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In life it's the journey, not the destination. In Hanna it's the story-telling, not the story. The story is a weird mash-up of movie cliches, paranoid Bourne Identity meeting coming-of-age Sixteen Candles. What makes Hannah so enjoyable is the craftsmanship of the story-telling. It's the acting by the stunning but asexual Saoirse Ronan and the not-quite-soulless Cate Blanchett. It's the visually sophisticated photography, which is serially beautiful. It's the music and the direction and the pace, which never flags but never rushes. The story is of a 16 year-old girl who's trained to be a killing machine by her guardian (Eric Bana), an on-the-run CIA operative. You could drop Matt Damon in her role and you'd have Bourne. But layered into Hanna's strange trip is her discovery of what her life has been missing: family and relationships. Director Joe Wright has taken his assemblage of cliches and orchestrated them into both an effective action thriller and an occasionally touching coming of age story. It's a fun ride.

Years ago I worked for a guy who seemed to be a pretty good egg. Short guy, a bit of a Napolean complex. But also a bit of a swashbuckler, friendly, willing to take chances. Exciting to work for. And what stories he had about his life: successful news director, A-7 pilot in the Air National Guard, award-winning photo-journalist. Never been fired in a business that eats its own. Then I met the guy who'd fired him. And all his stories came crumbling down. Pretty much every one of them a pack of lies. Got so bad he tried to take me down with him when he got canned for a second time. Mark Whitacre's just like him. Whitacre's the guy whose secret tapes help make a price-fixing case against agri-giant Archer Daniels Midland. Working undercover for the FBI for two-and-a-half years, Whitacre assiduously recorded meetings with ADM's competitors at which production levels and prices were fixed. But the more the FBI learned about Whitacre the more it wondered if it was prosecuting the wrong case. Whitacre's life was a hopeless maze of lie piled upon lie. And he embezzled. A lot. In The Informant! director Steven Soderbergh's tells Whitacre's story in a style that is wry, oddly cheerful and yet deeply, deeply cynical. That Soderbergh is after bigger fish than a mere embezzler should be clear from his casting of the enormously sympathetic and likable Matt Damon as the embezzler-in-chief. Damon's uncomfortably convincing as a guy with strange energy who's spinning tales from the opening minute to the last. But Soderbergh treats him almost affectionately. Because in Soderbergh's worl, Whitacre's on the bottom rung of a ladder in which everyone's working an angle, all the way to the top. ADM, the FBI, federal prosecutors, attorneys, the media... no-one's dealing an honest hand. In a world that's so thoroughly corrupt and bumbling, Whitacre's embezzled millions begin to look like small potatoes. So it's kind of funny to watch him make them dance to his tune. I found The Informant! to be simultaneously entertaining and alienating. There really isn't a character you truly like, except perhaps for Whitacre's eternally supportive wife, and she's a bit of a dim bulb. If the film works it's because Soderbergh refuses to bring the doom and gloom. In a world full of liars, he seems to be saying, whaddya gonna do?

It doesn't take long for Girl With The Dragon Tattoo to tip its hand. Inside of five minutes we're presented with a television reporter doing a typical live shot from outside a courthouse. Well, typical in every way except that she's prominently, ostentatiously pregnant. Ah. Female power. Gotcha. In the ensuing two hours we learn that women are lesbians because they were **** as children. That women are smarter and stronger than men. That victims are allowed to be warped by their past but that criminals are not. And that it's quite OK for a female to play the traditional male role and for the male to more or less play the traditional female role. That last one is especially OK because the female in question happens to be the very best thing about this movie. Her name's Noomi Rapace and she plays a pierced, tattooed punkish girl with a very violent streak who also happens to be a whiz at the internet thingie and has a crackerjack memory. I'd like to say she's complicated but that's being a bit generous to the writer, Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson. But she is interesting in a malevolent, **** kind of way. Rapace becomes entangled in the life of an investigative journalist who's hired to solve a 40 year-old case of a missing girl. And if Rapace is the best thing about this movie, then the impact she has on his life, thin gruel though it may be, is the second best. Third best is the actual plot of the movie, a somewhat complicated whodunnit replete with sex, sadism and, of course, murder. Salacious stuff somehow rendered limp, save for a handful of electric scenes with Rapace and her probation officer. I understand that Larsson wrote three novels based on these characters, popped them off to his publisher, then dropped dead. He never saw them become an international success. I also understand that this Swedish movie (with subtitles) is the first of three films to be based on his books. In the next film I look forward to seeing how Rapace's character develops and grows. She's really quite interesting. And I hold out hope that the girl power message is supported by stronger story and is energized by a director with a more skillful grasp of pacing and tension.

