Visually, The Grey is harsh and drab, aside from a few coruscating shots of a freezing river against a backdrop of white mountains. But even that image squashes the men down to size. They don’t belong here; the wolves do. There’s no human civilization in sight; Neeson wearily advises the other men not to pin their hopes on being rescued — “Unless you want to freeze to death. That will come for you.” Director Joe Carnahan and his cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi emphasize the sharp cold and grinding discomfort of the journey. More often than not, the men are imperiled not by hungry wolves but by their own terrible luck bashing up against the remorseless physics of outdoor survival.

At times, the movie could just as well be acted out on a stage, as the men talk about their lives and their loved ones. This is the soul of The Grey, an existentialist thriller in which Liam Neeson faces down the void of God. He commands God, in less polite language: Never mind faith — earn it. Do something; show yourself. The answer is silence. Thus a Bergmanesque despair creeps around the edges of what’s being marketed as a survival action flick. One of the men becomes weighed down by the meaningless sadness of what awaits him if, by dazzling fortune, he should actually happen to survive and return to what passes for his normal life. The Grey is a hard slog and a bummer. I can’t say I was sorry it was over. But it also has the stark purity of an icicle; it earns my respect if not my love.

The dialogue is a bit overexplicit here and there, and the action (especially a bit where the men cross a divide between a cliff and a tree) feels somewhat makeshift. Ultimately, The Grey shakes out as more of a spiritual drama, the spirit simply being the will — or lack thereof — to live in the face of vast futility. The wolves might as well be bears, or cancer, or faulty car brakes. They’re not the villains; the wild is their home, and the plane crash has delivered them some unexpected dinners. Take the wolves out of the equation and you still have an environment that tests human endurance at every turn. Narratively, The Grey is a little amorphous, with an ambiguous ending (a post-credits bit doesn’t clarify matters). It leaves us with some not entirely happy thoughts about humans and our role in the universe; the silence of the movie’s God echoes like a dark bell.

A mixed martial-arts fighter, Carano makes her acting debut in Haywire. As he did with former porn star Sasha Grey in The Girlfriend Experience, Soderbergh uses Carano as a found object, a non-actress who has, as Liam Neeson put it in Taken, a very particular set of skills. These women carry themselves differently from most women; their bodies speak eloquently of physical experience (and excess) beyond the rest of us. Carano is small but not tiny (five-foot-eight), muscular but not beefy, and she uses her taller adversaries’ weight and height against them, jumping up onto their backs and squeezing their throats hard. The men topple like trees, one by one. With standard gun-toting cops she doesn’t have to kill, Mallory is somewhat gentler — just a punch or two, and they topple nicely. (This is the movie that should have been called The Iron Lady.)

Soderbergh has built an entire movie around this woman and her ability to get into (and win) vicious fights without a lot of cheating in the editing bay. The battles play out in long shot, and David Holmes’ groovy retro score shuts the hell up once the fists start flying, so we can hear the realistic pounding. The hits sound and look painful — some of them couldn’t have been faked, and I felt sorry for such actors as Michael Fassbender, Channing Tatum and Ewan McGregor, who probably put in a few weeks of training for their confrontations with Carano but clearly aren’t in her league. Again, it’s the physical eloquence: the men act their moves, sometimes passably; Carano isn’t acting. Unfortunately, that extends to her non-fighting scenes. Carano speaks in a hard flat voice; her eyes don’t take the light, and every so often her discomfort shows. The actors, aside from a panicky dude (Michael Angarano) Mallory sort of kidnaps, compensate by lowering their energy level around her. When Ewan McGregor, say, gets to act opposite Michael Douglas instead of Carano, his relief is palpable — he can now play a scene.

