I would buy a used coffin from this man. In Richard Linklater‘s droll comedy “Bernie,” Jack Black plays an east Texas funeral director named Bernie Tiede, and it is surely one of the performances of the year. I had to forget what I knew about Black. He creates this character out of thin air, it’s like nothing he’s done before, and it proves that an actor can be a miraculous thing in the right role.

Black is not a giant. He stands 5’6.” Yet the word for Bernie Tiede is “hovering.” He seems to hover above even those taller than him. He is solicitous, gentle, tactful. When Marjorie Nugent’s husband dies, he is the angel at her shoulder, creating the impression that no client has ever touched him quite so much as she has. That’s a triumph because Marjorie (Shirley MacLaine) is the most disliked woman in Carthage, Texas.

Bernie Tiede’s story is factual, based on a celebrated Texas Monthly article titled “Midnight in the Garden of East Texas” by Skip Hollandsworth. The late Mr. Nugent, apparently a prince of a fellow, owned the local bank. Marjorie took over after his passing and started throwing loan applications into the waste basket and otherwise offending the locals.

Was it her money that attracted Bernie? No one can say. Bernie was known and liked by almost everyone, sang in the church choir, served on charity boards, organized civic functions, provided a sympathetic shoulder. His origins were obscurely in Arkansas, but his manner was such that he got the job at the Carthage funeral home almost just by presenting himself. Among his many abilities was the tact to convince mourners he believed they had selected precisely the right coffin.

Bernie’s courtship of Marjorie is a masterpiece of social delicacy. In the odd dance between the two, he never seems to want anything in particular. Not sex, certainly; there were those in Carthage who assumed Bernie was gay and rumored to be a few who knew. Nor was he boldly after her money, although he suggested purchases which in embellishing her lifestyle did nothing to diminish his. Surely Marjorie knew she was hated in the town and surely she enjoyed being paid tribute; MacLaine allows the slightest of smiles to sometimes shine out from a fixed frown. They began to be seen around town, especially at the theatrical and artistic events that Bernie supported and sometimes performed in. They shared such sublimated sexual experiences as holding hands while having simultaneous massages in a (respectable) local spa.

There are flat-footed ways this story could have been told. Linklater finds a tricky note difficult to define. “Bernie” never declares itself a comedy; often when we laugh we’re thinking, “I can’t believe I’m seeing this.” An unspoken compact grows between Bernie and Marjorie in which neither one declares exactly what’s going on, but the fiction is maintained that Bernie believes her worthy of his kindest attentions, and she believes that at last a man has gotten her right. But a relationship this problematic can’t last forever, and eventually Bernie shoots Marjorie four times in the back.

Now Linklater surpasses himself. Bernie’s attempts to conceal the death is based on the ability of many good funeral directors to know instinctively what people really think about each other. In Marjorie’s case, no one liked her, and she isn’t particularly missed. Bernie redoubles his charity efforts and continues to lead his accustomed lifestyle. Only a curious district attorney named Danny Buck Davidson (Matthew McConaughey) eventually sniffs out something wrong, and even as he comes under suspicion, Bernie remains a man who knows exactly how to behave in difficult situations.

Richard Linklater has made all kinds of movies, most of them very good. They have little else in common: He worked with Black in a completely different mode in “School of Rock.” Why did he make “Bernie”? I suspect he read the magazine article and knew it was a natural movie. Anyone could have seen that. His genius was to see Jack Black as Bernie Tiede.

“This could be like Columbus and the Indians,” a nerdy radio astronomer worries. “Except we’re the Indians.” From a powerful transmission facility in Hawaii, he’s supervised the transmission of a signal to the Earth-like Planet G in another galaxy, and in no time at all, aliens come calling. Considering that they arrive in weeks, they must have discovered faster-than-light speeds, so it’s a little strange that when they arrive they’re strictly analog. Their vast warships splash down in the Pacific (except for fragments that devastate Hong Kong in one of those toppling skyscraper scenes so beloved in disaster movies). But these alien craft are only armed at a level that makes their battle with U.S. warships more or less a standoff.

