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Tim Burton makes dream movies. Stephen Sondheim writes musicals. It is hard to think of two more optimistic genres of popular art, or of two popular artists who have so methodically subvert that optimism. Mr. Sondheim has always gravitated toward the discord lurk in summable tunes, and has threaded his song-and-dance spectaculars with subtexts of nervousness and alienation. Mr. Burton, for his part, dwells most naturally (if somewhat uneasily) in the realms of the gothic and the grotesque, turning comedian books and children’s tales into scary, nightmarish shadow plays.

And so it should not be surprising that “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” Mr. Burton’s film adaptation of Mr. Sondheim’s musical, is as dark and terrifying as any motion picture in new recollection, not excluding the bloody installments in the “Saw” franchise. Indeed, “Sweeney” is as much a horror film as a musical: It is cruel in its effects and fundamental in its misanthropy, expressing a breathtakingly, thoroughly apathetic view of human nature. It is also amazing close to a masterpiece, a work of great — I am tempted to say evil — genius.

As it was originally performed onstage, with all the songs Mr. Sondheim composed for it, “Sweeney Todd” balanced its inherent grisliness with a whimsical vitality. The basic story is a revenge’s disaster more Jacobean than Victorian, but Mr. Sondheim nonetheless wrings some grim, boisterous humor out of both the impulse for vengeance and the bustling spirit of commerce. A barber, wronged by a powerful judge, returns to London and sets up shop, cutting throats as well as hair. The bodies of his victims are turned into savory meat pies by Mrs. Lovett, his lively partner in business and crime. Cannibalism and mass murder as the base for a hit show — what a perverse and appetizing joke.

It seemed a lot less funny in the recent revival, which starred Michael Cerveris and Patti Lupone in roles originated on Broadway by Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury in 1979. Mr. Burton’s film, in spite of the participation of Sacha Baron Cohen (as a mountebank barber in a skin-tight costume) and Timothy Spall (as a louche bailiff) pretty much casts out frivolity altogether. Mr. Burton’s London is a dark, smoky oil slick of a city. Dante Ferrety’s production design, which owes something to the Victorian city confected for Carol Reed’s “Oliver!,” be capable of make even daylight look sinister. Innocence, represented by a pair of young would-be lovers (Jayne Wisener and Jamie Campbell Bower) has virtually no chance in this place; it is a joke played by fate, something to be corrupted, imprisoned or cracked

Mrs. Lovett the pie maker is played by Helena Bonham Carter, a witchy fixture of Mr. Burton’s cinematic universe as well as the mother of his children. If the director has an alter ego, or at least an actor time and again able to embody his ideas on screen, it would have to be Johnny Depp. He was the hurt, misunderstood man-child in “Edward Scissorhands,” the cracked visionary in “Ed Wood” and the cold, creepy candy mogul in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” in each case giving shape to an emotional equation that had never quite be seen on film before. As Sweeney, his hair streaked with white and his eyes rimmed in black, he is an avatar of fury.

Mr. Depp’s singing voice is harsh and thin, but amazingly forceful. He brings the unpolished urgency of rock ’n’ roll to an idiom accustomed to more refinement, and in doing so awakens the violence of Mr. Sondheim’s lyrics and melodies. Some of the crowd-pleasing numbers, like “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” have been pared away, but their absence only contributes to the diabolical coherence of the film, which moves with a furious momentum toward its sanguinary conclusion.

Like nearly every other horror-film serial killer — the outcast teenager abused by the cool kids; the decent man whose suffering has been ignored or mocked — Sweeney starts out as a sympathetic figure. Once upon a time, he was a happy husband and father, until his lovely wife (Laura Michelle Kelly) caught the eye of a malignant judge (Alan Rickman), who transported the poor barber to Australia. Now, after many years, he has returned to find that his daughter, now a teenager, has become the judge’s ward. Finding his old straight razors — “my friends” — under the floorboards of his former shop, Sweeney sets out to ensnare the judge, a project that requires the deaths of quite a few customers along the way.

“They’ll never be missed,” sings the practical Mrs. Lovett. Sweeney’s view is harsher, almost genocidal. “They all deserve to die,” he says, looking out over the rooftops of the city. And Mr. Burton depicts those deaths ruthlessly. The initial geyser of blood may seem artificially bright, but when the bodies slide head first from the chair down a chute into the cellar, they crash and crumple with sickening literalness. You are watching human beings turned into meat.

It may seem strange that I am praising a work of such unremitting savagery. I confess that I’m a little startled myself, but it’s been a long time since a movie gave me nightmares. And the unsettling power of “Sweeney Todd” comes above all from its bracing refusal of any sentimental consolation, from Mr. Burton’s willingness to push the most dreadful implications of Mr. Sondheim’s story to their blackest conclusions.

