You’ll be glad to know that writer-director Todd Solondz is not finished rummaging through the inner lives of depressive perverts. That puts it more cruelly than Solondz would, which is part of his charm.

With Life During Wartime, a quasi-sequel, as he has called it, to his 1998 film Happiness (i.e. “the one about the pedophile”), Solondz revisits the variously troubled characters from that earlier film, and even recasts them. Instead of Philip Seymour Hoffman, we get Michael Kenneth Williams (who played Omar on The Wire). Instead of Jon Lovitz, we get Paul Reubens. And so on.

What remains is an arresting affinity for suburban disfunction. You might call it the Solondz touch. You might call it an inappropriate touch. Here’s what the filmmaker has to say for himself.

Do people stop you in the street and say, “What’s wrong with you?”

I mean, people have been nice…to my face. I don’t quiz people. I don’t interrogate them. When people say nice things I say thank you. So no. I have to say it says something good about human nature that many people do stop and say nice things to me, actually. On the street, in the subway, what have you. But I know there are just as many people who hate everything I do. And they have the good discretion and good tact never to assault me.

I mean this as a compliment to you both: If Paul Reubens deserves to be in anyone’s films, it’s yours.

I’ve always loved him. He read for me years ago. So I had a sense of what he could do, and we both took a leap of faith in each other here. With Paul of course there’s an extra layer of pathos or poignancy because of the whole history that the audience is aware of with him. And also, no one has any idea that he’s even capable of such a performance. And that’s all very exciting. And I’m very playful; in my head the character probably even has his own Pee Wee Herman doll.

That’s something to think about. How did you first discover cinema?

I went to Yale, and they didn’t have a film major. But that’s where I first thought of the idea. I think because I was socially shy or awkward and felt intimidated. When I went, we had VHS tapes, they had film societies. It could be a Howard Hawks double-bill, followed by Maya Deren, followed by Bergman, Garbo. Every night, many options. And I went out all the time. In part to escape the pressures, the social pressures, and in the process I fell in love with movies in a way that I hadn’t taken seriously as a child. I mean, I can remember I was 16 and my mom came home, and she said, “I saw a movie, Todd. What a movie. It was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” I said, “Oh, I want to see that.” And she said, “No, no, you’re too young.” So I was very protected, in what I saw growing up. It had to be rated G. And then things changed in college. I didn’t have to understand a movie. I just let it all wash over me.

So at what age would the younger you be old enough to see the movies you now make?

I have a different viewpoint from my mom. I think children have built-in censors. I think parents are always worried about, “Oh my god, the sex, the violence.” But I can remember, as a kid, anytime they started kissing, I went for the Jujubes at the concession. I took a break. No interest. And I think usually the more anxious the parents are about that stuff, probably they don’t realize they themselves are the main source of whatever nightmares these kids are having.

What will be your next movie?

The title is Dark Horse. And I can tell you there’s no child molestation, rape or masturbation in it. But I’m afraid those are the only details I can share at this point.

Those are useful details.

It’s an abstraction, really, until it’s made. You have all sorts of plans; nothing ever turns out the way you plan it. If I were maybe smarter, wiser, I would maybe have a real career. But I’m not interested in that. I just make movies that interest me in my own way. I don’t pay attention — I can’t — to what I maybe should do. A lot of times I think, “Oh this could make a lot of money, I have a very marketable idea.” But then I end up writing something unmarketable. I listen to whatever compels me to put pen to paper. I don’t have a strategy. I’m very fortunate. When I look back, I say, “Oh my god, someone gave me money to make these movies.” It’s amazing. But I never presume that I will get money again. I have to be zen about all of this. I mean, you can just get depressed and jump out the window. But I have a sense of humor about it all.

Directed by Tom Ford, from a script by Ford and David Scearce and based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood

It’s hard not to notice that A Single Man’s timing seems a little awkward. For starters, there’s that inevitable confusion with the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, and the fact of both movies having to do with horn-rimmed sad sacks who feel trapped in the peculiar quicksand of 1960s Americana.

What’s more, maybe it’s just too late now to get a great film from Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel of one day in a closeted man’s suddenly lonely life. Certainly director Tom Ford and co-writer David Scearce seem to take that seminal gay-lib text for granted. An established fashion designer who made his name peddling erotically flamboyant luxury, Ford sees A Single Man as sedulous diversion: just one long and lovely and carefully struck pose.

