BY DENNIS KING

They used to call them “indie” films, but that seems passé. Some have called them “art” films, but that sounds elitist. Now those movies produced on modest budgets, with strong themes, story-driven narratives and actors instead of stars (small-scaled dramas and comedies, documentaries and foreign releases) are generally referred to as “specialty” films.

Whatever you call them, they’ve come on strong in the final weeks of 2010 and are now poised to filter out into heartland theaters to warm the gloomy, chilly winter movie landscape. Several will also figure strongly in the upcoming Oscar races.

Over the first few months of 2011, look for this cool dozen “specialty” films to gladden the hearts of movie lovers:

“Blue Valentine” – A dramatic look at the happy-go-lucky past and troubled present of working-class couple Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams).

Paul Giamatti

“Barney’s Version” – Paul Giamatti takes the lead in this prickly tale about irascible TV-show producer Barney Panofsky, who reflects upon his life’s successes, failures and its greatest mystery, the unsolved disappearance of his best friend, Boogie (Scott Speedman).

“Another Year” – British director Mike Leigh (“Life Is Sweet”) shows us four seasons in the lives of a happily married couple (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), and their relationships with family and friends – who all have personal demons to battle.

“I Love You Phillip Morris” – Serving his second prison term, scam artist Steven Russell (Jim Carrey) concocts an elaborate con in order to escape and win the heart of Phillip Morris (Ewan McGregor), with whom he fell in love during his first stretch behind bars.

Jim Carrey, Ewan McGregor

“Rabbit Hole” – Director John Cameron Mitchell (“Hedwig and the Angry Inch”) adapts a stage play about Becca and Howie Corbett (Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart), whose lives and marriage go wildly off track after their son dies in a car accident.

“Night Catches Us” – Set in 1976 Philadelphia, this Sundance favorite tells of a former Black Power activist (Anthony Mackie) who returns to his old neighborhood and finds himself entangled with an old friend (Kerry Washington) and being accused of arranging the murder of a Black Panther.

“Casino Jack” – Kevin Spacey plays real-life super lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who with business partner Michael Scanlon (Barry Pepper) built a fortune through scheming and power brokering, until their seedy tactics lead to headlines, scandal and a prison sentence.

“Somewhere” – A hard-partying actor (Stephen Dorff) holed up in L.A.’s Chateau Marmont gets a reality check when he’s visited by his 11-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning) in this roman-a-clef from director Sophia Coppola (“Lost in Translation”).

“The Illusionist” – Set at the end of the vaudeville era, this animated feature from French artist Sylvain Chomet (“The Triplets of Belleville”) follows a stage magician on the skids, until, while performing in a Scottish pub, he meets an innocent young girl who will change his life forever.

“The Company Men” – Prolific producer-director-writer John Wells (TV’s “ER”) offers this drama centered on a year in the lives of three businessman (Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper and Tommy Lee Jones) who struggle to pick up the pieces after being laid off by their company.

“The Way Back” – Peter Weir (“Gallipoli”) directs this adventure about a young military officer (Jim Sturgess) who engineers an escape from a hellish gulag in Soviet-occupied Poland during World War II, leading six companions on a daring mission across Asia to a hope-for refuge in India.

“Biutiful” – Uxbal (Javier Bardem) is a dour man but a devoted husband and father who, thanks to his ability to read the minds of the recently deceased, ekes out a living in Barcelona in this latest from director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (“Amores Perros”).

Ben Affleck’s “The Town” is a wild, thrilling cops-and-robbers ride through some of the meanest streets of Boston that is derailed too often by over-the-top action sequences and story

Jon Hamm, left, and Ben Affleck.

 turns that strain believability.

Boston is plagued by more than 300 bank robberies a year, and most of the perpetrators come from a one-square-mile neighborhood in Boston called Charlestown, which has produced more bank and armored car robbers than anywhere else in the country, according to the screenplay by Affleck, Peter Craig and Aaron Stockard, based on the Chuck Hogan novel “Prince of Thieves.”

Directing himself for the first time, Affleck stars as Doug MacRay, leader of an extremely efficient and seemingly bulletproof crew of heavily-armed thieves who almost always make a clean getaway.

One of his partners in crime is Jem (the excellent Jeremy Renner of “The Hurt Locker”), a hotheaded, unpredictable and reckless dude who’s like a brother to Doug and the human nitro who could blow things for everyone.

During a tense robbery situation, Jem impulsively grabs bank manager Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall) as a hostage, releasing her once the gang has gotten safely away. But when they discover Claire lives in Charlestown, Jem gets jumpy and wants to know how much she saw, even though she was blindfolded and the men had all been wearing grotesque masks.

