The Anchorage, a stark, bold, almost abusively demanding experimental drama by Cal Arts grad C.W. Winter and acclaimed Swedish photographer Anders Edstrom, defies all established rules of traditional cinema and carves out its own unique and inimitable onscreen vision. As a result, the co-directors craft a remarkable viewing experience virtually unlike any other.

The story, which takes place in Northern Sweden during the autumn months, involves a middle-aged widow named Ulla (Ulla Edstrom), inhabiting a rural homestead embanked by ocean. Each morning, she ventures down to the shore, disrobes, plunges into the icy water, and slips back into her clothes. Her adult children visit, then leave. Then, one evening, the unexpected occurs: a hunter in day-glo colors passes a little too closely to the house; Ulla’s dog begins to whine. In the days that follow, she notices an unmoored boat parked nearby, seemingly occupied by the same man. Thus, she begins to feel increasingly unsettled.

This is a minimalist work, but that categorization doesn’t begin to hint at how challenging the material is. Gone is the standard movie exposition – we can’t even conclude that Ulla is a widow without reading the production notes – and gone are the standard desires and conflicts of conventional drama. Gone, even, is any narrative momentum per se – so that although this movie nominally has a conceit similar to that of Diego Vignatti’s 2007 minimalist drama Tides (a lonely woman making her daily pilgrimage to the water) , the similarities end there; The Anchorage makes Vignatti’s work seem lightning paced.

That isn’t necessarily a criticism, however; Winter and Edstrom’s goals lie elsewhere. Their desire involves achieving and sustaining a cinematographic and emotional stasis – evoking a pure state of being onscreen. In this regard, the film recalls Alain Tanner’s masterful 1983 picture Dans la Ville Blanche. Yet to be even more specific, the emotions that materialize in The Anchorage are as different from Ville blanche as night and day, and make this film a thoroughly singular beast.

Here , the primary feeling that emerges from the images is one of dread. It remains unclear throughout the picture if the hunter is benign or malignant, and if he will turn up again, but that scarcely matters; his enigmatic presence escalates Ulla’s anxiety to a boiling point and ours along with it. Each time an interior shot of the house appears onscreen, with the exteriors illuminated through the panes of glass, we feel a nauseating sense of fear that the stranger will suddenly pass by, or peer into the window before us. What makes this suspense particularly effective is the fact that it surpasses standard cinematic tautness in its philosophical depth. Within the context of this particular story ,we never merely get empty movie tension, but rather, tension as a metaphor for a single middle-aged woman’s haunted inner life. This is driven home by one of the film’s few medium shots, as Ulla stands in her bathroom, of her lonely, distraught and emotionally-shattered face. Ulla is not a happy or well-adjusted character, and despite the orderliness of her external self-made world, her emotional state is anything but. As we linger inside the empty, still house, anticipating an eerie glimpse of the passerby in the distance, the vulnerability that is a product of the woman’s solitude becomes not only palpable for us but raw and then truly uncomfortable – evoking thoughts of the millions of older single women who have spoken of the horror associated with physical, emotional, and geographic isolation. Thus, the movie – for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with its pace – grows challenging to watch; we may find ourselves recoiling from the screen, so overwhelming is the dread. But in this regard, the film is an unmitigated success.

For all of the reasons described here, The Anchorage sits about as far away from conventional Hollywood filmmaking as anything in memory. As a viewer, embracing such extremism means abandoning all presuppositions about the fundamentals of narrative, and adjusting one’s own perspective beyond the myopic boundaries to which it may be conditioned. Those able to do so will discover that the movie rewards them immeasurably.

Günther Bachmann (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the main character of Anton Corbijn’s John Le Carré adaptation A Most Wanted Man, is a post-9/11 operative in a sub-rosa Hamburg counterterrorism organization. His agency functions as a kind of loose cannon — it flies beneath the public and media radars, and operates independently of the GSG-9, the formal German governmental unit assigned to combat extremists. As the story opens, a battered Muslim vagrant from Chechnya named Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin) drifts into town, and his ominous behavior and appearance magnetize the attention of Bachmann’s unit and the GSG-9. The agencies harbor a shared concern that Karpov might be a possible jihadist threat, especially given what they discover of Karpov’s late father’s criminal past, but Bachmann and his acolytes disagree with the GSG-9 suits over how quickly to act — Bachmann expresses recalcitrance to arrest Karpov until the outline of the scenario gains focus, an equivocation that intensifies as the days pass. In a short time, Karpov earns the friendship and trust of a beautiful young social worker named Annabel (Rachel McAdams) who tries to refute the suspicions surrounding the illegal immigrant and fights for his welfare — especially after she learns that he was tortured in Russia and that he’s deferring on collecting a huge inheritance from his dad’s bank account. Meanwhile, Bachmann concocts an ingenious plot to use Karpov to fight a potential source of terrorism that will also — if all goes according to plan — result in the young man obtaining amnesty. The GSG-9, however, would prefer to ignore Bachmann’s strategies and snatch Karpov up to be doubly certain of eliminating all risk.

