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By KAREN WILKIN

Boston, Washington and London

This year marks the 177th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Degas (1834-1917) and the 94th of his death—hardly milestones. Yet this fall, three separate Degas exhibitions were inaugurated at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Phillips Collection, Washington; and the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Whatever provoked this concatenation, anyone who cares about the work of this most enigmatic and, arguably, most inventive of the Impressionists—certainly the most eloquent draftsman—should rejoice. Each exhibition focuses on a slightly different aspect of Degas’s oeuvre: nudes, themes and variations, representations of movement and the ballet; together, they offer a wide-ranging overview of his evolution and his obsessions.

The wonderful “Degas and the Nude,” conceived by George T.M. Shackelford of the Boston MFA and organized by him, with Xavier Rey of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, turns out, surprisingly, to be the first museum study of the theme. The show begins with fastidious drawings from the model and after Old Masters, made in the 1850s during a youthful Italian sojourn, and preparations for early history paintings, made in the 1860s. It goes on to explore works made from the 1870s to about 1911: ferocious monoprints of brothel scenes, their brutal images wrenched up out of darkness; intensely observed drawings; vibrantly hued pastels; roughly modeled sculptures; and sketchy canvases of bathers. We watch Degas abandon an idealized past for the gritty present, shifting his attention from invented scenes of remote history to seemingly stolen observations of women of his own time at their daily routines.

Works by older artists whose example reverberated with Degas provide a context: paintings by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Eugène Delacroix, Francisco Goya and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, along with Japanese prints and a sampling of the efforts of the artist’s friends and near-contemporaries, including Auguste Rodin, Pierre Renoir, Mary Cassatt and Gustave Caillebotte. Degas’s potent influence on younger painters is attested to by works by Paul Gauguin (whom he actively supported), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard. Yet Degas’s astonishing late bathers, urgently stroked in lushly colored pastel or broadly scumbled in a restricted palette of oil paint, are as radical as anything produced by the younger generation. His images of absorbed women, caught unaware from unexpected points of view, often seen from the back and/or abruptly cropped, are as much about daring formal relationships as about the body.

Mr. Shackelford alerts us to persistent poses first announced by the female victims in the aspiring young Salon painter’s “Scene of War in the Middle Ages” (1863-65) and reprised in casual views of women bathing, combing their hair and drying themselves, after 1874, when Degas began exhibiting with the independent artists labeled “Impressionists.” He returned frequently to certain postures, tracing, reversing or multiplying them, describing them with incisive line or treating evocative, often off-balance movements, viewed from destabilizing angles, as near-abstract elements among blocks of color or vigorously scribbled patterns of cloth, wallpaper or upholstery. Poses and gestures change meaning, from an expression of torment in “Scene of War” to the benign motion of a bather wringing out her hair. Similarities reveal themselves among works as disparate as a rough-hewn monotype of a prostitute scratching her buttocks and an unfinished canvas of nude bathers in the sea. The results can be so intimate that we feel like voyeurs or, alternatively, aggressively confrontational, but Degas’s engagement with the expressive possibilities of a glimpse of an apparently unposed, unclothed body remains constant.

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Repetitions and variations are the subject of “Degas’s Dancers at the Barre: Point and Counterpoint.” The heart of this small, thoughtful show is the Phillips’s own eponymous canvas (begun before 1884, revised c. 1900), a startlingly pared-down painting nominally about two women stretching that resolves itself as a tall rectangle slashed diagonally into a radiant red-orange wall and patchy salmon floor, overlapped by the floating blue semicircle of the dancers’ tutus. Placing this remarkable image near a more naturalistic, closely related drawing (c. 1900, from the National Gallery of Canada) and an earlier nude study of one of the poses, from a private collection, illuminates Degas’s obsessive revisitation of the image, as he suppressed anecdotal specificity to emphasize intense color and the essential elements of structure.

Similar comparisons are made by other works in various mediums, most impressively by the pairing of “Ballet Rehearsal” (c. 1885, given by Duncan Phillips to the Yale University Art Gallery) with a charcoal and pastel version of the motif (1900-05, from the MFA, Boston) made when Degas no longer attended performances or watched rehearsals, but relied on memory and his own work. Both images are long horizontals divided by a column, with tired dancers on a bench on the right. In Yale’s picture—obviously a composite of disparate observations—a row of surprisingly distant, small figures at the barre expands the space on the left; that side of Boston’s friezelike drawing is occupied by large dancers close to us, paradoxically making the invented image more immediate.

