Morgan P Salvo

Crazy Heart is this year's The Wrestler – a true character study built on pain, suffering, angst and real human emotion with a standout performance by the lead actor. Instead of over-the-hill wrestler Randy the Ram spilling his blood on the stage as he fades into obscurity we get the burned-out 57-year-old country star Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges) on a binge of self-destruction.
Blake travels in a battered Suburban performing at bowling alleys and dive bars in a string of low-paying, low-turnout gigs with pickup bands along the way. Playing a Gretsch guitar through an old Fender Tremolux amp and sleeping in sleazy motels, Blake smokes and drinks to no end. Reminiscent of such classic down-and-out country-stars-gone-bad movies such as Payday with Rip Torn and Tender Mercies with Robert Duvall, the story follows the road trip and ensuing relationships Blake handles or mishandles along the way. He constantly argues with his agent by phone and lives under the burden that former sideman and protégé Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell) has eclipsed his fame. Jean (Maggie Gylenhall), a New Mexico journalist, shows up to interview Bad and finds genuine interest in this mess of a human being. Bad, still able to score groupies, discovers hope in the awkward interview with Jean and the tables begin to turn.

Mel Gibson has been hiding behind the camera, producing and directing since starring in 2002's dreadful Signs, perhaps a wise choice since he spent equal time revealing weird religious philosophies and actively shocking us with his crazy off-screen persona. But now Gibson makes his somewhat triumphant return to the screen in Edge of Darkness, yet another Massachusetts-set crime thriller in which we're forced to spend time debating the authenticity of the actors’ Boston accents. The good news is this one is not without its merits.
As it happens, the film is a remake. Director Martin Campbell upgrades his 1985 British mini-series (which he also directed) in which a straight-laced father, an inspector of the local police force, deals with the mysterious death of his activist daughter, and the murkiness of the British Nuclear Policy.

The Book of Eli gives us yet another post-apocalyptic end of the world saga. This time, Eli (Denzel Washington) walks through barren wasteland carrying a machete and a Bible. It's almost like Eli travels in the footsteps of Viggo Mortensen, who recently set down his own apocalyptic travelogue in The Road. With the washed-out landscape, deserted and decaying skyways, junked cars, rotting skeletons and onramps to nowhere, both have the feel of post nuclear Westerns. Shot in New Mexico with the Sony RED digital camera, Book of Eli, at the very least features some impressive massacre scenes.
In Eli, due to some divine intervention, the title character must walk “west.” Referring to “before the flash,” a holy war of sorts that blew up the sun, everyone now wears protective (and sometimes designer) sunglasses and no one person under 40 knows how to read or has ever seen a television. Water is scarce and people have turned to cannibalism, but it's all about Eli and his journey. This includes fending off marauding Road Warrior-like thugs (who rape, murder and pillage around every turn), dispatching people with his mystical fighting skills, ending up in a town that resembles a post-apocalyptic Deadwood, adopting an apprentice against his better judgment, going head – to-head with an evil villain and, of course, spreading the gospel. Eli, a true Bible thumper, severs limbs and decapitates with a ninja assassin's flair while trying to remain righteous. Eli doesn't turn the other cheek, but he will chop one off.

Beginning with ultra-cool shots and dreamlike photography, Daybreakers shows promise, but with all of its flourishing potential (and tons of blood and gore) it starts to fall apart midway and never recovers. The Spierig Brothers directed The Undead, a fairly unknown and underrated Australian zombies-from-space flick, but this time the pair of sibling directors traded in zombies for vampires and daytime for night. Daybeakers is an apocalyptic vision wherein vampires rule the world that proves strong in some parts and disappointingly bad in others.
Thanks to a viral epidemic a decade ago, most of the world's population has turned into vampires (the non-sparkly, non-sexy sort of vampires), and a huge corporation oversees a sterile, clinical slaughterhouse that creates the world's blood supply. A brute-force vampire military hunts and herds humans like cattle, but still the blood supply is dwindling. Ethical vampire chemist Edward (Ethan Hawke) is attempting to find a blood substitute but it's not that easy. Without human blood, vampires are starving to death, their physical deterioration resembling bat-winged meth-heads. The covert underground consists of a few straggling human survivors wielding cross bows and shotguns.