This might sound wildly complicated. To the credit of Corbijn and scribe Andrew Bovell, the jigsaw-puzzle-like premise remains lucid and transparent enough that we never for a second feel lost or confused. Curiously, though, the details of the spy plot are far less significant in retrospect than Bachmann’s own human story. A haunting question lingers beneath the surface of the action: We keep asking ourselves how and why Günther — despite his cool amiability, his evident control and dexterity at handling spy investigations, et cetera — also seems so emotionally rigid, so locked inside of himself, so unwilling to trust even his closest and dearest colleagues, so isolated and guarded with his personal life. We eventually find out exactly why — boy, do we ever.

Per Le Carré’s standard MO, Bachmann and all of the men and women in his unit are severely damaged in more ways than one, with traces of moral bankruptcy and a propensity for ethical compromise existing alongside a basic core of integrity. Bachmann delivers the film’s message in one critical scene: All men, even those considered morally just and upright (including Bachmann himself), have some impurity, some evil, in them. It’s a dark perspective — cynicism handed to us on a platter — but one all too familiar from Le Carré’s fiction. Think, for example, of George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy or Alec Leamas in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. We’ve seen variations on this character before — basically good but internally damaged — and we can easily recognize him this time. And per the actions of those prior Le Carré antiheroes, we come to realize that Günther’s job rests on a bedrock of deception and manipulation. For instance: In one piquant, unsettling scene, eroticism comes to the fore, as Günther embraces a young male informant — a gesture which continues for such a protracted time that it eventually leaves the realm of the paternal and begins to assume homosexual overtones, followed by a verbal hint of the man’s arousal. But complicating the situation is the young man’s threat (just prior to that hug) to abandon his professional obligations to Günther — which casts suspicion on the legitimacy and sincerity of the romantic embrace. Is Bachmann gay? Perhaps not; perhaps Bachmann knows that the young man is gay and just wants to tease him to keep him on a leash. Pretense pervades within the spy realm, and virtually nothing that espionage agents do can be taken at face value. Deceit means nothing to them.

To be clear: The film does have a few flaws. Though it runs just over two hours, one wishes that it were slightly longer; the final scene with Bachmann feels abruptly truncated. We’ve grown to care about him, and we want to know how he emotionally and psychologically works through the final tumultuous developments in the central case. Also: Corbijn and co. do take one regretful misstep with their post-9/11 posturing. Annabel informs Issa about a Muslim terrorist attack that wiped out numerous civilians in a market, to which Issa responds, “Inch’allah” (or “God willing”). That line feels like a punch below the belt; outside of this scene, Issa is depicted as a quiet, gentle man with a traumatic past and a sincere faith in Islam. One might ask oneself what the filmmakers gain by indicating his support of jihad. This seems needlessly hostile and gratuitous, especially when the one other key Muslim character in the movie also has ties to jihadist activity. As it stands, the picture threatens to enter “not my daughter” territory with its uniform take on the Muslim world, and suffers for it. However, the film redeems itself somewhat with a damning (and politically correct) portrayal of twisted American operatives, notably Robin Wright as an ice-water-veined shrew.

All minor reservations aside, the movie must be counted as a great success. In terms of conception, performance, and execution, it is first-rate, and actually feels a bit superior to Tomas Alfredson’s 2011 Le Carré adaptation of Tinker. Though that was a very fine film in its own right, it occasionally felt top-heavy and laborious, as if Alfredson & co. were struggling to squeeze in too many elements of the novel. A Most Wanted Man is more efficient — sleeker on a narrative level, more intelligently gauged, slyer in its ability to slip up on us and catch us off guard. In hindsight, we realize that every scene, every line of dialogue, every action, has contributed a piece to a giant, gorgeous mosaic — and all lead up to one of the most shattering, emotionally devastating payoffs in recent movies.

