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James Franco has the sweetest smile, and a voice like chocolate pudding. Both onscreen and over the phone, he transmits an appealing, gentle-dude air. I never bought him as Harry Osborn, the jealous, wet-eyed villain in the three Spider-Man movies, and now I know why: Franco, 30, can't help but seem like a guy who'd just forgive everybody right away and have them over for pasta.

He's having a good year. In August, he played a kindly dope dealer in Pineapple Express, and everything about him was perfect: his ethnic sweatpants, his loneliness inside his cannabis haze, and his stoned laugh with its undercurrent of omnipresent bewilderment. Franco, his co-star Seth Rogen, and their producer Judd Apatow (who worked together on Franco's cancelled-before-its-time TV series, Freaks and Geeks), pulled off something pretty rare. Beneath the sloppy caper plot and filthy jokes, they made a buddy comedy that was genuinely about male friendship. It pulled in over $87-million in theatres; and now, on DVD … dude, it's gonna be huge.

In September, in a tiny role as Richard Gere's aid-worker son in Nights in Rodanthe, Franco was a believable heir to the older actor's sensitive intensity. Franco also made an amusing appearance in a New York Times piece about a new software program that takes someone's photograph and then improves their flaws – widens and enlarges eyes, shortens long noses, smoothes out foreheads. They tested a photo of Franco's ridiculously handsome face. It came back unchanged.

Now, he's playing the love of the title character's life in Milk, the moving new biopic from director Gus Van Sant about Harvey Milk (Sean Penn), the first openly gay man to hold a major political office in the U.S. (In 1977, Milk was elected to San Francisco's board of supervisors, where he helped bring down Proposition 6, which would have banned homosexuals from teaching in California schools.) As the boy toy who becomes much more to Milk, Franco does his best work yet, and makes Penn seem warmer and more connected than ever.

“I really pursued this movie,” Franco says. “I'm the biggest Gus Van Sant fan, and have been since before I was an actor. I would watch Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho repeatedly when I was in high school. Then, when I started acting, I continued to watch those movies, because the performances in them were really inspiring, and something I aspire to. So I wrote Gus an e-mail saying I'd play anything, the pizza boy, just to be in it.”

California's Nov. 4 passing of Proposition 8, which bans gay marriage, “shows that a lot of the issues of the movie are still alive, a lot of the fights Harvey Milk was fighting still need to be fought,” Franco adds.

Next year, he'll take on another fight, playing Allen Ginsberg in Howl, a drama about the 1957 obscenity trial over that poem. And between films, he's in two different MFA programs in New York: at New York University's Tisch School, for film directing; and at Columbia for fiction writing, where he's working on a second novel. (He wrote his first at UCLA under the tutelage of the novelist Mona Simpson, and earned a BA last year.) “They're two other things I enjoy and I'm really interested in,” Franco says. “I believe in hard work.”

To top it off, turning 30 this year made him feel “a bit more relaxed. I'm learning about all the things that I'm interested in. I'm doing everything I want. I couldn't ask for anything more.”

You know what else is having a good year, by the way? The 1970s. Milk is one of three recent films that showcase the decade in a light more positive than the way it felt while I was living through it, from age 8 to 18. Back then, the seventies felt dark and cynical, tainted by Watergate and Vietnam, gas crises and bankrupt cities, the opposite of the optimistic sixties. But Milk highlights the giddiness of the gay community's coming out, and the activism that it prompted, in such a laudatory and inspiring way that it makes the whole decade look brighter.

Ditto for Frost/Nixon, Ron Howard's upcoming movie about the machinations behind a series of interviews that talk-show host David Frost (Michael Sheen, who played Tony Blair in The Queen) did with Richard Nixon (Frank Langella; put him on your Oscar ballots) in 1977, when Nixon had yet to apologize for or even admit to any wrongdoing vis-à-vis Watergate. The movie is a juicy, satisfying meal for journalists, and it makes everyone in the seventies look more politically informed and active than in the 30 years since.

My favourite 1970s film – and my favourite documentary this year, period – is Man on Wire, which looks at the now-legendary stunt that a French tightrope walker named Philippe Petit and a bunch of accomplices pulled off in 1974. Illegally, they strung a tightrope between the World Trade Center's twin towers, and Petit performed upon it for an hour or so one dawn, before being arrested and becoming a sensation.

Now out on DVD, the film is moving on many levels. First, it's immediately apparent how significant the act was to its perpetrators. It was a serious piece of performance art, a glorious celebration of human accomplishment. Even the cops waiting on the ledge to arrest Petit knew they were looking at something exceptional; watch for the one who says so with an eloquence that is inimitably New York. Second, most of the original gang was interviewed, so it's poignant to see them then, in their youthful exuberance – with all their seventies hair – and now, in their thin-haired, middle-aged maturity. And third, of course, is the fate of the towers themselves, which is not mentioned in the film, but permeates it with an almost unbearable poignancy.

Every decade looks better in retrospect, but these three films make a strong case – which resonates strongly in Obama's North America – that commitment is worthier than apathy, that action is more admirable than resignation, and that informed hope, though hard to sustain, is necessary. You should see them all.