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The Phillips show prepares us for the Royal Academy’s “Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement,” organized by Richard Kendall and Jill Devonyar. It’s not their first examination of the subject, but they approach it freshly, through a selection that includes some superb, less familiar works by Degas. Their persuasive thesis is that Degas, like many of his generation, was fascinated by the new medium of photography—he took photos himself—and that photographic precedents and conceptions, such as Etiènne-Jules Marey’s and Eadweard Muybridge’s dissections of movement, inform his work.

Many of the show’s photographs and period film clips are extremely informative and apposite, but a plethora of animations and enlargements of still photos, among other bells and whistles, seems like a concession to short attention spans. Degas’s work speaks eloquently to the thesis, with its emphasis on contingent, in-between, imminent poses that are simultaneously redolent of past and future states. Witness an astonishing charcoal drawing, c. 1880-85, full of pentimenti and reconsiderations, of a dancer, arms flailing as she prepares for an “inside” turn; she spirals away from us, limbs extending to the corners of the sheet, unanchored, unstable, turning inert paper into pregnant space. The 1915 film clip that closes the show, however, requires no justification. Sacha Guitry surreptitiously filmed the octogenarian painter, who had refused to take part in a project documenting senior artists, as he walked on a Paris boulevard, two years before his death. Seeing the slim, erect, white-bearded Degas emerge from the crowd and walk slowly toward us, before moving out of the camera’s field of vision, is deeply moving. So are the three very different exhibitions organized in his honor this fall.

Ms. Wilkin writes about art for the Journal.

Watch a clip from the film ‘Contraband’ starring Mark Walberg. (Video; Universal Pictures)

Only one thing moves slowly in “Contraband”—a container ship whose cargo includes a potential fortune in counterfeit bills. Everything and everyone else hurtles along at breakneck speed, leaving no time to dwell on the standard-brand plot, or the surfeit of events—including an episode of being buried alive—that could fill three more movies. Yet the pounding pace is matched by perfect clarity; you really do understand what’s going on, and come to accept all sorts of preposterous stuff as perfectly plausible. This is an uncommonly well-crafted action adventure, or an action misadventure, given how much goes wrong for the resourceful hero. It’s a genre film, not great art, though there’s a good joke about art—a pricey piece of action painting, appropriately enough—but it’s a thoroughly satisfying entertainment, and, in this season of lowered expectations, a nice surprise.

Mark Wahlberg is Chris Farraday, a master smuggler gone straight and determined to remain so; his performance is a masterly display of quick intelligence, easy warmth and cool authority. Ben Foster makes Chris’s friend Sebastian hard to read—intentionally and intriguingly so. Giovanni Ribisi’s psychopathic thug, Tim, has a chillingly pinched voice. Kate Beckinsale is strong and yet vulnerable as Chris’s wife, Kate. (How did they think up her name?) Caleb Landry Jones is Kate’s kid brother, Andy, a hapless fool who sets the plot in motion by forcing Chris to make one more smuggling run out of love for his family. (I told you the plot is generic, but did I say it doesn’t matter?) To prepare for the fateful run, Chris rounds up a team of trusted professionals, à la “Ocean’s 11,” but they’re grizzled merchant sailors on a container ship, under the command of J.K. Simmons’s malign Capt. Camp, that shuttles between New Orleans and Panama.

A container ship turns out to be a terrific place to shoot part of an action movie. At least it is for the adroit director of this one, Baltasar Kormákur, and his cinematographer, Barry Ackroyd. (The film editor was Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir.) Shooting aboard ship means giving the audience a chance to see colorful men who know how to do skillful things, and who do them with machines that fill the screen commandingly. (Watch out when a loss of hydraulic fluid sends the ship out of control.) Container ports prove impressive too, what with their giant cranes and controlled tumult. The density of detail is extraordinary throughout—police cars flashing their lights like swarms of fireflies in the New Orleans night; the labyrinthine slums of Panama City; a psychotic counterfeiter’s lair (when this guy says he’s thrown someone to the wolves, he isn’t speaking metaphorically); the fine points of counterfeiting. (If you plan to print your own money, make sure you do it on starch-free paper.)

“Contraband” was written by Aaron Guzikowski, Arnaldur Indridason and Óskar Jónasson. It’s an English-language remake of “Reykjavik-Rotterdam,” an Icelandic thriller in which the director—who was born in Iceland—played Mr. Wahlberg’s role. Of the Icelandic films that Mr. Kormákur has directed, I’ve seen only the creepily intense and extremely accomplished “Jar City”; he has also done a couple of English-language films that haven’t set the movie world on fire. This one, however, should do very good things for his international career. His touch is sure in the action sequences, and he’s willing to dial the action back at crucial junctures for intimate encounters involving Chris, his family and his incarcerated father. Instead of slowing the film down, these scenes enrich it. There’s nothing like emotional substance, even in an ostensibly unsubstantial thriller.