There's an unintended irony in The American's title, an irony that sweetly describes this movie's charm. When you think of an American movie these days, you think of a noisy spectacle, entertainment over character, explosions over story. But despite its title, The American is the antithesis of the big Hollywood spectacular. It's a quiet, contemplative film, lyrical in its grey, damp beauty and solemn in its business. The American is to be enjoyed for how it tells a story, not for the story itself, because the tale is familiar. It's the one about an aging hitman. Need I say more? Yet Dutch director Anton Corbijn finds new touches for his old story. His setting is the Italian medieval town of Castel del Monte, in the Apennine mountains of Italy. It's a postcard setting, crowded tile rooftops hugging each other up a hillside, narrow twisting cobblestone roads zig-zagging up between the old buildings. The cinematography is beautiful. But the light is rarely the golden, the colors rarely those of the picture postcard. Instead it's mostly drizzly, dark, dank and slightly worn. The town's a character every bit as much as George Clooney, who plays the title role with a restraint that matches the weather and the lighting. He's a paid assassin and it's all become too much for this paranoid, deeply introverted loner. Clooney goes the distance without ever cracking a smile. It might have been a dangerously low-energy, one-note performance. But instead it plays as a man who earned a good living by staying under a rain cloud but who finally dares to hope that maybe he's entitled to a little sunshine as well. As I said, the story's a familiar one and the ending's morality is straight out of the Hays code from the 1930's. For my taste, the utterly conventional conclusion is perhaps the film's weakest point. But its strengths overcome that solitary weakness. It has a subdued style, an elegance and beauty not typically associated with movies about assassins. Nor, for that matter, with movies about Americans.

Inception a bladderful of a movie. It's long. As befits a film written and directed by the guy who made Batman cool again, it's heavy on the action and visual arts. As befits a film written and directed by the guy behind Memento, it has a mind-bending plot. What's the movie about? The most basic of questions: what is reality? It plays with us by sending its characters into ever-deeper layers of dream states in search of a MacGuffin. And while the film ostensibly delivers the obvious enigmatic ending, it's scattered with hints that suggest a further hidden layer. How clever. By the time my bladder had insistently declared its presence, I was bored with the spectacle. For the film is indeed a spectacular, the sort of thing Hollywood does well. It's also an example of what Hollywood spectaculars often don't do well; it fails to connect with the emotions, with our sense of empathy. This, despite a plot in which the love interest is a central device. Ellen Page is terrific as the spunky, wisecracking, rule-breaking girl who gets pregan.... wait, let me start over; Ellen Page is terrific as the spunky, wisecracking, rule-breaking sidekick. She's also at risk of getting typecast as a spunky, wise.. well, you get the idea. Leonardo DiCaprio is excellent as the thinking man's tortured action hero. He looks great. Everyone else is a cipher, including the aforementioned love interest. I'm sure that Inception is a visually stunning, intellectually intriguing movie. I'm not sure it earned the right to test my bladder's breaking point.

The modern hillbilly doesn't make moonshine. He lives in poverty-stricken places like the Ozarks and cooks meth for his money. He lives in a paranoid, violent world where everyone's related and all live by a social code that excludes the law and outsiders. Director Debra Granik creates a viscerally real setting as she tells the story **** who has to challenge this social order to save her family. Jennifer Lawrence, outstanding in the lead role, is supported by uniformly strong performances and writing. Winter's Bone isn't a lot of laughs but it's one of the best movies of the year.