Welcome to awards’ season. Around mid-November of every year, I start to get packages from movie studios who want me to vote for their pictures for the Online Film Critics’ awards. Since I have a brand new baby, a three-year-old daughter, and a busy work schedule, I don’t get out to movies much in the theater these days. The end of the year is a good opportunity for me to play catch up. Some of these award screeners are just off-the-shelf commercial releases, sometimes repackaged with “For Your Consideration” labels. Some are DVDs of films still in theaters, or even just about to be released. Sometimes, studios send swag along with the movies, in an effort to win my approval. For example, a couple of years ago, DreamWorks (who always seems to send the best goodies) mailed me a signed litho to promote Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron. The movie sucked (it would have been better as a silent picture, lacking Matt Damon’s patronizing narration and Bryan Adams’ painfully obvious pop songs), but the litho was gorgeous. So I framed it for my children’s’ room -- and voted for Spirited Away (which Disney never even sent me a screener for) as Best Animated Feature.

Anyway, my plan is to offer capsule reviews of these award screeners as I watch them, with a few comments thrown in about any gimmicky packaging or promotional stuff the studios send along. Why? Well, for the same reason the studios send this stuff in the first place: they want me to tell you what I think. And maybe I’ll be able to tell you about some overlooked gems from 2005.

Crash: Ok, so the first film that arrived this season isn’t so overlooked. It also wasn’t so shiny a gem as some have made it out to be. Paul Haggis’ sometimes moving, sometimes ponderous ensemble piece wants to offer a profound take on race relations. But ensemble pieces like this work only if two things come together: 1) the good subplots outweigh the tedious ones, and 2) the intersections among the characters are not so improbable as to strain credibility. Matt Dillon’s performance as an angry cop who compensates for his own inability to help his father by spitting racism is riveting. Terrence Howard’s meltdown as a black television director insecure about his own identity works too. (Howard is having a hell of a great year as an actor.) But a subplot about an Iranian store owner and a Latino locksmith (with a little girl who almost glows with the angelic power of Hollywood sentimentality) strained my patience. And I saw the tragic end of Don Cheadle’s subplot coming a mile away. Overall, when I believed in the characters as people, the film worked. But when Haggis turned actors into archetypes, the film became too “meaningful” and “inspiring” for its own good, lifting itself away from the real complexities of race in America and into movie fantasyland. Overall: B.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room: A slightly overlong, if generally successful effort to explain one of the biggest business debacles of the last decade. Director Alex Gibney occasionally misleads the audience (an opening sequence recreating the suicide of an ENRON bigwig never quite meshes with the story that emerges through the course of the film), but he still manages to explain ENRON’s complicated schemes to rake in loads of profit at the expense of everyone who wasn’t an ENRON executive. Starting with aggressive marketing, moving to unethical manipulation, and climaxing with outright fraud, Ken Lay, Peter Skilling, and their cronies walked off with millions by building what one observer in the film calls “a house of cards that had been built over a pool of gasoline.” They turned their belief in Social Darwinism into an arrogance that blinded them to the lessons of real Darwinism: adaptability and cooperation will ultimately beat purely predatory behavior in the long run, because the predators will eat themselves out of house and home. Unfortunately for the victims of ENRON, the ruin left in the company’s wake will take years to repair. Overall: A-