In 1962, as Soviet missiles are piling up in Cuba and college kids are giving up in Los Angeles, Colin Firth is George Falconer, quite clearly the best dressed professor of English ever to have walked the Earth (although in that regard he is not without competition). Having just learned of his lover’s death, George has taken to radiating sartorially magnificent grief, thinking suicidal thoughts and trudging around in his splendid home. He has a support system of sorts, cobbled together from a fetchingly boozy best friend (Julianne Moore), a flirty student in a fuzzy sweater (Nicholas Hoult), and a full-on come-hither hustler (Jon Kortajarena), but nothing quite lights George up like the memory of his soulmate, who’s played in flashbacks by Matthew Goode.

In fact, Ford and cinematographer Eduard Grau take that lighting up very literally, setting it off as a periodic efflorescence from their meticulously pallid status quo. As if Firth’s face, here a marvel of emotive subtlety and control, somehow weren’t enough to get the point across. That’s really the best and most confounding thing going on in here: an extraordinary central performance without which the whole movie, flan-like confection that it is, might completely collapse. It’s astonishing to see how nimbly Firth navigates the simultaneous numbness and volatility that mourning can bring. And it’s frustrating to see him, along with every other shrewdly self-possessed performer in his supporting cast, not so much directed as tastefully arranged within the frame.

Given the milieu of a hazy, uneasy neverland somewhere between conservative cultural nostalgia and foundational progressive mythology, it’s no surprise that Ford should want to reduce all of A Single Man’s feeling to a languid fashion-mag swoon. (Is that moment set in front of a billboard for Hitchcock’s Psycho actually meaningful, or just something the filmmaker saw in another movie once?) But his characterization of the dapper, depressive George risks reinforcing a mopey and preening stereotype — the core of queer vanity behind a veil of hollow flair — that Isherwood sought preemptively to peel away. Funny, and sad, how times have changed.

Best? Top? Favorite? I don’t know what to call them. I had enough trouble narrowing it down to as many movies as years. These annual reflective round-ups always confound me (and you, probably), but the tyranny of ten becomes even more outrageous when dealing with a decade’s worth of material.

So there’ll be no proselytizing here, just a sort of blurred time-lapse snapshot of one man’s (evidently rather arty) moviegoing disposition.

You’ll notice a lot from Europe. And one American film set in Europe. And another that’s a documentary about an American made by a European. What can I say? By the time you read this, I’ll have left for a European vacation. I doubt that will get it out of my system.

You may also spot me feeling wistful about the relentless march of time. Well, as someone in a movie once said, “Memory is a wonderful thing if you don’t have to deal with the past.”

Alphabetically:

1. Before Sunset (2004). Writer-director Richard Linklater reunites the couple played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in his 1995 film Before Sunrise, with profound and moving results.

2. Caché (2005). A perfect little thriller that also happens to be a timely parable on colonial blowback and the inverse proportionality of surveillance and disconnection. Typically excellent actors Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil rise to a typically pitiless challenge from the austere Austrian auteur Michael Haneke.

3. Grizzly Man (2005). This exquisitely appropriate union of artist and subject — German madman moviemaker Werner Herzog reflecting on doomed Alaskan bear-watcher Timothy Treadwell — has been haunting me for years.

4. Let the Right One In (2008). If I could see only one vampire movie ever again,  or one coming-of-age movie, both would be Tomas Alfredson’s film of John Lindqvist’s script of his own novel. (Which is also to say that, Richard Jenkins notwithstanding, I can do without the forthcoming American remake.)

5. Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005). My first experience of writer-director-performance-artist Miranda July’s inspired, invigorating feature debut ranks high among decade-best movie memories. Its faith in artfulness and fellowship has since been guiding.

6. Russian Ark (2002). At last, a film that Russian history buffs and tracking-shot fetishists can agree on. Filmmaker Alexander Sokurov’s technically and poetically astonishing stroll through St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum is a virtuosic correlation of content and form.

7. Saraband (2003). The late, great master Ingmar Bergman reunites the couple played by Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann in his 1973 film Scenes from a Marriage, with profound and moving results.

8. Sexy Beast (2000). Gangster chic had gotten tediously shabby when director Jonathan Glazer’s sinewy feature debut came along and revitalized it. Ray Winstone gives this brilliant black comedy its savory soul, and Ben Kingsley gives it a live-wire jolt. To borrow a line from the latter, “Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!”