“Sweeney Todd” is a fable about a world from which the possibility of justice has vanished, replaced on one hand by vain and arbitrary power, on the other by a righteous fury that quickly spirals into madness. There may be a suggestion of hopefulness near the end, but you don’t see hope on the screen. What you see is as dark as the grave. What you hear — some of the finest stage music of the past 40 years — is equally infernal, except that you might just as well call it heavenly.

“There Will Be Blood,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s heroic American nightmare, arrives belching fire and brimstone and damnation to Hell. Set against the backdrop of the Southern California oil boom of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, it tells a story of greed and envy of biblical proportions — echoing with Old Testament sound and fury and New Testament evangelicalism — which Mr. Anderson has mined from Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel “Oil!” There is no God but money in this oil-rich desert and his messenger is Daniel Plainview, a petroleum speculator played by a monstrous and shattering Daniel Day-Lewis.

Plainview is an American primitive. He’s more articulate and civilized than the crude, brutal title character in Frank Norris’s 1899 novel “McTeague,” and Erich von Stroheim’s masterly version of the same, “Greed.” But the two characters are brothers under the hide, coarse and animalistic, sentimental in matters of love and ruthless in matters of avarice. Mr. Anderson opens his story in 1898, closer to Norris’s novel than Sinclair’s, which begins in the years leading up to World War I. And the film’s opener is a stunner — spooky and strange, blanketed in shadows and nearly wordless. Inside a deep, dark hole, a man pickaxes the hard-packed soil like a bug gnawing through dirt. This is the earth mover, the ground shaker: Plainview.

Over the next two and a half mesmerizing hours Plainview will strike oil, then strike it rich and transform a bootstrapper’s dream into a terrifying prophecy about the coming American century. It’s a century he plunges into slicked in oil, dabbed with blood and accompanied by H. W. (eventually played by the newcomer Dillon Freasier), the child who enters his life in 1902 after he makes his first strike and seems to have burbled from the ground like the liquid itself. The brief scenes of Plainview’s first tender, awkward moments with H. W. will haunt the story. In one of the most quietly lovely images in a film of boisterous beauty, he gazes at the tiny, pale toddler, chucking him under the chin as they sit on a train very much alone.

“There Will Be Blood” involves a tangle of relationships, mainly intersecting sets of fathers and sons and pairs of brothers. (Like most of the finest American directors working now, Mr. Anderson makes little on-screen time for women.) But it is Plainview’s intense, needful bond with H. W. that raises the stakes and gives enormous moving force to this at length imagined period story with its pictorial and historical sweep, its raging fires, geysers of oil and inevitable blood. (Rarely has a film’s title seemed so ominous.) By the time H. W. is about 10, he has become a kind of partner to his father, at once a child and a sober little man with a jacket and neatly combed hair who dutifully stands by Plainview’s side as quiet as his conscience.

A large swath of the story takes place in 1911, by which point Plainview has become a successful oilman with his own fast-growing company. Flanked by the watchful H. W., he storms from side to side California, sniffing out forecast and trying to persuade frenzied men and women to rent their land for drilling. (H. W. gives Plainview his human mask: “I’m a family man,” he proclaims to prospective leasers.) One day a gangling, unsmiling young gentleman Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), arrives with news that oil is seeping out of the ground at his family’s ranch. The stranger sells this in order to Plainview, who promptly sets off with H. W. to a stretch of California desert where oil puddles the ground among the cactus, scrub and person misery.

Not long afterward oil is gushing out of that desert. The eruption rattles both the earth and the local inhabitants, whom Plainview soothes with promises. Poor, isolated, thirsting for water (they don’t have enough even to grow wheat), the dazed inhabitants gaze at the oilman like hungry baby birds. (Their barren town is inexplicably named Little Boston.) He promises schools, roads and water, delivering his sermon with a carefully enunciated, sepulchral voice so as to Mr. Day-Lewis seems to have largely on loan from the director John Huston. Plainview is preaching a new gospel, though one soon challenged by another salesman, Paul Sunday’s Holy Roller brother, Eli (also Mr. Dano). A charismatic preacher looking to build a new church, Eli slithers into the story, one more snake in the desert.

Mr. Anderson has always damaged his influences openly, cribbing from Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman among others (he assist the ailing Altman with his final film, “A Prairie Home Companion”), but rarely has his movie love been as organically included into his work as it is here. Movie history weighs on every filmmaker, informs every cut, camera angle and pressure group. “There Will Be Blood” is very much a personal endeavor for Mr. Anderson; it feels like an act of possession. Yet it is also directly engaged with our cinematically constructed history, specifically with films — “Greed” and “Chinatown,” but also “Citizen Kane” — that have dismantled the mythologies of American success and, in doing so, replaced one utopian perfect for another, namely that of the movies themselves.

