, but a longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay area, what does it mean to you to come back to South Florida and screen your film?

Glazer: Even though I couldn’t wait to move away from Miami, it’s still the place I come back to often. It was a beautiful place to grow up. I feel very nostalgic for South Florida. It will always be my home.

I have a strong community of friends and extended and chosen family here. Mitchell Kaplan, founder and owner of the Coral Gables bookstore, Books & Books, is my best friend. We went to elementary school together. So, it’s always wonderful to come here. Since I work in the Bay Area, none of these people have had much of an opportunity to see my work. There’s something really gratifying about being able to share my work with friends and family.

PBAP: Can you tell us a little bit about the film?

Glazer: The film is a modern-day morality tale. The story is not the surprising part of the film – it’s the behavior by the characters that we never expect. It makes us examine our own values. In our culture, art takes a second seat to commerce and the commodification of art. What happens when we value meaninglessness over meaning? How does that impact our relationships? It’s something I struggle with as well. As a theater director and an indie filmmaker, I do these things because I love them – it’s who I am. It’s not a way of becoming famous or making money.

PBAP: Whom does the film appeal to?

Glazer: The film appeals to people 40-plus. First of all, it’s a very smart and funny film. I’ve been compared to Woody Allen and I think it’s because we both make films that are language-driven. It appeals to filmgoers that want to be challenged. But I also think it appeals to the younger generation, too, because the character of Clea is a beautiful, vacuous, social climber who is actually much smarter than she appears and is not afraid to work the system for her own advantage.

PBAP: I saw the film at the Fort Lauderdale Film Festival and I loved Heather Gordon, the actress who plays Clea. I think she will go on to be a star.

Glazer: Heather Gordon is smart, sexy and gorgeous and a great comedic actress. She is a cross between Lucille Ball and Marilyn Monroe. While we were working on the play, I said: “You are too brilliant to go to Hollywood and get eaten up. Go to graduate school.” She auditioned at Yale, Harvard and NYU and got into Harvard on a scholarship.

PBAP: Many times it’s difficult to translate a play into the film genre. How were you able to translate the play into the film, and is it a successful transition?

Glazer: Yes, I think it is. The film is more successful than the play. I deconstructed the play because there was so much language. What had been a monologue became a scene, but the story, the tone, the satire all translated well to film.

PBAP: What directors do you admire? Did you have any mentors in your professional life, someone who influenced your work?

Glazer: I love Woody Allen. I love Robert Altman and John Cassavetes. These are the filmmakers that influenced me the most because their work is character-driven. At the end of the day, I’m most interested in character and the behavior that comes from that character.

On a more personal level, I was strongly influenced by my professor at California Institute of the Arts, Alexander Mackendrick. He directed The Lady Killers and The Man in the White Suit. He was very interested in how I told stories and in my natural storytelling abilities. He was the one who encouraged me to learn the grammar of film.

I now use one of his textbooks that was printed posthumously, and it’s so wonderful to remind myself of his lesson, which is: The most important thing you can do in film is to capture the performance. If you can capture an authentic performance, if you can get a certain level of work from your actors, then you’ll tell your story.

PBAP: I know that you were exposed to a lot of art, theater and culture as a child, and that your uncle, Sidney Glazier, was a producer of The Producers. What did you learn about filmmaking from him?

Glazer: My parents filled our lives with the arts. We went to theater, both in New York and Miami. We went to concerts, we went to ballet. We were inundated with the arts. It’s subliminal. I learned my own aesthetic sensibility from these experiences.

I remember going to London in 1973 with my parents and seeing Claire Bloom in A Doll’s House. That experience was life-changing. I met Claire Bloom again in 2010 at the Fort Lauderdale Film Festival, where she received a Lifetime Achievement Award. I went up to her and told her that I saw her and Colin Blakely in The Doll’s House and that it is one of my best memories. It was wonderful to be able to see her. She is still so beautiful, elegant and articulate.

