WHAT'S NEW: After the starry, lucrative grand finale that was the Christmas weekend, only four films bothered to shuffle out of the holiday hangover on to screens in the last minutes of 2008. Neither of the biggest among them — Defiance and Good — seem to have designated The Reader and Valkyrie worthy-enough Nazis-by-way-of-Hollywood parables for the season, so we now face a quartet of films recounting the era — each in their own, fitfullly successful ways, but perhaps not enough to justify their coexistence when all anyone really wants to do is sleep in until '09 begins in earnest next Monday.

Still, they're out there: Defiance (finally reaching screens after a delay by Paramount Vantage) banishes screen siblings Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell to the Belarussian woods, where their makeshift Jewish refugee encampment in 1941 established a heroic, true-story counterpoint to the horrors of the Holocaust. Directed by Edward Zwick, who previously dramatized Glory, The Last Samurai and Blood Diamond to within an inch of their lives, Defiance is Oscar fodder of the highest grade and the lowest momentum, opening on two screens too late in the year to aquire any traction other than a per-theater average that should crack $40,000.

Good, meanwhile, is a casualty of similar timing and near-mute word-of-mouth, adapting C.P. Taylor's play about a German intellectual (Viggo Mortensen, recalibrating his Aragorn accent to an academic lilt) who finds his novel about euthanasia perverted to endorse Nazi atrocities. The problem: He's the pervert, the proverbial "good German" who comes to realize that his helplessness is the least of the consequences of his complicity in Hitler's regime. Mortensen has the right idea here, following an enlightened parallel of Kate Winslet's equally bewildered, illiterate war criminal in The Reader, but Vicente Amorim's direction is so woefully on-the-nose and stage-managed (let Good count as Exhibit A in the Steadicam's own trial for crimes against humanity) that the actors are almost incidental to the moral crisis beating you over the head. It's too bad; there's something here that filmmakers Stephen Frears or Neil Jordan — with Mortensen's aid — probably could have knocked out of the park. But not this year.

Also opening: The Bollywood Memento rip-off — complete with amnesia, tattoos, Polaroids and everything — Ghajini; and the slice-of-arty-20-something-life Let Them Chirp a While.

THE BIG LOSER: N/A, unless you count us.

THE UNDERDOG: There's not so much to recommend here, either, so let's just suggest once again: If you haven't seen Synecdoche, New York, it's time. And even if you have, a second viewing of 2008's best film can't hurt.

FOR SHUT-INS: Now we're talking. New DVD's this week include the Shia-running-for-his-life thriller Eagle Eye; the underrated Keira Knightley drama The Duchess; Ricky Gervais's abortive big-screen breakthrough Ghost Town; Nick Broomfield's terrific narrative feature debut Battle For Haditha; and Alan Ball's notorious piece of shit Towelhead. Happy New Year — it can only get better from here.

But what happened? There's plenty of finger-pointing to go around, but none of it in Viggo's direction:

· Blame Warner Bros.: Pundits were optimistic about his supporting turn in Appaloosa, the Ed Harris-directed Western that Warner attempted to platform opposite The Duchess in mid-September. It fell off not only moviegoers' radar but the entire box-office (and Oscar-season) map a few weeks later, expanding to 1,000 screens and getting pummeled by the likes of Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Religulous and Rachel Getting Married. Expect Warner to redirect whatever Academy screeners it had whipped up into retail when the DVD is released Jan. 13.

· Blame Harvey: While a handful of unlucky staffers packed up their desks, the Weinstein Company cleared even more budget space by tossing a collection of '08 releases into storage. Among them: The much-anticipated (and arguably unfinished) Cormac McCarthy adaptation The Road, featuring Mortensen as a father struggling through an ashy post-apocalyptic wasteland with his son and a shopping cart. It was likely the actor's best shot for a 2008 nod, and now — with literally no other Viggo films in development for next year and the Weinsteins on a little more stable footing after The Reader release squabble — it becomes his best shot for 2009.

· Blame ThinkFilm: The indie distributor had the Holocaust drama Good — of which Mortensen is reportedly most proud — in its queue for the end of the year before financier David Bergstein's wheels flew off last summer. Think has battled back to the extent it can, getting Good in theaters today, just in time for an Oscar qualifying run. But despite its campaign prowess (and success) as recently as last year, the money and time aren't there to push Mortensen to the kind of visibility required in a tough year for Best Actor hopefuls. Which reminds us:

· Blame Mickey Rourke, Sean Penn, Frank Langella, Clint Eastwood, Brad Pitt and Richard Jenkins. The six front-runners for this year's Best Actor prize love Mortensen as much as the rest of us. That doesn't mean they wouldn't run him over in their crowded campaign bus before letting him on, Holocaust movie or not. There's always '09.

Mortensen adores Good, which ThinkFilm plans to release by year's end. But the film is directed by Brazilian director Vicente Amorim, who is not in the Academy directors' club.

Mortensen's third fall pic, John Hillcoat's film version of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel The Road, wasn't ready for the film fests. The 2929 Entertainment pic is set for release November 26 by Dimension/MGM, which suggests that despite its literary pedigree (and the Oscar Best Picture win for No Country for Old Men, based on McCarthy's book), the film may not be on Harvey Weinstein's Oscar must-push list.

Nevertheless, Hillcoat's follow-up to his bleak, brilliant Aussie Western The Proposition got a once-over in New York Magazine's fall preview issue, with Hillcoat indirectly slagging the likes of Cloverfield ("We wanted something more resonant than, you know, the Statue of Liberty cut in half") while keeping mum on Viggo's performance as a father dragging his son through the ashy aftermath of apocalypse. Until we can judge for ourselves, we have the stills above to turn us on/off. Correct us if we're wrong, but like another pivotal dramaturgical maxim of our era, no one we know ever won an Oscar after going "Full Shopping Cart."

• Awards Season Watch: Mortensen Trifecta [Thompson on Hollywood]
• Dossier: John Hillcoat [NYM]