BY GENE TRIPLETT

You can dress up a turkey in IMAX, 3-D and ear-shattering Surround Sound and throw it up on the biggest screen in town, but if there’s no great story, direction or acting to go with the visual feast, it’s still just a big fat turkey that gobbles loudly. Here are 10 that weren’t turkeys in 2011.

Ryan Gosling in "Drive."

1. “Drive” — Nicolas Winding Refn’s powerful film about a loner (Ryan Gosling) who works as a mechanic and part-time Hollywood stunt driver and moonlights as a wheelman for small-time heisters quickly reveals itself as a high-octane, 21st-century “Shane” in a souped-up Chevy, with all the action, suspense, heart, soul and heroism of that classic Western, as the driver comes to the aid of a threatened family. There’s a surprisingly tender love story in the midst of this bloody battle between good and evil, and Albert Brooks is unexpectedly chilling as the coldblooded boss of the bad guys. Unfortunately, Oscar will dismiss this one as just another ultraviolent popcorn seller.

2. “The Descendants” — George Clooney has never locked into the humanity of a character with more depth of sensitivity than

George Clooney, Shailene Woodley

 he displays here as a Hawaiian landowner who’s just trying to do the right thing by his money-hungry relatives, two troubled daughters and a wife who’s been cheating on him — a fact he discovers only after an accident has rendered her permanently comatose. Director/co-writer Alexander Payne couldn’t have wished for a better lead in this superb trouble-in-paradise comedy-drama that delivers laughter and pathos in generous equal measures.

Michael Shannon, "Take Shelter"

3. “Take Shelter” — The ever-intense Michael Shannon stirs an emotional tempest as a working-class family man tortured by visions both real and imagined that seem to portend an apocalyptic climatological disaster — or his impending loss of sanity. It’s through Shannon’s tour de force performance that writer-director Jeff Nichols fashions an extraordinarily effective allegory on a more widespread fear gripping the world at large, of nature and economics spinning irreversibly out of control. Shannon is memorably electric and moving as a man unsure of whether the real threat to his family is a brewing storm or his unraveling self.

4. “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” — Director Thomas Alfredson’s riveting screen version of John le Carre’s Cold War cloak-and-dagger classic is a classroom study in slow-burning

Gary Oldman

suspense, and Gary Oldman rewrites the book on perfectly-pitched stillness that speaks volumes as seasoned, bespectacled spymaster George Smiley, who’s pitted against deadly treachery and his own desperate loneliness as he plots to flush out a mole in the top echelon of British intelligence. No tricked-out Aston Martins or rocket packs here. Just gripping, gritty realism and a superb cast that also features John Hurt and Colin Firth in powerful turns.

Elizabeth Olsen, John Hawkes

5. “Martha Marcy May Marlene” — Elizabeth Olsen steps out of the shadows of her famous twin sisters with a mesmeric big-screen debut performance in the title role of a young woman who steals away from a cult “family” and attempts to re-enter the “normal” world. Writer-director Sean Durkin takes an auspicious first bow as well with this chilling psychological thriller, quietly and cunningly unfolding one disturbing secret after another, but the film’s lasting impression owes no small debt to John Hawkes’ dark presence as the deceptively warm, enormously sinister, predatory communal overlord adept at holding impressionable young people in his thrall.

6. “Another Earth” — The Earth has a newly discovered twin, looming larger than the moon overhead and promising all the mind-blowing

Brit Marling

possibilities of a parallel reality that may exist there. That’s the speculative element of director Mike Cahill’s exceedingly imaginative and moving first feature, which he co-wrote and co-produced with his fledgling star Brit Marling, whose screen presence and physical and emotional beauty are as mesmerizing as the film’s sky-gazing visual effects. Shot on a startlingly low budget, Marling and Cahill’s story of tragedy, self-confrontation, desperately sought-after redemption and forgiveness is a provocative and heartfelt examination of human fragility and healing love effectively designed to be at once haunting and hopeful.