My brother (Mitch Glazer, writer/producer for the Starz TV series, Magic City) and I were on the set the entire time my uncle was filming The Producers. He also produced Take the Money and Run and The Twelve Chairs. He loved theater, and whenever we were in New York, he would always get us tickets to any show we wanted to see.

PBAP: Amy, you have a lot of energy and seem to juggle a lot of balls in the air at the same time. What are you working on now?

Glazer: I’m directing a play at San Jose Repertory Theatre and I’m the associate director at the San Francisco Playhouse. I’m working on my next film, based on a play that I directed called Blue Surge by playwright Rebecca Gilman. She’s a dear friend and a brilliant play and screenwriter. I’ve directed five to six of her plays. Blue Surge is a story that I love and I’m very excited to get started on this project.

PBAP: Well, we’d love to see that film as well. Do you think you will screen it here in South Florida?

Glazer: I’d love to. When you direct a play, you spend a few months of your life and then you move on. This film has taken three years of my life and has taken on a life of its own. Everyone said the likelihood of getting the film distributed was low, but we never took “No” for an answer.

PBAP: What advice would you give to budding playwrights, filmmakers or directors?

Glazer: Work from your passion. At the end of the day, I have never done my art for money. I never said, “Oh, this will make me famous.” Or, “this will make me rich.” I tell stories because it’s who I am. It’s what I need to do to be whole. When you’re working from a place of love and you respect the work you do, if you are passionate about the work, that is contagious.

In the words of Winston Churchill: “Never, never, never give up.” That is my mantra. Also, trust yourself. Believe in your passion and follow your bliss. When the work is an expression of your joy, then it doesn’t feel like work and you can get anything done. Doing the work is being alive.

PBAP: Will you ever slow down or take time off?

Glazer: I never see myself retiring. I fully expect to be making movies and directing theater until the day I die. I can’t even imagine not doing this. The truth is: When you have something that you love to do, it keeps you young. As a professor, filmmaker and theater director, my joie de vivre comes from my work. I can’t imagine myself not working.

Seducing Charlie Barker screens Friday at the Living Room Theaters at FAU in Boca Raton. For more information, please call 561-549-2600 or visit www.fau.livingroomtheaters.com. Prices are: $9.50 regular admission; $7.50 matinees before 5 p.m.; $6.50 military, students and educators (with ID), seniors. For information on the film, please visit: www.seducingcharliebarker.com.

George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a film that felt awfully new in its time and now feels as musty as mothballs, ended on an iconic freeze-frame of the titular bandits plunging into a hail of gunfire and their certain deaths: the outlaw criminals as tragic fatalists.

This retelling of the real-life Cassidy story climaxed on the conventional wisdom of the time, that Butch and Sundance indeed perished in a police shootout in Bolivia. But, since 1974, dribs and drabs of circumstantial, anecdotal information have emerged suggesting that Cassidy lived, possibly until 1936, under a cloak of anonymity, like a Western version of Carlos the Jackal.

The juicy narrative possibilities of a mellower Cassidy growing old in the dusty Southwest were enough to attract first-time screenwriter Miguel Barros and director Mateo Gil (who wrote the Spanish hit Abre Los Ojos and its American remake, Vanilla Sky) to this apocryphal re-envisionment of Cassidy’s weary, post-Sundance life.

Here, Cassidy, played by a rugged, weathered Sam Shepard (is there any other kind?) is living in a South American pueblo under the name James Blackthorn, some 27 years after his disputed death. At the film’s opening, he’s selling all but one of his horses and withdrawing his entire $6,000 bank account in preparation for a journey to the United States to meet a niece (or nephew) to whom he writes letters.

His trip is swiftly stifled by the appearance of Eduardo (Eduardo Noriega), a bandit on the run, whose sneak attack leads to the escape of Cassidy’s equine and his entire cache of cash. The two bond, albeit with guns perpetually pointed in each other’s direction, as they head toward a mine where Eduardo says he has hidden $50,000 of an unscrupulous businessman’s money.