9. Touch the Sound (2004). You might expect a documentary about a deaf percussionist to get gimmicky or shamefully schmaltzy. But Thomas Riedelsheimer’s innately cinematic portrait of Evelyn Glennie takes its subject’s example and defies all conceptual limitations.

10. You Can Count On Me (2000). With serene intelligence, genuine warmth and great roles for great actors Mark Ruffalo and Laura Linney, playwright/screenwriter Kenneth Lonergan’s directorial debut sets a new standard for intimate character-driven drama.

“Nutrinos have mutated into a new kind of nuclear particle. They’re heating up the earth’s core.”

“It’s the biggest solar climax in recorded history.”

“Don’t you see the signs?”

“California’s going down!”

“All our scientific advances, our fancy machines! The Mayans saw this coming thousands of years ago.”

“Daddy!”

“We’re gonna need a bigger plane.”

“It’s a brave new world you’re heading for, and the young scientists are gonna be worth 200 old politicians.”

“The director of the Louvre was an enemy of humanity?!”

“Everybody out there has died in vain if we start our future with an act of cruelty.”

Written and directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen

As an exercise in futility (a Coen-brothers-appreciation primer if ever there was one), let’s imagine what might have happened had A Serious Man been made by gentiles, or, Hashem forbid, by Arabs.

Under those circumstances, it might be called the most anti-Semitic film of the year.

Hashem, by the way, is the name that characters in A Serious Man say instead of God, because they are serious Jews. They are funny too, the film suggests, but only because they’re so serious. As in not laughing with, laughing at.

Not that religious seriousness ever was the Coens’ first priority. It has been reported that Ethan wrote a philosophy thesis at Princeton in which he described belief in God as “the height of stupidity.” Later, he and Joel wrote Blood Simple and Barton Fink and Fargo and The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou? and all the rest. Earlier, they endured suburban dullness and spiritual desperation in mid-’60s Minnesota — or so A Serious Man, set there, suggests. It’s the story of a schlemiel who hopes to be a mensch, but only suffers for his efforts. Is the suffering his own fault? His family’s? His neighbors? Hashem’s?

No, it’s the Coen brothers’. They’re pitiless. They’re like children torturing a small animal. For an audience. Of unpleasant Jews.

Timidly put-upon middle-class assimilate Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a professor of physics, lately has begun to observe the allegorical implications of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Larry seems to have become derailed from his tenure track. His wife (Sari Lennick) plans to leave him for a sanctimonious goon (Fred Melamed). His daughter (Jessica McManus) is stealing his cash to save up for a nose job. His son (Aaron Wolf) just wants to get high and watch F-Troop or listen to Jefferson Airplane in Hebrew school. And his mopey, unemployed, cyst-afflicted gambler brother (Richard Kind) lives on the couch and monopolizes the bathroom. Also, Larry has been fielding increasingly irritated calls from a collections officer of the Columbia Record Club. It goes on like this. Eventually, the stoned nude-sunbather next door (Amy Landecker) asks, “Do you take advantage of the new freedoms?” Larry doesn’t really know what to say.

Mostly he hoists his eyebrows, yanks down the corners of his mouth and diminishes his voice with a grating quaver. He does turn for guidance to a series of three rabbis, each less helpful and more monstrous than the last. The middle rabbi tells Larry a (brilliantly edited, Jimi Hendrix-enhanced) tale of a Jewish dentist who discovered a coded Hebrew message engraved inside a goy patient’s teeth. But the tale leaves Larry unfulfilled and well within his rights to reply, “It sounds like you don’t know anything. Why even tell me the story?” Once the delight of an expectation-defying punchline has abated, the same might be said to the filmmakers by their audience.

What seems to matter most is the suffering, and the spectacle. A Serious Man makes room for characters both sebaceous and phlegmatic. Roger Deakins’ cinematography is as skillful as always, but the way the camera looks at these people is like leering and also like staring them down.

It’s illuminating to have A Serious Man in theaters at the same time as Where the Wild Things Are, whose own menagerie of hairy, enormous, personal-space-invading grotesques derives from Maurice Sendak’s child’s-eye view of his old-world Jewish relatives. That view could be glaring at times, but would not now be so familiar to so many of us were it not also so fundamentally humane.

