I wanted to begin, though, with a less obvious candidate for deconstruction, because it does, in a fashion, speak to some of the peculiarities of public life right now. I’m referring to the director Tim Burton’s “Big Eyes,” with Amy Adams as Margaret Keane, the painter whose husband (Christoph Waltz) took credit for her work.

Adams just picked up a Golden Globe for best actress in a musical or comedy, which was pretty odd because “Big Eyes” isn’t exactly a comedy. It’s a biopic, essentially, and the disappointment of it is that it never quite transcends the familiar, predictable rhythms of that genre. But “Big Eyes” raises a set of questions that seem to me especially germane to this era of Twitter and Instagram and indefatigable branding and unabashed self-promotion.

Do the spoils go to the gifted, or do they go to the shameless? How completely can showmanship obscure the truth, and how far can a smooth and self-infatuated operator travel on swagger alone?

Waltz’s character goes quite a distance, and as I watched him, I kept thinking of political campaigns and of a central challenge in a country where, all too often, more energy goes into the marketing than into the product (or the policy). Voters have to figure out which of the many people stepping forward with a gaudy sales pitch is truly the author of something substantive. That’s not always easy.

I think this was apparent at the Globes last night, where, apart from Adams’s “Big Eyes” win, the victors (and, for the most part, the nominees) were all movies and performances that came out before — long before, in the case of both best-picture winners — the official holiday rush. Not that they were all particularly bad; it’s just that they mostly called to mind better treatments of similar material. “American Sniper” had some gripping moments and a great performance by Bradley Cooper, but its themes were worked through much more creatively by Kathryn Bigelow in “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty.” Angelina Jolie’s “Unbroken,” like Gary Ross’s “Seabiscuit” before it, was an intermittently impressive adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand that didn’t live up to the book’s standard, and it mostly made me want to go watch “The Bridge on the River Kwai” again. Only “Selma” left me genuinely impressed, and even there I couldn’t help comparing it somewhat unfavorably with last year’s “12 Years a Slave,” a race-and-history drama less constrained (save during Brad Pitt’s awful cameo) by the conventions of the genre.

And it wasn’t just the prestige movies: The holiday “crowd-pleasers” mostly felt like, if you will, imitation games, failing to live up to standards set by better blockbusters. I’m a conscientious objector from “The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Hours or So,” but I’m assured that it’s exactly the bloated desecration of the “Lord of the Rings” that it appears to be from afar. “Exodus: Gods and Kings,” like every historical epic Ridley Scott has made in the past decade, mostly just made me want to fire up “Gladiator.” And “The Interview,” which I did my patriotic duty and paid $5.99 to watch On Demand, doesn’t really offer anything — save a truly bizarre James Franco performance, an eyebrow-raiser even by his standards — that wasn’t delivered with much more gonzo flair and self-awareness in “Team America: World Police.”

To take off my curmudgeon’s hate for a moment, I did like “Wild” and “A Most Violent Year” (though the latter not as much as I’d hoped), and to put on my political pundit’s hat, I do think the controversy around how “Selma” portrays L.B.J. is genuinely interesting. But before getting into that debate, tell me I’m wrong about December — or just least tell me what you liked last month, and why.

Bruni: No evasion here! You have teed me up to talk about “American Sniper,” and I will gladly take my swing: I found it absurd. From a technical standpoint, it’s made with skill, but in all other regards, it’s dumbfounding. It gives us a protagonist who believes that just about anything is warranted in defense of what he bluntly states is the greatest country on earth, but what little glimpse we get of his back story tells us nothing about how he defines that greatness and about whether his patriotism is rooted in anything more than slogans, received wisdom and the dining-room-table sermons of his spookily intense father. He’s a one-dimensional killing machine in thrall to his own marksmanship, and when he winds up rattled by all the death that he’s seen and at times been the agent of, it’s unclear if this is because he’s come to doubt the war’s purpose or to question its justification. It’s unclear that he’s asked any big questions at all. Maybe that’s the point — that many warriors are simply swept up in the call to battle — but it makes for a thinly written character.Equally frustrating is the way the movie draws a straight line from the attack on the Twin Towers to the war in Iraq. As David Edelstein wrote in his review of “American Sniper” in New York magazine, there’s “no indication that the two events — 9/11 and the Iraq invasion — have been yoked together by unscrupulous politicians who don’t have a clue what lies in store for American soldiers.” Edelstein actually went further, calling “American Sniper” “a Republican platform movie.” I’d love your reaction to that, Ross. Does it indeed veer toward propaganda, or are Eastwood’s critics now seeing his work through the prism of that moment at the 2012 Republican National Convention when he took the stage and talked to an empty chair that was meant to symbolize Obama?