But then the movie isn’t primarily about acting, is it? I suppose Haywire is, on paper, no different from many Asian martial-arts films, or even a few American ones (like, say, the ’90s filmography of Cynthia Rothrock), that put a shaky actress but unquestionable fighting master front and center. But Soderbergh takes the opportunity to write a trim visual essay on attack and retreat. Going back to that shelf scene: the important thing isn’t the exposition but the sense we get that Mallory yearns for a peaceful, orderly place to call home. She’s an expert in her field, and she doesn’t necessarily want to leave it — she’s just tired of dealing with corrupt men. Aside from a brief exchange between McGregor and Fassbender (“I’ve never done a woman before.” “Don’t think of her as a woman; that would be a mistake”), the movie treats a killer woman as a complete non-issue and non-novelty, and thankfully we don’t get the false sense that she does what she does out of some shamefully unfeminine flaw. She isn’t rebelling against or trying to impress Daddy; indeed, Daddy (Bill Paxton) is a military-thriller writer who seems a bit awed by her. Of course, this also means Mallory has no shading, and no flaws at all aside from perhaps trusting the wrong people, but the film moves so ruthlessly and economically that it doesn’t matter much. It’s the sort of action-thriller that’s been done a billion times, but its severe, almost austere sense of purpose sets it apart.

The Iron Lady is a bit confused. It celebrates Thatcher’s strength as a woman making a go of it in male-dominated politics, but seems to regret that it had to be this woman. Thatcher, who came from a humble working-class background, seemed to fetishize pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps, which is fine unless you’re too poor to have bootstraps, or boots. Anyway, liberal feminists watching Thatcher being sneeringly debated by Liberal party members (photographed to look piggish and sexist, though at that point they’re denouncing her policies, not her gender) may feel a bit of dissonance. The film doesn’t seem all that interested in the things Thatcher said and did as Prime Minister; its heart is in the later scenes of loneliness, but the tone is so wobbly that I don’t know whether we’re meant to take pity on a suffering old person or take pleasure in her downfall.

Streep dominates, and Broadbent pops in to comfort or taunt from beyond the grave. Here and there, reliable farceurs like Richard E. Grant and Anthony Stewart Head show up, plotting or being humiliated; it’s a pity Michael Sheen couldn’t drag out his Tony Blair one more time, but whatever. Phyllida Lloyd (who also directed Streep in Mamma Mia) mainly sticks to the stately rhythms of a conventional biopic, with odd little shards of absurdity, including two separate uses of the doofus punk band Notsensibles’ single “I’m in Love with Margaret Thatcher.” The mood, I think, would like to sidle up to half-admiration, half-satire, as in Ed Wood or The People Vs. Larry Flynt. But some of the scenes of old Thatcher wobbling around her bleak gray house, chasing after voices in other rooms that may or may not be real, are poised between tragedy and comedy in a way that might strike even Elvis Costello as cruel. The filmmakers haven’t come to any conclusion about Thatcher or, indeed, why they made a movie about her. Streep, in the political scenes, scrupulously acts Thatcher’s defiance in the abstract but doesn’t, or can’t, bring much conviction to what she’s actually saying.

In brief, the split between Thatcher the private person and Thatcher the politician isn’t dramatized or even comprehended. How someone from a working-class background goes on to become a person widely noted for her lack of compassion for the unemployed is well beyond this movie. And I hate to say it, but the device of gathering the splinters of an elderly person’s memories was handled with far more poetry in Bill Condon’s Gods and Monsters — whose openly gay protagonist James Whale may have fashioned a tart rejoinder to Thatcher’s complaint “Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay.” (If you’re waiting for Meryl Streep to deliver that line and still come off as a poignant figure in decline, you have a long wait in store — the movie neglects, among other things, the noxious and bigoted Section 28.) The Iron Lady is not in love with Margaret Thatcher, nor does it yearn to tramp the dirt down. It scatters some banalities about misunderstood powerful women, floats the notion that Thatcher was a different kind of feminist, then pulls back, then floats, then pulls back. The dithering becomes irritating. What’s next — an is-she-crazy-or-just-too-bold biopic of Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann?