The Coens’ gargoyles, on the other hand, are universally loathsome. Not just ugly, they all tend to be morally or at the very least temperamentally repellent too. It’s fair to say they seem rather less likely than Sendak’s and Spike Jonze’s Wild Things to cement parent-child bonds and inspire several generations worth of proprietary affection. Not that the Coens even care about that.

What do they care about? What had they hoped to extract from this particular plot of personal history? Maybe they did intend a satirically affectionate commemoration, or even a Voltairean denunciation of faith-based optimism, but in any case what they’ve made seems more like some sort of long-deferred, highly disciplined tantrum.

So, phew, it’s a good thing they’re not gentiles or Arabs.

The young gentleman might think he has made a capital move by purposely taking his date to see that film about the tubercular Romantic poet whose muse enjoys sewing and butterflies. Quite. But the young gentleman also should be advised to proceed with caution, for the tubercular Romantic poet in question, John Keats, was among the finest of his kind. It is not merely Keats’ series of influentially sensuous odes that this film exists to commemorate, but also his exceptional gift for the art of the love letter — with which the young gentleman, Heaven help him, may yet be invited by his date to compete. Keats died broke and obscure and devoted at 25, by the way; it will be no contest.

The beneficiary of those letters, Bright Star reminds us, is Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), literally the girl next door. A skeptic according to her somehow arousingly impassive disposition, she knows fashion — and indeed even makes her own clothes, with taste and visionary flamboyance — but does not know poetry. Yet she registers the immortal lines, such as Keats’ “A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” and finds herself intrigued. Eventually, she’ll be called upon to erupt with sorrow at his death, and the power of that moment will be bracing for its forbearance of movie convention. A woman so gorgeous as Cornish in a performance so gorgeous as this is certain to leave the young gentleman feeling beguiled. It is important that he not defeat his own purpose by neglecting his date — most certainly a young lady of sensitivity and intelligence and independence of thought herself, as he would be wise to remember.

Similarly, the young gentleman is cautioned not to fall in love with Keats either. This important ancestor of all wispy tousled emo darlings is well cast with Ben Whishaw, who also recently has portrayed movie versions of Brideshead Revisited’s scandalously self-debauching Sebastian Flyte, plus Bob Dylan and Keith Richards. Here, it is entirely understandable that Keats’ smugly protective friend and Hampstead flat-mate Charles Armitage Brown (Paul Schneider, also terrific) should consider Fanny a rival for the poet’s affection. “Your writing is the finest thing in my life,” Charles tells him once, with such naked, disarming awe that the young gentleman had better prepare himself for a flush of embarrassment.

The writer and director of Bright Star is Jane Campion, whom the young gentleman possibly will recall as the maker of The Piano, a film he may have glimpsed accidentally when much younger and not yet a gentleman, and before that An Angel at My Table, which he shan’t be expected ever to have seen but which did establish that no other living filmmaker better understands how to photograph such romantic atmospherics as cherubic red-headed little girls and moss. Such details, along with blooming flower fields and the aforementioned butterflies, abound in Bright Star — the rare 19th-century period piece that’s ultimately too airy to be stuffy. The young gentleman needn’t even fully comprehend how these things can move him so. He need only have faith in what Keats called “the holiness of the heart’s affections,” without which surely he will remain a bachelor forever.

By Joseph Epstein (Yale University Press, 2008)

One doesn’t read Joseph Epstein’s most recent book, Fred Astaire, to learn new things about Fred Astaire. One reads it to see what the former editor of The American Scholar and author of Snobbery: The American Version, the wittiest essayist alive according to William F. Buckley, might do with a self-described “slender disquisition” on this question: “Whence derived Fred Astaire’s sublimity, his magic?”

One reads for sport, in other words, and at one’s leisure. Published almost a year ago with no apparent occasion other than the luxury of intellectual indulgence, Fred Astaire today remains as fresh as a book that puts on such airs possibly can be. It is timelessly unhip.

That’s not to say the book lacks charm. In fact, it has an entire excellent chapter on charm. And it has eleven other chapters, or “acts,” as Epstein calls them, all of which just breeze right along. With mature appreciation and lucid verve, Epstein stays mostly on the surface, studying the face, the clothes, the moves, and the cultural context in which the dancer became iconic.