7. “The Help” — Writer-director Tate Taylor’s awards-worthy adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s novel about black housemaids and the white

Viola Davis

women who employed them in the early 1960s South is brought to vivid life by an ensemble cast that could very well clean up during awards season. Viola Davis, Emma Stone, Octavia Spencer, Bryce Dallas Howard and Jessica Chastain give uniformly unforgettable performances in a story rife with poignancy, hope and big-hearted humor. Just try to stay dry-eyed. Betcha can’t.

Saoirse Ronan

8. “Hanna” — Once upon a time, a man (Eric Bana) raised a little girl named Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) in the frozen woods of Finland to be a perfect killing machine. Then he turned her loose to fend for herself in an unfamiliar modern-day culture and a treacherous high-tech spy-world in this supercharged fairy tale from screenwriters Seth Lochhead and David Farr and director Joe Wright. Yet another cloak-and-dagger thriller, but the originality of this one is mind-blowing, as is Ronan’s hypnotic turn as a sweet-faced but lethal, unlikely action hero going up against the brilliant Cate Blanchett as the evil witch-agent of the West. Better watch out, my pretty.

Rooney Mara

9. “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” — Another great tough-girl tale, this one is based on the first novel in the late Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s blockbuster trilogy about Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), punked-out, street-savvy, street-savage survivor of childhood abuse who teams with blackballed journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) to solve the ugly mystery behind decades-old serial killings. Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyqvist have earned raves in these roles in the Swedish film versions of the series, but fierce and brooding Mara and un-Bond-ishly seedy and world-weary Craig acquit themselves handily in a harsh, noire-ishly brooding atmosphere expertly crafted by director David Fincher.

10. “War Horse” — Director Steven Spielberg shamelessly plays audience heartstrings like a Playskool piano, and those of us who are suckers for

Jeremy Irvine, "War Horse."

tear-tugging boy-and-his-horse tales (or boy-and-his-dog, as the case may be) happily dance to his predictable tune based on British author Michael Morpurgo’s children’s book about a British farm boy (Jeremy Irvine) who is separated from his beloved horse, Joey, when the animal is drafted into World War I combat duty and suffers the cruelties and tragedies of war. Add the vivid sweep and color of Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography and a rousing John Williams score, and this one comes in a good old-fashioned winner reminiscent of such family classics as “The Story of Seabiscuit,” “National Velvet” and “Lassie Come Home.”

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – Director David Fincher casually admits it was a daunting job – casting his American remake of the internationally popular Stieg Larsson mystery “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.”

David Fincher

After all, millions of avid readers had consumed Larsson’s gritty, pulpy detective novel – and the two follow-ups, “The Girl Who Played With Fire” and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.” And millions of fans had likely formed vivid images in their minds of the books’ scarred and world-weary protagonists – the disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist, a dogged investigator, crusading idealist and unrepentant womanizer; and the anti-social computer hacker Lisbeth Salander, a pierced, punk genius with lots of abusive skeletons rattling around in her psychic closet.

And, to top it off, all three books had already been adapted to the screen in successful Swedish-language versions that featured memorable performances by Scandinavian actors Michael Nyqvist as the handsomely scruffy scribe Blomkvist and the startlingly convincing Noomi Rapace as the dangerously brilliant Salander.

So, during press interviews hosted by Columbia Pictures at Soho’s boutique Crosby Street Hotel, Fincher patiently fielded questions about his method of finding the right actors to inhabit those coveted, high-profile roles and his take on Larsson’s hugely popular novels.

“The mystery of these books wasn’t that interesting to me,” said the notoriously frank director of “Se7en,” “Fight Club” and “Zodiac.” “You know, Nazis and serial killers and the evil that people do in their basements with power tools wasn’t that unique. The thing that was first and foremost to me was this partnership (between Mikael and Lisbeth). I hadn’t seen these two people working together. So I liked the thriller, I liked the vessel of that, but I was more interested in the people front and center.

