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.”

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)

Fans of the Swedish art-house pulp that has defined author Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy on screen will have come to identify its ferocious, brainiac heroine Lisbeth Salander as a girl of swift, impetuous and violent action.

But in “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” the final, drawn out but ultimately satisfying film in the trio, the dynamic Salander spends much of her time laid up in a hospital bed, having been shot three times at the conclusion of the last film, and later confined to a jail cell awaiting a court date that will seal her fate.

Noomi Rapace

After undergoing ghastly ordeals (torture, rape, gunshot wounds, a bullet in the brain) and facing off against seemingly endless onslaughts of nefarious villains (Nazis, pedophiles, pimps, conniving psychiatrists, assassins, a Frankenstein half-brother), in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” the surly, tattooed Salander – again portrayed with punk brilliance by Noomi Rapace in fierce mohawk – might seem slightly the worse for wear.

But for the third go-around, she proves to be just as resourceful, determined and anti-social as ever, even though the final film feels short on action and far more talky than the first two.

“Hornet’s Nest” (in Swedish with subtitles) takes up the story just minutes after the conclusion of the second film. Salander has been airlifted to a hospital in critical condition from gunshot wounds in a confrontation with her malevolent father (Georgi Staykov). But even as she’s under tight guard in a hospital ward, the “hornet’s nest” she’s stirred up in very high levels of the Swedish intelligence service is buzzing angrily.

As Salander becomes target for assassination by the Section, a top-secret government cabal, her champion, old-school crusading journalist Mikail Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist, reliably world weary), is on her case. He’s working on an expose that he hopes will clear Salander’s name and reveal a wide-spread conspiracy of rogue spies.

And for his efforts, Blomkvist – along with his editor and lover (Lena Endre) – also becomes potential prey for a swarm of machine-gun-toting assassins.

Director Daniel Alfredson (helmer of the second film) and screenwriter Ulf Rydberg do a sharp job of distilling a clear narrative through-line from the multiple plots of the novel while managing to create a propulsive, complex and satisfying thriller (even with its heroine confined throughout).

Rapace’s prickly Salander is again the film’s alpha character, and watching her slowly, painstakingly rise from the ashes to reclaim her leather-clad, bad-to-the-bone computer hacker persona is one of the movie’s greatest satisfactions. And Nyqvist deftly invests Blomkvist with a dogged determination and earthy wisdom that lends the action an appealingly tattered nobility.

Villains and allies are smartly etched – including German arch-fiend Niederman (Mikael Spreitz), oily hospital shrink Teleborian (Anders Ahlbom Rosendahl), and Blomkvist’s lawyer sister Annika (Annika Hallin).

Readers of the late author Larsson’s Nordic noir will ultimately go away satisfied by the big screen incarnations of the three novels, with “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” ably tying up loose ends, rounding out character arcs and lining up final confrontations and conclusions with fitting intensity and cool skill.

And for those reluctant to say goodbye to Salander and Blomkvist and their chilly world of Swedish paranoia, there’s director David Fincher’s English-language adaptations to look forward to and rumors of a fourth Millennium book left behind by Larsson to inspire hope.

- Dennis King

“The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest”

R
2:28
3 stars
Starring: Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist, Lena Endre, Annika Hallin, Georgi Staykov
(Strong violence, some sexual material, brief language)

Noomi Rapace

Fueled by copious jolts of strong coffee and propelled by the chilly – and chilling – Nordic sensibility of its late creator Stieg Larsson, “The Girl Who Played With Fire” delivers an appropriately pulpy if not wholly fulfilling second cinematic chapter in the author’s hugely popular Millennium trilogy.

Not as grippingly seductive or fully creepy as Niels Arden Oplev’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” veteran Swedish TV director Daniel Alfredson’s version of the second book suffers slightly from a middle-child syndrome. It’s not as surprising or startlingly fresh as the first film, yet it leaves us anticipating an exhilarating climax in the third (“The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest,” due up next in American markets).

“The Girl Who Played With Fire” (in Swedish with subtitles) picks up a year after the first film, when Lisbeth Salander (the perfectly cast Noomi Rapace) returns to Stockholm after a year underground. In a tight series of events, this fierce, freaky brainiac with genius hacker skills and zero social graces finds herself implicated in three brutal murders (seems they found her fingerprints on the gun).

So, in essence, the story concerns efforts by her old friend, knight-errant journalist Mikael Blomkvist (appealingly world-weary Michael Nyqvist), to exonerate Lisbeth and in the process uncover a tangled web of sex trafficking and decades-old conspiracy that taps into Lisbeth’s dark, inflammatory history of violence and sexual abuse.

A great deal of the appeal in Larsson’s moody crime writing is in hanging out with this odd pair of crime solvers (his anti Nick and Nora Charles, if you will) – Mikael oblique, noble, virile and bemused; Lisbeth all sharp edges, explosive rage and raw pain.