Ye gad! Guy Ritchie made a kid's movie in the same vein as Pirates of the Caribbean. Sherlock Holmes gives the feeling of a Disney ride – this Ritchie number features uncharacteristically straightforward storytelling and zero cursing. As Sherlock homes would say, “It boggles the mind.”
In the action-packed opening scene, Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) and Watson (Jude Law) are on the tail of occult “sorcerer” Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong). Their pursuit continues beyond the grave, hampered by criminal seductress Iren Adler (Rachel McAdams) and Scotland Yard's semi-bumbling Chief Inspector Lestrade (Eddie Marsan). This is not the sort of intellectual brain teasers brought forth by of other Holmes sagas nor does it feature the super sleuthing of past Holmes performances that range from the likes of Basil Rathbone, Peter Cushing, Christopher Plummer, Nicol Williamson and even Michael Caine. Rather, Downey's depiction is a buff, brawling, self-medicating, masochistic and supremely reclusive Holmes, humorously conducting experiments on himself and Watson's bulldog.

Director John Hillcoat likes dirt. His gritty western The Proposition and The Ghost of the Civil Dead, a dark and macabre look at brutal violence in Australian prisons, both feature flies buzzing around people's heads. Hillcoat has tackled all of his movies with collaborator Nick Cave either writing the script and/or scoring the film's music and now they undertake another dismal worldview in The Road, Cormack McCarthy's (No Country for Old Men) desperately bleak saga of the last men (and women) on earth.

Judging from the previews, Armored looked destined to deliver high-octane thrills. Instead, we're handed a weakly written and simple-minded heist movie that wants us to believe it's a character study. The intro begins with sad tremolo guitar that attempts to induce despair and sincerity, trying to resemble “indie cool” and something heavier than it is. It's nothing short of boring. I needed a thick shell of armor to protect me from the banality.

According to the notorious ninja website (realultimatepower.net), “Ninjas are awesome; they cut off heads – they flip out and kill people.” In the case of Ninja Assassin, they also sever main arteries, hack off limbs and entire mid sections causing torsos to spurt towering fountains of blood. There is enough blood pumping out of veins in this movie to fill an aquarium tank at SeaWorld.
Brought to you by the same team as V for Vendetta (produced by the Wachowski bros and directed by James McTiegue), the plot is simple with the opening delivering the best scene. The Yakuza gang delinquents suffer a collective blood-spewing, decapitation death at the hands of an invisible knife-wielding foe. Later, Interpol agents in Berlin learn that demon ninjas are to blame, and the biggest, baddest-ass of them all is Raizo (played by Korean pop star Rain).

Somehow, the filmmaking duo that brought us Fargo, No Country For Old Men and The Big Lebowski managed to sneak a movie under the radar that has the feel of an instant art house classic. Simply put, A Serious Man is the best movie I've seen this year. Stemming from all things Jewish, Leave it to Beaver and Middle America circa 1967, the Coen brothers have executed a comic masterpiece.
While opening credits snap to the drumbeat of Jefferson Airplane's “Somebody to Love,” we zoom through an ear cavity of a kid listening to a transistor radio during Hebrew school. And you might guess that this is going to be another bizarre ride on the Coen Bros Express. But it's not as weird as it is simplistic, a meticulous tale that's taken to every inch of its breaking point.

OK, let me say this right off the bat: The Fourth Kind is the biggest hoax of the year. Immediately raising the bar for believability sky high, Milla Jovovich saunters towards us in the film's opening to convey that she will be playing the “real” Dr. Abigail Tyler and that some of the “real” archival footage may prove disturbing. The movie then slams down to Earth, falling flat on its face.
Shot in Bulgaria, The Fourth Kind is basically another Paranormal Activity or Blair Witch, but with a bigger budget. Both director (Olatunde Osunsanmi) and Jovovich tell us on camera, “Here are the facts; it is now yours to decide.” The real facts are that in Nome, Alaska between 1960 and 2004 more than 20 people mysteriously died, or vanished. The FBI concluded that “excessive alcohol consumption and a harsh winter climate” were to blame for the disappearances, though a serial killer hadn't been ruled out. This still left many unanswered questions and nine unrecovered bodies. From that, The Fourth Kind postulates that Nome is the epicenter for alien abduction, and not the ET-friendly kind, but rather the murderous-evil-white-light probing kind. Phoniness, however, overrides any hope for realism.