This is Mr. Anderson’s fifth feature and it proves a breakthrough for him as a filmmaker. Although there are more differences than similarities between it and the Sinclair book, the novel has provided him with something he has lacked in the past, a great theme. It may also help explain the new film’s narrative coherence. His first feature, “Sydney” (also known as “Hard Eight”), showed Mr. Anderson to be an by instinct gifted filmmaker, someone who was born to make images with a camera. His following features — “Boogie Nights,” “Magnolia” and “Punch-Drunk Love” — have ambition and flair, though to increasingly diminish ends. Oval, self-conscious, at times multithreaded, they contain passages of clarity and brilliance. But in their rising stylization you feel the burdens of virtuosity, innovation, self-government.

“There Will Be Blood” exhibits much the same qualities as Mr. Anderson’s previous work — every shot seems accurately right — but its narrative form is more classical and less weighted down by the pressures of self-aware auteurism. It flows smoothly, linearly, building impetus and intolerable tension. Mr. Day-Lewis’s outsize performance, with its footnote references to Huston and strange, contorted Kabuki-like grimaces, occasionally breaks the skin of the film’s surface like a dangerous undertow. The actor seems to have invaded Plainview’s every atom, filling an otherwise empty vessel with so much rage and purpose you wait for him to blow. It’s a thrilling performance, among the greatest I’ve seen, with determination alienating and brilliantly located at the point in time between cinematic realism and theatrical sight.

This tension between practicality and spectacle runs like a fissure through the film and invests it with tremendous unease. You are constantly being pulled away from and toward the charismatic Plainview, whose hunt of oil reads like a chapter from this nation’s grand narrative of discovery and conquest. His 1911 strike puts the contradictions of this story into graphic, visual terms. Mr. Anderson initially thrusts you close to the awesome power of the geyser, which soon bursts into flames, then pulls back for a longer sight, his sensuously fluid camera keeping pace with Plainview and his men as they race about annoying to have what they’ve unleashed. But the monster has been uncorked. The black billowing smoke pours into the sky, and there it will stay.

With a story of and for our times, “There Will Be Blood” can certainly be viewed through the smeary window that looks onto the larger world. It’s timeless and topical, general and specific, theoretical and as plain as the name of its fiery oilman. It’s an origin story of sorts. The opening images of desert hills and a dull electronic chord allude to the commencement of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” whose fatal apes are part of a Darwinian range with Daniel Plainview. But the film is above all a consummate work of art, one that transcends the historically fraught context of its making, and its pleasures are unrepentantly aesthetic. It reveals, excites, disturbs, provokes, but the window it opens is to human awareness itself.

Those are the arrogant words of John Lennon’s killer, Mark David Chapman (Jonas Ball), who shot Lennon on Dec. 8, 1980, in front of his home at the Dakota, the Manhattan apartment complex at 72nd Street and Central Park West.

Everything Mr. Chapman says in “The Killing of John Lennon,” devastating re-enactment of events leading up to, including and immediately after the murder, is taken from interviews, depositions and court transcripts. Because much of the dialogue is voice-over, the film takes place largely inside Mr. Chapman’s feverish mind. Lennon comes into views in the movie but only briefly, and in shadow: a phantom to be slain.

Shot in a quasi-documentary style at the actual locations where the events took place, including the sidewalk outside the Dakota, the movie is extremely uncomfortable to watch. Using a least amount of photographic tricks, it evokes episodes of mental bewilderment in which images jiggle and blur into one another. Its fragments from the movies “Raging Bull,” “Taxi Driver” and “Ordinary People” suggest the volatile interaction of popular culture and mental instability. And its sampling of vintage clips of the Beatles and of Lennon is distressing.

Although “The Killing of John Lennon” doesn’t ask you to sympathize with Mr. Chapman, who is now serving a 20-year-to-life sentence in Attica state prison, it requires you to spend almost two hours in his disturbing company. That’s asking a lot. Grandiose, narcissistic, subject to delusions and extreme mood swings, he comes across as the kind of maniacally self-centered creep who, if come across in a bar, would prompt most people to disengage after five minutes of small talk.

Listening to him gas on about his twisted mania with “The Catcher in the Rye” and his identification with its troubled teenage protagonist, Holden Caulfield, is torture. That J. D. Salinger novel set off the sort of brainstorm in Mr. Chapman that some evangelical Christians have described as their reaction to encountering a Bible on the eve of conversion.

Encountered by Mr. Chapman when he was “searching for some kind of guidance,” the book became “an exciting current in my hand, burning my body,” he recalls. From then on, Mr. Chapman began confusing himself with Caulfield, often signing the character’s name instead of his own and in the courtroom quoting passages from the book as if they were Scripture.

As evidence of Lennon’s phoniness, Mr. Chapman cites the lyrics of “Imagine” (“Imagine no possessions”), then enumerates that star’s properties.

