Movie review by Greg Carlson

Inspired by a script written by Jacques Tati, animator Sylvain Chomet’s “The Illusionist” strolls through the wistful melancholy of a bygone era. An itinerant rabbit-and-hat performer’s act of kindness for a rural chambermaid named Alice leads to a chaste and gentle relationship that parallels the timeless tug between the outdated and the modern, the past and the future. While Chomet’s resolute commitment to missed opportunities, personal humiliations, and the crushing weight of failure distinguish “The Illusionist” from the majority of animated features, cinephiles should find much to admire in the movie’s exquisite design. More contemplative than Chomet’s “The Triplets of Belleville,” “The Illusionist” is also more rewarding.

As we follow the fragile acquaintance of the older man and the younger girl, Chomet casts his adopted country as the principal character. Few films have rendered Scotland as lovingly as “The Illusionist.” Filtered through the gauze of its late 1950s settting, Chomet’s nostalgic, romanticized Edinburgh is much closer to the leisurely picnics of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” than the needle dens and filthy toilets of Danny Boyle’s “Trainspotting.” Painstakingly researched, the movie’s cityscape is a stunning simulacrum, from individual buildings to clothing styles and automobile makes and models.

Chomet constructs “The Illusionist” with remarkable restraint in an era of manic, computer-generated hallucinations populated by hyperactive, chattering beasts caroming through pinball machines built from dated movie references and shiny pop song montages. In “The Illusionist,” one is hard pressed to spot even a single facial close-up, and Chomet’s deliberate distance from the human beings has put off any number of critics quick to label the film airless, empty, and repetitive. Instead, the filmmaker mimics the wide shot staging favored by Tati predecessors Chaplin and Keaton (especially visible in a scene that alludes to the motorcar mayhem of Keaton’s 1922 “The Blacksmith” without surrendering to total chaos).

In an essay for Senses of Cinema, Tati biographer and Princeton French literature professor David Bellos complains bitterly, perhaps jealously, that Chomet has done literally “nothing” with Tati’s source material, and that the “transposition of a Tati gag from the medium of mime to the medium of animation changes its nature entirely – and makes it just a bit pointless, too.” Bellos goes on to argue that Chomet has insensibly conflated the lead character in “The Illusionist” with Tati’s signature M. Hulot persona, most probably through signifiers that include the replication of a number of Hulot gags and the film’s lack of spoken dialogue.

It must be noted, however, that the magician in “The Illusionist” shares Tati’s unaltered surname Tatischeff, not Hulot’s, and Chomet’s purpose with the character departs significantly from Tati’s careful erasure of Hulot’s “trade, profession, activity, or social integration of any sort” (as Bellos puts it). In one of the most enjoyable moments in “The Illusionist” the old conjurer hides from Alice by ducking into a screening of “Mon Oncle.” The animated figure regards his projected, live-action doppelganger with a seemingly contradictory blend of surprise and recognition, and in this single moment, Chomet reiterates his artistic prerogative to honor Tati with homage rather than mount a futile attempt at a “pure” Hulot feature.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Mike Leigh’s polarizing style moves and inspires some as surely as it alienates and bores others, and “Another Year,” the prosaically titled Academy Award nominee in the original screenplay category, falls short of several of the filmmaker’s features, including “Happy-Go-Lucky,” “Vera Drake,” “Secrets & Lies,” and cult favorite “Naked.” Divided into seasonal quadrants leading up to an inevitable winter, “Another Year” bluntly compares the comfortable existence of an aging couple with the misery and loneliness of a frequent dinner guest. Deliberately selected quotidian content shapes the narrative in a decidedly low-key portrait of domesticity, and audience enjoyment will depend on tolerance levels for the prickly and often unlikable characters populating the film.

As Tom and Gerri, Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen reek of blissful, long-term partnership. Employed, stable, and affectionate, they often entertain their sad sack pals at cookouts featuring the bounty of their well-tended and symbolic garden allotment. Chief among the losers is Mary (Lesley Manville), a souse whose dreams of romantic partnership are so desperate she openly flirts with Tom and Gerri’s thirty-year-old son Joe (Oliver Maltman). While Mary’s encyclopedia of woe charts one futile letdown after another, a visit from Tom’s old buddy Ken (Peter Wight), a wheezing, chain-smoking lush, makes her plight look – for a moment – sunnier by comparison.