Today, many regard Jack Kerouac as a revolutionary — one who liberated more conventional literary forms with a freewheeling, stream-of-consciousness authorial style that fluidly bridged poetry and prose. A trademark joy lies at the heart of Kerouac’s magnum opus On the Road and its successors, such as Big Sur and The Dharma Bums, that enabled him to capture the restless spirit of the postwar generation at its peak. Yet this only represents one side of the equation: If one steps outside of Kerouac’s catalogue and reads more objective material about him — such as Ann Charters’s dispassionate 1994 tome Kerouac: A Biography — it becomes apparent that self-myth and mythmaking were central to Kerouac’s life and art, and that a broad chasm opened up between the writer in his private life and the thinly veiled fictionalizations of himself and his friends on the page, such as Sal Paradise (Kerouac), Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady), and Carlo Marx (Allen Ginsberg). Stripped of myth, the real Kerouac and his friends lived lives of desperation — directionless, strung out on alcohol and barbiturates, riddled with despair; in fact, Cassady and Kerouac each died before the age of 50, Kerouac from the cirrhosis brought on by years of unmoderated drinking.

The oddest aspect of the movie version of On the Road is the fact that — despite preserving events and figures from the novel itself — it keeps its feet firmly planted in the lives of the actual Beat writers in lieu of Kerouac’s inflated characterizations. Not only does it not lasso the youthful exuberance of Sal and Dean’s traveling, it travels to the opposite extreme: Director Walter Salles Jr. and screenwriter José Rivera paint the whole Beat Generation as a downbeat, dead-end group of irresponsible young men, whose attempts at rebellion only succeeded in breaking a lot of hearts — such as that of Carolyn Cassady aka “Camille” (here beautifully played by Kirsten Dunst), Neal’s emotionally tortured wife, whom he cruelly abandons at one point with two infant children. Salles and Rivera also make a point to depict visually (though it is never stated outright) the physical, emotional, and mental strain that drugs took on these wistful rebels.

As a result, the picture doesn’t even begin to work as an adaptation per se, and does nothing to disprove the commonly held misperception that On the Road is an unfilmable book. It neither sides with Kerouac’s generation’s countercultural values, nor does it find an equivalent for the jazz-like ebb and flow of Kerouac’s language. Salles is a competent, gifted director, but he’s too square for this material; it demands a filmmaker willing to push the envelope stylistically with his camera, with a cinematographic technique comparable to what Kerouac did on the page. Ideally, a treatment of the Beat Generation would go even one step further by juxtaposing Kerouac’s “real” life with his “literary” life to explore the critical role that mythmaking played in his development as an artist. But that doesn’t happen here.

One can approach the picture as a straightforward biopic of Kerouac and Cassady (not unlike John Byrum’s 1980 Heart Beat), and it generally works on that level. Nothing in it is inept or klutzy — created under the imprimaturs of heavyweights Salles, Rivera, Francis Ford Coppola, and Marin Karmitz, it reflects professionalism on all levels. And the performances are uniformly extraordinary: In addition to Dunst, leads Garrett Hedlund (as Dean/Neal) and Sam Riley (as Sal/Jack) perfectly evoke the authors they are depicting, and the picture features a wealth of small, eloquently realized turns — an emotionally persuasive Kristen Stewart as a lover shared by both men, Tom Sturridge as a bonked-out (and man-hungry) Allen Ginsberg, and Viggo Mortensen and Amy Adams in magnificent portrayals of William S. Burroughs and a grungy Joan Vollmer (two evocations so brilliant and on-target that you wish Salles and co. would drop Kerouac and just focus on them). The ensemble’s performances are the movie’s pride and joy and make it worth seeing (if not essential viewing); the only problem with reading it as an objective depiction of Kerouac’s life is that we never, even for a second, get a sense of the scope or breadth of his talent from what’s onscreen. The film may be adequate and moderately enjoyable, but overall, it falls short of its full potential.