“Obviously, there are many parallels to ‘Chinatown’ in this story of the Vanger clan and their secrets,” Fincher continued. “But I don’t think Larsson invented anything new except Blomkvist and Salander, this odd pairing, that’s the invention.”

So, much attention and speculation attached itself to the long process of casting Daniel Craig, best known for his two outings at the head of the “James Bond” franchise and last summer’s sci-fi hit “Cowboys & Aliens,” as Blomkvist, and smart actress Rooney Mara, the daughter of pro football royalty (namesake kin to founders of the Pittsburgh Steelers and New York Giants franchises) and standout in a small role in “The Social Network,” as the prickly Salander.

“The casting process began with Daniel,” Fincher said, “and if you build your universe, it’s like a good basketball team, you start with the anchor. And I knew him to be self-effacing and witty, and I knew that I needed that for Mikael. I wanted a very masculine center to the film. The androgynous side of the movie would be carried by Rooney, that was her job. So I knew that I needed a sort of Robert Mitchum center. And so when we had Daniel that was a fait accompli.

“And because there is this sort of magnetic element – (Mikael and Lisbeth) sort of push against each other – I started to look for the things I wanted to see in Lisbeth, and I didn’t see them in anyone we’d been looking at,” Fincher said. “And Rooney was right under our noses, in that I’d already spent four or five days with her on ‘Social Network.’

“But again, when you cast someone you look for an inherent quality that, you know, you’re going to be shooting 14-hour days, you’re going to be tired, you’re not necessarily going to be able to conjure an armor or a façade every single moment,” the director said. “I liken it to a quality that you can’t beat out of them with a tire iron. You’re looking for an innate quality that they have. Rooney was somebody that we brought back time and time again. Not because we didn’t see what we were looking for initially.

“The problems that she was solving for me in the beginning of ‘Social Network’ were that she was intensely feminine, very mature, she was warm, she was verbal, she was trying to build a bridge to Jesse (Eisenberg) desperately in that five and a half minutes she was on screen,” he said. “And none of those qualities applied to Lisbeth. In fact, they were the antithesis.

“So every time she would come in we would work together, and I’d say, ‘OK, here’s a new hurdle and you have to jump this.’ And after two and a half months, the thing that seemed to be most Lisbethian was that she was just not giving up. She was indomitable,” Fincher said. “There were times in auditioning when I was personally embarrassed to say, ‘I need you to come back in one more time,’ and there was never a moment when she balked, although I would have. She always said, ‘OK. What do you need from me this time; what’s the new wrinkle?’ And I would give it to her, and she would come in and do that. And at the end of it, when we put her on a plane to Stockholm by herself to learn how to ride a motorcycle and find an apartment we knew we had the right person.”

In addition to the casting glare, Fincher said the huge popularity of the novels created lots of roiling undercurrents of political speculation about the movie.

“There’s a lot of mythology that comes with Stieg Larsson because of his untimely demise,” Fincher said. “I was certainly aware of his magazine and his political reporting, and I read a lot of stuff in The New York Times and other magazines about the Stieg Larsson story. But I don’t think that the actual political leanings of the material are why the book was optioned or the reason that everybody waiting for a plane at La Guardia is reading this book. That has little to do with everyone’s fear of the ultra-right in Scandinavia.

“My interest was it had a ballistic envelope, it had an aerodynamics to it,” he said. “Obviously 60 million people thought it was a ripping yarn. I thought it was a ripping yarn, but the thing that interested me most was these two people.”

So, Fincher is asked, will he be behind the camera for the sequels?

“Classically, movie studios don’t make deals with directors for sequels, even if there’s a hope that there’s going to be three, because they want to make sure that you behave,” he said.
But if he did agree to do two more films in the series, he speculated that a wise filmmaker would shoot them back-to-back in one big production push.