No reviewer hated Leigh’s film more than the Village Voice’s Karina Longworth, whose blood-draining demolition compared “Another Year” unfavorably with “The Human Centipede.” Longworth might have a point with her criticism of the entitlement, self-righteousness and condescension demonstrated by Tom and Gerri to their less fortunate acquaintances, but she misses the man’s point when bemoaning the ambiguity inherent in the writer-director’s own sympathies. One of the film’s pleasures is the concluding scene’s alliance with Mary in her emotional isolation, which unfolds as a grim epiphany (or perhaps anti-epiphany) that would be right at home in “Dubliners.”

After spending the entirety of the narrative as an object of pity, scorn, and even ridicule, Mary sits in the midst of a group meal as the soundtrack fades to silence. Far from Longworth’s description as “totally awful,” Mary has perhaps glimpsed a kind of future to which she may resign herself. Branched into a pair of possibilities in which a tenuous connection to Tom’s quiet brother Ronnie (the excellent David Bradley) opposes the resignation of continued solitude, Leigh renders enough vagueness for the viewer to wonder whether Mary will continue to search for some elusive joy that sits just out of reach.

Additionally, Leigh shares a clue to his concerns with the cameo appearance of Imelda Staunton, whose brief screen time sets up the gulf between the well adjusted and the chronically depressed. As Janet, a patient counseled by Gerri, Staunton’s stone-faced matron is asked to rate her happiness on a scale of one to ten. When “one” comes as the practically unhesitating reply, viewers should – via Leigh’s casting choice, especially since Staunton never returns to the story – understand the implications of the tired woman’s response. Leigh drapes her grave self-assessment over the proceedings like a shroud, indicating that one should not necessarily take comfort in the cheerful banalities of the “lucky” Tom and Gerri.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

A harrowing man-versus-nature adventure in the vein of a classic Reader’s Digest “Drama in Real Life” story, Danny Boyle’s “127 Hours” imagines the ordeal of mountaineer Aron Ralston, who amputated his right arm after being trapped by a boulder while exploring some narrow rock formations near Moab, Utah in 2003. While Ralston’s survival has been extensively documented on television, most notably in Dateline NBC’s “Desperate Days in Blue John Canyon,” Boyle’s movie is as exhilarating and indefatigable as any number of the filmmaker’s previous features, from “Trainspotting” to “Slumdog Millionaire.”

“127 Hours” is a precision-machined study in dialectical opposition: external reality battles internal fantasia, kinetic action collides with punishing immobility, and the threat of failure interlocks with soaring triumph. Director Boyle embraces these polar opposites with vigor, and even though the faint of heart have been warned via numerous publicity-enhancing accounts of possible lightheadedness or nausea brought on by the film’s graphic depiction of Ralston’s self-surgery, “127 Hours” transcends the grotesque through a relentlessly life affirming posture undoubtedly affected by the fact that Ralston made it out alive against overwhelming odds.

Adapted by Boyle and collaborator Simon Beaufoy from Ralston’s memoir “Between a Rock and a Hard Place,” “127 Hours” owes much of its visceral impact to James Franco’s performance as Ralston. Franco’s confident portrayal is certainly the best work of the young actor’s career, and he covers a huge range of emotional terrain without resorting to any significant traces of self-pity. Ralston’s initial sense of invincibility, forever erased by the 2003 experience, gives Franco a terrific platform from which to probe the character. Longtime admirers of the actor will not be surprised by Franco’s reserves of humor, manifested in a series of pitch black jokes laced with cosmic irony.

“127 Hours” is redolent of Sean Penn’s film of “Into the Wild” in the way that viewers are poised to vicariously witness the mettle-testing, life-altering, and mind-bending odysseys of principal characters from the safety of a darkened theater. Both Ralston and Christopher McCandless documented enough of their ordeals to provide the foundation for the “major” motion pictures that would eventually follow, and in the case of “127 Hours,” the presence of a small camcorder opens up a tantalizing world of possibility for Boyle, who uses it as a confessional, a time machine, and a last will and testament.

