McConaughey and Efron in The Paperboy.

One by one, the punishments suffered last month at the Toronto film circus are arriving to pollute the screens at home. Next week, get ready for a diabolical torture called Seven Psychopaths. For now, avoid at all costs a trash-wallow about sex and inbred Southern racism called The Paperboy. The director is Lee Daniels, who shocked and turned off a sizeable portion of the public three years ago with Precious. Maybe shock for the sake of nothing else is what he stands for, but regardless of what you thought about his disturbing feature debut, it was light years ahead of The Paperboy. This raunchy dreck, cut from the same disposable toilet tissue as the recent trailer-trash creepfest Killer Joe, is a leap downhill from Precious.

A transcendentally awful slab of chicken-fried camp replete with Nicole Kidman urinating on the near-naked body of Zac Efron, The Paperboy was booed in Cannes, laughed down in Toronto and inserted in the New York Film Festival for no other purpose than to stir up controversy. It has no place in any of them. A cartoonish and rubicund film noir that is drenched in too many bright colors to be noirish and played for lunacy by too many overwrought actors with hilariously phony Southern accents to be remotely believable, it stars Matthew McConaughey, who can’t act, and teenybopper twit Efron, who has been trying to do entirely too much of it lately. Fast on the heels of his nude romp in Killer Joe, McConaughey takes it off again, his legs tied and his rear end slightly less than camera-ready as he is viciously gang-raped by a band of black drug dealers in a seedy motel. Exposing his butt may be a disgrace, but it didn’t bother me half as much as his speech impediment. Incompetence in the acting department is one thing, but this guy whistles through his teeth. Every “s” sounds like Jack Benny’s fiddle. Even in a good movie, too much Matthew McConaughey makes it hard to concentrate.

And The Paperboy is not just a bad movie. It’s a stinker. McConaughey is dismally miscast as a gay closet-case Miami reporter named Ward Jansen, who returns to his hometown in the Everglades to investigate the murder of a bigoted sheriff by a maniac named Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack). Ward is accompanied by a fashion-sleek black reporter with an English accent named Yardley (David Oyelowo), whose looks and attitude draw instant hatred from the local rednecks. The chauffeur for this motley pair is Ward’s younger brother Jack (Zac Efron), a college dropout turned newspaper delivery boy who falls for the death-row killer’s girlfriend Charlotte, the town tramp with a penchant for convicted felons, played by a Nicole Kidman with undulating thighs, pounds of lipstick and her old bottle-blonde wig from To Die For. While this rancid, raucous freak show crawls on its knees in the direction of disaster, the actors are all subjected to embarrassing humiliations, but none so appalling as the sight of the accomplished but misguided Ms. Kidman saving Mr. Efron from a jellyfish sting by squatting on his swollen head, adjusting the crotch of her bathing suit, and peeing on his face. One of the loopiest lines of the year: “If anyone is going to piss on that boy, it’s going to be me!” The audience doesn’t know whether to laugh or scream, so it does both. In another regrettable scene, this death-row groupie does jailhouse sex in a prison visiting room to Mr. Cusack’s delighted arousal. This is the stuff you fire your agent for. Mr. Efron, working as fast as he can to destroy his all-American image, goes sweaty, shirtless and lewd. Mr. McConaughey’s earnest gusto for oral sex with black thugs that leads to his brutal bondage is too deplorable to describe.

Supposedly based on a true Florida crime story that took place in the ’60s and a book about the case by pulp writer Pete Dexter, the screenplay for The Paperboy (co-written by Mr. Dexter and Mr. Daniels) is too ludicrous to invite any comparisons to prize-winning journalism. Pretentious camera angles substitute for tight plotting, pirogues angling their way to crime scenes in the alligator-infested swamps where no reptiles ever appear make up for a false sense of Southern authenticity, and the crass editing robs every scene of the chance to develop character. Not the least of the punitive damages inflicted by such a painful flop is that you start squirming early and end up feeling you desperately need a bath. It’s all narrated by a black maid Mr. Efron sexually mauls from time to time who seems like a demented throwaway from a sendup of The Help. Although it is never clear to whom she is speaking, or why, I had to applaud when she finally utters the funniest line in the movie: “I think y’all seen enough.” Amen, and bring on the Lysol.

