Photo: Music Box PicturesThere's a purity to the English actress Rachel Weisz, as she glides from playing a doctor in the popcorn thriller "The Bourne Legacy" to a love-besotted wife in the intellectual romance "The Deep Blue Sea." In the latter film, she plays Hester Collyer, a postwar English aristocrat who risks everything for an affair with the charming but vapid pilot Freddie Page ("Thor's" Tom Hiddleston). Weisz delivers an Oscar-worthy performance that merits a second look. Adapted from the Terence Rattigan play and directed by Terence Davies, "The Deep Blue Sea" is one of the best films of 2012 that you probably haven't seen: It grossed $1.1 million domestically, while "The Bourne Legacy" hauled in $275 million worldwide.

One difference between the two movies: In the big-budget "Bourne" Weisz is the chief damsel in distress; in "TDBS" she's the lead, and her character's story drives the plot. The posh Hester has married an older man for love and social position and then gets blown sideways when she meets a man in uniform who unleashes her libido. There's a thematic parallel to "Anna Karenina," another historical fiction about a women who exits a stifling marriage through infidelity and suffers the consequences.

Photo: Everett Collection

It's that voice that got me when Liza Minnelli phoned last Friday. The way it squeaks at times and then expands with feeling; the way it rises up as if it's trying to touch you, to prod you, to share the same emotion as the speaker. The way the voice never stays still and carries a bit of her mother, Judy Garland, like a genetic imprint, but still is all Liza (with a "z").

Photo: Columbia Pictures/Music Box

"Bond cries in 'Skyfall.' No one remarks on that," Rachel Weisz told me over breakfast in the East Village of Manhattan. "I think it's a huge scene, isn't it?"

I couldn't help but agree with Weisz, who deserves an Oscar nomination for her role as an unfaithful wife in "The Deep Blue Sea" — but couldn't have been more faithful in her reading of her husband Daniel Craig's hit "Skyfall." She was referring to the climactic scene when Bond holds an injured M, played by Judi Dench, in his arms in a Scottish church.

Photo: Focus Features

Knightley dons the hats, veils, and upholstery silks as Anna Karenina, a character once played by Greta Garbo and Vivien Leigh. Working with her "Atonement" and "Pride and Prejudice" director, Joe Wright, and Tom Stoppard's adaptation, Knightley drives a radical restaging of Leo Tolstoy's Russian lit classic. She plays an aristocratic wife and mother who betrays her chilly husband (Jude Law) with dashing Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson).

Photo: Universal/The Weinstein Company/Dreamworks/Fox Searchlight

Best actor is a crowded race in which 10 slots hardly allow for all the meaty male performances of 2012. Historical figures dominate the field: Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln, John Hawkes as the disabled poet-journalist Mark O'Brien, Anthony Hopkins as Alfred Hitchcock, and Bill Murray as Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But, by year's end, we could be singing Hugh Jackman's tune from "Les Misérables."

Photo: Dreamworks

"I would say that we still have Daniel Day-Lewis as No. 1," Thelma Adams told Gold Derby's Tom O'Neil in their second joint podcast. Ever the gentleman, O'Neil agreed about the "Lincoln" star's front-runner status, but couldn't quite back Adams's contention that John Hawkes is "pretty much a sure thing for 'The Sessions.'" Too small?

Also tossing their pointed elbows in the crowded competition are Joaquin Phoenix ("The Master"), Denzel Washington ("Flight"), Anthony Hopkins ("Hitchcock"), Hugh Jackman ("Les Misérables"), and Christoph Waltz ("Django Unchained"). And then there's Bradley Cooper, who may ride the "Silver Linings Playbook" popularity contest all the way into the winner's circle.

Meanwhile, the final five depend on the two yet-to-be-screened movies: "Django" and "Les Misérables." "You can pretty safely say that Waltz is going to knock it out of the park," Adams asserted, adding: "The huge open question is Jackman."

Another open question is whether Phoenix has hit the