“The other two books are very much one story,” he said, “and it doesn’t seem prudent to me to go to Sweden for a year, come back for a year, put out the second one, go to Sweden for a year, come back …

“Please, don’t,” Mara piped in from the sidelines.

“I don’t think Rooney wants to be doing this four years from now,” Fincher said with a wry laugh. “So, I think that would be crazy, especially given that it’s a story that’s kind of bifurcated in the middle.”

The stark, chilly 2009 Swedish screen adaptation of the late Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and its two follow-up films utterly belonged to Noomi Rapace, a spiky, darkly seductive actress who seemed to inhabit the role of punk, pieced computer hacker Lisbeth Salander with eerie ferocity.

Rooney Mara

So the questions that persistently hovered over director David Fincher’s American remake of the first in Larsson’s blockbuster Millennium Trilogy of blunt, pulpy crime novels were: who will play Salander and how will anyone ever match up to Rapace’s fearsome intensity?

Well, the answers to those questions are: 1) Rooney Mara, the tart co-ed who practically stole Fincher’s “The Social Network” in a brief, brilliant and pithy opening-scene performance, and 2) Mara more than matches Rapace, piercing for piercing and tat for tat and delivers a bold, brash and brave acting turn that makes this slick new adaptation of “Dragon Tattoo” all her own.

Since Larsson fans (of both the internationally best-selling novels and fine Swedish-language movies) are legion, it hardly merits detailed synopsis to describe Fincher’s movie. The artful, perfectionist director of such stunning police procedurals as “Se7en” and “Zodiac” and his canny scenarist Steven Zaillian (“Moneyball,” “Schindler’s List”) are fully on their game with this interpretation that trims away loads of exposition and ancillary characters yet stays true to the author’s dense plot and his duo of mismatched, world-weary crime solvers.

While they jigger the ending slightly and juice the thing with stylish visuals that make director Niels Arden Oplev’s Swedish version seem staid by comparison, Fincher and company smartly keep the focus on hyper-intelligent Goth Salander and disgraced crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig in a nice, stubble-faced contrast to his suave 007 persona). Indeed, they are the characters that propel Larsson’s three stories so compellingly – his Nordic, anti-Nick and Nora Charles, if you will.

Wisely, Fincher doesn’t try to Americanize the story and setting. It’s still set in the well-scrubbed Stockholm metropolis and the craggy, frigid climes of Hedeby Island, where the wealthy Vanger clan – a creepy nest of drunkards, hermits, greedheads, abusive parents, closet Nazis and anti-Semites – has its ancestral estate.

The plodding, old-school Blomkvist, with jazzy computer aid from Salander, takes on the case proffered by elderly tycoon Henrik Vanger (smooth Christopher Plummer) to look into the disappearance, and presumed murder, of his beloved teenage niece at a family gathering 40 years earlier.

The rest is a complex, perverse tangle of serial murder, S&M depravity, stark nudity, cold-blooded brutality, rape and mutilation, painstakingly unraveled by two unlikely investigators. But it’s their startlingly unconventional relationship (and love affair) that provides the passionate, coursing pulse for Larsson’s coldly complex tales.

As usual, Fincher surrounds his stars with stellar support, from the suavely patriarchal Plummer to the smarmily convivial Stellan Skarsgard as Vanger scion Martin, and from efficient Robin Wright as Blomkvist’s crisp editor-lover Erika to the porcine Yorick van Wageningen as Salander’s slimy, manipulative legal guardian.

Undoubtedly, Fincher’s film will have its detractors and its champions, its debates between purists and partisans. But, whatever the consensus of readers and moviegoers, it’s a measure of Larsson’s storytelling prowess that two such fine films have been rendered from the dire, pulpy doings of his first novel.

Note: Fincher and co-stars Craig and Mara said last week in interviews that they have not been contracted to participate in remakes of the other books in the trilogy – “The Girl Who Played With Fire” and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.” But all three said they would be ready and willing if called.

