Can a movie as modest as this one, wrapped up in spandex, sweat and a stolen kiss to Ratt’s “Round and Round,” be last year’s best? Here is a film that, through its very intimacy, touches on money, love, dreams and death in a way that will pile-drive you through the mat. The pounder is one Randy “The Ram” Robinson (Rourke, in an astounding career revision), once a 1980s superstar but now plying his cash-poor trade in smelly veterans’ halls in Jersey. As the camera sweeps the wintry Asbury Park boardwalk, The Wrestler takes on Kazan-level poetics, the big man suddenly seeming small and fragile. All in all, a superb achievement. The disc has Bruce Springsteen’s video for his theme song (yawn) and an in-the-ring doc.

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