Ralston has attested to Boyle’s essential accuracy in the translation of his crucible, but it is worth noting that the film’s subject did not enjoy the secret pool frolic with hikers Megan McBride (Amber Tamblyn) and Kristi Moore (Kate Mara) prior to his accident. While the truth is less thrilling – Ralston demonstrated some basic climbing moves to his chance acquaintances before they parted ways – the swimming scene is revisited in a fascinating meditation that dares to flirt with erotic reverie despite, or possibly because of Ralston’s perch at death’s door. The enveloping presence of water, a major motif throughout the movie, provides one more example of Boyle’s deployment of contrasts, as Ralston’s own dwindling supply puts his life in jeopardy. By the end of the movie, if Boyle has been persuasive, the audience shares Aron Ralston’s thirst.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Filmmaker Andrew Jarecki, whose excellent 2003 documentary “Capturing the Friedmans” examined a family destroyed by sexual abuse and child pornography, fails to translate his sharp observational acuity to drama in “All Good Things,” a fictionalized account of Robert Durst, wealthy heir to a family fortune in Manhattan real estate and prime suspect in his wife’s still unsolved 1982 disappearance. Durst, renamed David Marks and played by Ryan Gosling in the movie, was also questioned in the execution-style killing of a longtime friend and eventually served time for lesser charges following the murder of a boarding house neighbor in Texas.

Durst’s proximity to three grim cases included tabloid headline-baiting details: he posed in wigs and make-up as a woman named Dorothy and openly admitted to dismembering Morris Black (called Malvern Bump and played by an underutilized Philip Baker Hall) with a hacksaw. Weirder still, Durst – a free man today, spoke favorably about Jarecki’s film in a November 24, 2010 “New York Times” article by Charles V. Bagli and Kevin Flynn, reporters who had covered the Durst case beginning in 1999.

Lurching through decades of domestic dysfunction traced all the way back to Marks witnessing his mother’s suicide, “All Good Things” oversimplifies the relationship between David and his father Sanford (Frank Langella), a ghoulish presence constantly pressuring his son to do his bidding. When David meets the winsome Katie (Kirsten Dunst) and retreats with her to Vermont to open the health food store that provides the film with its title, Sanford tightens his grip, bullying David into the family business back in NYC. Dunst’s performance as Katie is one of the few bright spots in the movie, principally because viewers can relate to her confusion and frustration as David begins to lose his temper and eventually his mind. As soon as she exits the movie, so too does the viewer’s interest.

Vague when it needs to be concrete and detached when it should show concern, “All Good Things” frustratingly holds Marks at a distance too great for Gosling to make him a thoroughly human character. Blunt pronouncements about David’s childhood trauma are repeated to explain the character’s warped and wounded social maladjustments, but the filmmaker shares only the most superficial aspects of David and Katie’s unraveling marriage. When David’s inability to cope with his demons reaches a fever pitch, so does Rob Simonsen’s bombastic score, a dreadfully obvious wreck alleviated only by the presence of some period pop, including a trio of well-placed Steely Dan cuts.

With the exception of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, seen brushing off possible evidence of the Marks/Durst family’s seedy corruption, screenwriters Marcus Hinchey and Marc Smerling rename all the real life models, granting a greater degree of freedom and speculation than might have been used if the original missing persons case was closed. Theories are offered for all kinds of dirty deeds, ranging from contract killing to blackmail to a decoy imposter used to establish an alibi. The result is messy guesswork that lacks all the intrigue and spooky ambiguity displayed in “Capturing the Friedmans.”

Movie review by Greg Carlson

While watching “The King’s Speech,” one might occasionally wonder what present monarch Queen Elizabeth II would think of Colin Firth’s portrayal of her father Albert Frederick Arthur George, better known as King George VI to the world, and Bertie to his immediate family. Dashing movie actors have a tendency to abet filmdom’s fantasy reconstruction of history, and Firth’s handsome face provides only the first clue that movies tend to do more than simply cut out all the boring bits.

Stately and dignified if not always majestic, “The King’s Speech” inverts “Pygmalion,” stripping it of George Bernard Shaw’s keenest satire in favor of a more superficial “crowned heads are people too” theme that played just as well in Stephen Frears’s “The Queen.” Focused on the eradication of Bertie’s prominent stammer, the story traces the relationship of the royal to his Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue, played with relish by Geoffrey Rush. Commoner Logue’s unorthodoxy and insistence on informality initially vex the stiff noble, but positive results and a requisite amount of dramatic conflict cement the unlikely friendship.