rreed@observer.com

THE PAPERBOY

Running Time 107 minutes

Written by Lee Daniels and Peter Dexter

Directed by Lee Daniels

Starring Matthew McConaughey, Nicole Kidman and John Cusack

0/4

With relatively brief screen time in The Paperboy, Ms. Kidman takes over the film; a lurid mélange starring Zac Efron as a young man who stumbles upon conspiracy and evil, the film tips all too often, as did Mr. Daniels’s last effort, Precious, into excess. But the Australian actress, playing a past-her-prime beauty with a deadly attraction to things that are just plain wrong, clarifies the film’s Baroque obsession with violence.

In her polymorphous perversity, Ms. Kidman’s character humanizes the film’s nastiness. She puts a face on its obsession with the depraved, and through a conscious dulling of her intellect and her stock-in-trade melancholia, makes that depravity seem almost sweet. A scene in which she takes a near-naked Mr. Efron, 21 years her junior, into her arms and waltzes with him is the communion of two broken souls; when she urinates on him to relieve a jellyfish sting, it’s is an act of pure, frenzied love. “She gets her—she understands this woman,” Mr. Daniels told The Observer. “And she understands my insanity.”

That is precisely what, at least since her reinvention as a serious actress 11 years ago, Nicole Kidman does for every serious movie in which she chooses to act. She personifies the human consequences of directors’ intellectual arguments. And of all the actresses working today, she has the riskiest attitude when it comes to her collaborators. Among her contemporaries and past co-stars, Meryl Streep has winnowed her stable down to a few subpar directors who let her to do her thing. Meanwhile, few directors seem to have any idea what to do with Julianne Moore, who’s largely moved to TV. By contrast, Ms. Kidman has worked with Mr. Daniels, John Cameron Mitchell, Noah Baumbach, Jonathan Glazer and Lars von Trier, among other iconoclasts, and in each case she hasn’t merely been a part of an exacting vision, but pushed it to new places.

Part of her uniqueness, as has been widely observed, is her appetite for a kind of chic suffering. Before 2003’s Cold Mountain came out, New York Times critic A.O. Scott, in an essay on Ms. Kidman, noted of her characters, “Their misery is a sign of her independence, her courage, her victory over unpleasant circumstances, and our applause is the measure of our compassion.” This view of the actress’s career took into account her then-recent divorce from Tom Cruise and all the subsequent tabloid attention. In the years since, Ms. Kidman’s celebrity has dimmed—her name is no longer, as Mr. Scott’s put it, “inscribed at the very top of the Hollywood A-List.” With her name coming up only in the context of a paycheck movie, like 2007’s The Golden Compass, or a magazine spread on alleged plastic surgery victims (remember last year, when she claimed her beauty was natural, then admitted having used Botox by saying she’d stopped?), her audience’s compassion has waned commensurately. “Everyone was against hiring her. How could you hire her? She’s an ice princess,” said Mr. Daniels. “But those are the roles Hollywood offers you. They put you in a box. And she refuses.”

Through it all, though, she’s kept on trucking, with the loud flops of 2007 (The Invasion was the other one) reminding her that the Hollywood route is not exactly for her. There’s something deeply unsympathetic about Nicole Kidman both on- and offscreen. She’s uninterested, in a chilly way, in the give-and-take of Hollywood. Her Oscar acceptance speech for The Hours, delivered while wearing a deeply un-belle-of-the-ball, downright funereal black gown (granted, it was the beginning of the war in Iraq) and while taking out for a spin an increasingly, ahem, immobile visage, is a case study in elegant boredom. “Art is important,” the actress intoned. We may have really liked her, but did she really like us? During her two-year window of extreme fame, Mr. Scott argued that Ms. Kidman wanted to suffer for a broad audience. But the period since the fading from collective memory of her divorce from her famous Scientologist ex has proved that the more apt formulation might be that she wants a very limited art-house audience to suffer alongside her.