Why would the U.S. fleet conveniently already be near the splashdown point? It’s involved in war games with allies such as Japan, which provides an excuse for a Japanese officer to take temporary command of one of our ships and thus boost the grosses of “Battleship” in Asia. It’s also handy that the aliens create a force field that forms an impenetrable barrier around their craft, which seals in three U.S. ships, locks out all other ships and explains why our jets don’t simply nuke the SOB.

Of course, in the old B-movie tradition, our response to the alien visit is immediately military. There’s not one word of discussion about the aliens possibly just making a social call. We invite them, they come and we open fire. This despite the fact that they’re remarkably humanoid; when we finally remove the helmet from one alien’s spacesuit, he turns out to look alarmingly like James Carville.

In the set-up, we meet a shiftless beach bum named Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch), whose brother Stone (Alexander Skarsgard) is a naval officer. In a bar, Alex hits on the lithesome Samantha Shane (Brooklyn Decker), who wouldn’t you know is the daughter of the admiral of the fleet (Liam Neeson). Breaking into a convenience store to get her a burrito, Alex is arrested and his brother delivers an ultimatum: Join the Navy or else.

Meanwhile, the nerdy Cal (Hamish Linklater) supervises transmission of the signal to Planet G, and in no more time than it takes to get Alex into uniform and on board a U.S. destroyer, five alien spacecraft enter our solar system in tight formation. One alien craft then levitates from the ocean depths, as large as a skyscraper and bristling with ominous protrusions. You gotta say it takes real nerve for a communications officer (Rihanna) and two seamen to speed over to it in a rubber boat armed with just a machinegun.

In a parallel story, we learn Samantha is a physical therapist working with the Army vet Mick Canales (real-life Iraq hero Gregory D. Gadson). She takes him on a hike up the mountainside where the big NASA radio dishes are located, they meet the nerd, and much depends on preventing the aliens from phoning home. In the Pentagon situation room, officials fret. There’s the obligatory montage of cable news reports on the alien invasion, and the U.S. destroyers exchange fire with the aliens. Two ships are destroyed, including the one commanded by Stone, and after several officers on Alex’s ship die, he turns out to be next in command and becomes the captain of the surviving U.S. destroyer. So that’s convenient. The characters we met at the beginning all become the key players.

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“Battleship” is based on the Hasbro board game of the same name, unplayed by me. You get a sense of that when radar doesn’t work, and Rihanna figures out a way to deduce the underwater movements of the alien craft by tracking wave patterns on a grid with old-fashioned weather buoys. The film eventually comes down to lots of scenes in which things get blowed up real good. One alien weapon is especially fearsome: a large metal ball with spikes, which rolls through things and flattens them. Were less sophisticated versions of this used in medieval times, maybe made of flaming tar balls?

The film is in the tradition of the “Transformers” movies, also based on Hasbro games, and you get the feeling that Hasbro showed director Peter Berg some Michael Bay movies and told him to go and do likewise. To his credit, “Battleship” is a more entertaining film than the “Transformers” titles, because it has slightly more fully fleshed characters, a better plot and a lot of naval combat strategy. The work of Gregory D. Gadson, as the disabled vet, is especially effective; he has a fierce screen presence. Rihanna is as convincing as the character allows, and Taylor Kitsch makes a sturdy if predictable hero.

But the nicest touch is that “Battleship” has an honest-to-God third act, instead of just settling for nonstop fireballs and explosions, as Bay likes to do. I don’t want to spoil it for you. Let’s say the Greatest Generation still has the right stuff and leave it at that.

During lazy summer days and nights, the subjects of “La Collectionneuse” practice idleness and slow-motion mind games in a villa in the hills above St. Tropez on the French Riviera. Sensuality is always in the air, where it drifts aimlessly. This is the third of Eric Rohmer‘s Moral Tales, the first at feature length, the first filmed in color. It functions as a jumping-off point for the rest of his long career.

