Writer-director Joe Wright’s adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel “Atonement” is a handsomely mounted bore, equally beautiful and unsatisfying.

The first third of the film is set in Merchant Ivory’s stolid version of England; everyone’s rich, beautiful and bored. Briony Tallis (Saorise Ronan), a precocious 12-year-old, wiles away her days on her family’s estate, writing plays and irritating the servants. Briony’s older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) lies around on a fainting couch, smoking and pouting, because the hunky gardener Robbie Turner (James McAvoy) has not responded to her advances. Will the spoiled, sullen Cecilia get to sleep with the handsome help?

Fear not, gentle reader: she does. Unfortunately, Briony also has a schoolgirl crush on Robbie. After walking in on Cecilia and Robbie’s tryst, Briony falls into a confused fit of jealousy and falsely accuses Robbie of a horrible crime. He’s arrested and conscripted into the army, and Cecilia is left heartbroken.

Then the film jumps ahead five years. World War II is at full boil, and Robbie’s in France in the thick of it. The Talis sisters are estranged, working as nurses in different military hospitals. Cecilia continues to see Robbie during leaves from the front. Briony, now an adult, regrets her lie and the harm its caused.

It should be said that Wright is a true talent as a director. He has a distinctive visual style, often using a handheld to give what could have been a staid chamber piece a much-needed vibrancy. In one virtuose scene, Robbie arrives on a beach where thousands of despondent British soldiers wait at a wrecked boardwalk for transit home. It is a place meant to evoke hell, the very end of hope, and Wright breathes it all in in a single, unbroken tracking shot reminiscent of the audacious car chase from “Children of Men”; while officers execute horses, wretched soldiers slump in busted ferris wheels and gather to sing out sadly to the vast ocean.

But impressive visuals cannot save a film betrayed by its script. The proceedings lack genuine emotion, because the characters lack genuine depth. They are all generically aristocratic, especially in the beginning. Other than a moving scene in which Briony pretends to be the girlfriend of a delusional, dying soldier, I never felt that Briony did much in the way of, well, atonement. What effect did all that guilt have on Briony? The script never delves, and Briony remains a cipher to us.

And much of what we see is muddied by an abrupt twist ending. Suddenly an elderly Briony (Vanessa Redgrave) shows up, looks into the camera, and explains that much of what we ‘d just seen was an exercise in wish fulfillment.

And a waste of time for the audience. What was and was not real? If much of what we saw didn’t really happen, then what was the point? And the most baffling question of all… why have so many people trumpeted this confused, little muddle as the finest of 2007?

In the Coen Brothers’ latest film, “No Country for Old Men,” a down on his luck hunter Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles across the bloody aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong and finds two million dollars. At long last, the destitute man thinks, fate has smiled upon me. However, by taking the money, he unwittingly becomes the target of Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) a relentless killer who sets out to find Moss and retrieve the money.

Fate’s a funny thing.

I went into “No Man” with some trepidation. Of late, the Coen Brothers’ movies have been nothing more than slapsticky hokum. “O Brother Where Art Thou?,” “The Lady Killers” and “Intolerable Cruelty” were populated by dim bulb caricatures designed to be nothing more than punchline delivery systems. In returning to the deadly serious Texas noir of “Blood Simple,” the Coens have created characters so undeniably human that they come close to breaking your heart.

Moss is the perfect noir protagonist, the everyman succumbing to irresistable temptation that eventually threatens to destroy him. Moss’ decision to keep the money and go on the run stems not from greed, but from a dogged stubbornness. He’s an unemployed Vietnam vet forced to hunt in order to put food on the table. Fate has taken everything else away from him, and, Goddammit, it’s not going to take away this.

Bardem’s Chigurh begs to differ. He is the most chilling monster to come out of American cinema in a decade. In his unblinking gaze, there is no glimmer of mercy or uncertainty. He is terrifying, because his murderous tendenices are not in service of greed, politics or pride. He cannot be bought off. He cannot be flattered. He is an agent of fate itself; Moss’ windfall has thrown the universe out of balance, and Chigurh intends to right the scales… even if he has to kill every single man, woman and child in East Texas to do it.

And while sad-eyed, old Sheriff Bell tries to save Moss from Chigurh, all he can do is watch helplessly as the inevitable mayhem ensues. Tommy Lee Jones’ Bell is the polar opposite of Deputy Gerard, the brilliant, driven manhunter Jones played in “The Fugitive.” While Gerard had all the answers and knew just what to do, Bell seems completely outmatched by the brutal Chigurh. In the end, the old man accepts that he is powerless to change fate, whether it be Llewellyn’s or his own. And in that wisdom, he finds a kind of grace.

In James Mangold’s stark new western “3:10 to Yuma,” Dan Evans (Christian Bale) and his son William (Logan Lerman) must transport a prisoner Ben Wade (Russell Crowe), the notorious leader of an outlaw gang, to a prison train in order to collect a reward and save the Evans family farm. Wade’s gang, led by Ben Foster’s prissy yet sadistic Prince, engage in a a scorched-earth campaign to get their boss back at all costs. Evans and Wades journey takes them across a grim, pre-PC Old West that more closely resembles a dry, lifeless moonscape than the green vistas of travelogue-style oaters like the recent “Open Range.” There are no noble Native Americans here, only vicious “Injuns” who wait and watch in the darkness for their chance to steal and scalp.

Along the way, Wade repeatedly tries to bribe the simple farmer in order to gain his freedom. But Evans never accepts, because he didn’t take on this mission just for the money. Evans’ troubled son has becomes increasingly seduced by the smoothly charismatic Wade. His father’s hard-scrabble farm life pales in comparison to Wade’s seductive tales of whiskey and women. Evans sets out to show his son that justice can survive, even in this hard, hopeless land. I realize this may seems trite, but Bale and Crowe’s amazing performances bring a credibility to the message.

While the journey they take is largely enjoyable, it sometimes feels broken up into disjointed episodes. Evans and Wade reach one place, fight, then narrowly escape. Again and again. Don’t get me wrong. The gunfights and horse chases are vintage Western fun, but sometimes Wade’s repeated escapes can feel a little numbing.

But the film’s greatest weakness is its unlikely ending, in which Wade makes a last minute about-face that completely strains credulity. This rosy ending is especially irritating, given that the rest of this film is so wonderfully bleak and gritty.