Her directors are, broadly speaking, known for contorting their performers into uncomfortable or compromising positions, and yet, in every case, Ms. Kidman has taken the initiative, pushing her movies further than, it would seem, even their directors intended. (Mr. Daniels said he was initially embarrassed before she urged him to direct her forcefully, at which point he told her she’d need to sit on a washing machine and spread her legs.) No moment in Mr. Daniels’s work, which has gained two performers Oscar nominations and one a win, has ever been so deeply felt as the scene in which his Paperboy star pushes younger women out of the way so that she might pee on Zac Efron.

So too do her performances in other movies push the bounds of what their directors might have intended: people remember Birth, her 2004 psychodrama about a woman united with a child she believes is her reincarnated husband, not for its directorial flair, but for a minutes-long shot of Ms. Kidman silently emoting as she watches an opera. The actress is feeling the consequences of the action more deeply than her director, who tosses away the plot of the movie in a dumb, poorly paced finale, and far more deeply than her audience, who greeted Birth with disdain and negligible box-office returns.

And consider The Hours, the film that earned Ms. Kidman an Oscar. Out of a triple-lead miasma in which two of the actresses, though credible, projected vague, early-2000s mumbly indie-film disdain for their surroundings, Ms. Kidman, playing Virginia Woolf, wrenched the film into melodrama through her sheer dogged commitment to the emotional, despite director Stephen Daldry’s clinical detachment. Or Rabbit Hole, in which director John Cameron Mitchell’s clear hope for another indie triumph—complete with animated interstitial segments—was waylaid by Ms. Kidman’s dogged earnestness in the face of losing a child. Or Dogville, in which Ms. Kidman, nearly alone among Lars von Trier’s long line of tortured leading ladies, manages not to transform into something more or less virtuous than that which she essentially is. Mr. von Trier’s other favored actresses, including Björk and Charlotte Gainsbourg, usually fall somewhere within a dull, nihilistic Scandinavian good-bad dialectic, whereas Ms. Kidman presents the sort of reactions a real person might have to being held captive and enslaved in an isolated Western town. Mr. von Trier’s films, generally, are meditations on broad themes, but with Ms. Kidman in place, Dogville became the story of a woman under duress. Amid a stream of postmodern ideas, she was, implacably, that most conventional of devices: a character.

Mr. Scott’s appraisal of Ms. Kidman’s career, for the Times, concluded that suffering was the essential element in bringing audiences to love and idolize her. Lincoln Center tributes aside, those fans have largely moved on after an unrewarding period between 2004 and 2008. Suffering is Ms. Kidman’s alienation effect—she manages to turn every picture she is in into a woman’s picture. Hers is a very particular talent, one not seen since the heyday of Joan Crawford, and Ms. Kidman’s icy public persona—buffed, polished and impervious to both age and negative press—is its perfect complement.

Unlike many of her contemporaries, Ms. Kidman has never been a whiz with accents, and viewers of The Paperboy will have to forgive her tortured attempt at a Southern one. She’s never, in any sense, disappeared into a role (leaving aside The Hours, in which makeup and special effects rendered her unrecognizable). When she plays an American, as in, for instance, Margot at the Wedding, her Australian lilt comes to the fore, but it works as an aid to her portrayal of hauteur, rather than an impediment. It’s not range in the sense of breadth of possible roles that Ms. Kidman seeks—she can play a very narrow slice of the roles offered to 40-something actresses—but in the range as depth of emotion. And she has succeeded in conveying a shocking depth of emotion to an unfeeling audience in our post-ironic age. “I now know what those old-time directors felt like while working with Bette Davis or with Greta Garbo—one of the legends,” said Mr. Daniels. A director like Michael Curtiz would know exactly what to do with Ms. Kidman. As it stands, she’s had to make her own way—a vaguely defined mission that Lincoln Center honors even as audiences remain puzzled.

