The Globe and Mail

BLACK MAGIC

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo’s Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) can be described in one word: sharp. All jutting hipbones, piercings and ragged, dark separates, the new style icon even inspired an H&M clothing line produced with Trish Summerville, the costumer on David Fincher’s version of the story.

Whether you love or hate her dramatic, Goth-inspired look, one thing is certain: You can’t ignore it.

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BLUE TORY

Hillary Clinton may have popularized the blue power suit, but the pioneering British pol Margaret Thatcher laid the sartorial groundwork. In The Iron Lady, Meryl Streep’s laudatory performance of the MP-cum-PM sports a conservative-yet-vibrant wardrobe setting her apart, visually and metaphorically, in a sea of often hostile men.

Symbolically, those blue suits go from powdery to powerful as her status and influence rise, putting a new spin on the notion of the political spectrum.

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CURVE APPEAL

If anyone has forgotten just how well Marilyn Monroe filled out her clothes in her heyday, My Week With Marilyn (and Michelle Williams’s justifiably acclaimed performance as the voluptuous yet highly vulnerable screen goddess) remind us with aplomb. Take that, Kate Moss.

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FLOWER POWER

As the villainous sixties-era Southerner Hilly Holbrook, Bryce Dallas Howard gets some of The Help’s best lines – and frocks. Reportedly, costume designer Sharen Davis made 50 outfits from scratch to dress the cast in authentic garb, complete with the nipped-in waists and full skirts of the pre-civil-rights era.

In Holbrook’s case, the bold florals she sports throughout the film have a disturbing quality, providing a misleadingly cheerful sheen to her virulent racism.

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HAWAIIAN PUNCH

Leave it to George Clooney to make Hawaiian shirts chic. Admittedly, those he sports in The Descendants are more subdued than usual, reflective of his sober lawyer character. Expect an even bigger jump in their appeal if he wears one Sunday night.

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HOT FUZZ

Mustaches may have been common in movies of yore, but their return on a trio of devilishly handsome blokes in last year’s crop – from left, The Artist’s Jean Dujardin, Hugo’s Sacha Baron Cohen and Midnight in Paris’s Corey Stoll – proves that they’re still as dapper as can be.

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JACKET ART

Nothing cemented Ryan Gosling’s trendsetter status as decidedly as the satin jacket the actor wore in Drive. Since the movie came out, legions of men have channelled Gosling’s brooding, mysterious Driver through the dead-on replicas produced by California’s Steady Clothing, now in their third production run.

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THE LEGEND CONTINUES

As a treatise on an extremely fabled romance, W.E. is not amusing. Where Madonna’s take on the story of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor does score is in its evocation of their world. Arianne Phillips’s costume design does justice to Wallis Simpson’s legendary taste in clothes.

It is also one of the main reasons for this season’s mania for art deco chic.

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MID-CENTURY MOVES

It’s easy to understand why the eldest son in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life becomes an architect (played by Sean Penn) when he grows up: His childhood home in 1950s Texas is such a temple of down-home modernism, exquisite in both its unpretentious elegance and its warmth.

By comparison, the character’s adulthood in the big city feels empty and unmoored, all surface and no depth. Whatever you think about the dinosaur sequence, the film’s use of interior space to suggest innocence, hope, joy and loss borders on the sublime.

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PATTERN TEST

The lush set designs that characterized both critical darling Jane Eyre and less-well-received Anonymous provided appropriately rich backdrops for the examination of such weighty subjects as love and art. In Eyre, the opulence that Jane encounters at Rochester’s estate serves as a deliberate contrast to her forlorn upbringing.

While the Elizabethan court depicted in Anonymous could be (and is) nothing less than regal. That sound you hear is the makers of ornate wallpapers rejoicing.

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POWER HAIR

Bryce Dallas Howard’s hard-headed Hilly Holbrook in The Help, a newly sleek Miss Piggy from The Muppets and Rose Byrne’s passive-aggressive Helen Harris in Bridesmaids also had locks that killed (or threatened to). Could Hairspray 2 be far behind?

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SOCIAL GRACE

Sure, Midnight in Paris is all about misplaced nostalgia, but its Jazz Age milieu is so compellingly rendered that both Owen Wilson and the viewer are unable to resist. In the end, Gil does (spoiler alert!) reject it for the present, but only after complete immersion.

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SPECS APPEAL

If the eyes are the window to the soul, a good pair of frames can reflect hidden depth, even in Jonah Hill! Besides the Moneyball star, other sexy four-eyes from 2011 noms include Dougray Scott of My Week With Marilyn and Gary Oldman in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

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SPOT ON

In The Artist, a silent-cinema vet (Jean Dujardin) draws a beauty mark on Bérénice Bejo’s wide-eyed ingénue during a private moment in his dressing room – and a star is instantly born. From that quiet moment on, the ingénue’s career soars, while the vet’s strays farther from the limelight.

In the end, though, her fondness for him sticks like her trademark spot. She ultimately returns the favour that he pays her, leveraging her own fame to give him another shot at his own.

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