Christian Petzold’s Barbara unfolds in East Germany in 1980. The central character, Dr. Barbara Wolff (Nina Hoss), is a physician in her late thirties or early forties who accidentally committed some unspecified medical error in West Berlin and received amnesty from the Stasi police in return for life under Communist rule behind the Iron Curtain. As she tends to patients in the ward of a DDR medical clinic, she also receives none-too-subtle amorous advances from the institution’s male doctor Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld), who has a similar background. Barbara’s heart, however, lies with her lover, a West German man who routinely slips her contraband money and turns up for brief sexual liaisons. Ultimately, he offers to aid Barbara in securing covert passage to Denmark — which will ideally liberate her from the socialist police and government and enable the two of them to marry.

This might sound like the setup for a slick thriller, and Barbara has been promoted in some quarters as exactly that. Nothing could be further from the truth. At heart, it’s the story of one woman’s emotional and psychological metamorphosis. At the outset, Barbara demonstrates Hippocratic compassion toward patients but remains shut down inside — unwilling to even acknowledge Andre’s advances, let alone return them. Despite her inherent nurturing instincts, her long-term focus is wholly self-oriented: escape from the Communist Bloc by any means necessary. Over the course of the drama, we witness her gradually evolving into a much different person — someone emotionally accessible and magnanimous. Her transition culminates with a surprising course of action that she never would have even considered a few weeks prior.

The themes of this story are not particularly profound, but execution is everything. Thanks to expert scripting and direction, and an elegant central performance by Hoss, the shifts that we witness in Barbara Wolff are so delicate and subtle that they fly under our radar — we feel that we’re watching the credible growth of an actual person, not a character. In the background of this tale, Petzold also etches out one of the most compelling love stories in recent memory, one all the more magnificent because the film never calls it out and never goes for a big amorous payoff — it emerges and lingers delicately, sub rosa, beneath the surface of the narrative. In other words: The writer-director trusts the audience’s intelligence enough for us to infer the fundamentals. As such, the movie earns the romantic persuasiveness that it seeks, and then some.

None of this should surprise admirers of Petzold, who has demonstrated the same skill set in many prior films, such as his 2005 masterpiece Ghosts. Yet Barbara also represents a major step forward for the director. Petzold emerged from the Berlin School, a group of German filmmakers dedicated to telling slight, small-scaled stories of everyday men and women who undergo subtle transitions. In Barbara, he takes the same successful formula and posits it against a complex political backdrop without ever losing his humanistic touch — we constantly get telling little details of human nature that force us to see through the politics, as in a masterful shot of a Stasi guard racked with tears and sobs as his wife dies of a terminal illness. In this instance and at other times, Petzold seems to be saying that the Communist police and the confined physicians in this movie are all victims of the same totalitarian regime, bound up in the same emotional struggles as the rest of us, but cruelly dropped onto opposite sides of the political barrier. It’s an observation that has been made before in other pictures, but rarely as gracefully as it is here.

It is difficult to find any serious fault with this film, though it does have one tiny misstep. A substory involving a pregnant female patient treated by Barbara needs slightly greater elucidation in one respect: Petzold and co. could stand to be a little bit clearer about the fate of the child. But that’s a negligible flaw. Barbara emerges as an anomaly — a movie so impeccably crafted that it reminds one of a rare and delicate seashell with hundreds of magnificent nuances and gradations. It easily qualifies as one of the very best films of 2012.

Sutter Keely (Miles Teller), the adolescent hero of James Ponsoldt’s gentle teen seriocomedy The Spectacular Now, is one of those types who seems permanently glued to his preadult world in Anytown, USA. At 17 years old, he can’t picture himself ever doing anything other than Mickey Mousing classes, working at his part-time job in the local suit store, partying with friends, indulging in underage drinking, and dating around. He’s a real character — a dyed-in-the-wool b.s. artist and charmer who has his timing and his “lines” down pat as he glides through crowds at parties, attempting to woo his classmates and pick up gorgeous women. When we first meet him, he’s still struggling to come to grips with a recent breakup with his dynamic ex-girlfriend Cassidy (Brie Larson). He awakens after a night of heavy drinking on a suburban lawn, where he’s discovered by another classmate, the beautiful Aimee Finecky (Shailene Woodley). At first glance, she’s everything Sutter isn’t: a committed student, a wallflower and social outcast, a virgin with no relationship history, as sincere and from-the-heart as Sutter is full of hot air. But in time, the two begin spending their days together and, upon learning that they have a great deal in common, gradually become the most important individuals in each others’ lives.