In 1989, we are told, a woman named Maria Rossi (Suzan Crowley) killed two priests and a nun (rivalling the psychotic Krug in Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left, who’d killed two nuns and a priest) during an attempted exorcism at her house. An early news report we see, filed before the facts were in, characterizing this exorcism as “a church group” provides the one lonely bit of entertainment in the entire film. The Devil Inside is yet another mock-documentary, found-footage horror movie, which means we spend a lot of time wondering why the cameraman doesn’t just say — well, what the gentleman in my theater said — and run away. This intrepid, stupid cameraman tracks the journey of Isabella Rossi (Fernanda Andrade), the daughter of the woman with the triple murder rap. Maria is tucked away in a laughing academy in Rome, where, for fun, she carves crosses on her arms and generally behaves like every demon-possessed movie character of the last 39 years.

Isabella’s quest is to find out whether her mother is really possessed, and she enlists the help of two rogue priests who have sworn to perform unauthorized exorcisms on afflicted people the Vatican turns its back on. They mostly fumble about, looking at this reading or that, while the victim more or less dances on the ceiling and stops just short of going out like Michael Hutchence did. They first visit a possessed young woman played by someone who, I gather, is an impressive contortionist. Some Latin clears her right up. Then they visit Maria, a tougher nut to crack; whatever’s in her may have the ability to jump to another body. We know this because the word “transference” works its way into at least a dozen conversations, up to and including “Should we have Chinese or Italian take-out?”

Towards the miserable end, the itchy-footed demon hops from one person to another, and before the credits roll we are invited to visit www.therossifiles.com for more information on this developing case. This is how the world ends: not with a bang or a whimper but with a URL. “Be part of the ongoing investigation,” the website tells us. Thank you, but no. I see a great many lame things on the site, but a proper ending to the film I and many millions paid to see is not among them. I see “Click below to discuss the case with others,” but I do not see “Click below to get your money back.” In the comments section, I see many credulous viewers (or webmasters posing as such) debating solemnly over whether the film’s events were real, but I do not see anyone responding as did the loudly unimpressed gentleman in my theater, who I now maintain is the most spontaneously honest film critic I have heard since Pauline Kael died. Well done, sir; I concur.

The movie didn’t thrill me, exactly, but it’s absorbing. Half the film devotes itself to the ludicrously convoluted schemes Ethan and his IMF team — including ass-kicking Paula Patton, returning Simon Pegg, and shadowy Jeremy Renner — hatch in order to gain access to highly secure places. My favorite, used early on in Moscow, is a screen that covers a hallway and projects what a security guard is supposed to be seeing, while Cruise and Pegg hide behind it and move it forward a few feet every minute or so. Not only that, some sort of tracking is used to move the image on the screen so that it looks natural to the security guard wherever he’s standing or sitting. It would have been easier, I suspect, simply to take the guard out with technology no more sophisticated than a blow dart. But it wouldn’t have been as cool.

Coolness, indeed, is the film’s main weapon. This is the live-action directing debut of Brad Bird, an animator best known for his work on The Simpsons and his acclaimed animated features The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille. Bird approaches Ghost Protocol as a live-action cartoon, yet one with an appealing sense of physics. Ethan Hunt gets bashed around quite a bit, landing in the hospital not once but twice. When he’s prone and exhausted near the end, we believe it. Cruise is in fine shape, but he’s aging out of his pretty-boy looks — the nose is starting to look gnarled and bulbous, approaching Owen Wilson levels. And so when he gets chewed up, while his teammates mostly kick back on the sidelines (although Patton gets a nicely feral fight scene and Renner gets a high-stress mid-air scene that almost parodies Ethan’s dangling in the first film), he becomes more human and likable, somehow. Cruise isn’t quite so cocky here. Ethan throws himself into impossible situations because there’s no other way; he doesn’t just assume he’s going to master the situation.

The movie’s most sung and storied sequence by far places Ethan on the side of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the tallest building in the world. Cruise, we are assured, is really up there, though suspended by wires that were later digitally removed. The scene could easily have been faked, but Bird’s camera, moving around Cruise’s body and staring down the face of the monolith, catches images that simply wouldn’t occur to anyone to fake. It’s the centerpiece of the film but doesn’t take up too much time; it’s economical and governed by the story’s needs, like everything else in the movie. As for the rest of it, it’s a smoothly rhythmed piece of work, moving at a pace sufficient to bypass inconvenient questions. Ethan is on the side of the building so he can access the place’s server so that the team can fake a meeting and swap a fake nuclear code for a real one using special contact lenses and a fake hand, when in a more boring film they might’ve just killed the thugs and taken the code. It’s the theater of subterfuge.

• Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked made more money on its first day than A Dangerous Method has made in four weeks
• Mars Needs Moms made more money than The Tree of Life (and I’m not a Malick fan, but c’mon)
• I Don’t Know How She Does It made more money than Cave of Forgotten Dreams
• Conan the Barbarian made more money than The Rum Diary
• Sherlock Holmes 2: Sherlock Holmesier, or whatever the fuck it’s called, has made more money on its opening weekend than The Descendants has made so far in 33 days
• Even Atlas Shrugged Part I made more money than Melancholia.

Of the top ten moneymakers, eight were sequels — straight-up, the top seven were sequels. The two exceptions were based on Marvel comic books. This is the list as it stands now, though latecomers like Mission Impossible 4: Mission Impossibler might supplant a few.

1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
2. Transformers: Dark of the Moon
3. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1
4. The Hangover Part II
5. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
6. Fast Five
7. Cars 2
8. Thor
9. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
10. Captain America: The First Avenger

Now let’s take our annual look at the top ten from twenty years ago:

1. Terminator 2: Judgment Day
2. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
3. Beauty and the Beast
4. The Silence of the Lambs
5. City Slickers
6. Hook
7. The Addams Family
8. Sleeping with the Enemy
9. Father of the Bride
10. The Naked Gun 2 1/2

There’s a good deal of family/kiddie/fanboy pap on there, yes. But at #4 is the year’s eventual Best Picture winner, The Silence of the Lambs, recognized then and now as a modern classic. Not that it matters much, but how many times since then has a top-ten-of-the-year breadwinner also been a Best Picture winner? Exactly five times: Forrest Gump, Titanic, Gladiator, Chicago, and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Which means we haven’t had a top ten Best Picture winner in eight years.

Let’s flip back ten years. 2001 looks like 2011 in a lot of ways. A Harry Potter film sits at #1, just as in 2011. There’s also a Michael Bay film (Pearl Harbor), a Joe Johnston film (Jurassic Park III), and a Planet of the Apes film. The rest of the list is clotted with kiddie flicks, sequels, and movies based on previously popular properties. Then there’s Ocean’s Eleven, which itself would become a franchise (and was also a remake, though higher in tone than most). Note the lack of comic-book films: even though the previous year’s X-Men had made the top ten, and Spider-Man would dominate a year later, Marvel and DC hadn’t quite gotten Hollywood in a stranglehold yet. Since 2000, there have been only two years when no comic-book flicks appeared on the year-end top-ten list at all: 2001 and 2009. (2009 was a relatively light year for the subgenre; the double-whammy success of The Dark Knight and Iron Man in ’08 led to a new boom in superhero films being greenlighted, but they wouldn’t actually hit theaters until 2010 and thereafter.)

So what films might make the list of 2012′s top-ten grossers? The Hunger Games might be the new Twilight. The old Twilight still has one more film to go. Comic books will rule again: The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, The Amazing Spider-Man. Peter Jackson is revisiting Middle-Earth, and 3D isn’t going away. And possibly a few surprises. They still happen. The Help just missed a spot on the top ten, and Bridesmaids wasn’t far behind. And even the execrable Bad Teacher cracked $100 million. That means more non-rom-coms made for females who aren’t fourteen. It won’t happen in 2012, though; you’ll start seeing the Bridesmaids wannabes in 2013. That’s if we’re still here, of course. Remember, the world’s supposed to end December 12, 2012, just like Roland Emmerich said. This means the last big-budget movie you’ll ever see is Les Miserables with Hugh Jackman on December 7. As for The Hobbit (scheduled for release December 14) and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (December 25), well, we’ll just have to wait and see.