Bertie is both a hesitant patient/client/pupil and a reluctant ruler, and director Tom Hooper bounces back and forth between scenes of often humorous therapeutic techniques, including one that requires the liberal application of salty profanity, and the succession crisis initiated by brother Edward VIII (Guy Pearce), who abdicated when his proposed marriage to American Wallis Simpson met with stern political rebuke. A few sticklers have criticized the narrative streamlining that suggests a much tighter cause-and-effect chronology for George VI’s public speaking remedy, but there is no question that dramatically, “The King’s Speech” works best during the scenes exclusive to Firth and Rush.

The two actors capitalize on the gulf of wealth and privilege that divides their characters from one another, and Rush’s barbs earn numerous laughs as he skewers pomposity and protocol without personally offending His Highness. When Logue finally does overstep, the tension created by Bertie’s cold shoulder gives the film its strongest jolt. On multiple occasions, David Seidler’s screenplay suggests that Logue’s lack of deference was a deliberate ploy to trigger a commanding response from the usually taciturn Bertie. The fantastic image of Rush casually slouched in King Edward’s Chair, the seat of coronation for all but two British sovereigns since 1308, offers the most visually arresting example.

Hooper might have done more to emphasize the transformative influence of the media as a conduit between governors and governed, and a few moments in “The King’s Speech” hint at the seismic impact of widely distributed sound and vision on the masses during the ascendancy of radio transmission and film distribution. In one suggestive scene, a newsreel of Hitler delivering a fiery oration impresses Bertie, who recognizes that his own speech skills pale by comparison. Once Hooper has set the stage for the predictably triumphant climax, the broadcast of King George’s September 3, 1939 address in the wake of declared war with Germany, most viewers will be ready to hang on every word. The curious might even make time to visit YouTube or the BBC’s online archive to hear the actual recording.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Unintentionally hysterical, “Country Strong” is another variation on “A Star Is Born” assembled with all the skill and depth of a third-rate made-for-cable tearjerker. A textbook case of predictability, cliché, and superficiality, Shana Feste’s movie can claim only a single asset: the decent, if not spectacular, musical performances delivered by three of the four principals. Charting the “comeback” of a substance-abusing recording artist caught between her controlling manager husband, her younger lover, and her own demons and insecurities, “Country Strong” drowns in its own melodramatic self-seriousness, from locked dressing room fits to on-stage meltdowns.

As multiple Grammy-winning country music star and slow motion train wreck Kelly Canter, Gwyneth Paltrow can’t entirely shed the elitist, blue blood, power-cleanse entitlement that has served her in a string of British-accented roles including “Shakespeare in Love,” “Great Expectations,” and “Emma.” On paper, the Canter part looks juicy, and hard-luck country singers have earned Oscars for Sissy Spacek, Robert Duvall, Reese Witherspoon, and Jeff Bridges. In each of the previous cases, however, some amount of identifiable human complexity was present; Canter remains so thoroughly opaque we have to take her word that she wants to rebuild her shattered image, since her behavior suggests otherwise.

Feste’s murky screenplay often loses track of Kelly to juggle the rivalries and recriminations of husband James (Tim McGraw, the only legitimate country music star in the bunch, in a non-singing role), rising talent Beau Hutton (Garrett Hedlund, likable) and determined ingénue Chiles Stanton (Leighton Meester, pretending to lack confidence as a performer), each of whom occasionally threatens to steal the spotlight. Many scenes almost collapse under the weight of their own shameless mawkishness, from an awkwardly laughable bedroom cold shoulder to the fluffy and symbolic quail chick nicknamed Loretta Lynn that Kelly intends to nurse to health to the contrivance of Kelly’s redemptive serenade to a little boy dying of cancer. “Country Strong” embraces every stereotype in a tight bear hug.

In his own way, Beau behaves as erratically as the boozy, addled Kelly, inexplicably flip-flopping when it comes to his feelings for “country Barbie” Chiles. Initially, he treats the shallow dim-bulb with outright contempt, mocking her beauty contestant credentials and questioning her devotion to “real” country music. Later, despite a promise of fidelity to the already adulterous Kelly, Beau finds it hard to resist Chiles’s physical charms (essentially setting up a strongly hinted-at four-way romantic roundelay that, perhaps regrettably, never comes to fruition). Feste herself cannot seem to make up her mind about Chiles, alternately painting the character as a calculating Eve Harrington and as an earnest sweetheart.