The central conflict of the movie involves Sutter’s immaturity. Stuck in the rut of arrested adolescence, he has apparently given no thought to growing up, to taking control of his life and abandoning a juvenile mind-set. While most of us see high-school life as a means to an end, Sutter would prefer to stay there perpetually, in the “spectacular now” of the title; at one point, he informs Cassidy that he has everything he could ever want or need right there in town — a home, a job, a car. Aimee challenges that sense of security: She’s the first person in his life who has ever made him want to think about grander things.

Many films rise and fall on the strength of their approach, and for at least part of the way, this picture nails the ideal tone. Sutter could have easily come across as a real cad, especially given his social manipulations, but this never happens. Ponsoldt and his two screenwriters, Michael H. Weber and Scott Neustadter (500 Days of Summer), strategically include scenes at the beginning that unveil the teenager’s naiveté, suggesting that he’s basically an innocent whose attempts to curry favor with those around him (women and men) often backfire rather than help him succeed — as when Sutter tries to charm two girls at a party, and instead comically falls on his face. Above and beyond that, the casting of Teller was an inspired move: The young actor enables us to see through the veil of the character’s party-happy mind-set to the massive vulnerability and fear that lie beneath. Woodley was an equally ideal choice for Aimee; the actress plays her character as so open-faced, so guileless, so unassuming, that you can instantly believe in her ability to strip Sutter’s defenses and touch his heart sans any conscious awareness of what is happening. The result, in the early stages of the film, is one of the most affecting movie love stories in a very long time, with characters we begin to care about passionately and intensely.

If the picture began and ended there, perhaps it could earn its right to classic status as Say Anything and 500 Days of Summer did. Unfortunately, this film has a flaw — a grave one in fact — involving Sutter’s drinking. Bear in mind that this kid is underage — and he doesn’t simply drink on occasion; he constantly has a flask of some unspecified hard liquor in hand. While driving, at his job, at parties. He drinks so much that if he lit a cigarette, he would combust. The movie lays out all of the telltale signs of a serious, clinical alcoholic, but never deals with it satisfactorily or intelligently. The romance with Aimee eventually begins to strain credibility for this reason: We learn that her father died of an overdose of painkillers, so she of all people (a young woman who is a sharp, articulate, and perceptive character) should have warning signs going off right and left in her head, and there is absolutely no way under the sun that she would so readily accept a liquor-filled flask from Sutter as a gift and begin drinking steadily herself. There are also two unforgivable developments in the final act involving alcohol, the most critical of which involves a serious quarrel between the two lead characters. What eventually happens in tandem with that argument is so extreme and severe, we can’t believe for a second that Aimee would be anything less than enraged at Sutter to the point of permanently severing all ties with him. Instead, she seems to lack any trace of ire, and that isn’t merely difficult to swallow, it is ludicrous.

In the process, then, the film eventually begins to work against itself and erodes the goodwill that it had earned: Your sympathies continue to lie with this couple, and you realize that you’ll feel seriously cheated if Ponsoldt and his scribes don’t provide an optimistic, hopeful ending, but at the same time, the script sets the bar far too high in terms of the issues that Sutter needs to overcome. In addition to harboring a serious need to check into Betty Ford, the character continues to slip in school to the point of almost complete disaster; in fact, everything about the movie’s interior logic suggests that it’s setting up a tragedy. The filmmakers try to save the day and the character with a reassuring last-minute pep talk from his mom (Jennifer Jason Leigh) designed to bring him back to his senses, but it’s all too little, too late; by then we’ve already given up on the story and can’t help but feel that Sutter and Aimee deserve to be in a far more intelligent and thoughtful movie.

Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons were one of the key rock groups of the early- to mid-’60s, not to mention a treasure of mid-20th century pop culture. They rose to acclaim in the Brill Building era of 1963, a year before Beatlemania struck. And like other acts of the period (such as Dion and the Belmonts and Ricky Nelson), their music evokes a simpler and gentler time — the innocence of the pre-Vietnam, Kennedy-era ’60s. There is also a tough, gritty undercurrent to much of their music that neatly offsets the effusive sentimentality of the lyrics — and that speaks to the East Coast, Italian-American origins of artists Valli, Tommy DeVito, and Nick Massi.