The movie unfurls in fragments, bouncing around through time, the main signifier being the length of Eva’s hair (in the earlier bits, before her life has completely fallen apart, she has a stylishly short style; later on, it’s longer and lifeless). What we gather is that Kevin, now a teenager, has gone on a school rampage, and that this has destroyed Eva’s life. In flashbacks, we see her living with her son, her clueless husband (John C. Reilly), and her younger daughter in a huge house without many neighbors around. (The remoteness of the house becomes important later.) As a best-selling writer of travel books, Eva can afford the set-up. In the present-day scenes she’s renting a ratty suburban house and toiling as a secretary in a — insult-to-injury here — travel agency. Everywhere she goes, she stands a good chance of being insulted, being physically attacked, or having her property vandalized by the grieving parents of the fellow students Kevin killed. Her life is effectively over. We sense that the only reason she doesn’t OD on a bottle of pills and a bottle of the red wine she’s always chugging is that she needs to hear Kevin — whom she visits in the juvie institution — explain why he did it. As if there could be an explanation.

We Need to Talk About Kevin isn’t the kind of film that provides such a reason. What it does do, with stomach-freezing efficacy, is to swim around inside the pain of a parent whose child is a monster. (Another recent film, last summer’s Beautiful Boy, probed the same sort of wound.) But we also see that Eva is not entirely innocent. I said before that she tries and tries, but some people are cut out to be parents and some are not; some have the patience for a particularly recalcitrant child and some don’t. As it happens, Eva’s relationship with the younger daughter, Celia, seems perfectly healthy, if only because Celia doesn’t smear sandwiches on glass tables or shit herself to spite Eva. It can also happen that parents make all their mistakes with the first kid and are mellower with the subsequent ones. Whatever the case, we’re shown that Kevin gave Eva trouble right from birth, literally from birth. The only time he cuts her some slack is when he’s sick and he develops an interest in the Robin Hood storybook she’s reading to him, which in turn forms an interest in archery.

This is easily the most mainstream film Lynne Ramsay has made, though it’s still far from ready for prime time. A lot of it, thematically and symbolically, is very neat; a little too neat. There are the obvious images of Eva straining throughout the movie to clean up red paint that’s been splattered across the front of her house, with many close-ups of her washing the paint off her hands. Yes, we get it; out, damn’d spot! We also get that every hapless interaction she endures with Kevin marches them both irreversibly towards his massacre. When we see that little Celia has two healthy eyes in some scenes and an eyepatch in others, we tense up and wait to find out how that happened (remembering all the while Kevin’s affinity for arrows). When Celia gets a plump little hamster for Christmas, we wait to see what Kevin will do to it. Some of the plotting mechanisms hark back to Lionel Shriver’s 2003 source novel, which if anything made Kevin even more of a bastard.

Still, what Ramsay does with the material — with invaluable help from the prickly-vulnerable Swinton and a peerless portrait in sociopathy by the 18-year-old Ezra Miller as the teenage Kevin — sticks in the mind and the eye. This is a thriller, after a fashion (some have called it a horror movie; Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells memorably termed it “emotional rat poison”), and it made me wonder anew what Ramsay might have done with The Lovely Bones, which she was attached to for a while before Peter Jackson took it over and stank it up with his heavy-breathing CGI visions of heaven. I wonder, too, if the experience of losing out on The Lovely Bones made Ramsay hungry for another story about murder and familial noncommunication and devastated mothers. This is by leaps and bounds the better film, though not nearly as comforting — we even hear Eva, with suspicious cheerfulness, telling Jehovah’s Witnesses that she fully expects to go to hell — and to recommend it to young or prospective parents would be the height of cruelty. The movie, among other things, gives us to think about how much of parenting is the luck of the genetic draw: some babies come out destined to bring pain to themselves and everyone around them, and not the smallest or largest damn thing can be done about it.