Rohmer (1920-2010) was older than his fellow directors in the French New Wave, and it’s remarkable that he was already 47 when he made the film that enfolds so much of the indolence and narcissism of youth. Much of his prolific output fell into three groupings: Six Moral Tales, Comedies and Proverbs, and Tales of the Four Season. The moral tales studied tricky questions of romance, and there was little or no sex in them but much discussion about it. He found actors of undeniable physical appeal, and his camera caressed them as they spoke, and spoke, about the possibility of caressing each other.

“La Collectionneuse,” which refers to a female collector (of men, in this case) centers on a young woman named Haydée who finds herself living at the villa with Adrien and Daniel, two friends about ten years older than she is. They watch her being picked up by a series of young guys who drive up to the villa and then speed off to the fashionable beachfront city, bringing her back after dawn. Both men claim they have no desire to sleep with her, and talk themselves into an undeclared contest to see which will be the first to succumb.

This assumes that Haydée can be had for the taking, which is by no means the case. The film is narrated by Adrien, and information is filtered through his unreliable opinions of Haydée and Daniel and his high opinion of himself. There is no scene at which he isn’t present, but since he can’t control what is said, we are invited to arrive at our own conclusions. Rohmer had a deliberate narrative style that postponed or sidestepped events that a conventional director would have supplied right on schedule. The Moral Tales demonstrated that his characters were not fated to do obvious things, and reserved the option of thinking about the meaning of their actions. They were not invariably moral, nor was their alleged morality necessarily one we would agree with.

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But step back a moment and look at these three. Daniel (Daniel Pommereulle) is the least interesting, a lanky layabout who fancies wearing kaftans to the beach, who smokes and drinks a lot, who boasts of his indolence, and who expects to sleep with Haydée sooner or later. Haydée (Haydée Politoff), about 20 when the film was made, is a slender woman with a pretty round face, full lips and a saucy haircut. She has a lot of self-confidence and knows how to keep her secrets. Adrien is played by Patrick Bauchau, a strikingly handsome youth who is described in the dialogue (which he co-wrote) as “six feet six with the profile of an eagle). He is actually only 6’3″, but when I saw him for the first time at Telluride I wanted to stop and stare: He would have been in his 40s then, and age had only added character and intrigue to his face. In 1967 he was already a New Wave actor, writer and producer, and appeared in Rohmer’s “Suzanne’s Career” (1963), a 55-minute short that counts as the second Moral Tale.

They live at a languorous pace. The men decide she is a “slut,” because they assume she sleeps with the revolving roster of guys who take her into town. When a rich art collector visits the villa to look at a vase Adrien is selling, Adrien essentially offers her to the older man. The way she handles that speaks well for her insight into the situation.

Although it must be near St. Tropez, the villa is on an unspoiled hillside, and the characters can walk directly down to the sea. It has been loaned them by a friend. It’s sparsely furnished, and as the three sit on a veranda or under trees, nature is well-represented with the bird songs Rohmer is fond of.

Adrien, who hopes to raise money to open a gallery, has confided in his narration that he plans, for a month, to do as little as possible. He doesn’t even want Daniel around, and is annoyed when Haydée turns out to have been invited by the absentee owner. Determined not to get involved with a silly younger girl, he begins a private game to maneuver Haydée and Daniel into bed together. Sensing his plan, Daniel tries to turn the tables of then. Haydée keeps her own hopes completely to herself.

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To watch a film like this, or any Rohmer film, creates a sense of peaceful regard in me. He isn’t afraid of losing my attention with too much dialogue, or too little action. He invites me to arrive at my own moral judgments. Immediately after this film came the celebrated “My Night at Maud’s” (1968), the first Rohmer most Americans had seen, and then came the seductive and wickedly funny “Claire’s Knee,” an entire movie about the lengths the hero Jerome will go to find an excuse to touch the delectable knee of Claire.

Rarely has a knee seemed more touchable. “La Collectionneuse” opens with a series of three brief prologues showing the characters before they meet at the villa, and the camera watches as Haydée, wearing a bikini, wades in the waves at the edge of the sea. The camera’s gaze is bold and objective, regarding her body part by part: Her legs, her thighs, her stomach, her chest, her ears, hands, throat. It’s diabolical how well Rohmer sets her up as an object of desire in a film that will indefinitely postpone the realization of any desire we may feel. I wonder if this prologue in some way inspired the idea for “Claire’s Knee.”