The idea of a musical built around the ensemble’s transition from street life to the limelight is not only a fantastic one, but welcome news given the uniqueness of the Seasons’ sound and the longevity of member Bob Gaudio’s cunningly written tunes (which still sound great, decades after they first charted). The concept excelled on-stage thanks to playwrights Marshall Brickman (co-writer of Annie Hall) and Rick Elice, and the production went on to win the 2006 Tony Award for Best Musical. But the film adaptation — brought to life by producer Graham King and director Clint Eastwood — feels laborious, ill-conceived, and woefully overlong at more than two hours.

The movie is at its best during the early scenes in New Jersey, when we watch Valli (John Lloyd Young) and his friends search for a way out of their enclave. As the characters flirt with petty crime and dazzle themselves with fantasies of a music career, the picture captures the zany, freewheeling spirit of youth. Though Eastwood’s direction is leaden, the movie does occasionally nail the ideal tone. For example, when Valli and his friends make a disastrous attempt to steal a safe that is ten times heavier than the car they want to use to transport it, the result is like a cross between a gentler version of Mean Streets, Philip Kaufman’s The Wanderers, and a Buster Keaton gag. This type of material is delightful, but unfortunately, it’s also all too brief. The picture soon descends into B-grade psychodrama, narratively structured with a series of irritating theatrical asides to the camera. The story is anchored by a battle of wills between the diminutive, put-upon Valli and Type-A aggressor DeVito (Vincent Piazza), who feels threatened and alienated by Gaudio’s genius and eventually lands the group in hot water with his irresponsible antics. Later, we watch the young men grapple with the burdens of fame, as when Valli’s constant touring carries him far away from home and threatens to destroy his first marriage and attempts at fatherhood.

None of these conflicts strain credibility per se, but they are overly familiar. We’ve seen the rise-and-fall showbiz story dozens of times before in better movies — everything from The Rose to Coal Miner’s Daughter to What’s Love Got to Do With It? — and it feels stale here. You keep looking for something fresh and interesting in the characterizations and scenarios and coming up empty-handed. It’s also telling that Valli and Gaudio (Erich Bergen) are presented as nearly spotless, whereas Massi (Michael Lomenda) and DeVito come off as neurotic and complicated; perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised by this, given the fact that Gaudio and Valli are two of the film’s executive producers. Christopher Walken turns up as a neighborhood figure known as Angelo “Gyp” DeCarlo; he’s a welcome presence and gets to deliver a few amusing lines, but the characterization is so badly drawn that it’s difficult to determine what relationship he has with the leads.

There is another issue: The Four Seasons’ tunes, many of them bubblegummy, up-tempo, and carefree, are at odds with the pseudo-Cassavetes emotional brutality of the characters’ interactions. If Brickman and Elice (who co-wrote the screenplay) wanted to make these two extremes gel, they probably needed to carefully define the role of the music in Valli and co.’s origins — for instance, by presenting the songs as a form of deliverance from the inner-city blues, as in Alan Parker’s Fame. That sort of conceit never materializes here, and as a result, the music clashes badly with the events surrounding it. Whereas people who saw the original production on-stage often commented on the sense of joy that they carried away from it, you don’t get the same feeling from this picture. Instead, the movie makes listening to these beautiful old pop songs remarkably unpleasant; you feel they’ve been weighed down by morose and lugubrious human drama.

But all of that notwithstanding, there are several good things scattered throughout Jersey Boys — especially stellar production design by James Murakami, convincing performances by the young leads (all of them relative unknowns, which lends the picture credibility), and a single crane shot involving the legendary Brill Building that qualifies as one of the most inventive and spectacular movie moments of the year. There is also a marvelous closing-credits number, lifted directly from the stage production, in which the entire ensemble gather on a closed set and dance to the Four Seasons’ hit “December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night).” It’s a rare dose of ebullience, infectious in its joy, but also something of a mixed blessing: It has the misfortune of underscoring what we’ve been missing for the last two hours.