- Dennis King

“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”

R
2:38
3 1/2 stars
Starring: Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara, Stellan Skarsgard, Christopher Plummer
(Brutal violent content including rape and torture, strong sexuality, graphic nudity and language)

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – Director David Fincher is notorious among actors as a demanding, hard-driving perfectionist.

Rooney Mara, Daniel Craig

For actors who’ve worked with him on such films as “Fight Club,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “The Social Network” and the much-anticipated American remake of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” Fincher is known for shooting numerous (some say endless) takes of a single scene in search of just the right nuance of performance and production.

During press interviews for “Dragon Tattoo,” Fincher and cast members joked about his well-deserved reputation as a stylish perfectionist and offered some insights into the director’s demanding methods.

“I like people who like to work the way I like to work,” Fincher said of his casting decisions. “And there are people who share an unspoken understanding and way of communicating that’s easy. Sometimes people freak out when you shoot 40 takes or something, and they are sort of looking at you like, ‘what did I do wrong?’

“No it’s not wrong; we’re going to try something different,” he said he explains. “I like certain people’s energies, and you think this person could work well in this situation. Hopefully, you’re not going to the well for the same thing every time.”

Stellan Skarsgard, who plays the wealthy Vanger family scion in “Dragon Tattoo,” told of his own experience with Fincher’s work ethic.

“For instance, I have a five-minute monologue, which is very hard to get right, and we rehearsed it and we talked it over with (screenwriter) Steve Zaillian and it was a work in progress,” Skarsgard said. “Working with David you get a lot of chances to get it right. You get about 40 takes.

“And he does push you,” Skarsgard continued. “It’s not that he says, ‘I want the scene to be played this way’ and tells you how to do it. But after a couple of takes he pushes you one way, and then he pushes you in another way and then you push yourself in a third way and hopefully you come up with a lot of different colors in the same scene, which gives the director the options to calibrate your performance afterwards. That’s my hope that the director can calibrate my performance.”

“You don’t really think about it after a while,” said Rooney Mara who has the demanding role of Lisbeth Salander. “It’s all very exaggerated and dramatized. I think our average take count was much less than that.”

“Thirty-five,” her co-star Daniel Craig (Mikael Blomkvist) mock whispered. “You don’t count. You really don’t count.”

“Unless it’s an insert shot, you really don’t think about it,” Mara said. “Then that can be quite frustrating.”

But, the actors are asked, does each successive take get better or worse?

“Sometimes you get worse and worse,” Craig said.

“Usually you get worse in the middle and then better,” said Mara.

“When someone throws a lot a money at you to do this, you’re there to get it right,” Craig said. “Things get frustrating in a work day, but there are lots of other things to get frustrated about, and then lots of sort of triumphs at the end of the day.”

The veteran Christopher Plummer, who plays wealthy industrialist Henrik Vanger, said he understands and applauds Fincher’s demanding regimen.

“It’s funny that great directors – there are very few of them – know how to cast right,” Plummer said. “(David) casts right so that half his job is done. He obviously trusts his cast, otherwise why did he hire them? And because the job is half done the atmosphere on the set is so easy and so relaxed and so free that he lets you improvise whatever you want and then he just puts the cream on top. He just says, ‘that’s fine but let’s try it this way.’

“And the takes, the endless takes, are not really endless in the sense that he knows exactly what he wants and changes each take so it’s absolutely different,” Plummer said. “Some directors do take after take because they simply don’t know what they want. In his case his always he has the camera totally ready so you don’t hang about waiting, which is half the misery of doing many takes. He’s also great fun to work with because he has an enormous sense of humor. So he can be teased as well as us.”

BY GENE TRIPLETT

No telling what John Wayne might’ve thought of his grandson acting in some loco Western called “Cowboys & Aliens.”

“Young ‘un,” the Duke might have bellowed, “you been out in the sun too long without yer Stetson?”

But Brendan Wayne, 39, isn’t so sure his granddaddy would disapprove.