Rohmer was late to join the New Wave, although as the editor of the influential Cahiers du Cinema he published the film reviews of such future directors as Godard, Truffaut and Chabrol. He made a film named “The Sign of the Lion” in 1959, to little effect. Finally, partnering with Barbet Schroeder as his producer and sometime actor, he made the two shorts in 1963. When “La Collectioneuse” appeared in 1967, he was late to the table; Godard, Resnais, Chabrol, Varda and Truffaut were already well-established.

“La Collectionneuse” was the first feature photographed by Nestor Almendros, the Spanish cinematographer who won an Oscar for “Days of Heaven” and was nominated three more times. He earlier worked with Rohmer on “A Student of Today,” the short that was the first Moral Tale, and thy went on to collaborate on nine features in all. His lush, contemplative approach fit perfectly with Rohmer’s desire to look at characters and think about them, instead of forcing them through their paces.

I saw my first Rohmer, “My Night at Maud’s,” at the 1969 New York Film Festival, and wrote: “It is so good to see a movie where the characters have beliefs, and articulate them, and talk to each other (instead of at each other). It is so good, in fact, that you realize how hungry you’ve been for this sort of thing.” I’ve been in love with Rohmer ever since.

A high school lesson plan calls for a study of coming of age. The teacher approaches this topic as if it’s uncharted territory for her teenage students. Maybe she’s right. A student named Ansiedad (Cierra Ramirez) does some extra study outside class and begins a project to deliberately and consciously come of age.

Was it only a couple of weeks ago that the couples in “Think Like a Man” led their lives after studying Steve Harvey‘s self-help book? I’ve only enjoyed one movie based on a self-help book: “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask).” Come to think of it, there have also been some good films based on the Bible. What Ansiedad discovers is that she has to go on full alert for epiphanies, become aware of tensions between adults and children, lose her virginity and dump her best friend. The first three will likely occur by themselves, and the process of dumping her best friend is so mean-spirited, it casts a pall over several scenes.

Ansiedad’s mom is Grace (Eva Mendes), a woman with problems of her own. During days, she cleans house for the married Dr. Harford (Matthew Modine), and in the evenings, she’s a popular waitress at a clam shack in Vancouver (which of course is not identified; Canada is playing America again). Grace and the doctor are having an affair, and Grace should read a few more books before believing him when he says he’ll leave his wife and child and marry her.

Ansiedad’s best friend is the appealing Tavita (Raini Rodriguez), who is loyal, true and overweight. She’s one of those pals you should keep around instead of dumping because of some goofy theory about rites of passage. When and how Ansiedad dumps her is so stupidly cruel that the subplot undermines the film and does serious damage to the character.

Ansiedad has chosen who she wants to lose her virginity to. This is a character actually identified in the credits as Bad Boy (Richard Harmon). Attention, women! You should never sleep with a man whose only attribute is that you want to sleep with him. I should write a book of my own. Because Ansiedad is a smart charmer, and well-played by Cierra Ramirez, she should really be above this sort of thing — above the whole movie, really. It’s rather hard to accept her as a heroine when she’s treacherous to Tavita and shamelessly looking for stud service.

The movie, written by Hiram Martinez and directed by Patricia Riggen, finds parallels between the unwise relationships between Ansiedad and her mom, who both have unwise taste in men. The mom is not super-attentive to her daughter, which is why the kid is driven to grow up by studying books. Eva Mendes is another actress too good for this movie. I should add that the clam shack is also too good. It’s another one of those movie restaurants where the regulars know everybody; it supplies the stage on which their lives are led.

I wonder if I’ve been coming across as a moralist recently. In reviewing Bobcat Goldthwait‘s “God Bless America,” I felt it was necessary to point out that, gee, it’s not right to go around killing people, even if they do offend you on reality TV. Now I wonder what teenage girls the makers of “Girl in Progress” had in mind, and whether they actually consider it progress.