He makes short work of establishing Astaire and Gene Kelly as the Apollo (“classic and understatedly calm”) and Dionysus (“romantic with high-banked fires”) of movie dancers, although Kelly’s own comparison—he called them the Cary Grant and Marlon Brando—made even shorter work of it. Epstein also supplies a nimble cross-referencing of Astaire’s and Ginger Rogers’ respective autobiographies, and a rather reproving survey of the other literature on his subject. “The amount of penetrating writing about Fred Astaire is less than overwhelming,” he writes. Too bad that line might also be used against him, to describe the contents of his own book.

The emerging answer to Epstein’s operating question has a lot to do with discipline, and one starts to wonder if removing all instances of the word “perfectionist” would render Fred Astaire only a few paragraphs long. But the point is well taken: Astaire, in Epstein’s estimation, was not a genius, necessarily, but rather a hardworking “unconscious artist” of exacting high standards, who brought transcendent joy to popular entertainment.

To prove it, one could do worse than spend an afternoon with a comfy chair, a stack of DVDs and a couple hundred pages of slender disquisition.

Written and directed by Max Mayer, Fox Searchlight Pictures

Adam is a new movie about a guy with Asperger’s Syndrome. The guy’s name is Adam.

Before we continue, I would like to say that except maybe in the case of Aladdin or Hamlet or Gandhi, it’s automatically lame when a movie’s title is just its main character’s name. In the case of Adam, all we get from the title, aside from a little bit of Biblical confusion, is a dispiriting premonition of writer-director Max Mayer’s laziness.

I would also like to say that in the case of Adam, Asperger’s Syndrome seems an awful lot like just another way of saying wish fulfillment for callow, sensitive dudes who can’t be bothered to get better at relationships. Or maybe for the girlfriends who can’t resist mothering them? I’m sure we all can agree that it is more enjoyable to watch such things on the big screen than on Lifetime.

By day, Adam is an electronics engineer living in Manhattan. By night, he’s still an engineer, but with elaborate interests in astronomy and Central Park raccoons. Other important Adam facts: His father has just died; he subsists on a diminishing supply of neatly stacked boxes of mac-and-cheese; and he is more than just a neurological disorder, thank you very much. In fact, he’s a token non-threatening movie version of one. It helps a lot that Adam is very well played by Hugh Dancy, last seen as an altogether different kind of boyfriend material — namely, the ideal — in Confessions of a Shopaholic.

Adam’s new neighbor, Beth, is played by Rose Byrne, and she’s lovely — all sassy boots and cheekbones. More importantly, she’s tolerant. Beth teaches kindergarteners, and aspires to write books for them. “My favorite children’s book is about a little prince who came to Earth,” she says very early in the film, invoking Antoine de St. Exupery’s classic and possibly striking a cautionary note about unrealistic expectations. Beth’s other boyfriends, and her father (Peter Gallagher), have proven unreliable. How so doesn’t really matter, except to establish the emotional circumstances by which Adam’s literalism and tendency to stare into the middle distance might appeal to her. If nothing else, she could be his life coach. Beth is pretty much the movie-poster girl for neuro-typicality.

And that’s about all there is to it. If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen the tonally characteristic scene in which Beth asks Adam if he can give her a hug and he doesn’t understand that she means right now. In another scene, Beth brings Adam a box of chocolates, and he says, “I’m not Forrest Gump, you know.” That’s true. Forrest Gump got out more. Also, Forrest Gump didn’t have an autism spectrum disorder. But if Beth had brought him a box of toothpicks and spilled them on the floor and expected Adam to count them, and he’d said, “I’m not Rain Man, you know,” that just wouldn’t have the same magic. Such as it is. Anyway, it takes Beth a moment to figure out that he’s making a joke. Now who has trouble reading emotional cues, eh? Well, yes, that would still be Adam, who also has trouble making jokes, but we’ve got to hand it to him for trying.

By Werner Herzog; translated from the German by Krishna Winst (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2009)

In the annals of moviemaking catastrophe — from Apocalypse Now to Cleopatra to Heaven’s Gate to Waterworld — perhaps no famously troubled production has been more copiously documented than Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo.

Maybe it’s because, in that case, the making-of really is more interesting than the movie itself. Or maybe it’s because they tell the same story. Fitzcarraldo is a tale of one man’s nearly ruinous obsession with bringing opera to the Amazon jungle. Its backstory is a tale of one man’s nearly ruinous obsession with the first man’s obsession. So the annotation of Herzog’s 1982 movie, much of it from the filmmaker himself, just seems to flow like a — well, like a great, majestically indifferent tropical river.