Jane Fonda, future Nancy Reagan on film. (Getty Images)

Lee Daniels, director of Precious, is currently in Cannes promoting the thriller The Paperboy, but he's already planning his next film, an adaptation of a Washington Post article on a long-serving black White House butler who lived to see the election of Barack Obama. Early reports indicate that the butler, Eugene Allen, is to be played by Forest Whitaker and his wife by Oprah Winfrey, who likely needs a distraction from her OWN cable network. Matthew McConaughey, in Mr. Daniels's Paperboy, is to play John F. Kennedy, somehow (but his accent is pure LBJ!); John Cusack is to become the latest actor to assay the part of Richard Nixon; Alan Rickman and Jane Fonda are playing the Reagans; Nicole Kidman is playing an unnamed role that we'd wager a President's salary will be Jackie Kennedy.

It's all very strange (a Brit playing the iconic Reagan? Jane Fonda playing a demure conservative?) but Lee Daniels has a knack for making peculiar casting work--his directing won Mo'Nique an Oscar and Mariah Carey newfound respect, and John Cusack as Nixon has a peculiar sweaty genius to it. He'll be the one who wins an Oscar for this, right?

Best Actor: Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart

Is Fox Searchlight contractually obligated to release one film per year with a veteran actor in a career-defining showcase performance? Last year it was Mickey Rourke who delighted audiences in The Wrestler; this year, it looks poised to be Mr. Bridges in Crazy Heart. For those unfamiliar with the film, consider it The Wrestler gone country. Mr. Bridges plays an aging performer on his last legs hoping for one last... yadda yadda yadda. The film might seem trite, but the buzz on Mr. Bridges—who, as the trailer happily points out, is a four-time nominee—is already borderline deafening. Though Crazy Heart doesn't come out for another two weeks, he already feels penciled in as a nominee and perhaps could be a favorite to take home Oscar gold.

Best Supporting Actor: Woody Harrelson, The Messenger

Call him Jeff Bridges, Jr. The long-beloved Mr. Harrelson has only been nominated once (for The People vs. Larry Flynt), but there is a very good chance that he'll wind up in the running next year. Best Supporting Actor is one of the weaker categories on the docket (lest we forget—and God love him—but people were taking Zack Galifianakis somewhat seriously as a contender for The Hangover), and Mr. Harrelson's work in The Messengers, as a casualty notification agent for the army, has been universally acclaimed. Whether voters actually sit-down and watch the little-seen indie film is a different story, but, hey, that's what screeners are for!

Best Feature: The Last Station

If you've never heard of The Last Station, don't worry: you're probably not alone. But we have a feeling everyone is going to be sure of its existence come Oscar night. The film tied Precious—the ostensible belle of the ball—with five nominations (in addition to Best Feature, nods went to director Michael Hoffman and stars Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer), and if the early reviews are any indication, the plaudits won't stop there. Our own Rex Reed outright gushed about The Last Station, saying it "should be accompanied by the sound of trumpets" and calling it "passionate, profound and unforgettable." With ten slots to fill for Best Picture, will it surprise anyone when The Last Station shows up on the not-short list?

1. 2012: $65 million ($65 million total)

The massive destruction in 2012 wasn't just limited to California falling into the Pacific (hey, you knew that was going to happen eventually, right?), and obviously the massive box office wasn't just limited to North America, either. Internationally, Roland Emmerich's disaster porn epic grossed $160 million, for a worldwide total of $225 million. If that sounds like a lot, that's because it really is: 2012 is the proud owner of the fifth highest international debut ever, and the highest ever for a non-sequel. With a deal that reportedly earns him 25 percent of the total gross, we're guessing Mr. Emmerich might be in the market for a bigger house... though maybe not on the California coast.

