Holiday movies: Stumbling into the final stretch

This fall the pressure is on as it has rarely been on before. The year is rapidly winding down, yet film studios are still holding back the prestigious, important, artful, thought-provoking movies that will define the 2008 Oscar race.

If nominations were due today, the only movies with a shot at enduring status would be "Wall•E" and "The Dark Knight." Granted, they transcend their origins, just as "The Godfather" became more than the cheap gangster flick Paramount Pictures thought it was producing. But seriously: With two months left, our best-picture candidates are a cartoon and a movie based on a comic book?

As we survey the horizon, we see ever-greater hopes pinned on fewer and fewer contenders. Frustratingly, several of the season's most promising titles were abruptly rescheduled or dropped into limbo by their distributors.

Weinstein Company's "The Road" carries an impressive pedigree. Based on Cormac McCarthy's eerie novel, it stars Viggo Mortensen leading his son through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Directed by Australia's audacious John Hillcoat (of the powerful, bloody Down Under Western "The Proposition") and scored by rock icon Nick Cave, it promises to be a powerful blast of wintry pessimism. It's now on hold.

The same holds true for Paramount's "The Soloist," starring frequent best-actor contenders Jamie Foxx as a homeless Los Angeles street musician and Robert Downey Jr. as the journalist who covers his unlikely rebirth and triumph.

The studio also has delayed "Defiance," a serious World War II drama starring Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell as resistance fighters.

The films might get limited Oscar qualifying runs, like "Revolutionary Road." The film oozes prestige, reuniting "Titanic" lovers Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as 1960s Connecticut suburbanites whose differing desires wrench their marriage. Sam Mendes ("American Beauty"), composer supreme Thomas Newman and superstar photographer Roger Deakins (who just finished shooting the Coen brothers' "A Serious Man" around town) collaborate on this adaptation of Richard Yates' rueful novel. The film's original fall release date has been pushed back several times, and now it won't open in top-20 markets like the Twin Cities until January.

The same goes for "The Wrestler," a character study of a onetime sports star that won the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival and propelled comeback kid Mickey Rourke into the Oscar spotlight. Rourke can probably identify with Randy (The Ram) Robinson, an aging has-been grappler who gives his bloody all for the loyalists who remember him. His love interest is Marisa Tomei as a past-her-prime stripper; Evan Rachel Wood is his estranged daughter. The story shapes up as a touching tribute to a battered but brave American generation.

The precise reasons for these multiple postponements are hard to pinpoint. There are rumors of postproduction technical delays, rumblings about the box-office prospects of grim stories in lean times.

The results are clear, however. November looks threadbare while December is crowded with such promising last-minute entries as David Fincher's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" and Ron Howard's "Frost/Nixon." Here's a rundown of what else is concealed behind the curtain.

OPENING FRIDAY

"Quantum of Solace": Daniel Craig's second assignment as 007 continues the story line of "Casino Royale," with James Bond hunting villains who killed his beloved Vesper Lynd. The locales are exotic, the stunts Bourne-like and the cast A-list. Mathieu Amalric (the paralyzed protagonist of "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly") is breathtakingly malicious as a power broker capable of holding entire nations to ransom with his control of their natural resources. Judi Dench, Jeffrey Wright and Giancarlo Giannini reprise their roles as Bond's colleagues. For the first time, the producers tapped a director from outside the Commonwealth of Nations to direct, Switzerland's Marc Forster ("Finding Neverland").

Nov. 21

"Slumdog Millionaire": England's wizardly Danny Boyle can pour his talent into all sorts of containers, from punk addiction dramedies ("Trainspotting") to horror ("28 Days Later") and children's charmers ("Millions") to science fiction ("Sunshine"). This time he filters India's economic, political and social structure through an exciting drama/romance. Three actors play the protagonist, a street kid from Mumbai's teeming ghettos, who becomes a contestant on India's "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" Screenwriter Simon Beaufoy cleverly employs the game show format to skip through his hero's cursed, wonderful life. (Date tentative.)

NOV. 26

"Australia": Baz Luhrmann ("Moulin Rouge") has had seven years away from filmmaking, and he's come thundering back with a $130 million World War II love story. The cinematography is epic, with the land playing a role all its own. Nicole Kidman plays a refined Englishwoman come to claim a vast Outback cattle ranch; Hugh Jackman is the rough-hewn loner cowboy who captures her heart. There are grandiose battle scenes involving Japanese dive-bombers and swooningly romantic dance sequences.

"Milk": Sean Penn plays Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in California; Josh Brolin plays disturbed San Francisco City Councilman Dan White, a homophobic foe of Milk's who assassinated him in 1978. Director Gus Van Sant vividly portrays the struggles of the gay rights movement and reportedly examines Milk's untidy private life, with love scenes between Penn and James Franco, Emile Hirsch and Diego Luna.

DEC. 12

"Frost/Nixon": Ron Howard explores the backstage drama surrounding the post-Watergate TV interviews between English talk show host David Frost (Michael Sheen, who played Tony Blair in "The Queen") and disgraced ex-president Richard Nixon (former Guthrie actor Frank Langella).

DEC. 19

"Seven Pounds": Will Smith plays it straight as a suicidal IRS agent who vows to change seven deserving strangers' lives before he goes. When co-star Rosario Dawson offers him an emotional connection he never anticipated, he reassesses his plans. Directed by Gabriele Muccino, who guided Smith to a deeply touching performance in 2006's "The Pursuit of Happyness."

Dec. 25

"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button": Brad Pitt is shaping up as the best character actor ever to inhabit a handsome movie star's body. In this adaptation of an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, he plays a man with a bizarre medical condition that causes him to age backwards. Director David Fincher (who worked with Pitt in "Seven" and "Fight Club") gives the tale a lush, stately look; his peerless command of cutting-edge film technology should come into play as Pitt regresses from 90 to 8. Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, Julia Ormond and Elias Koteas co-star. The deliciously creepy composer Andre Desplat wrote the score; Oscar winner Eric Roth ("Forrest Gump," but still) wrote the screenplay.

DEC. 26

"Valkyrie": On the plus side, there's immense drama in this true-life tale of German military officers engineering a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. Director Bryan Singer is a dramatic and visual craftsman, and "Apt Pupil" proved he knows how to make Nazi uniforms look elegantly evil. The cast boasts Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson and Eddie Izzard, the cream of Britain's acting pool. On the downside, we have Tom Cruise playing lead plotter Col. Claus von Stauffenberg with a Malibu accent, and hammer-it-dead expository dialogue about the true nature of patriotism. Did we mention he has a dead hand and an eye patch? Cross your fingers, jawohl?

Colin Covert • 612-673-7186