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”).

Gary Winick

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – Gary Winick has made his name primarily as a producer of smart, low-budget independent movies with such indie icons as Richard Linklater, Rebecca Miller and Steve Buscemi. But as a director, the New York native said he often feels lightly typecast as “the romantic comedy guy.”

Two of his most recent films, 2009’s “Bride Wars” and 2004’s “13 Going on 30,” have fallen squarely in rom-com territory, and his latest, the hyper-romantic “Letters to Juliet,” will likely do nothing to disprove Winick’s attraction to scripts leaning heavily toward light love and whimsy.

But to hear the director tell it during a recent round of press interviews hosted by Summit Entertainment, “Letters to Juliet” in pre-production had an entirely different tone from the film that finally made it to the screen.
“Originally, this concept had a ’50s romantic comedy feel – you know, like one of those Katharine Hepburn-Cary Grant stories. It had the repartee,” said Winick. “But then the script drafts never really seemed to duplicate that. And part of that was because maybe we’ve just outgrown those ’50s type of films.

“Because of the success of ’13 Going on 30’ I now seem to be this romantic comedy guy,” he said. “And what we had in mind was something like ‘Notting Hill,’ which seems to me one of the best romantic comedies of the last 20 years, in my opinion. It’s interesting when I look back at that film they had that repartee, but it was in a different milieu. I mean we were locked in this kind of timeless warp of Italy and Vanessa (Redgrave) coming back and looking for her old love and going to beautiful places.

“And its funny because ‘Letters to Juliet’ turned into more romance than comedy,” he said. “If Amanda (Seyfried’s) audience is our audience then I think they expect something like that movie I did last year (“Bride Wars”) which Entertainment Weekly, if you look it up in the 2009 year-end issue, put on their 10 worst list.

“Anyway,” he continued with a rueful laugh, “I only make a movie if it has a story worth telling, and for me that movie was all about friendship. And I’ll always make a movie about friendship because that’s the most important thing in my life.”

Does he feel hemmed in by the “romantic comedy guy” label?

“I know what I’m not good at and I believe my strength, if I have a strength, is that I’m pretty truthful and honest in my moments and can get the comedy out of situations without getting too broad and get the emotional stuff from being truthful and honest,” Winick replied. “So if that is able to elevate a romantic comedy, I’ll give it a shot. Unfortunately, I don’t read that many romantic comedy scripts that do that, so usually you have to get a good screenwriter to come in and elevate the material so that you have a shot at making something that audiences will really respond to.

“But would I like to make other kinds of moves? Yeah, maybe some dramas and stuff like that,” he said. “But when I look back, I’m very grateful to have done the work I’ve done.”

But getting any modestly budgeted romantic comedy made these days is an uphill battle, the veteran producer-director said.

“It’s funny because there are two films that we’d wanted to make for years,” he said. “and one of them was ‘Letters to Juliet.’ And there’s another that hopefully I’ll get to make one day, and it’s called ‘Rat Bastard.’ It was written after ‘Tadpole’ and it’s my ‘Tootsie,’ and it was written for Ewan McGregor and Kate Winslett, but for some reason I can’t get that made.”

But getting the right cast, with bankable actors such as Amanda Seyfried and Vanessa Redgrave, does go a long way toward getting a green light.

“I think I’ve been very fortunate that I get actors who are just wonderful people and we all go in wanting to make the same movie,” he said. “There are so many great directors working today. And you know what, I may not be as talented as a lot of them – I’ve accepted that – but I think I have a way that I make people feel comfortable and trust me, and that goes a huge way with the actors.”

One thrill of working on “Letters to Juliet,” Winick said, was overseeing a romantic, on-screen reunion between Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero, whose lifelong love affair began when they co-starred as Guenevere and Lancelot in 1967 screen musical “Camelot.”

“They’re married but they don’t live together,” Winick said of the pair. “I’m not telling you anything that you can’t find out on the internet. One lives in London and the other lives in Italy. But they spend all this time together and they were so romantic on set. It was wonderful to have them on set together. The last third of the movie is when they’re at the vineyard and stuff. The whole atmosphere was magical – we all joked more and you could just tell that they’re in love.