Worried that Jem might do something rash, Doug steps in, seeking out Claire and finagling a “chance” encounter with her. She has no idea that Doug is one of the men who terrorized her; she only knows that he’s charming, and over time she begins to fall for him, and vice versa.

Passionate romance ensues, and Doug finally determines that he wants out of this life and out of town. But neighborhood crime kingpin Fergie Colm (an effectively menacing Pete Postelthwaite), whose florist shop is a front for money laundering, drug dealing and criminal enterprise, stands in his way. Fergie doesn’t want to lose the best crew leader he ever had, and he makes it plain that Doug will never get out of the business alive.

Meanwhile, local lawmen, including the fiercely determined FBI agent Adam Frawley (Jon Hamm of “Mad Men”) are bearing down on Doug and his boys.

“This is the not (bleeping) around crew, so get me something that looks like a print because this not (bleeping) around thing is about to go both ways,” Frawley swears.

The acting is almost uniformly solid, especially on the parts of Hall as the vulnerable Claire, who’s strong enough to resist becoming a victim, Renner as the volatile Jem, and Chris Cooper in a brief but memorable scene, nailing it dead center as Doug’s deeply embittered convict father.

But what gets in the way are the lengthy, impossibly stunt-happy, fender-shearing car chases, and the frantic, machine-gun shoot-outs on public streets, with the four hijackers standing off what seems to be most of the Boston police force and an army of local feds, escaping every time with nary a scratch. Are there really so many lousy shots in the ranks of Boston badge wearers?

And what about that scene where the gang dons nuns’ habits and scary Halloween masks, and march into a robbery in broad daylight with automatic weapons in plain sight? This isn’t going to cause passers-by to do a double-take?

And when the crew dresses as cops for a daring raid on the Fenway Park box office, shouldn’t they have shaved first for an overall authentic look?

Incredibly, nobody seems to notice these things, and the boys are free to perform their larcenous deeds unimpaired by the oblivious population.

And Affleck, the only true Bostonian among the leading players, sports a Beantown accent that at times sounds appallingly exaggerated and phony.

But putting these nitpickings aside, action lovers will score a good time, and discerning moviegoers will enjoy some good performances. Unfortunately, fans of “Gone Baby Gone,” Affleck’s excellent 2007 directorial debut, also set in Boston, may feel a bit shortchanged.

— Gene Triplett

“The Town”

R

2:05

2½ stars

Starring: Ben Affleck, Rebecca Hall, Jon Hamm, Jeremy Renner, Blake Lively, Titus Welliver, Pete Postlethwaite, Chris Cooper.

(Strong violence, pervasive language, some sexuality and drug use)

BY GENE TRIPLETT

TORONTO — Ben Affleck wanted to pull a job in his hometown of Boston. To get away with it, he imported a string of pros who he knew could fake convincing Beantown accents and

Ben Affleck

provide solid backup when the shooting started.

His accomplices were Jon Hamm (“Mad Men”), hailing from St. Louis; Jeremy Renner (“The Hurt Locker”), out of Modesto, Calif.; London native Rebecca Hall (“Vicky Cristina Barcelona”); Blake Lively (upcoming “Green Lantern”), from out L.A. way; Pete Postlethwaite (“Inception”), another limey from Warrington, Cheshire, England; and Chris Cooper (“Adaptation”), of Kansas City, Mo.

Affleck’s plan was to knock over box offices nationwide with “The Town,” a heist thriller he co-wrote and directed, based on the Chuck Hogan novel “Prince of Thieves.” It opens today in theaters.

Ben Affleck, Jeremy Renner

“I think the accents are a big issue because if you don’t do them well … they can really upend your movie,” Affleck said during a news conference last week at the Toronto International Film Festival.

“You have to hire really good actors to do it. I didn’t even have to know they can do it. So, when Blake came in and read the scenes, I asked her which part of Boston she was from. So, that was handled. And then with Renner — who I knew was a good actor, a great actor — I wasn’t worried about his ability to do it, I was just worried would he do it. … And so I sent him a lot of recordings.

“But more than the recordings, I found out that it’s about the people you stand next to. So, I put the right people around Jeremy without saying anything, and Jeremy’s so smart, and you could immediately see him sort of like radiating towards the people. … It was really fun to watch. And he’d show up at the set, and he had it dead to rights.”

“The Town” is about people who grew up in a one-square-mile neighborhood of Boston called Charlestown, which has produced more bank and armored car robbers than anywhere in

Jon Hamm

 the U.S., according to the authors of the film and the book.

