August: Osage County , co-starring Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts (it premieres at this month’s Toronto International Film Festival and opens commercially in December). Martindale plays the needling secret-keeper Mattie Fae, a role that, sight unseen, has industry observers predicting an Oscar nod. It may have taken a while, but Margo Martindale is finally experiencing the ultimate victory of the underappreciated character actor: that moment when she becomes a household name. —Christopher Kelly

6. The Dark Side of The Mood

Ah, concept albums. Austin’s gloomy, verbose indie rockers Okkervil River have made a lot of them, dating back to 2005’s Black Sheep Boy . Yet the group’s most enduring numbers—“Pop Lie,” “Lost Coastlines,” “Plus Ones”—are largely unrelated to their thematic surroundings. Memorable songs are such rare and magical things; why hang even more constraints on them? Still, front man Will Sheff can’t help himself. The Silver Gymnasium (ATO) is all about the tiny town of Meriden, New Hampshire, where he grew up. Sheff is not a lighthearted soul; he seems to feel everything intensely. You get the sense—hell, hearing these songs, you know—that his upbringing was not an easy one. “It Was My Season” and “Where the Spirit Left Us” imaginatively capture the high-wire terrors of young relationships (“Only wary in our lives, open-eyed and half-ashamed”), while the album’s impressive opus, “Down Down the Deep River,” powerfully evokes childhood fears of the unknown. But the bolero-like builds and overwrought finishes of virtually every song grow tiring, and as with a small town, much here feels cloistered and secretive. Unlike, say, Randy Newman’s Good Old Boys , another album focused on a specific region, there aren’t enough universal truths offered to make Sheff’s world really come alive. —Jeff McCord