But unfortunately the two spend little time in each other’s company as this tangled tale unspools and as an exaggerated raft of evil villains strive to impede their progress, and worse.

Certainly Alfredson and screenwriter Jonas Frykberg (who also adapted the trilogy’s third book for Swedish film) do an able job of paring down big blocks of exposition and subplot from the book while still holding on to the essential mystery and icy atmospherics – the endless espressos, the Ikea furnishings – that lend Larsson’s work its distinctive Scandinavian noir style.

At heart, “The Girl Who Played With Fire” feels like a good, polished police procedural of the BBC or “Masterpiece Mystery” ilk (think “Prime Suspect” or better still the “Wallander” mysteries, based on the novels of another best-selling Swedish author, Henning Mankell). It’s more than good enough to satisfy fans of Larsson’s flinty prose and to leave audiences poised for yet another prickly waltz with Lisbeth and Mikael through Stockholm’s bleak, wintry backstreets.

Note: The web keeps buzzing about David Fincher’s English-language adaptation of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” in pre-production for a 2011 release, and it has been announced that Daniel Craig is set to play the role of journalist Mikael Blomkvist. Wild speculation abounds as to who will be cast in the coveted role of Lisbeth Salander, but given the spiky, indelible performance by Noomi Rapace in the Swedish films, whatever ambitious actress lands the role will have some very big combat boots to fill.

- Dennis King

“The Girl Who Played With Fire”

R
2:09
3 stars
Starring: Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist, Lena Endre, Peter Andersson, Annika Hallin
(Brutal violence including a rape, some strong sexual content, nudity and language)

Noomi Rapace

The late Swedish author Steig Larsson’s blockbuster Millennium Trilogy of bleak crime novels gets its initial, bracing cinematic treatment in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” a chilly film that deftly condenses the sprawling exposition of the first book into a taut, violent, troubling and deeply compelling experience.

Drawn from the novel whose original Swedish title translates as “Men Who Hate Women,” this adaptation is densely plotted and slightly overlong and packs in enough serial murder, S&M depravity, stark nudity, cold-blooded brutality, rape and mutilation to scare away the overly sensitive and merely curious.

But hardcore fans of Larsson’s sharply intelligent writing and his gloomy Scandinavian aesthetic will be rewarded with a film that’s scrupulously faithful to the author’s characters and to his scathing social commentary.

“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” (in Swedish with subtitles) introduces us to the mismatched pair of crime solvers that propel Larsson’s three novels – his Nordic, anti-Nick and Nora Charles, if you will.

They are crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), a world-weary knight errant recently convicted of slander for an investigative piece gone askew, and Lisbeth Salander (a wondrous Noomi Rapace), a 20-something goth hellion with a genius for computer hacking and an utter disdain for social graces.

The duo become reluctant allies when Blomkvist, awaiting his prison term, is hired by elderly tycoon Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube) to look into the disappearance, and presumed murder, of his beloved teenage niece at a family gathering 40 years earlier. The pierced and surly Salander, working for a private security firm, is first hired to vet Blomkvist for the job but soon finds herself aiding in his sleuthing efforts.

The complex investigation takes the pair to the gray, frigid climes of Hedeby Island, where the Vanger clan – a creepy nest of drunkards, greedheads, abusive parents and closet Nazis and anti-Semites – has its ancestral estate.

As the case unfolds, director Niels Arden Oplev adroitly inserts worlds of backstory revealing the deviant horrors of the decades-old crime along with more recent horrors of rape and torture that haunt the beautiful Salander and answer for her furious nihilism.

The stark story gets a needed jolt of full-blooded humanity in the performances and personalities of the two leads. Nyqvist lends a rueful wisdom and wry, dark humor to Blomkvist that puts him in league with such noble, weathered sleuths as Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. And Rapace throws off exhilarating sparks of sexual energy and righteous anger as the clenched and guarded Salander.

Larsson is said to have numbered among his influences in the genre such writers as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Sara Paretsky. But Thomas Harris and screen adaptations of his “Red Dragon” and “The Silence of the Lambs” come most readily to mind as kindred tales to this harrowing, thrilling film. “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is every bit as spine-tingling.

A note: The second and third novels in the trilogy – “The Girl Who Played With Fire” and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest” – have been adapted as Swedish film productions but have yet to be released in American markets. Also, an English-language adaptation of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is reportedly being planned by director David Fincher (“Se7en” and “Fight Club”) for release in 2012.

-Dennis King

“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”

Not rated
2:28
3 stars
Starring: Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Gunnel Lindblom, Ingvar Hirdwall and Tomas Köhler
(Recommended for adults, due to sexual themes, nudity and violence)