Douthat: O.K., you’ve provoked me: In spite of finding it middling as art, I’ll speak up in defense of the politics of “American Sniper” — or, more accurately, the conspicuous lack thereof. Edelstein’s a fine critic, but his line about “Sniper” being a “Republican platform movie” is ridiculous, as is the alleged stark contrast he draws between “Sniper” and Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima.” The reality is that all of Eastwood’s recent war movies — “Iwo Jima” and “Flags of Our Fathers” as well as “Sniper” — share the same basically apolitical quality: They’re interested in the warp and woof of war, the experience of comradeship and wartime stress, and so they take their characters’ official reason for fighting — be it rah-rah American patriotism or dutiful Japanese nationalism or something else — as a given and don’t spend a lot of time asking bigger questions about which side or strategy is right or wrong.

I’m not in love with this approach, but it’s a consistent one for Eastwood. He neither endorses Chris Kyle’s monologues about American greatness nor is he particularly interested in subjecting them to a scathing critique; mostly he just rushes through them in order to get back to the world he’s really interested in, the world of battle, where politics recedes and all the questions that matter are much more immediate than the W.M.D. debate. He’s no more making Bush administration propaganda than he was making imperial Japanese propaganda; he’s just trying to make movies about wartime experience, period, in its varied forms.

And then since I am interested in political arguments, I’ll also offer a brief word in defense of Kyle’s own attitudes, at least as expressed on-screen. There was no straight line from 9/11 plot to Saddam Hussein’s regime, I agree, but one can regard the invasion as a misbegotten folly and still acknowledge that by the time we arrived at the specific in-theater events the movie narrates — particularly the hunt for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — United States troops really were fighting adherents of the ideology that inspired the 9/11 attacks (or a variant thereof). Again, that doesn’t make the case for the war itself, but it means that from the ordinary soldier’s perspective, the connection wasn’t just smoke and mirrors, and there’s nothing inherently deluded about invoking it as an argument for staying in the fight.

Bruni: The problem that I have with the odd vacuum in which “American Sniper” tells its story is that there’s been, and almost immediately was, such a furious swirl of questions about why we went into Iraq, about whether it was the right target at the right time and about how the war was marketed, that you simply can’t watch the movie without feeling that a crucial bit of context is being steadfastly avoided. It’s a voice in your head that intrudes on and distracts from what’s happening on-screen. Like you, I wouldn’t go so far as to call “American Sniper” a “Republican platform movie,” but I would call it disconcertingly simplistic and off key.

“American Sniper” has a plot that could easily have accommodated big questions about America, and it chooses not to ask them. “Foxcatcher,” another somber awards-season movie, is the opposite. It insinuates that the story of the spectacularly wealthy industrialist John du Pont’s ill-fated patronage of working-class wrestlers is some sort of mirror of the country’s dysfunctions: Flags, eagles and references to national pride abound. But really it’s about a singularly creepy social misfit, and it buckles under the weight of the larger meanings piled onto it. It’s also strangely dull, and I say “strangely” because its director, Bennett Miller, previously made “Moneyball,” turning a tale of statistics into a riveting, moving drama: the best movie of its year, IMHO. In “Foxcatcher,” he has a kook, half-naked men pinning each other to the ground and a bizarre true crime to work with, and he presses them into a hushed, stately, stale epic.