‘Joyful Noise’

Watch a clip from the upcoming film ‘Joyful Noise’ starring Queen Latifah and Dolly Parton. (Video: Warner Brothers)

The members of the poor, mostly black church choir at the center of Todd Graff’s would-be inspirational film lift their voices in song that makes you smile, and squander their voices on dialogue that makes you cringe (but also smile in oddly pleasurable disbelief). Queen Latifah’s Vi Rose Hill and Dolly Parton’s G.G. Sparrow have conflicting notions of how the choir should go about winning the National Joyful Noise Competition, which is the movie’s pretext for everything that happens after the first two minutes. Vi is a traditionalist, while G.G., the church’s longtime benefactor, wants to shake things up. Feel free to guess which view prevails.

One of the movie’s distinctions, if that’s the right word, is its disdain for any details that might interfere with the musical numbers. The people who made it know we already know the hoary plot: There’s a competition, they’ll win the semifinals, then they’ll go from their humble town in rural Georgia to glamorous Los Angeles and win the finals, though not without some cliffhanging complications. As a result, suspense plays second fiddle to the music, which is a good thing, since the music is pretty great, though also to the two leading ladies’ store of folk wisdom. That’s no so good, since Vi makes such statements as “I swear your train of thought makes all local stops,” and G.G. issues such warnings as “tryin’ to fool me is like tryin’ to sneak sunrise past a rooster.”

Another distinction is the movie’s willingness to address Ms. Parton’s physical appearance by referring to it directly. “I am who I am,” G.G. declares, to which Vi replies: “Maybe you were five procedures ago.” Ms. Latifah’s vibrant presence owes everything to her verve and vocal cords. When Vi lets loose with the gospel strains of “Fix Me,” gorgeous music fills the air and all’s right with the movie and everything else. The cast includes Romeo and Juliet surrogates played, and ardently sung, by Jeremy Jordan and Keke Palmer, and Kris Kristofferson doing one of the weirdest cameos in movie history.

‘Pina’

A couple of weeks ago, after Wim Wenders’s 3-D film about the late dance icon Pina Bausch had already opened in New York, the Journal’s dance critic, Robert Greskovic, wrote about it in detail. Now that “Pina” is in limited national release, as of Friday, I’ll add a few words of my own—not so much as a critic, though I do want to discuss the use of 3-D, but as someone who has viewed Bausch’s theatrical works over the years with a mixture of excitement and bafflement.

Sundance Selects

Ditta Miranda Jasjfi in ‘Pina.’

First the technology, which enhances its subject as cinema technology rarely does. Using 3-D was a stroke of genius, but only because it’s been used in such a self-effacing way. The sense of a proscenium is preserved, more or less, yet the invisible wall that stands between the camera and the dancers in most dance films disappears in this one. The 3-D camera gets close enough to the dancers to make them corporeal, and place them in tangible space, yet never intrudes on their dance.

As for the substance, Mr. Wenders manages a phenomenal trick of demystifying his subject (who died shortly before the film went into production) and preserving the profound mysteriousness of what she created. Pina the icon becomes Pina Bausch the enigmatic provocateuse who tells one of her dancers, “Don’t forget, you have to scare me,” and tells another, “You’re just going to have to learn to get crazier.” The images captured by the film—dancers in theatrical sets, dancers in surreal exterior settings—are deeply scary for their loneliness and pain, and crazily thrilling for the intensity of their joy.

DVD Focus

‘The Fighter’ (2010)

Mark Wahlberg had long championed this story about boxing in a blue-collar Boston family, and then, when financing finally came through, chose to play the role that’s initially distinguished by its passivity. He’s Micky Ward, a fighter who’s become a punching bag, but supports his family by absorbing physical punishment. Christian Bale is his trainer and half-brother, Dicky Ecklund, a wild-eyed, crack-addicted caricature of the boxer he once was. David O. Russell directed a superb cast that includes Melissa Leo as the family matriarch and Amy Adams as Micky’s tough and fearfully tender girlfriend.

‘Laurel Canyon’ (2002)

Kate Beckinsale plays opposite Christian Bale in Lisa Cholodenko’s pleasantly time-warped romantic comedy, set in a Los Angeles canyon where hippie culture survives in modern dress. She’s Alex, a beautiful young scholar and the fiancée of Sam, an earnest young psychiatrist who’s more vulnerable than Alex knows to the ministrations of Natascha McElhone’s resident physician from Israel. The movie’s high point—its very high point—is Frances McDormand’s sensational performance as Sam’s mother, Jane, a pansexual record producer who can’t suppress a nervous giggle when she introduces her strait-laced son to a gaggle of indolent musicians.