“Country Strong” also has the distinct misfortune of arriving a season after “Crazy Heart,” a superior treatment of some of the very same landscape. While both Paltrow’s Kelly Canter and Jeff Bridges’s Bad Blake must atone for their failures and transgressions, only the latter character is rendered with deep reserves of nuance and detail. All four of Feste’s core characters live just outside the grasp of verisimilitude – Chiles’s stage fright freeze-ups are notably phony. Both “Crazy Heart” and “Country Strong” feature tunes meant to exemplify the challenges and regrets of the protagonists, but while “The Weary Kind” readily communicates its unique value to Blake, none of the songs in “Country Strong” share the same kind of emblematic, self-defining importance to the frustratingly unknowable Kelly.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Hollywood mythmaking and recent political chicanery collide in Doug Liman’s fictionalized version of the Valerie Plame scandal in “Fair Game,” based on separate books by Plame and her husband, former ambassador to Gabon and Sao Tome and Principe Joseph C. Wilson. Marked by Liman’s own jittery handheld photography and the inclusion of some tense, action-oriented scenes, “Fair Game” joins a growing roster of films – both fictional narrative and documentary – critical of the George W. Bush administration’s WMD-focused pretext for war in Iraq. Nowhere near as compelling as Charles Ferguson’s “No End in Sight,” “Fair Game” nevertheless manages to communicate several points of outrage and frustration from the perspective of Plame and Wilson.

Strongly played by Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, Plame and Wilson pursue career trajectories that tax their personal time and seem to limit family involvement with their twin children. Well-connected members of the D.C. intelligentsia, Plame and Wilson are shown in early scenes conveying disgust as America prepares for battle with Saddam Hussein. While the movie pivots around the inevitable revelation of Plame’s identity and the stormy fallout, Liman juggles subplots including the domestic deterioration of the protagonists’ marriage, speculation about the involvement of the White House and Karl Rove in the decision to leak Plame’s name, and a family drama revolving around an Iraqi scientist and his U.S.-based sister.

Several writers have questioned the veracity of those scenes in which Plame’s contacts in Iraq appear to be directly compromised and even abandoned as a result of her being outed by Robert Novak in his July 14, 2003 “Washington Post” column titled “Mission to Niger,” but Liman endeavors to connect as many previously documented dots as possible, and thematically the film sticks close to the chain of events surrounding Plame and Wilson’s reaction to Plame’s blown cover. Fall guy/villain I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby (a scene-stealing David Andrews) remains the only government official held legally responsible for disseminating classified information. Libby was convicted of perjury, making false statements to federal investigators, and obstruction of justice.

Even though it remains largely unexplored in the film, the most interesting dimension of “Fair Game” concerns the extent to which Plame’s gender was used as a means to discredit her in the media following Novak’s original “Washington Post” column. Following the bombshell, Plame maintains silence even as her husband books television appearances to defend his position, and Liman shares several of the speculations leveled against Plame during the aftermath of the leak, most intriguingly that Plame somehow simultaneously held no position of real power as a C.I.A. operative but yet could still pull the right strings to get her husband assigned to a 2002 trip to Niger to investigate the possibility of uranium sales to Iraq.

Even though Watts brings tremendous poise to a challenging role that requires secrecy, discretion, and silence, “Fair Game” is more than once thrown off balance by the contrast between the tight-lipped Valerie and Wilson’s blustery verbal pyrotechnics – well-suited to Penn’s off-screen image as a frank debater. A later scene, in which Valerie visits her father (Sam Shepard in a cameo appearance) doesn’t add much to the character’s assessment of the conflict between personal integrity and loyalty to the state, and “Fair Game” concludes with more than a hint that justice was done, even if that premise is hard to swallow.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Feature film newcomer Hailee Steinfeld holds the screen with veterans Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, and Josh Brolin in Joel and Ethan Coen’s remake of “True Grit,” a sturdy piece of genre moviemaking quick to remind viewers of the enduring appeal of the Western film. Henry Hathaway’s 1969 adaptation of Charles Portis’s novel contained plenty of humor, but the Coens specialize in absurd observations honed to a razor’s edge. The filmmakers’ gift for shaping a universe from the syntactically stylized patois of its denizens has not seen this kind of workout since the invented gangland slang of “Miller’s Crossing.” Much of the dialogue is pulled directly from Portis, who imagines 1870s oral communication as the poetic “prairie Shakespeare” familiar to fans of David Milch’s brilliant “Deadwood.”