Splits/doubles/twinning are all over the place in A Dangerous Method, which makes this a pure David Cronenberg film despite the level of violence being held down to bottom-thwacking and one neat cut delivered to Jung’s face. Cronenberg has always been preoccupied with what he calls the “Cartesian split” between mind and body; he’s a bit of a psychoanalyst himself. He brings his usual pensive rigor to the proceedings, with little flashes of perversity now and then. Most of the drama is the drama of ideas; we can almost hear angry swords clanging in a prideful comment from Freud and its politely dissenting rejoinder from Jung. The irony, not lost on Jung, is that Jung must kill his “father” — a key Freudian concept.

Once Keira Knightley’s Sabina calms down, all of this unfolds in quiet talk in immaculate period settings. Michael Fassbender’s Jung, never less than exquisitely courteous, represses his feelings for Sabina while Viggo Mortensen’s Freud pulls on his cigar and sees everything coming (or would like to think he does). A little-noticed feature of much of Cronenberg’s work is that of a woman who yanks a man out of his comfort zone into strange new territories; sometimes it doesn’t end well for the man, but such is drama, and there’s always some sense of bold discovery, even if it’s entirely interior (and frightening). A Dangerous Method is about as interior as a movie can get; some of it feels stagebound (it originated as a play, The Talking Cure, by Christopher Hampton, who also wrote the script), but Cronenberg long ago graduated from drive-in gore-meister to actor’s director, and his camera attends to the smallest subtleties in the performances. We don’t need to know beforehand that Freud was a middle-class Jew who envied the gentile Jung’s marrying into wealth; a tiny, disapproving “hmph” from Mortensen says it all.

It may be that A Dangerous Method is less fun the more you know about the actual figures; to answer my opening question, at least one prominent therapist accused Cronenberg and company of “missing the story.” Well, that may be true if what you want is a textbook. For Cronenberg fans who didn’t desert him after he stopped blowing up heads and started exploring them, it’s yet another intensely calibrated portrait of repression and expression. Cronenberg remains the pre-eminent droll philosopher of English-speaking films, inviting us into his well-appointed office and probing us inside and out. Right at the start, in his first short film Transfer 45 years ago, Cronenberg told a seven-minute story about a psychiatrist and his fixated patient. A Dangerous Method takes him full circle.

Matt holds it together, barely. He doesn’t understand his two daughters, especially his 17-year-old, Alex (Shailene Woodley). He tries to be strong for them, to be the father he hasn’t been lately (he’s a busy lawyer). George Clooney has a way here of seeming most authoritative when Matt is at his most baffled and insecure. We never see Matt at ease — we’re tossed into his crisis right at the start — and he’s always roaming around the islands, looking for answers. There’s no enforced conflict in the movie; people talk, working their way through awkward moments. Director-cowriter Alexander Payne, working from a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, has left the venom of his past films (Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt, Sideways) far behind. Payne is generous to everyone here, even the realtor, who gets a scene of sad realization that almost single-handedly redeems Matthew Lillard’s past crimes.

The lightness of the surroundings doesn’t exactly mock the heaviness of the emotions; Hawaii just seems like the calmest place in the world to have a nervous breakdown, and it helps if you’re quite well-off and possibly soon to be even better off. On the evidence, Payne is most comfortable among the moneyed, the better to probe the fissures where their public faces meet their wolf-hour preoccupations. There’s a small risk that The Descendants, in the current atmosphere, may be dismissed as a melodrama about the problems of the rich. (Matt may not be in the 1%, but he’s at least in the 10%.) Usually I sympathize with such charges, but the movie has such a delicate touch in moments like Elizabeth’s gruff father (Robert Forster, still great at age 70) speaking gently to his Alzheimer-stricken wife or visiting Elizabeth’s bedside that the universality of grief — we all endure it, those clad in silk and denim alike — is strongly underscored.