2. A Christmas Carol: $22.3 million ($63.2 million total)

Remember last week, when everyone was calling A Christmas Carol a disappointment? Yeah, forget about that. Down just 26 percent, the Robert Zemeckis film pushed its total past $63 million and is well on pace to crack $100 million by the end of Thanksgiving weekend. Right now, A Christmas Carol is running about 15 percent behind Elf—which opened on the same weekend six years ago and went on to gross $173 million—meaning it could wind up with at least $140 million domestically by the time Santa Claus comes to town. Some disappointment, huh?

3. The Men Who Stare at Goats: $6.2 million ($23.3 million total)

Speaking of Christmas, let's hope the guys and gals in the marketing department at Overture get a little extra in their stockings this year. After making a modest hit out of the totally uninteresting Law Abiding Citizen (the Jamie Foxx/Gerard Butler film broke $67 million this weekend), the studio is doing something similar with the critically reviled The Men Who Stare at Goats. With $23 million in the bank thus far, Goats has an outside shot at topping $50 million, a mark that, frankly, didn't seem possible before its release.

4. Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire: $6.1 million ($8.9 million total)

Say hello to Slumdog Millionaire, 2009 edition. Precious pushed into the top-five over the weekend by averaging $35,000 per showing on just 174 screens. Expand that out to next weekend, when the film hits 600 theaters, and Precious could be on track for $20 million or more and well on its way to $100 million overall. At this rate, be prepared to start hearing words like "phenomenon" and "sensation" used in conjunction with Lee Daniels' indie very shortly.

5. Michael Jackson's This Is It: $5.1 million ($68.2 million total)

Down 61 percent and scheduled to leave theaters after Thanksgiving, the end of the road for This Is It is fast approaching. Still, the Michael Jackson concert film added another $11 million overseas this weekend, meaning it has now grossed $222.6 million worldwide. Deemed a bust far too soon by some uninformed Internet hysterics, This Is It has proved itself to be a winner after all thanks to some heady international receipts. The moral: don't listen to Nikki Finke.

1. A Christmas Carol: $31 million ($31 million total)

Much like what happened with This Is It last weekend, there is a faction of people (read: Nikki Finke) who want to call A Christmas Carol disappointing. And to that, we say: huh? The Disney film had the fourth highest opening for a Christmas film in box office history, behind only The Grinch Who Stole Christmas ($55 million), Elf ($31.1 million) and Four Christmases ($31.07 million). And of those four, only Elf opened this early in the season—if you can even cal the first full weekend in November "the season." Elf went on to gross $173 million total, so if A Christmas Carol can follow suit—and frankly, with the added benefit of IMAX theaters, there is no reason it can't; the next big IMAX movie to hit theaters is Avatar in December—under no metric could it be considered a disappointment. Perhaps Ms. Finke should revise her history before its too late.

2. Michael Jackson's This Is It: $14 million ($57.8 million total)

The aforementioned This Is It dropped a slim 39 percent from last weekend, pushing its total to nearly $60 million domestically and putting it on course to become the highest grossing concert film ever here in America (see you never, Miley Cyrus!). Internationally, the film already has that title with $128.6 million in total grosses. That means this "disappointment" has grossed $186.4 million worldwide in just 12 days. What a disaster!

3. The Men Who Stare at Goats: $13.3 million ($13.3 million total)

A funny thing about George Clooney: he isn't the box office superstar you might think. If you take away his event pictures (the Ocean's series, A Perfect Storm and Batman and Robin), the average wide release opening (2,000 screens or more) for a George Clooney film is around $12 million. With that in mind, $13.3 million for an R-rated military comedy with little buzz—seriously, do you know anyone who wanted to see this?—seems like a pretty big win for both Mr. Clooney and Overture Films.

4. The Fourth Kind: $12.5 million ($12.5 million total)

We have to wonder: if Universal had opened The Fourth Kind two weeks ago would this alien abduction scare fest have scored a bigger debut? The film had to fight not only another weekend Paranormal Activity, but also newcomer The Box (Richard Kelly's parlay for mainstream recognition landed in sixth place with just $7.8 million) for the horror fans hard-earned dollar. We'd venture to say that decision cost Universal at east $5 million if not more. Lest we forget that in the right vehicle—that is: something genre, something scary—Milla Jovovich is usually good for a high-teens opening gross.