Nothing suits a sociocultural documentary portrait of a nation more powerfully than the gestalt of sweeping, irreversible change reshaping and redefining the landscape to an immeasurable degree, while the cameras are rolling. Yung Chang’s Canadian-produced documentary Up the Yangtze benefits from just such an element. An essay on geopolitical transition that could not possibly have been made at a riper or more advantageous moment in history, it also embodies an autumnal film of death and rebirth — death to innumerable generations of indigenous Chinese culture, rebirth to a country now shaping itself and emerging as an anglicized economic superpower on the world stage. And that dual reality carries overtones not bittersweet, but in Chang’s hands, deeply and profoundly sad. Even as this masterfully conceived and executed film illuminates the mind’s eye, it succeeds in breaking one’s heart.

As complex and multifaceted as 21st century China is, it could easily demand a 12- or 14-hour documentary miniseries. Chang never once shies away from the complexity of his subject, which makes the breadth and profundity of the picture’s insights within its intimate scope that much more remarkable. The director posits the film against the backdrop of the massive Three Gorges Dam installation — an overpowering symbol of the country’s industrialization. The largest hydroelectric project in the world (as the narrator reminds us), it will do much to revitalize and reshape China’s economy, but it also means raising the mythical Yangtze River to unseen levels and literally drowning out the villages of uneducated, illiterate peasant villagers who ostensibly have nowhere else to go — thus obliterating centuries of Chinese history.

Chang’s approach involves humanizing this bifurcated tragedy by filtering it through the lives of two subjects: 16-year-old Yu Shui, the sweet-natured (if taciturn) daughter of a gaunt peasant farmer on the Yangtze banks whose family suffers from abject poverty, and (in an unrelated thread) 19-year-old aspiring vocalist Chen Bo Yu, who hails from an affluent family. He’s as much a victim of China’s government-sanctioned one-child-only policy as he is of his own gross conceitedness and pomposity. As Yu Shui heeds her mother’s request to skip secondary school and serve as a hostess on a luxury cruise line, sailing up and down the Yangtze and catering to American tourists (a job that will generate extra income for the clan), so Chen Bo Yu also takes a job as a host on the said ships.

Chang’s heart and soul lie with the peasant villagers, and nothing in the film carries as much lyrical beauty or cultural authenticity as intimate, candidly shot scenes of Yu Shui’s family huddled around dinner in their jerry-built shack on the Yangtze banks. To the credit of both the director and his subjects, one instinctively develops feelings of emotional attachment to this clan and empathy with their plight becomes an automatic. Chang turns to Yu Shui’s family as representatives of “the old China,” and indeed, in the wizened face of her middle-aged father one can see the product of generations upon generations of Chinese residents, stretching back into the dynastic era. As a measure of Chang’s success, one feels an overwhelming, palpable sense of sadness at the thought of not only their home (and, thus, vital elements of indigenous Chinese culture) being indiscriminately wiped out by the sweeping tide of industrialization, but thousands upon thousands of similar residences and family units also extinguished.

The events that unfurl on the cruise ship form a striking juxtaposition alongside the said familial scenes, and contrastingly lend an aura of deliberate, almost sly cynicism to the proceedings. The proprietors of the line promptly anglicize their new recruits by giving them new names (“Jerry” and “Cindy”), teaching them English, and schooling them in warming up to their American patrons. Against this backdrop, we witness the dark underbelly of capitalism — greed — rearing its ugly head. That theme waxes particularly potent when Chen Bo Yu delves headfirst into the Western affluence of the ship and its patrons, and his (already intolerable) cockiness shoots through the roof; he delivers a couple of ghastly, profane, and egocentric asides to the camera on the ubiquity of American tourists and how it only makes good financial sense to fraternize with wealthy middle-aged visitors because both younger Westerners and elderly Americans tip so poorly. (He also congratulates himself and expresses pride over his reception of 30 American dollars.) Nor does Yu Shui (sweetness aside) emerge as particularly immune to these lures; despite her said goal of regularly shuttling monies back to her family, we never once witness her doing so, and she seems more willing to fritter away her earned monies on high-end apparel and accessories such as flashy earrings than she is to support her folks.

The fiscal logic behind China’s shift away from rurality and toward an urban, westernized market is readily apparent and easily grasped, and may seem like an obvious move for the country in the 21st century global economy. But Chang seems to be asking throughout the film, “What of the cost? At what price glory?” And what of the government officials who — we learn — have literally strong-armed peasants into relocation, often demanding bribes for more upscale residences and reducing one shopkeeper to tears on camera? The wisdom of the film lies in its realization that there may not be any easy answers, and that coming face to face with an understanding of the concomitant losses represents a significant step forward.