‘Bringing Down the House’ (2003)

Queen Latifah is Charlene, a lusty prison escapee who employs an Internet ruse to invade the home of Peter Sanderson, a repressed lawyer played by Steve Martin. Don’t expect too much of Mr. Martin in this sloppy sitcom, but do expect to be seduced and entertained by Ms. Latifah. Full-figured, amply-fleshed and almost preternaturally—though not groundlessly—self-confident, this rap star turned actress turned movie star makes the most of every moment on screen. She doesn’t steal scenes; she simply dominates them. Adam Shankman directed from a script by Jason Filardi.

Write to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com

By JOHN JURGENSEN

The “Paranormal Activity” horror-movie franchise is known for its shaky-looking, faux-realistic “found footage” documenting gruesome events. The three “Paranormal” movies, made on small budgets and designed to look like they were filmed by amateurs, have grossed about $300 million and spawned a host of big-screen imitators. Now, the creators of the franchise are trying the formula again—this time, on TV.

With creepy story lines and frenetic camera work, “The River,” a new series premiering Tuesday on ABC, was co-created by Oren Peli, the director of the first “Paranormal” movie. How it fares on a network of high-gloss dramas such as “Grey’s Anatomy” will be a gauge of whether found footage is a viable genre for TV or a passing gimmick.

The plot revolves around the disappearance of Dr. Emmet Cole, the star of a fictional TV nature show. His wife and son go hunting for him on the Amazon River with a camera crew in tow. They discover Emmet’s deserted vessel and some abandoned video footage that shows him tangling with a bloodthirsty spirit, which then proceeds to menace the rescuers. Much of the plot is captured in a documentary style now familiar from reality television, but during bursts of action, hand-held cameras whip around, fall to the ground and jostle after characters down inky passageways.

The show’s most famous name—executive producer Steven Spielberg—is omitted from some promotional posters and ads, bolstering the show’s faux-documentary mystique. Mr. Peli and his producers brought “The River” to Mr. Spielberg’s DreamWorks studio as a movie concept, but developed it as a TV series at Mr. Spielberg’s suggestion.

ABC describes “The River” as “an experiment.” Channing Dungey, senior vice president of network dramas, said the show’s creators were careful to avoid an overdose of shaky video and skewed angles that might be “off-putting” to a mainstream audience. She said the network hopes “The River” will lure more young viewers, especially males, to its existing female-skewing audience.

There are risks, including whether audiences will tire of the approach. “It’s one thing for it to sustain a 90-minute movie, it’s another for a longer-term series,” says Dave Campanelli, senior vice president, national broadcast, for ad-buying firm Horizon Media.

ABC ordered an eight-episode season, rather than the traditional 22 episodes of a typical prime-time series. Ms. Dungey said this was partly to test a model favored by cable networks, where shorter seasons can be more conducive to “tightly woven” narratives.

Executive producer Zack Estrin (“Prison Break”) says that the found-footage style heightens the show’s scares and helps make the characters more realistic. To generate enough material for the editing room, some scenes had to be captured on up to 12 cameras. “We had to throw out a lot of our tricks, things like polished prose or jokes that were too cute—anything that smacked of the writers’ shadows on the wall,” he said.

Mr. Peli famously shot the first “Paranormal Activity” for about $10,000, but the found-footage style didn’t translate into an inexpensive TV show. The money saved on skipping computer-generated monsters, for example, was shifted to other pricey budget items, such as shooting in Hawaii with a relatively big cast. “Our pilot [episode] cost more than double what [Mr. Peli] ever spent on any of the ‘Paranormal’ films,” said writer and executive producer Michael Green, who also worked on the fantasy series “Heroes.” “It takes quite a bit of manufacturing to make a show look spontaneous.”

Write to John Jurgensen at john.jurgensen@wsj.com

By JACK FLAM

In the U.S., billions of dollars are spent annually on art. For the art market to thrive and remain healthy, both buyers and sellers must have confidence that the objects they trade in are authentic.

There are two main ways of protecting the integrity of an artist’s output: the authentication board and the catalogue raisonné.

An authentication board provides timely opinions to potential buyers and sellers. In some cases, as with the recently disbanded Andy Warhol authentication board, people who submitted works have had to agree to have them stamped as “Denied” if they were rejected. This is in effect a way of policing the market.