“The more I’ve thought about it, the more I think — relative to today — he’d love it,” the third-generation actor said in a recent phone interview from Los Angeles. “It’s a great way to tell a classic story that otherwise can’t be told because you’d offend cultures that don’t deserve to be offended. It was simpler back then. We didn’t understand the breadth of cowboys and Indians.”

Brendan Wayne plays a deputy in a small, 1875 New Mexico town that’s ambushed by varmints from another planet in director Jon Favreau’s “Cowboys & Aliens.”

Daniel Craig trades in his Walther PPK and his Aston Martin for a frontier six-shooter and a fast horse as a stranger who wakes up in the middle of the desert with an odd-looking shackle on his left wrist and no memory of who he is.

“And then he drifts into my town where I’m a deputy with Keith Carradine playing the sheriff,” Wayne said. “And we don’t know what’s going on, but we know that our town’s kind of under attack and that we’re losing people, and we think it’s the Indians coming to take ‘em. And the juxtaposition is that the Indians feel the same way. They think we’re taking their people.”

Meanwhile, Craig’s character discovers that the townspeople don’t cotton to strangers, and everyone takes their orders from the iron-fisted Col. Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford). It’s a town that’s already used to living in fear, but when incredible flying machines start streaking down from the sky to snatch people away, things get downright scary.

And as the stranger begins to remember who he is and what he’s just been through, Dolarhyde and his men, a gang of outlaws and an encampment of Chiricahua Apache warriors realize the mysterious drifter’s leadership may be their only chance of fighting off the airborne invaders.

“It’s a journey of spirit,” Wayne said. “You don’t want to put too much on it because it is an action movie. But it’s a good old-fashioned Western in that these people are going to get their people back.”

It’s a plot not unlike a John Wayne Western such as “The Searchers.” Of course, that John Ford film was made about 16 years before Brendan Wayne was born, and he was only 7 when his famous grandfather died in 1979.

“I didn’t get the John Wayne concept,” Brendan Wayne said. “I thought that was granddaddy, and didn’t everybody’s granddad ride horses and stuff?”

He remembers thinking of the man as “a big, goofy, you know, granddad … just a really gentle, sweet, funny guy.”

Born in Encino, Calif., the son of John Wayne’s eldest daughter Mary Antonia “Toni” Wayne La Cava, Brendan grew up around horses, attending rodeos and occasionally visiting his grandfather on movie sets.

“I was on the set of ‘The Shootist,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, I betcha other people’s parents and grandparents, this is where they worked.’ Like, you know, this is normal. It wasn’t until he passed that I was, like, Oh wait, he was a little more extraordinary than I had thought. It started when he was sick and everybody at school was writing him get-well cards. And I went to Catholic school. I said to the nun, I said, ‘Sister Roberta Ann, my best friend Tony, his grandpa was sick, and the whole school didn’t write him cards.’

“And she looked at me and really didn’t have much of an answer. … But that was when I started to piece it together.”

It was after watching his grandfather’s iconic portrayals in films such as “Red River,” “The Searchers” and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” that Brendan Wayne decided to study film at the University of Southern California. The father of three is best known for his roles in “Couples Retreat” and “Fast & Furious,” and guest shots on such TV series as “CSI” and “The Closer.”

And if his grandfather were around today, Brendan Wayne honestly believes the Duke would have taken a role in “Cowboys & Aliens” if it were offered to him.

“I don’t think he was afraid of anything,” Wayne said. “Anybody who’d play Genghis Khan (“The Conqueror,” 1956) sure liked a challenge, just to say the least.

“He could have played Daniel Craig’s role, or Harrison Ford’s role, and done them as well as anybody. You know, I think Harrison’s in this movie, to be honest with you, because he’s the closest thing we have to that character type. He’s as tough as they get. He was ridin’ his horse and jumpin’ off it. He wasn’t flinchin’ from the physical. He was willing to challenge anything that came along.”