Affleck directs himself for the first time as Doug MacRay, leader of a crew of ruthless bank robbers that always gets out clean. The only family Doug has is his partners in crime, especially Jem (Renner), a dangerous dude with a hair-trigger temper: the loose cannon of the bunch.

“I had the hardest time, I think (with the accent),” Renner said. “It’s difficult. I’m not from the region, and I thought it was one of the most important things I had to overcome. It doesn’t matter how good Ben is or how good any actor is. (If the accent sounds phony) it’s going to pop out, and it’s gonna pull people out of the movie, I think.

“So, Ben didn’t help me at all, initially. I kept calling and saying, ‘When do I get that accent coach?’ He says, ‘We’re not doing those.’ I’m like, ‘OK, great.’ ‘But I got this little tape for ya. It’s, like, some criminals talking.’ I’m like, ‘OK.’ So, yeah, he gave me a lot of actual resources. Actually, when I got to Boston, there were resources out the wazoo. So, it became easier. But the ultimate challenge is to improv on the dialect.”

Hamm, who plays the FBI agent in pursuit of Doug’s gang, said, “I had a pretty easy time with my accent on the film. It was nonexistent. No, but what Jeremy was saying is totally true. Walking around Boston is a pretty good accent coach. There are various and sundry versions of the Boston patois that you can pick out and find, and I think Renner and I had a blast exploring those particular vocal coaches.”

Affleck said Hamm didn’t really need to learn Bostonian speech patterns, since his federal agent character wasn’t really supposed to seem like a homeboy.

“We talked about it,” Affleck said, “and he and I both had the same instinct, that being from whatever it is — Illinois, Missouri, Rochester or something — being an outsider kind of said more for him than somebody who had an accent.”

Hamm did, however, take some pointers from Boston area law enforcement officers at the local, state and federal levels.

“It’s a collaborative effort between all three levels of law enforcement, and they do amazing work,” Hamm said. “There are a lot of robberies in Boston, and a lot of them get solved because of these guys’ hard work. So, it was nice to see from the inside how clear their objective is. Their job is to stop bad people from doing bad things. They’re very clear on that, so that was very helpful to me.”

But assistance from the local law was limited and unofficial. After all, the film is about a smart gang of thieves who keep giving the cops the slip.

“There were various levels of cooperation, as you astutely point out,” Affleck said in response to a question from The Oklahoman. “We were not officially embraced by the FBI, for example. We don’t use their actual logos; we’re not sanctioned by the Department of Justice. For one thing, that’s a long process, and for another thing, you end up in an editorial situation when you have to really subject your film to creative concerns that you might not want governing what you want to do.”

However, local authorities were not only cooperative but generously tolerant of the film crew when it came to shooting several spectacularly destructive car chases through Boston’s North End.

“It was difficult for us,” Affleck said of the constricted area. “We had to be very judicious about how we worked in the North End, where we parked or put the things, how much we smashed, how much we burned the cars. It just got very, very hard for us to do. And to make matters worse, it rained, so we kept postponing and postponing. We’d close all the streets, and then we wouldn’t be shooting. … The North End is now a great tourist destination, so they’re makin’ a lot of money, so we’re taking money out of people’s wallets.

“The movie is nothing if not one long apology to the people of the North End. So, I hope they like it. I wish there was a way you could bring your phone bill and get in free. But anyway, I’m sorry.”

Although “The Town” is the fourth movie Affleck has made in his hometown (the first was “Good Will Hunting” in 1997, for which he and Matt Damon won writing Oscars, and the second was his directorial debut “Gone Baby Gone” in 2007; the third was the upcoming “The Company Men”), he insists he’s not making a career out of filming movies about Boston.

“I just happened to find … stories set in Boston, and probably being from there helped me a little bit,” he said.

In fact, Affleck’s next project is far from Boston. He’ll be shooting a film with director Terrence Malick (“Days of Heaven”) in Oklahoma, in and around Bartlesville where Malick grew up, with production to begin at the end of September, according to the Oklahoma Film and Music Office. As yet, no official announcement about that film has been made.

Chris Cooper, right, in a scene from "Remember Me"

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – Chris Cooper certainly didn’t build an impressive resume of 57 films and an Academy Award, plus television and Broadway work, by being a prima donna.

The hard-working, plain-spoken actor takes a down-to-earth approach to his craft, one that’s not surprising for a guy who studied both acting and agriculture at the University of Missouri and got his start in community theater pounding nails as a set builder. Stardom doesn’t interest him; acting does.

Through an amazing run of movies ranging from John Sayles’ gritty, low-budget “Matewan” to the inspirational “October Sky” to the controversial Oscar-winning “American Beauty” to the reality-bending “Adaptation” (for which he won an Academy Award as best supporting actor), Cooper has proven himself to be as durable as he is versatile.