You’ll find it in Herzog’s commentary on the Fitzcarraldo DVD. And in his 1999 documentary My Best Fiend, about his nutso leading man and nemesis Klaus Kinski. You’ll find a lot of it in Les Blank and Maureen Gosling’s exceptional documentary, Burden of Dreams, whose Criterion Collection DVD edition even comes with a book gathering Blank and Gosling’s journals from their experience of Herzog’s production. And now you can read the maestro’s own journal of the event, Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo, originally published in 2004 and newly available in English from Ecco Press.

In his preface, Herzog writes: “These texts are not reports on the actual filming — of which little is said. Nor are they journals, except in a very general sense. They might be described instead as inner landscapes, born of the delirium of the jungle. But even that may not be entirely accurate — I am not sure.”

Uh, OK. And after 306 pages, he doesn’t seem much surer. Could anyone else get away with this? The book covers a very dreamlike two and a half years, through which Herzog remains mesmerized by his own restless tenacity. Only the most committed readers will do likewise, of course, but that’s exactly how the empathy of obsession is supposed to work.

Herzog’s narrating voice is an acquired taste. (Here’s his entry from July 20, 1979, in its entirety: “San Francisco. Emptiness.”) But you already knew that. The real fun to be had with Conquest of the Useless is in the cross-referencing.  Blank’s account of April 12, 1981, for instance, begins with instant coffee and vultures perched on a hotel roof. Herzog’s begins with a drowned workman and whiskey and card games. Consensus: Doom is in the air.

Those of us who remember Herzog’s comments on the obscenity and “overwhelming misery” of the jungle in Blank’s film, or his assertion that “I love it against my better judgement,” at last can have this clarification, of sorts, from April 14, 1981: “The Grand Emotions in opera, often dismissed as over the top, strike me on the contrary as the most concentrated, pure archetypes of emotion, whose essence is incapable of being condensed any further. They are axioms of emotion. That is what opera and the jungle have in common.” The next day, according to Blank’s account, “He expressed his intention to end his life if he failed to complete the filming.”

Rest assured, he did complete the filming — and apparently has yet to complete processing the experience of completing the filming. Maybe he never will.

Last week, for duty’s sake, I caught a matinee of Orphan, the disposable but not entirely deplorable new horror flick in which a troublemaking tween adoptee seems strangely wise beyond her years and psychopathic beyond her means.

Some people have suggested that Orphan perpetuates the baseless stigmatization of orphans. Maybe. I have an adopted sibling myself, and he too was sort of a disinformation specialist in his day. But never was there any bludgeoning of nuns at the side of the frozen road, thank goodness.

So I would like to ask, instead, if Orphan perpetuates the baseless stigmatization of Connecticut. Maybe. I had a treehouse myself, and it too concealed some evidence of mischief in its day. But never was it quite so treacherously high off the ground, thank goodness.

Maybe I’m overreacting, or just feeling homesick, but I can’t help but wonder what the movies of recent years have been trying to tell me about my birthplace. I know this much: It’s not good.

And I know that before it was in the movies, it was in the books — influential ones, like Revolutionary Road, The Stepford Wives and The Ice Storm. None of which have happy endings. Or beginnings or middles. But — lately, anyway — the Connecticut-set movies really seem to be piling on.

Although it’s already rather a grim exercise, I’ve begun cataloging common elements, and correlating them with recent films in which they occur. I’m sure there are more. Help me out here.

A) Aggressive upper-middle-class anomie
B) A disillusioned professor
C) An architect living in a fancy but gloomy house
D) Actor Martin Donovan living in gloomy house
E) A well-heeled but quite solemn story with the word ‘road’ in its title
F) Implications of incest, deleterious self-medication and the misuse of a family piano
G) At least one injured, dead or dead-inside child
H) At least one very troubled marriage
I) At least one shattered family
J) A graphic miscarriage
K) No point, really

The Haunting in Connecticut (2009): F, H, I
The Ice Storm (1997): A, G, H, I
The Life Before Her Eyes (2007): A, G, H, I
Orphan (2009): A, C, F, G, H, I, J
The Quiet (2005): A, C, D, F, G, H, I, K
Rachel Getting Married (2008): A, G, H, I,
Reservation Road (2007): A, E, G, H, I,
Revolutionary Road (2008): A, E, G, H, I, J
The Stepford Wives (1975, 2004): A, H, I
The Visitor (2007): A, B
The Women (remake, 2008): A, K