Along the way, Matt’s every advantage is turned against him. His money might have saved his wife; less devotion to his job could have saved his marriage. All that land is just a headache, and bringing up two daughters in paradise guarantees no happiness for them. Deservedly, Shailene Woodley, who just turned 20, is about to become a lot better-known. (She currently stars in the ABC Family show The Secret Life of the American Teenager, unwatched by me.) Her Alex is screwed up in some ways, mature beyond her years in others, and Woodley shows us the link between the two. She’s the real soul of the film, which otherwise attends to Matt’s various crises. The Descendants is being marketed, rather misleadingly, as a comedy; the ads are packed with crude humor beats such as the gruff father-in-law decking Alex’s oblivious boyfriend, when in fact the punch emerges from genuine rage, the emotion Matt never quite allows himself.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth lies unresponsive in her bed, growing more gaunt with each scene, provoking sorrow and anger in roughly equal measure; the film tries to outdo Last Tango in Paris with not one but two bitter one-sided deathbed confrontations. (The second is probably unnecessary but gives Judy Greer, as the realtor’s wife, some good material for her highlight reel.) Ultimately, the film is about how everyone resolves his or her feelings about this insensate body wasting away in paradise — sort of like a shotgun marriage between Jimmy Buffett and Harry Chapin.

Edward knocks Bella up first time out — way to go, dude! — and Bella, now occupied by a super-baby killing her from within, starts her long, romantic dissipation into death. The Twilight series has been drenched in the peculiar insanity of repression all along, but in Breaking Dawn it reaches a fever pitch. Apparently, even if you do everything right and marry your forbidden boyfriend before you bed him, you will still suffer nightmarishly. Bella, however, doesn’t seem to suffer much, though computer effects render her skeletal; maybe it’s just that Kristen Stewart can’t bestir herself to portray agony any more than she could depict love, anger, sadness, wanting a sandwich, anything. At this point it’s hard to tell whether her blankness in the role owes to shrewdness — intentionally giving teenage female fans a void onto which to project themselves — or simply to boredom with the material. If the latter, she should thank Stephenie Meyer, who penned the Twilight novels, for only writing four instead of seven, like J.K. Rowling.

For long stretches of Breaking Dawn, we could be forgiven for forgetting that Edward is even a vampire; mostly he frets and dithers, resulting in Robert Pattinson’s dullest performance in the series, despite Edward’s finally gaining some physical satisfaction. Bella is slipping away from existence by the minute, and all Edward and his fancy vampire clan on the outskirts of Forks, Washington can think to do is stand around and occasionally offer her a Slurpee cup full of blood. The hot-blooded werewolf Jacob (Taylor Lautner), who also loves Bella, takes over the movie by default; he’s the only one who takes any initiative to do anything. I’ve always been Team Jacob — give me the lower-income Native American shape-shifters over the bloodsucking aristocracy (Occupy Forks!) — but it’s a pity about Taylor Lautner, who on his best day makes Kristen Stewart look like Maria Falconetti.

As a movie, this isn’t terrible; none of them have been, really. Each film has gotten a director who has tried to do something simple and honest with Meyer’s tormented material. Assuming the chair of dubious honor this time is Bill Condon, a long way from the sunnier days of Gods and Monsters and Kinsey. Regardless, he soldiers on, and he gives this half-story (he returns for Part 2, due next November) more gravitas and conviction than it deserves. Condon knows he can’t show the particulars of the harrowing caesarean birth without risking an NC-17 rating, so he sketches and suggests, letting our imaginations do the queasy work. Breaking Dawn will not be his proudest moment, but it doesn’t bring him disgrace either. (It’s already the most insanely successful box-office hit he’ll ever have — until, perhaps, Part 2 — which may finance another film or two at the level of Gods and Monsters.)

The main problem here is that, aside from its many bizarre elements, the film feels like the prelude to the more interesting finale that Part 2 promises to be, what with Bella now vampirized and feeling her new powers. If that doesn’t goose Kristen Stewart into moving that angular granite she calls her face, I don’t know what will. We will also have a run-in with the Volturi, the elitest of all elite vampires, and the continuing saga of Jacob’s “imprinting” on Bella and Edward’s baby daughter, who has been graced with the perfectly ghastly name Renesmee. If you hear of any impressionable Twilight fans who have actually named their defenseless babies Renesmee — or Edward Jacob, for that matter — please keep this to yourself.