5. Paranormal Activity: $8.6 million ($97.4 million total)

Weekend seven of the smash hit of the fall brought Paranormal Activity ever closer to pushing past the $100 million plateau. We hope you're sitting down: even if it peters out at $120 million (likely since this weekend saw a 47 percent drop), Paranormal Activity will wind up grossing 8,000 times its reported $15,000 budget. Not even Nikki Finke could spin that as a disappointment.

A Christmas Carol

What's the story: Are you ready for Christmas? Yeah, we didn't think so. But that hasn't stopped Disney from trotting out yet another version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. This time around Jim Carrey stars as Ebenezer Scrooge, though the twist here is that his entire performance is motion captured and animated. Robert Zemeckis, apparently finished with flesh and bones—he is, after all, planning on a sequel to Roger Rabbit—directs what is sure to be a Polar Express-type money maker for years to come. It's in IMAX 3-D, people! Even Santa Claus couldn't resist that.

Who should see it: Tiny Tim.

The Box

What's the story: If you feel like The Box has been knocking around forever, that's because it has. Richard Kelly's follow-up to the inscrutable and unending Southland Tales was supposed to come out last November, and then again in early October. Now it's finally here, this November. This isn't necessarily a dump—it is opening in over 2,600 theaters—but don't get your hopes up (witness the 45 percent Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes). Based on a Richard Matheson short story, "Button, Button" (which was turned into a famous Twilight Zone episode), The Box stars a badly accented Cameron Diaz and James Marsden as a couple who find a box on their front porch that, if opened, will give them a million dollars... and kill someone they don't know. Oh, the moral implications! Cue the dun-dun-dun music!

Who should see it: Donnie Darko.

The Fourth Kind

What's the story: We know Hollywood loves piggybacking on to trends, but usually it takes more than a few weeks to do so. Ripping a page right out of the Paranormal Activity playbook, The Fourth Kind paints itself as a true-life look at some mysterious disappearances in Nome, Alaska, that were blamed on alien abductions. Wait, isn't that a close encounter of the third kind? Meh. This probably should have come out before Halloween.

Who should see it: Roy Neary.

The Men Who Stare at Goats

What's the story: Despite being the other George Clooney movie here in 2009—Up in the Air, with all its Oscar buzz, will be the one to remember—it feels like we should still be a bit more excited about The Men Who Stare at Goats. Mr. Clooney's good friend Grant Helsov directs this adaptation of Jon Ronson's book about the military's use of the paranormal and psychic soldiers. Don't worry—it might sound creepy, but it's a wacky comedy! The Men Who Stare at Goats has the look of a watered down Coen Brothers movie, complete with Jeff Bridges in a Dude-like performance as the founder of the psychic soldier program. The reviews have been mixed, but our Rex Reed spared no vitriol, calling The Men Who Stare at Goats a "cinematic Katrina" while comparing it to being "stung by a wasp on the inside of your eyelid." Ha! Also, ouch.

Who should see it: The Coen Brothers.

Precious: Based on the Novel Push By Sapphire

What's the story: Since the buzz machine on Lee Daniels' new film has been turned all the way up to eleven for a few months now—Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey signed on as executive producers after it appeared at Sundance; the New York Times did a massive Sunday magazine piece on the film and Mr. Daniels—logic dictates that the backlash would start eventually. And here it comes! While a majority of the reviews have been strong—the Observer's Rex Reed called it "one of the most unforgettable films of the decade"—there are a select few critics who don't seem all that impressed. Of course noted contrarian Armond White eviscerated the film (apparently Norbit is better), but both David Edelstein and Anthony Lane have their doubts too. Still, what everyone seems to agree on is that Precious is not for the faint of heart—the 16-year-old heroine is raped, abused, and worse. And while that might turn you off, since this is sure to be one of the films on the long list for Oscar (hey, 10 nominees!), you should probably find yourself a ticket anyway.

Who should see it: Madea.