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Mike Mills on Beginners' lessons

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Silver linings on a dark screen

ACROSS THE UNIVERSE: Is this the Beatles world we’d all like to think we live in?

1. Le scaphandre et le papillon|The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Julian Schnabel admires artists who overcome adversity. Like Jean-Dominique Bauby, a Parisian journalist who suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed except for one eye — he wrote the memoir on which this film is based by blinking out the words in code. Most directors would be content with the pathos. Schnabel looks deeper: his subtle use of point of view and poetic images and an overwhelming performance by Mathieu Amalric illuminate the conflict, the tragedy, the terror, and the triumph.

2. Across the Universe
What would the world be like with Beatles music but no Beatles? Would the songs spring from the lives and the subconscious of common people? That would be the perfect movie musical, and Julie Taymor comes close to pulling it off, as when “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” transforms a veterans’ hospital into a zoetrope aswirl with brutal images of ‘60s conflict. Across the Universe brims with creativity — what the world was like with Beatles songs and the Beatles.

3. The Bourne Ultimatum
Arty Paul Greengrass made the best action film of 2007. Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) suffers from amnesia and a guilty conscience; he’s killed, but he doesn’t know why or for whom, and neither does he know who he is. To find out, he hopscotches around the world, kicking ass and taking hits. Greengrass shot this in long takes with a handheld camera, creating a chaos with just enough clarity to let you figure it out. Kind of like Bourne himself, who suspects that the truth might set him free, but not from responsibility.

4. Red Road
Andrea Arnold’s film observes a world where even isolation has lost all humanity, where obsession, degradation, and violence are the price of making contact. It’s also an affirmation of courage and desire. A cop assigned to the Glasgow CCTV department spends the day spying on every back alley in town until an image stirs her memory, or maybe her imagination. What results draws on the lust and loss throbbing behind images. In a world where contact and betrayal converge, where public and private are the same and nothing, redemption can start with a TV screen.