More engrossing than anything in “Foxcatcher” were the recent real-life Twitter tantrums of Mark Schultz, the wrestler at the center of du Pont’s obsessions, played by Channing Tatum in the movie. He’s apparently outraged about scenes that suggest homoerotic currents between him and du Pont. I mention that partly to pivot to the following question, Ross, since it applies not just to “Foxcatcher” but also to “American Sniper” and perhaps to “Selma” most of all: What obligation, if any, do movies have to hew to the historical record and the known truth? I’m curious if you think there are any firm dos and don’ts, any inventions or suppositions that should be out of bounds.

Douthat: Well, it’s complicated. The obligation to historical fidelity clearly can’t be absolute, or no filmmaker could pass it, and there has to be ample room for movies to play with real-life events to get at particular points and argument and ideas. To pick an apolitical recent example, I loved “The Social Network,” a movie that I thought captured the culture of meritocracy (or at least its Harvardian iteration) brilliantly, even though its “Mark Zuckerberg” bore little relationship to the real-life man. In that case and many others, I tend to agree with Jamelle Bouie’s argument — made last week in the context of the “Selma” debate — that viewers should be generally “less concerned with fact-checking and more interested in understanding” why, exactly, directors and screenwriters wrestling with history make the compressing/eliding/inventing choices that they make.

That means, in turn, that I’m inclined to reject comprehensive indictments of the historical liberties taken by “Selma” — say — as a historian’s version of the tedious, commonplace “why didn’t the filmmaker make the movie I wanted her to make?” critique. But at the same time, I remain a little uncomfortable with the specific way that Ava DuVernay’s movie portrays Lyndon Johnson (which is the key problem the historian-critics raise), because in addition to being untrue to the record it has the effect of flattening his character and making the tangled relationship between activists and politicians — one of the movie’s key themes — less interesting and more unsubtle and thus less artistically satisfying than it could have been. I can see what the movie gained dramatically by making the president more of a stumbling block to the movement than he actually was, and I respect DuVernay’s professed desire to avoid anything resembling the “white savior” cliché. But I think that all this could have been accomplished without (spoiler alert) having Johnson actually sic J. Edgar Hoover on King, a black-hat moment that just seemed crude and unlikely in the context of the film, setting aside its lack of grounding in the facts.

Bruni: I’d say that movies don’t have any absolute duty to history. Even historians pick and choose what to focus on and come up with a perspective or argument that doesn’t do full justice to all of the small facts and subtleties in the unedited, messy record of real life. When you shape events into a particular form with finite parameters, be it a movie or a tome, some distortion occurs. It’s built into the process. But is there a rationale for the distortion? Does it serve a clear purpose without undermining your credibility and thus your impact? Some of the tweaks made by “Selma” seem unnecessary, and I think that may well be hurting the film in the awards season: Neither it nor its star, David Oyelowo, got Bafta nominations, which were announced after the controversy over the movie had grown in volume, and at the Golden Globes, the movie won only in the category of best original song.

But not all of its digressions from truth are as wildly cavalier and irresponsible as their harshest critics suggest. I talked about this with the Princeton historian Julian Zelizer, whose new book on L.B.J., “The Fierce Urgency of Now,” was the grist for my Tuesday column. He agreed with you, Ross, that the L.B.J.-Hoover emphasis was both wrong and needless; as for L.B.J. and voting rights, he wrote this interesting piece explaining precisely where and how “Selma” and fact diverge.

“Selma” is saddled by the ease with which it can be fact-checked (an ease that the moviemakers perhaps should have kept in mind). I’m sure if we had similar documentation against which to measure “Unbroken” and “Wild,” two other real-life narratives, we’d find inconsistencies, hyperbole, a tidying-up of things. The events of each occurred long before they were molded into the best sellers on which the movies are based, and memory has its biases and limits. I took both movies at face value, finding “Unbroken” tedious and disconcertingly old-fashioned but enjoying “Wild” largely for its soulful mood, achieved through music, imagery and Reese Witherspoon.

