Alexander Payne’s Oscar nominated The Descendants provides Best Actor nominee George Clooney with his most assured performance to date as the middle-aged Hawaiian lawyer and land baron who becomes the primary caregiver for his two daughters when their mother is injured in a boating accident.

The film is gorgeously photographed and scored, but despite its Oscar winning screenplay, all the characters, including Clooney’s, don’t seem to be any more than figments of the writers’ combined imaginations.

Clooney’s kids (Shailene Woodley, Amara Miller) are both foul-mouthed brats, which seems to come as a surprise to their oblivious father. The older daughter’s boyfriend (Nick Krause) is irrelevant to the story and appears to have been added to the narrative merely as a sounding board for Clooney’s character. Clooney’s father-in-law, played by the usually forthright Robert Forster, is a mean-spirited jerk no one but the boyfriend has the gumption to call out. Clooney’s cousins, including the once great Beau Bridges, are nothing but a bunch of money grubbing losers. Only Judy Greer as the wife of the man (Matthew Lillard) Clooney’s wife was having an affair with comes off as a believable character. Her last scene with Clooney is a real heartbreaker unlike most of the contrived manipulations of the rest of the film which seem as phony as the glycerin induced tear Clooney sheds in the scene anyone who has seen the film’s incessant TV spots knows all too well.

Maybe I was expecting too much, but this was a real letdown coming from the writer/director of the incandescent Sideways and the melancholy About Schmidt. Still, there is that gorgeous scenery and that captivating music and a good performance by Clooney to make it worth seeing at least once.

Charlize Theron generally gets bad rap for being beautiful. The gifted actress is often criticized for taking roles in which she de-glamorizes herself to the point of stunt casting, allowing her detractors to accuse her of playing against type in order to win awards. Indeed, two of those performances have resulted in Oscar nominations, a win for the first, 2003’s Monster and nod only for the second, 2005’s North Country.

With Young Adult, written by Oscatr winner Diablo Cody and directed by Oscar nominee Jason Reitman, the team behind 2007’s Juno, Theron plays up the glamour angle, but is otherwise anything but gorgeous as a vain, selfish writer who has nothing but contempt for everyone around her.

Theron’s character is no dumb blonde. She’s a smart cookie, but a poisonous one who returns to her home town determined to win back her happily married former high school boyfriend (Patrick Wilson) whose wife has just had a baby. The only person who seems to appreciate her is another former classmate (Patton Oswalt) who she refused to give the time of day to in her younger days.

Oswalt’s character walks with a limp and has other physical maladies caused by a beating he suffered from Theron’s friends, the school jocks. Both Theron and Patton give Oscar worthy performances that, despite early recognition from critics’ groups, failed to connect with Oscar voters when the film tanked at the box office. Perhaps the film’s box office failure has something to do with the film’s title and marketing campaign which tended to make the film appear to be more of a comedy than it actually is. The title does not refer to Theron’s character, but the type of niche novel she writes.

Michelle Williams is an actress who constantly surprises. From her inauspicious beginnings on TV she has emerged in the last few years as a remarkable actress, earning Oscar nominations for completely different characterizations in 2005’s Brokeback Mountain and 2010’s Blue Valentine. She earned a richly deserved third nomination for her portrayal of Marilyn Monroe in My Week With Marilyn.

My Week With Marilyn is based on the memoirs of Colin Clark, an intern for Laurence Olviier during the making of the 1957 Monroe-Olivier film, The Prince and the Showgirl. How much is as it actually happened, or happened as Clark recalled it or for that matter, embellished it, is open for interpretation. Suffice it to say that the Monroe delivered by Williams here is a poignat, plausible evocation of the actress.

Kenneth Branagh, who has reinterpreted several of Olivier’s Shakespearean films in the past, now interprets the director himself in a very deft impersonation and Judi Dench, though physically not of Sybil Thorndike’s stature, is every bit as commanding as her predecessor.

The film, The Prince and the Showgirl was not a particularly memorable one in the careers of either Monroe or Olivier. She was the producer, he was the director. He had a reputation as the world’s greatest living actor; she had one of being difficult to work with. On screen, the two have little chemistry with Monroe’s playful acting easily upstaging Olivier’s more serious approach. The film is stolen by Thorndike, who received a National Board of Review award as the year’s Best Supporting Actress. In the film about the film, however, Williams as Monroe is the clear standout with Brangh, Eddie Redmayne as Clark and Dench all in fine fettle in support. The rest of the cast, however, including Emma Watson, Dominic Cooper, Toby Jones, Derek Jacobi, Dougray Scott as Athur Miller and Julia Ormond as Vivien Leigh, is totally wasted.

