This is a revision of an earlier posting.

The new Pixar picture Wall-E is one for the ages, a masterpiece to be savored before or after the end of the world — assuming, like the title character, you’re still around when all the humans have taken off and have access to an old video player. Wall-E (that’s the name of the machine) is a trash compactor, the last of his kind from an age in which cleaning up garbage was mankind’s highest priority — before people threw in the towel (and broom) and apparently (no spoilers here!) rocketed away. Now, this squat, childlike robot with his pivoting goggle eyes resides in a metropolis surrounded by skyscrapers that turn out, on closer inspection, to be compressed trash bricks piled high into the soot-gray sky. The movie is a bit of a trash brick itself: Director Andrew Stanton and his Pixar collaborators have taken cultural detritus — bits and pieces from cherished film genres, pop icons, visionary sci-fi tropes, half-remembered bric-a-brac from childhood — and compacted it all into a sublime work of art.

Sydney Pollack’s death at 73 has robbed our cinema of one of its finest … actors. Yes, of course, he directed some terrific movies — Tootsie above all, but also (in descending order) The Way We Were, Three Days of the Condor, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Absence of Malice. But he had a weakness for prestige middlebrow beanbags like Out of Africa (which won him his cherished Oscar), along with A-list money pits like Havana and The Firm and The Interpreter (and The Electric Horseman, and Sabrina, and …) In later years, Pollack had more life in front of the camera than behind it.

After Lee Siegel was exposed and suspended for confronting nasty commenters on his New Republic blog under a pseudonym (“sock puppet”), I e-mailed him a condolence note to the effect that blogging is a pipeline to the id, and that some of us — the exhibitionist, the paranoid, the batshit-crazy — should approach such unmediated self-expression warily, if at all. It’s too bad that in his recent book (Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob), he blamed the medium far more than the lesser part of his — our — nature. I’m not going to blame the medium for the dumb-ass stuff I wrote in my last blog entry. It was an unholy confluence of man and machine.

It has taken a giant monster to rouse this blog from its postholiday hibernation — which is more context, by the way, than you’ll get from Cloverfield. That title is the upshot of “viral” Internet marketing that generated so much buzz that producer J.J. Abrams chose a nondescript code name for the film, borrowed from a street near his Hollywood office. It means nothing, which fits.

Nothing can be scarier than something, though. The Blair Witch Project, shot with one video camera from the point of view of the character holding it, proved that when you eliminate the omniscient perspective — when you show the audience only what a single character sees and no more — you introduce a note of irrational terror that millions of dollars of computer-generated effects can’t touch. But Blair Witch was a ghost story, a genre in which less is always more. What, asked writer Drew Goddard, if you used the same singular, disoriented vantage for a giant-monster picture, a spectacle: Godzilla through the eyes — or lens — of a sap way down below trying not to get stomped?

Good year.

Enough commentary. Time for list-making.

1. The Diving Bell and Butterfly
2. Away From Her
3. There Will Be Blood
4. Sweeney Todd
5. The Savages
6. No Country for Old Men
7. No End in Sight
8. Michael Clayton
9. Ratatouille and Persepolis (Tie)
10. Grace Is Gone

Sticklers can stop here. Others should go on.

It has been fascinating to read the polarized reviews of Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There, from A.O. Scott’s swooning but richly evocative celebration to Armond White’s frothing evisceration (of both the film and everything Haynes stands for). As someone in (about) the middle (here’s my review), I feel like a Man Without a Country. I even got a curt e-mail from producer Christine Vachon — with whom I wrote a book called Shooting to Kill — expressing her disappointment with me for not recognizing Haynes’s ambition. I’m so off her Christmas list.

It’s almost too late for Halloween movie recommendations, but I want to mention a few past and current DVD releases that will give you a good spooky night indoors. I’m currently working through a box of seminal silent horrors from Kino, among them the original haunted-house movie, The Cat and the Canary, The Man Who Laughed With Conrad Veidt (the deformed protagonist inspired Batman’s Joker), and John Barrymore’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — notable because Barrymore transforms largely without the aid of the usual monster makeup and lap dissolves. Barrymore is over the top, but no Hyde has ever been more terrifyingly savage when beating a man to death with a walking stick.