While this has been a better year for actors than for actresses, which is to say it’s been depressingly like every other year, we were treated to some great and surprising performances by women over the last month. I think of Julianne Moore’s in “Still Alice.” I mentioned that movie in a recent column, and I was happy to see Moore win a richly deserved Golden Globe, for best actress in a drama. I also think of “Cake” and Jennifer Aniston, whom I wrote about for last weekend’s Arts & Leisure section. Have you seen either, Ross? If not, do you have any actors or actresses to whom you’d like to give shout-outs before we wrap up this latest session?

Douthat: Wait — has this really been a better year for actors? We talked about this during our first go-round, at the end of the summer, and I think it all depends on where you set the baseline. I’m not going to join Russell Crowe and dismiss industry sexism: The persistent male advantages and endless May-November romantic pairings are real enough, and in the age of presold genre franchises, the business arguably caters more than ever to adolescent (and adultescent) males.

But at the same time, even though the action-driven culture of blockbusters provides permanent employment opportunities for younger actors who know their way around a weight room, it also seems to make them more interchangeable (how many moviegoers recognize the name Henry Cavill? how many can tell the Hemsworth brothers apart?), disposable (blink, and somebody else is playing Spiderman and Superman and Batman) and forgettable (quick, who played the male lead in “Godzilla”?) than the male stars of 20 years ago. Put it this way: If I had to pick the younger stars who had the best year in 2015, I’d put Jennifer Lawrence, Shailene Woodley (who had not one but two $100-million-plus movies) and Scarlett Johansson (who single-handedly propelled the lousy “Lucy” to big business while also racking up deserved art-house plaudits for “Under the Skin”) above any younger male of the species not named Chris Pratt. Or again: I don’t think any famous male star carried a major blockbuster as completely as Angelina Jolie did “Maleficent.” Or yet again: We haven’t talked about “Into the Woods,” but it’s the Christmas season’s second-biggest earner after Peter Jackson’s 17-hour Middle Earth cash-in, it’s thick with female stars, and it has Meryl Streep looming on its poster, not Johnny Depp or Chris Pine. (Again, how many moviegoers have even heard of Chris Pine?)Even the land of Seth Rogen and Co., long a bit of a wasteland for female co-stars, delivered us Rose Byrne’s terrific turn in “Neighbors.” And the likely best-actress contest, in which the terrific Witherspoon will probably still lose out to either Moore or Aniston, is dominated by women in roles that suggest — like Streep’s box office clout, and Sandra Bullock’s, and even Melissa McCarthy’s — that there’s some life (if, again, not as much as Crowe believes) in Hollywood for women near and over 40.

With all that said, maybe I’ll prove your point by offering my own parting shout-out to two men, J.C. Chandor and Oscar Isaac, respectively the writer-director and star of “A Most Violent Year,” about a heating-oil industry rivalry (it’s more interesting than it sounds) in the grim, crime-haunted Gotham of 1981. I’m offering it even though, as I noted above, the movie disappointed me in the end: It’s ridiculously good for two-thirds of its running time, but then it sort of peters out, leaving too many subplots unresolved instead of making them successfully converge. But Chandor has earned the right to disappoint just a little: He’s made three movies, “Margin Call” and “All Is Lost” and now this one, and they’ve all been more ambitious and effective and interesting than the work of — well, a long list of better-known directors, let’s just say. And Isaac (who’s also in the next “Star Wars,” for good or ill) is just phenomenal, as he was in a completely different sort of part last year in “Inside Llewyn Davis.”

Neither man is any kind of household name; neither earned even a nomination at the Globes. (Jessica Chastain, yet another female star enjoying a steady run of meaty parts, had the movie’s only Globe nod.) I’ll be interested to see if either one gets Oscar recognition this year. But whether they do or don’t, I’m sure something interesting will happen once Oscar season overwhelms us … and hopefully, we’ll be right back here to talk about it.