Motion capture is a curious hybrid of live action and animation that can’t seem to please either animators or live performance actors. The former group rejects motion capture films for Oscar’s top animation prize year after year and the actors’ branch refuses to consider actors for acting awards based on the performances of actors whose live performances are tracked and then voiced by those actors. The latest case in point is Steven Spielberg’sThe Adventures of Tintin based on a series of classic comic books about an intrepid young reporter. The film’s only Oscar nomination was for John Williams’ score.

The film, now out on Blu-ray and standard DVD looks and sounds great. The story is a kid’s story, so don’t expect anything too deep, but it’s a lot of fun as the reporter mixes it up with crooks and pirates from Belgium to Morocco. Jamie Bell and the ubiquitous Andy Serkis perfectly voice the title hero and the ship’s captain.

Twilight Time, heretofore known for its specialty CD releases of film scores, has in the last few years expanded to releasing films made by Twentieth Century-Fox and latterly, Columbia, first on DVD, now on Blu-ray.

Newly released by Twilight Time are three films that deserve renewed recognition.

Rodgers & Hart’s Pal Joey was a critical success on Broadway in 1940, but not a commercial one, although it did make Gene Kelly a star.

Many of the songs were too risqué to become pop hits, but a cleaned up version of “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” did become a standard. Then in 1950, Columbia Records released a studio cast recording of the full score which became a cultural phenomenon leading to the celebrated 1952 revival of the show with the recording’s stars, Vivienne Segal and Harold Lang, joined by Broadway regulars Helen Gallagher and Elaine Stritch. Segal had played the part of the show biz rat’s married rich lover. Lang, a popular dancer, had the role originated by Gene Kelly.

The 1957 film, which was a starring vehicle for Frank Sinatra, softens the character and adds a happy ending not in the original. Rita Hayworth essays the role of the rich lover, now a widow. Kim Novak plays the innocent caught in their web. The film not only tones down the play’s dicey relationships, but also guts the score, substituting other Rodgers & Hart’s standards such as “The Lady Is a Tramp” and “My Funny Valentine” for such gems as “In Our Little Den of Iniquity” and “Happy Hunting Horn”. The problem was that in 1957, the original score was still fresh in the minds of most film reviewers and many audience members who were disappointed in the film’s white washing. On the other hand, for anyone not familiar with the original, it will prove to be one of Sinatra’s and Hayworth’s best films. The same can’t be said for Novak who comes across like a wet blanket through most of the film.

The film has never looked better than in its Blu-ray presentation.

One of the strangest films in John Huston’s canon, 1958’s The Roots of Heaven is one that was ahead of its time. Concerned chiefly with the systematic depletion of the elephant population in Africa, the early sections of the film play it so much for comedy that when tragedy strikes it takes a minute or two to realize that what seemed to be meant to be funny earlier on, really wasn’t.

The casting here is curious. Errol Flynn receives top billing for a decidedly supporting role, while second billed Juliette Greco seems far too young and pretty to be attracted to third billed actual star Trevor Howard. Eddie Albert shows up late in the film and Orson Welles is in for a cameo early on.

The reason that Howard, then known as a sturdy character actor, was given the central role was because the producers had the film ready to go and no one to star. Howard was the only available willing to endure the grueling shoot. He was, in fact, a last minute replacement for William Holden who had signed up for the part without getting clearance from Paramount who at the last minute refused to release him from his remaining contract. Greco was purportedly producer Daryl Zanuck’s mistress at the time.

The Blu-ray does the color cinematography full justice.

A lost gem, 1965’s Rapture, directed by John Guillermin, was the second of three films made by Patricia Gozzi, the twelve year-old find of 1962’s Sundays and Cybele. At fifteen, she is simply luminous as a child in a woman’s emerging body.

Isolated at the country farm house of her widowed father, a retired judge turned writer, Gozzi still plays with dolls. Despite her father’s early misgivings, she is given one of his old suits and hats with which to make a scarecrow. When an escaped convict (Dean Stockwell) takes down the scarecrow and dresses in her father’s suit and hat, she believes he is the scarecrow come to life.

The film, which was only shown at film festivals in the U.S. was probably considered too shocking for general audiences of the day. The sex scenes between fifteen year-old Gozzi and nearly thirty year-old Stockwell, although tastefully handled, are disturbing. Still, it’s worth seeing for Gozzi’s mercurial performance and the stunning black-and-white cinematography.

This week’s DVD releases include the 2011 versions of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.