His latest film is “Remember Me,” in which he plays a hard-nosed New York cop from Queens who clashes violently with his college-student daughter’s rebellious boyfriend (who happens to be played by that handsome young star of the moment, Robert Pattinson).

Cooper, who is openly critical of young actors who seem to relish red-hot celebrity more than the precise, demanding work of acting, had a lot to say about his co-star Pattinson during a recent press junket for the film.

Mainly, that Pattinson is no prima donna.

“Robert is learning the ropes,” said Cooper, whose squinty gaze and no-nonsense manner could certainly intimidate any young actor. “He’s relatively new in the business. What he’s doing is making some good choices, I think. I think he wants to be a serious actor, and he’s a lovely guy. So realizing what he has to deal with, all the demands of the `Twilight’ popularity and the distractions, I think he’s handling it amazingly well.”

With paparazzi and groupies descending on the shooting locations in New York every day, Cooper admitted to being occasionally aggravated by the distractions that came with Pattinson’s presence.

“But Robert was a consummate professional,” Cooper said. “He always did his homework and came to the set prepared.”

One of Cooper’s pet peeves is with young actors coming to the set looking like they’ve just rolled out of bed without having done their homework, without having all their lines memorized.

“I let them know I’m not pleased. I confront them with it,” he said bluntly, while declining to name names. “There’s this theory that I’m hearing time and time again with young actors that, `well, if I don’t learn my lines to the word it looks good on camera if I’m thinking about those words, trying to pull them.’

“Well, nine times out of ten that’ll kill a scene because the director’s saying, `what are you doing?’” Cooper said. “Get in the scene, get involved in the scene, get involved with the other actor you’re working with. And you just can’t do that if you don’t know your lines. It’s just happened to me too many times.

“I don’t care if they resent it (when he confronts them),” he said. “They’re working with me. Time is money in a production – we never have enough rehearsal time when we’re shooting a film – actors should come prepared. To his credit, Robert always did.”

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – Will Fetters is living every aspiring young screenwriter’s dream.

His first script, completed while he was studying political science and prepping for law school at the University of Delaware, just finished a Cinderella journey to production and is set to open in theaters nationwide on Friday.

Robert Pattinson

It’s titled “Remember Me,” and is directed by Allen Coulter (“Hollywoodland”) with a heavyweight cast that includes Pierce Brosnan, Lena Olin, Chris Cooper and the currently hot Robert Pattinson (of “Twilight”). It was Pattinson’s participation in the film as star and executive producer that finally secured financing and gave the movie an invaluable publicity boost, the screenwriter said.

But it wasn’t Pattinson that Fetters had in mind as he was writing the script.

“When you’re a 22 year old and you don’t know anyone and you’re writing your first script, you have ideals in your head,” he said during a recent press junket. “When I was teaching myself to write, I read `American Beauty’ and Chris Cooper was actually the guy that I had in my head for the cop’s role when I was writing in my apartment in Delaware.

“And when I heard that he was going to do it – that was actually one of the last roles that we cast – that was pretty cool,” he said. “His performance in `American Beauty’ stayed with me, and to see him cast in my first movie, that was very, very cool.”

Fetters said he never dreamed that his first screenplay, loosely based on an incident in his own life, would attract the kind of heavyweight talent that it did.

“I always thought that if I were lucky this would be a small independent film that would go to Sundance without a distributor,” he said. “But to have this actor (Pattinson) at this moment come on board …. It’s wonderful, but who would have thought?

“My life has changed completely,” Fetters said. “When you’re a young writer, you cross this invisible threshold when you get your first movie made. And the fact that Rob’s involved certainly upped the profile. I got my first `job’ offer right after Rob started to circle this project, just by the mere mention of him and his potentially being in this movie.

“It’s like high school sometimes in Hollywood where once someone says this guy’s alL right, then it’s OK to date me,” he said. “So other studios started to send me books to look at. And now I’m in this really uncomfortable position where I have to actually choose what work I do as opposed to just doing whatever I’m offered. So I have to have some culpability for my own career.”

Recently, Fetters has adapted the Nicholas Sparks novel, “The Lucky One,” and drafted a remake of “A Star is Born” for Warner Bros. He just signed a deal to develop a TV pilot with “Gossip Girl” co-creator Stephanie Savage and is working on adapting Norman Ollestad’s survival memoir “Crazy for the Storm” for the screen.

In the meantime, he said he’s trying to just savor the hoopla surrounding the release of “Remember Me.”

“That first movie poster,” he says with a certain awe in his voice, “it’s always a big deal for a young writer.”