Familiar to scores of fans, “True Grit” traces the quest of fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross (Steinfeld) to find the killer of her father. Enlisting the help of a salty alcoholic, and soon joining forces with a proud, mustachioed Texas Ranger, Mattie’s horseback odyssey – and her own “sand” in the face of hardship and violence – defies the expectations of the older men en route to the creation of a thoroughly engaging Bildungsroman. The Coens have noted their admiration for Charles Laughton’s “The Night of the Hunter,” another kid’s-eye-view tale smoldering with the gothic, and the newer film’s inclusion of the hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” as an aural motif is one of several tributes to the 1955 thriller.

In a film predicated on the transactional, the Coens hold up their end of the bargain, remaking “True Grit” with all the grace notes of their signature brand of funny-bone fatalism (which runs parallel with the tremendously satisfying dialogue originally crafted by Portis). Entrepreneurial commerce, a familiar theme in the American Western, brightens the eyes of more than half the film’s characters, and many conversations hinge on negotiations related to buying, selling, or trading everything from room and board to bounty hunting services to corpses. Alongside Mattie’s literal righteous indignation at the already overburdened justice system’s unwillingness to apprehend her father’s murderer, the Coens take obvious pleasure in the ongoing hustles, haggles, and barters taken up by Mattie and just about everyone else.

Jeff Bridges, more versatile if less iconic than John Wayne, makes a terrific “one-eyed fat man” as he tries on the role that brought the Duke his only Oscar. As United States Deputy Marshal Reuben J. “Rooster” Cogburn, the trigger-happy lawman who likes to “pull the cork,” Bridges gleefully mush-mouths his dialogue to the brink of incomprehensibility. Like Wayne’s Rooster, Bridges embodies a sense of joy and merriment in the execution of his often dangerous trade. Although Mr. Cogburn’s reputation as a killer contrasts with Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski’s live-and-let-live passivity, both characters share the quintessentially Western idealism that privileges individual freedom over the restrictions of settled society.

While the Coen version is superior to the original in many significant ways, especially in maintaining Mattie’s point-of-view, a post-denouement coda depicting the heroine twenty-five years following the action distracts from the potency of Steinfeld’s work by catapulting Mattie into adulthood. Hathaway’s version, which concludes with Mattie’s touching offer to inter Rooster in her family plot (and Rooster’s comic rejoinder that he isn’t interested in moving in any time soon) preserves the character – who would appear in a 1975 sequel and resurface in a 1978 TV movie featuring Warren Oates in the role – without mourning, fossilizing or deifying him. While the Coen edition sticks closer to Portis’s story, it’s more satisfying to imagine Rooster alive, reins in his teeth, and guns ablaze.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

David O. Russell’s third collaboration with Mark Wahlberg recounts and burnishes the story of Lowell, Massachusetts junior welterweight “Irish” Micky Ward, a Rocky Balboa-like working class slugger whose family ties constantly threaten to derail his career. Hewing close to the requirements of the underdog struggle, “The Fighter” is surely Russell’s most traditional feature – seemingly miles away from the love-it-or-hate-it chaos of “I Heart Huckabees.” Closer inspection, however, reveals several of the filmmaker’s thematic strengths, most notably intellect disguised as foolishness or stupidity and the ways in which cynicism and redemption form uneasy truces.

Mark Wahlberg, whose long relationship with the project outlasted flirtations with Brad Pitt and the departure of Darren Aronofsky (who received an executive producer credit), understands Ward’s manual laborer appeal, and capitalizes on one of the boxing genre’s favorite types: the almost broken, disadvantaged dreamer capable of surprising himself with greatness. “The Fighter” even provides a two-for-one in this category, highlighting the downward spiral of Micky’s graceless, drug-addled half-brother Dicky Eklund – a one-time puncher who managed to last ten rounds with Sugar Ray Leonard. Dicky coasts on his reputation, deluding himself and anyone who might listen with talk of a comeback, even though HBO’s “America Undercover” is featuring him in a documentary titled “High on Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell.”

Christian Bale, recently awarded Best Supporting Actor from the National Board of Review for his work in “The Fighter,” plays Dicky in the kind of showy, twitchy performance that divides critics and viewers. Hollow-eyed and emaciated, Bale holds nothing back, and despite – or perhaps because of – the dire neediness of Dicky, pulls off some remarkably tricky interactions, most notably a rendition of “I Started a Joke” pregnant with the sort of false sincerity favorite sons use to bamboozle doting mothers.