Blackthorn thus becomes equal parts road movie, buddy film, Western and memory film, with Gil contrasting Cassidy’s modern-day exploits with his early-20^th-century reign alongside Etta Place and the Sundance Kid (Dominique McElligott and Padraic Delaney).

The point of Barros’ and Gil’s movie can only be expressed in exhausted aphorisms: “Once an outlaw, always an outlaw; history is doomed to repeat itself,” etc. Blackthorn boasts more blood and truer grit than Hill’s Cassidy dramedy, and I have to believe that the actual Cassidy shared more in common with Shepard’s grizzled countenance than Paul Newman’s marquee visage.

But it runs out of gas quicker than a Hummer on a highway, beginning to crater with the appearance of Stephen Rea, hamming it up embarrassingly as the alcoholic investigator who always knew Cassidy was still alive. The turgid patches that slowed down some of the action in the first half become the movie’s full-time pacing.

The shadows of Monte Hellman and Sam Peckinpah come and go from Gil’s palette of influences – the former in a number of expressively endless landscapes Cassidy rides across in existential isolation, and the latter in some hilariously crass scenes and dialogue: “Your ass is softer than a bookkeeper’s,” Cassidy remarks, after rubbing a cream on Eduardo’s buttocks to cure a saddle sore. Blackthorn could have used more of Bloody Sam’s inspiration to spruce up its own creaky, aching joints.

Shepard tends to leave more of an auteurist imprint on this project than its makers; as a playwright and actor, he’s staked his flag in Southwestern locales and twilight portraits. But a film he collaborated on a few years back, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, only shows the artistic potential this kind of revisionist Western iconography can have. Alternative history should be a lot more fun and imaginative than Blackthorn.

BLACKTHORN. Director: Gil Mateo. Cast: Sam Shepard, Eduardo Noriega, Stephen Rea, Magaly Solier, Dominique McElligott, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Padraic Delaney; Distributor: Magnolia; Rating: R; Opens: Friday at Living Room Theaters at FAU and Tower Theatre in Miami

As charming as it is preposterous, a French fable called Le Havre arrives this week by way of Finland, the home of writer-director Aki Kaurismäki, whose idiosyncratic style is evident throughout this tale of that current events topic -- illegal immigration.

Le Havre, the industrial port city in Normandy plays a vital role in this story of a likeable freelance shoeshine guy, Marcel (Kaurismäki veteran André Wilms), who befriends a young African boy, Idrissa (Blondin Miguel). Discovered on the docks with his family in a shipping container bound for London, Idrissa runs away from the authorities and encounters Marcel, who hides the boy in his humble home.

It is not like Marcel doesn’t have his own troubles, for his long-suffering wife, Arletty (the wondrously deadpan Kati Outinen, also a favorite of Kaurismäki’s) has just contracted a mysterious, life-threatening pain and had to be rushed to the hospital. While she is there, Marcel’s concerned neighbors conspire to care for Idrissa, keep the police off his tail and, eventually, do what they can to help the boy escape to freedom in England.

All of this whimsy could be badly overplayed, but Kaurismäki is a staunch minimalist and his actors uniformly underplay to a fault, at times to the extent of barely changing expressions within a scene.

Still, Le Havre is full of flavorful characters, including the local shopkeepers and particularly the police inspector, Monet (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), who always seems one step away from nabbing the boy, but ultimately proves to be far more benign than his dark garb suggests.

And for no other reason than Kaurismäki’s interest in showcasing him, the movie pauses for a concert by a diminutive rock singer named Little Bob (Roberto Piazza) that is entirely in keeping with the rest of the film’s non sequiturs. Chances are you would not want it any other way.

LE HAVRE. Director: Aki Kaurismäki. Starring: André Wilms, Blondin Miguel, Kait Outinen, Jean-Pierre Darroussin. Distributor: Janus Films. In French with English subtitles. Showing: Opening this weekend at the Mos’Art Theatre in Lake Park.