Perhaps fittingly, after playing for many weeks in various cities and winning a number of awards, including a Golden Globe from the most untrustworthy film critics' organization of them all, "The Artist" crept rather quietly up to this region. Also fittingly, the picture, silent and shot in black and white, demonstrates an impressive unity of style and subject, since it deals with Hollywood's transition from silent films to talkies from 1927 to 1932. In its numerous allusions to other works and in its dependence upon a long tradition of movies about the movies, "The Artist" creates a charming act of homage to the American industry.

Against the background of that transitional period, the simple story follows a familiar pattern, resembling all those versions of "A Star is Born," in showing two opposing and intertwining trajectories, the decline of one performer's career and the rise of another's, and in this instance mixing in a modicum of humor with its large dose of pathos. It opens in 1927, with the successful premiere of a film starring George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a star with Kinograph Studios; in a comic encounter he meets an adoring fan, Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), a dancer whom he sees again working as an extra in his next picture. Just as that film gets underway, the studio boss, Al Zimmer (John Goodman), announces that Kinograph will join the movement to talking pictures.

Like many other Hollywood people of the time, Valentin dismisses the new technology as a gimmick, a fad that will soon fade away. When the studio sticks to its plan, he produces his own silent movie, which fails at the box office, while Peppy Miller, whose career advances meteorically, becomes a star of the new talking pictures. Valentin's marriage fails along with his career, and he loses his money in the stock market crash; abandoned by everyone but his faithful chauffeur (played by James Cromwell) and his dog, he sinks into despair, burns his old films and attempts suicide.

In the manner of the old silent flicks, everything turns out well in the end, of course, but along the way "The Artist" squeezes every drop of emotion out of that insubstantial material. Because of its reliance on the old-fashioned cinema techniques, the picture surely never really creates any commensurate responses in the audience; instead, it mostly evokes a kind of nostalgic laughter, a comic response to the pictures of the past.

The movie in fact provides a kind of celebratory anthology of silent film methods. The acting styles, the lighting, the cinematography, the narrative methods all consciously recall a now distant past, the ancient history of the cinema. The performers convey their emotions through a number of exaggerated expressions and gestures, what Peppy Miller characterizes as "mugging" for the camera; the dashing, dapper George Valentin offers a lot of chiseled profile in the manner of the stars of that bygone era.

The picture also augments the actors' behavior with some well placed dialogue titles to explain those few bits that require more than a visual interpretation, and uses the familiar device of newspaper headlines to signal important events in George Valentin's and Peppy Miller's lives. The wipes between scenes and the frequent irising in and out to close or open a shot again repeat the techniques of silent film. Equally important, in the manner of the past, "The Artist" also features an impressive musical score, itself full of allusions; it includes not only echoes of the sprightly, bouncy popular tunes of the time, but even an outright theft of some of Bernard Herrmann's memorable composition for "Vertigo."

In addition to all that fun, the two principals really carry the movie. Handsome in an old-fashioned movie star way, with patent leather hair, a pencil mustache, and that chiseled profile, Jean Dujardin moves smoothly through all his scenes, mugging on demand, but also expressing a good deal of emotion through the grace of his gestures. Of all the actors, Bérénice Bejo suggests the very essence of the old silent flicks - her wide-eyed innocence, her extreme reactions, and a smile that simply lights up the screen sweetly sum up the genuine appeal of the good old days of the cinema.