The film begins in Honolulu, where Mr. Chapman lived with his Japanese-American wife, Gloria (Mie Omori), and worked as a security guard (a job he quit) in the months before his first visit to New York City in October 1980. In Honolulu he complains of severe headaches and of complexity eating and sleeping. We meet his mother (Krisha Fairchild), a blowsy blonde with a Southern accent whom he describes as a character out of “The Glass Menagerie.”

During his initial visit to New York, when he discovers that Lennon is away, he sees the movie “Ordinary People,” which temporarily dissuades him from his task. “My rage was defeated,” he declares proudly. “The volcano was capped.” But not for long.

I’ve met enough desperate hangers-on in the pop music world who resemble the loser portrayed by Mr. Ball to recognize him as a classic celebrity stalker seeking fame by association. The difference between Mr. Chapman and thousands of others is that in his case, a screw came loose in his mind. Mr. Ball, who is somewhat better-looking than photographs of Mr. Chapman but of the same physical type, captures the tiniest nuances of obsequiousness and cunning that such people exhibit. In Mr. Chapman’s case the precarious balance between adoration and envy tilted lethally toward the negative.

Describing his feelings during the killing, he says: “There was no emotion, no anger. There was dead silence in my brain.”

Later, when a psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital Center asks why he did it, Mr. Chapman replies: “Because I thought he was a phony. I actually loved his music.”

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Story &Direction

Even if you recognize nothing of Juno going in, it’s easy to pick up on the fact that the movie’s voice is unlike any you’ve heard in a while—it’s totally fresh, in every sense of the word. That’s because a brand new writer, Diablo Cody, and a new-ish director, Jason Reitman (Thank You for Smoking), are the brains behind the operation. Cody, whose past as a Minnesota stripper has been well documented/exploited, is most responsible for the greatness that is Juno. It’s one of the best debut scripts in recent memory, fearless for refusing to conform where other first-timers err on the side of conservatism. Cody doesn’t just elect not to go the conventional route; she gives it the finger! At the same time, Cody is unconcerned with maintaining the movie’s sheer coolness, as evidenced by Juno’s soft-around-the-edges second half. And then there’s Reitman, who sits back and lets the writer work her untapped magic—to a certain extent. Where the sophomore director shines is not just visually and audibly (the best soundtrack of the year features Moldy Peaches and lead singer Kimya Dawson quite prominently, as well as Belle and Sebastian, Cat Power and others), but tonally. He weaves Cody’s superb script, which could’ve taken a completely different turn in the hands of another director, into a simultaneously upbeat and downbeat near masterpiece. Reitman also plays no small part in the incredible performances turned in by the cast.

Story about Juno pulls no tricks, opening with teenage sex that leads to pregnancy, which would be a shocking climax for most movies. And Juno (Ellen Page) pulls no punches: The offbeat Minnesota teen and unexpectedly expectant mother simply cannot bite her acidic tongue. But as Juno comes to terms with her pregnancy, she softens. The terms of her pregnancy—that is, after deciding against “procuring a hasty abortion”—are that she will give her newborn to a baby-deprived married couple, Vanessa (Jennifer Garner) and Mark (Jason Bateman), from upscale suburbia. And helping Juno come to said terms are her father (J.K. Simmons), stepmom (Allison Janney), best friend (Olivia Thirlby) and, from a distance, the dad-to-be, Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera), who himself doesn’t look too far removed from infanthood. But Juno soon discovers that these nine months won’t pass by without physical and emotional pain—pain for which her icy-exterior defense mechanism is no match—and that some grown-ups still want to be children.

Acting

Twenty-year-old Ellen Page (Hard Candy) is an age chameleon as the title character: Physically, she passes for Juno’s age of 16 with ease, and whether Juno acts like a late-‘70s/-punk-era throwback or a plain old 21st century teen, Page has no problem. But it’s her range of emotion as Juno that is most impressive. Page first endears you with her ability to shoot off quick, rhythmic sarcasm at an astonishing rate—she’s hilarious, if initially a tad sitcom-y; it’s her vulnerability as the movie progresses, however, that is even more endearing and will move you beyond what you thought possible given the way Juno begins. Such an astounding yet believable transformation is what makes this possibly the year’s best performance from an actress (even the Academy might be forced to agree). There’s a major drop-off in screen time for the other actors, but not in quality. Neo-geek god Cera (Superbad) understands what makes comedy funny as well as anybody, but he throws the occasional, and totally effective, curveball at us with scenes of tenderness; Garner, in true “Who knew?” fashion, gives a superbly delicate, against-type performance; Bateman, reuniting with his Arrested Development son Cera and The Kingdom costar Garner, is typically flawless in his small but crucial role; and Simmons (HBO’s Oz) and Janney are pleasant surprises, casting-wise, as Juno’s free-spirited voices of cause.