A catalogue raisonné, by contrast, is a scholarly undertaking independent of the market. It is an analytical or “reasoned” compilation of all the works created by a given artist. Unlike an exhibition or book, a catalogue raisonné is not a selection. It presents the full breadth of the artist’s accomplishment, with nothing left out.

Works are submitted by individuals and institutions to a catalogue raisonné committee over a period of years. They are studied, and judgments about inclusion are made and sometimes reconsidered. Traditionally, such catalogs have been published as books, but digital versions, such as the online catalog of Isamu Noguchi’s works announced last month, are now becoming common.

In the catalogue raisonné, the works are arranged in chronological order, with entries on each work listing its dimensions, the materials it’s made from, every exhibition it has been in, every book and article in which it has been mentioned, along with what is known about its provenance. Compiling such a catalog is a meticulous process that takes many years, sometimes decades.

Corbis

The catalogue raisonné, an obscure art historian’s tool, can help determine a work’s authenticity, as in recent cases involving paintings claimed to be by Robert Motherwell.

In preparing the catalog, the authors evaluate the work in terms of three, and sometimes four, areas of inquiry. We always begin with connoisseurship, a close visual analysis of the work to determine whether it looks and “feels” like a work by the artist. We pay special attention to composition, brushstroke, color, surface, and the signature if there is one.

We also delve into the provenance, trying to reconstruct the ownership history of the work from the time it is said to have left the artist’s studio. This can be a thorny undertaking. The art market is notoriously opaque, and not all owners of works are forthcoming about when and where they obtained them. Even people who have nothing to hide are often reluctant to have their names published as owners, for fear of theft or because they do not want to reveal elements of their net worth.

We look into historical context, relating the style of the work to other works by the artist done around the time it was supposed to have been created. This is important, as forgers are often unaware of the precise times that an artist’s style changed.

When necessary, a fourth kind of inquiry is undertaken by a forensic scientist, who can provide valuable information visible only to sophisticated analytical tools such as electron microscopes. Recently, for example, the Dedalus Foundation, which I head, came across some questionable works claimed to be by the Abstract Expressionist artist Robert Motherwell that forensic testing revealed to contain deeply embedded layers of paint that had not come into use until well after the dates on the pictures, and that employed other materials and techniques foreign to Motherwell’s practice. But because disclosing such information might provide a roadmap for future forgers, most catalogue raisonné projects do not give detailed reasons for a work’s exclusion.

Catalogues raisonnés are compiled to provide a definitive corpus of the artist’s work for scholars. But the information in them is of great interest to collectors and dealers as well. Just as important is the information that is not in them—the works that have been excluded because the authors do not believe them to be by the artist.

The high prices paid for pictures painted by major Abstract Expressionist artists, and the works’ relative scarcity, have created a hothouse environment for the production of fakes. The authenticity of the artworks being sold today must be dependably protected, or we risk seeing the creation of a peculiar kind of bubble in which extremely expensive works of art can suddenly become worth virtually nothing.

But since the exclusion of a work can greatly affect its market value, a good deal of pressure is sometimes exerted by owners of questionable works to have them included in the catalog. As a result, the scholarly authors of catalogues raisonnés have increasingly had to worry about potential lawsuits from collectors or dealers unhappy about the exclusion of works they own. The Dedalus Foundation was recently involved in litigation regarding one of Motherwell’s “Spanish Elegy” paintings, which it held to be a forgery. In a settlement reached two months ago, the foundation was allowed to stamp the painting with the words “not an authentic work by Robert Motherwell but a forgery,” and was even reimbursed for legal expenses.

As a result of this growth in litigation, many experts have been discouraged from giving opinions about authentication not only to the public but even to scholars studying other artists. Some artist-created foundations have entirely sidestepped giving opinions about authenticity by delaying the creation of catalogues raisonnés, or by declining to undertake supplements to already published catalogs. So far as I know, all such lawsuits have been unsuccessful, but they can nonetheless inflict an enormous loss of time and money on the foundations involved. The Warhol Foundation cited costly litigation with collectors as the reason it disbanded its authentication board in October.

There are laws, such as the anti-Slapp (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) statutes, that protect free speech for the public good. Since a substantial part of the U.S. art market is based in New York, the art community should work with that state’s legislature to find a way to strengthen such laws so scholars can express their opinions without being intimidated or even silenced by the threat of litigation.

In the long run, permitting scholars to freely publish their opinions about works of art without getting entangled in complicated, expensive and often gratuitous lawsuits will benefit history and art history. But it will also benefit the marketplace, which is best served by allowing the truth to circulate freely.

Mr. Flam, an art historian and former art critic for this newspaper, is the president of the Dedalus Foundation, which is working on a catalogue raisonné of Robert Motherwell’s work.