Actions speak louder than words: that is the main thing that you must have in your head when you walk into this year’s best movie, “The Artist.”

“The Artist” centers on the life of an egocentric silent film actor, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), through the late 1920s and early 1930s and the fall of his immense popularity when the “talkies” come around. He’s told that talking movies are the future, but he refuses to take part in them, the reason for which we do not discover until the very end.

The story also focuses on the appropriately-named Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo), who wants to be a movie star more than anything else. You know, the usual Hollywood dream. She meets Valentin, in an old-fashioned meet-cute and he becomes quite taken her. He tells her that if she wants to be a star, she has to have something that no one else has and affectionately draws on a beauty mark.

Throughout the course of five years, as talkies get more popular, Valentin gets less and less famous. He becomes more and more estranged from his unhappy wife, who spends her days doodling evil mustaches on pictures of her husband’s face. Peppy becomes a huge star very quickly, and always tries to help out Valentin the same way he helped her. As the artist’s  lives spin out of control, Peppy does everything she can to save him.

Writer and director Michel Hazanavicius is a genius; he really made this look like a real old-fashioned, silent movie and I just loved it. Dujardin, an actor famous in France, is perfect as a silent-movie star. He has the looks of Errol Flynn and the comedic functions of Buster Keaton; he would have fit in easily in the 20s.  I am really hoping for him to win the Oscar for Best Actor this year because he is the one who really deserves it.

Bejo is also great in the supporting role; she easily played the part of this young, ambitious starlet who was willing to give up her career for the people she cares for. This is not the first time the actors and Hazanavicius have worked together on a project, so the director must have really seen Dujardin and Bejo’s talents for acting.

In the lesser supporting roles are equally talented actors. John Goodman (“Roseanne”) plays the grandiose film studio director like a pro, and James Cromwell (“Green Mile”) plays the loyal chauffeur so well that it’s almost tear-jerking. Perhaps the most memorable actor in “The Artist” is the little dog, Uggie. He added a comic feel and reminded me of the dog in Chaplin’s “A Dog’s Life.”

“The Artist” takes a page from every classic movie, from “City of Lights” to “Gone with the Wind” to “White Christmas” and used the silence idea to its advantage in one of the most brilliant scenes I have ever seen using sound. And the fact that it’s silent doesn’t mean it can’t be suspenseful, which it was. For those of you who don’t know about silent movies: no, it is not completely silent. There is music, just like in every movie, and it does have dialogue, but it isn’t audible.

I have exactly one criticism for the movie.  The clothes looked authentic and so did the cars and the buildings, but not the look of the actual people. Having seen of an exorbitant amount of silent movies, I know how the actors looked in that time. White, pale faces, with darkened lips for facial contrast, unevenly outlined crazy eyes. The actors in “The Artist” were a little too beautiful for that time, but it doesn’t take away from the story at all.

“The Artist” was, without a doubt, the best movie of the year. The cast was amazing, the story was too, and it really gave a feeling of nostalgia for those who love old movies.