Bale’s work is matched by the prowess of the frightening and fearless Melissa Leo as Micky and Dicky’s mother Alice. Alice presides over a brood that also includes Micky and Dicky’s seven sisters, a group of fiercely loyal, hair-sprayed harpies. Their palpable animosity toward Micky’s new love Charlene (Amy Adams in her best role since 2005 breakthrough “Junebug”) erupts in a handful of blackly comic confrontations in which Micky is caught in the middle. Despite being stuck with the eternally thankless supportive girlfriend role, Adams kicks her Disney princess image hard in the backside.

Amidst the thunderous turns by his co-stars, Wahlberg’s understated presence quietly and confidently grounds “The Fighter” with an element of Russell’s signature irony that casts the pugilist as peacemaker. Not everyone will swallow the late unification of Micky’s opposing camps (Mickey O’Keefe, one of Ward’s real-life trainers, is better than good simply, or not so simply, playing himself), especially in light of the brutal undercurrent of sibling rivalry that perpetually backs Micky into Dicky’s “Pride of Lowell” shadow. We know from experience, not to mention from Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides, that blood complicates relationships without regard for logic. On this count, “The Fighter” wins by decision.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The regally named Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck squanders his post-“The Lives of Others” art-house credibility with “The Tourist,” the umpteenth homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s dazzling romantic thrillers that falls far short of the Master of Suspense. Lavishly shot on location in Venice with A-listers Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie, the movie promises charm, eroticism, and action but delivers absolutely none of these things. A remake of the French film “Anthony Zimmer,” “The Tourist” inserts stultifying, unintentionally hilarious low-speed boat chases, dull chastity, rooftop scrambles, and groaning plot machinery where there should be effervescent and amorous stimulation.

The opening scenes show at least a hint of metanarrative, as Jolie’s Elise Ward is studied, ogled, and gazed upon by men on the street and hidden behind the tinted glass of a surveillance van. Studied from every angle, the mysterious Elise receives a note from her lover (a presumably clever and elusive thief named Alexander Pierce) instructing her to confuse Interpol and a gang of vicious thugs by taking up with a stranger on a train. She selects, more laughably than comically, a Madison, Wisconsin community college math teacher named Frank Tupelo (Depp), sweeping him off his feet and into a gorgeously appointed grand hotel suite as the pursuers close in.

Jolie’s experimental British accent forces her character into a state of imperiousness that prevents any real heat between Elise and Frank. It doesn’t help that the clumsy screenplay fails to include the kind of smoldering double entendre present in “North by Northwest” and “To Catch a Thief,” the two Hitchcock films (along with Stanley Donen’s own Hitchcock tribute “Charade”) that “The Tourist” aims to resemble. Instead, the sheepish Frank sleeps on the couch in his PJs, cheating the audience out of what should have been one of the movie’s certain attractions. The remainder of the film, despite a truncated wet dream and the sight of Jolie channeling Sophia Loren at an opulent ball, insists on vacuum-sealed sexlessness.

Those who plan to see the film are warned to stop reading here. An ill-conceived twist revealed at the climax of the movie represents the single-most devastating failure of “The Tourist.” The mild-mannered title character played by Depp is, in fact, the sought-after Alexander Pierce – the movie’s MacGuffin who has been hiding in plain sight courtesy of a fortune in plastic surgery. Viewers are asked to somehow believe the unbelievable. Have Elise and Frank been engaging in an elaborate role-play or is Elise, now revealed as a highly trained undercover agent, not capable of figuring out that the man she selected as a decoy is in fact the same person with whom she intimately spent the previous year?

Insulting and idiotic, the introduction of this information wholly negates every interaction between Elise and Frank that has come before. If Frank and Elise are merely toying with the agents pursuing them, why would they pretend not to know one another when they are behind closed doors? Certainly, scores of films mislead viewers in this, or similar, fashion – Alan Parker’s “Angel Heart” and Alexandre Aja’s “High Tension” are two examples. One of three credited screenwriters on “The Tourist” is Christopher McQuarrie, whose Keyser Soze in “The Usual Suspects” is a prime representation of a figure, like Alexander Pierce in “The Tourist” whose identity is disclosed as a last-minute surprise.