Wayne said co-stars Craig, Sam Rockwell, Julio Cedillo and Olivia Wilde were game for doing most of their stunts as well — and so was Wayne — in the best daring Duke tradition.

“You’re not going to see a lot of back-of-the-head shots because of stunt guys,” he said, “because those guys were amazing, and they did some great work.”

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Daniel Craig

Director Jon Favreau mixes sagebrush shoot-’em-up with science fiction freakiness in “Cowboys & Aliens”

and fires off a mash-up of movie genres that’s lightweight fun at a warp-speed gallop.

There’s a whole posse of writers credited for this thriller (six in all) which is usually a sign of trouble ahead, but all potential narrative bullets are dodged, the top-hand stars are all on target, and the special effects, non-stop action and gritty period look of this piece should satisfy horse opera enthusiasts and sci-fi fans alike.

Daniel Craig switches from James Bondian martinis and tailored tuxes to the rotgut whiskey and brush-scarred chaps of the iconic, laconic Western hero, filling those boots with a minimum of strain as a stranger who wakes up in the middle of the desert with an odd-looking shackle on his left wrist and no memory of who is, but possessed of an instinctual and deadly ability to take down three local yokels who happen by and attempt to take him prisoner for a possible reward.

After appropriating boots, cartridge belt, six-gun and hat (bad choice there) from the three corpses, he’s fully outfitted for the hero role and, in true loner hero tradition, rides one of the dead men’s horses into the dusty town of Absolution, New Mexico Territory, where he immediately gets crossways with its inhabitants.

First he puts down the bullying antics of a loudmouth named Percy Dolarhyde (a superbly obnoxious Paul Dano), who happens to be the spoiled son of powerful cattle baron Col. Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford, convincingly rawhide-tough), who owns the town and tells everyone in it when to jump and how high.

Then the sheriff (Keith Carradine) recognizes the stranger from wanted posters as one Jake Lonergan, leader of a notorious outlaw gang. Now our hero has a name, plus the daunting task of resisting arrest against the sheriff and his handful of armed deputies, which he almost manages in heroic saloon-brawl fashion before he’s coldcocked from behind by a mysterious, sad-eyed beauty named Ella (a winning Olivia Wilde), who wears a pretty gingham dress and a great big revolver around her tiny waist.

Ella doesn’t want Jake leaving town because she knows who he is and the fantastic tragedy that he’s been through, and that he is the only one who can help her in a desperate search. And when incredible metal flying machines come screaming out of the sky hurling fiery thunder and snatching people from the street, Jake suddenly recalls what that cumbersome bracelet is for and the townspeople realize he may be their only hope of defeating the “demon” marauders and recovering their abducted people.

What follows is plenty of good old fashioned gunplay and bare-fisted action as Dolarhyde and his men, Jake’s former outlaw gang and a band of Chiricahua Apache warriors form an uneasy alliance against some of scariest looking bug-eyed creatures ever created by CGI.

Who’d have thought Favreau, back when he was a young hipster making smart and funny little indie comedies (“Swingers,” 1996; “Made,” 2001) with his buddy Vince Vaughn, would ever become such a such a sure-handed crafter of such big-budget blockbusters as “Iron Man,” “Iron Man 2,” and now “Cowboys & Aliens.”

Crossbreeding the Old West with the outer limits is nothing new, dating back to the 1935 serial “The Phantom Empire,” when singing cowboy Gene Autry discovered a race of advanced humans living deep beneath the earth. But Favreau has given the idea a stellar 21st century reboot that’s a good bet to outdraw all comers at the box office on its opening weekend.

— Gene Triplett

“Cowboys & Aliens”

PG-13

1:58

3 stars

Starring: Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell, Ana de la Reguera, Adam Beach, Paul Dano, Clancy Brown, Keith Carradine.

(Intense sequences of Western and sci-fi action and violence, some partial nudity and a brief crude reference)

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