“Vanessa was the one who said, ‘I want to cast Franco,’ when there were so many actors, more famous actors, in Italy that wanted to be in the movie,” he said with a wry chuckle. “I do have to say this, and I say it in a very loving, fun way, but you know – I guess part of it is being an actor, part of it’s being Italian, part of it’s being Franco – I mean, he has a big ego. And he said, ‘I’ve been in 157 movies and I’m doing this only because of Vanessa, but, come on Gary, I’m in only four scenes.’”

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK — The stark winter weather that hangs like a pall over Roman Polanski’s new political thriller, “The Ghost Writer,” has nothing on the storm raging outside the posh midtown hotel as British actress Olivia Williams showed up for a round of recent press interviews.

The storm outside was literal and figurative. The literal storm dumped 20 inches of gloppy confetti snow on the city and caused canceled airline flights that left co-stars Ewan

Olivia Williams in "The Ghost Writer."

McGregor and Pierce Brosnan unable to attend the media gathering hosted by Summit Entertainment.

The figurative storm was the one swirling around Polanski, 76, the Oscar-winning director who is under house arrest in Switzerland awaiting court action on a 1977 case charging him with having unlawful sex with a minor. The legal controversy has left Polanski effectively mute in the process of launching his movie.

In the face of both storms, the slender, elegant Williams, best known to U.S. audiences for roles in M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense” and Wes Anderson’s “Rushmore,” stepped up gamely to carry the new film’s banner and talk up its merits.

Perhaps paradoxically, she’s cast in the seemingly thankless but deceptively calculating role of political wife in the script based on a novel (originally titled “The Ghost”) by Robert Harris, a longtime British journalist and Tony Blair confidante.

“The Ghost Writer” stars McGregor as a writer-for-hire who is brought in to finish the memoirs of a suave, former British prime minister very much in the mold of Blair. As he begins work on an isolated island off the wintry coast of New England, the writer is confronted with a web of sordid secrets and even murder that leads him on a dangerous quest for the truth.

Williams, as she will be all day, is immediately confronted with a question about Polanski’s off-screen problems and their effects on the movie. Clearly, she’s prepared as she deftly deflects discussion of legal issues and turns the talk instead to Polanski’s artistry and her own multilayered role as Ruth Lang, wife of former British Prime Minister Adam Lang, played with starchy allure by Brosnan.

“I read the novel first, and my first reaction was, ‘I hope they don’t want me to do an impersonation of Cherie Blair,’” said Williams in satiny British tones. “And when I spoke to Roman, he told me that’s not what he wanted.

“And so I went back to the text and pulled out every adjective and every clue to Ruth, and then I wrote an e-mail to the author, Robert Harris, and said, ‘OK, what do you want from this?’ I think I said, ‘Is she evil?’ And he wrote back a paragraph of basically oxymorons, you know, she is vulnerable/confident, she is naive/cynical, she is contemptuous but in love with her husband, and at the bottom he underlined in bold, ‘She is absolutely not evil.’

“And my first thought was, ‘My God, how do I do this?’ It was a really amazing challenge he set me,” Williams said. “I think the point is that nobody sets out to be a bad person, and, of course, we’re not allowed to give away the ending, but Ruth seems so transparent and nonthreatening but then turns out to be much more complicated. It was such a great pleasure to act this part. I got to lead the audience down one path and then deceive them in the end.”

Williams said Polanski’s old-school style of directing took some getting used to.

“His sets are quite intense. He’s so meticulous and so particular. Every single thing has to be exactly where he wants it,” she said. “He’ll stop a scene even to re-arrange books and pillows on the set. He spends quite a lot of time with his head in his hands and his eyes closed, which is a little distressing when you’re an actor.

“One time, I said to him, ‘You’ve got your head in your hands again. Is there anything in my performance which is upsetting you?’ And he said, ‘When my eyes are closed, I’m trying to see what it was I saw when I wrote the script.’ So, the way he directs is quite precise and demanding and idiosyncratic.

“And, you know, this was a French, Polish, German set so … instead of gentle, coaxing direction, you got (in a dead-on impression of Polanski’s Polish accent), ‘No, no, no! Do it like this!’ I’d been in California too long, where everyone is so gentle and sweet to each other, and I had to remember that kind of European inflammatory temperament. If Roman’s preoccupied, your feelings and good manners and everything else go out the window,” she said. “But a moment later, he’s joking and laughing with you.”

Despite the director’s brusque, demanding demeanor on set, he apparently earns great affection and loyalty from actors under his tutelage. Williams — with two other films, Oscar-nominated “An Education” and punk-music biopic “Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll,” now on screens — speaks glowingly of attending “The Ghost Writer” premiere last month in Berlin, “to a public in Europe that loves film and loves his work so much.”

“And to be his voice there, it was an honor and an extraordinary experience, to face a press conference where the director wasn’t there and … to be in some senses afraid to tell people of what a debt one owes him,” Williams said. “It was a very intense experience, and Ewan and Pierce were fearless in their praise of him.”

Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer” is a film flogged by nasty weather and an oppressive atmosphere of moral isolation and sinister suggestion. Its gray rains and nagging winter winds carry with them a relentless chill of delicious paranoia that is sure to excite fans of twisty cinema thrillers.

Pierce Brosnan and Ewan McGregor "The Ghost Writer."

While not in the same league with his seminal thrillers “Chinatown” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” Polanski’s first film in four years delivers some pleasantly tingling surprises, a masterly McGuffin worthy of Hitchcock and enough stellar performances to score as a solid commercial enterprise.

Seen side-by-side with the recent, belabored “Shutter Island,” another bleak thriller of moral isolation by another master, Martin Scorsese, the advantage definitely goes to Polanski.

“The Ghost Writer” stars Ewan McGregor as a cocky scribe of best-selling biographies — referred to throughout only as “the ghost” — who is persuaded by his agent to take a big paycheck for polishing up the final draft of a bland memoir by former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan, debonair as usual).

Dispatched to a soulless glass-and-teakwood compound on a wintry island off America’s northeast coast, the ghost is met by Lang’s icy blond assistant Amelia Bly (Kim Cattrall, sporting a crystalline British accent) and his tart, broody wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams, throwing off vague Lady Macbeth vibes), and is set to task.

It quickly becomes apparent that this is no simple writing job. First, the scrupulously guarded manuscript is dull and poorly written, and its author, Lang’s longtime political aide, has died under mysterious circumstances.

Second, Lang is a self-absorbed prig who is stingy with information and preoccupied by news that he’s about to be indicted by the World Court in the Hague for being party to war crimes in Iraq. (Any resemblance between Lang and real-life British Prime Minister Tony Blair is no mere coincidence since the story’s author, Robert Harris, was once a close Blair associate.)

As the ghost sets out to untangle Lang’s real story and find some semblance of truth, the narrative meanders off merrily into a maze of intrigue (break-ins, car chases, threatening bodyguards, stolen documents, hidden messages, turncoat political alliances, CIA skullduggery and the like).

And McGregor finds himself cast in the classic Hitchcock dilemma of an ordinary bloke in way over his head, caught up in a tangle of devious circumstances beyond his control or understanding. And, clearly, Polanski relishes this homage to Hitch by cranking up the ominous musical score of Alexandre Desplat, editing with nail-biting rhythms and maintaining an unsettling sense of dread.

He’s aided by a top-shelf cast that turns in crafty performances even in the briefest of roles. For instance, TV sitcom mainstay James Belushi is a hoot as a blustery American book publisher; Eli Wallach, at 94, is wonderfully crusty as a snoopy old beachcomber; and Tom Wilkinson is dangerously obtuse as a tweedy Harvard professor with a clandestine past.

With McGregor carrying the yeoman’s freight as the self-effacing, nameless protagonist, it’s left to Brosnan, Cattrall and Williams to provide vivid flourishes of character coloration to enliven the film’s relentless monotones. Each delivers delightfully, especially Williams, who lends Ruth various facets of calculation, aloofness, bitterness, seductiveness and vulnerability.

For his part, Polanski may have lost a step or two since his filmmaking peak, and certain moviegoers may be decidedly put off by his checkered personal life and long-running legal problems. But “The Ghost Writer” deftly adds another neat, noirish chapter to a film career marked by nimble storytelling, wrenching personal tragedy and dubious international playboy antics. As they say in the book business, it’s a good read.

— Dennis King

MOVIE REVIEW

“The Ghost Writer”

PG-13
2:08
3 stars

Starring: Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Williams and Kim Cattrall.

(Language, brief nudity/sexuality, some violence, a drug reference)