THE FIGHTER – david o. russell – 5.9 / 10

It’s all Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro’s fault.  I’m not positive that they originated it, but ever since they popularized it in Mean Streets, the good-for-nothing screw-up hoodlum sidekick has become an archetypal character in gritty movies about blue-collar guys from the wrong side of the tracks.  Johnny Boy, DeNiro’s character in Mean Streets, may not have been the first such character, but he was certainly the most indelible.  And ever since that movie, in any film centering around a group of male friends struggling to get or keep their lives on track, that character is bound to turn up.  Scorsese even went back to that well a couple times (with Joe Pesci’s characters in Goodfellas and Casino).

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS, PART. 1 – david yates – 6.1 / 10

That Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 is the first half of a two-film finale to an eight-film series makes it clear that this isn’t a movie that can be judged completely on its own.  Nor can it even really be understood outside the context of the larger film / book series.  If you sat down to watch Part 1 with no idea what came before, you’d be hopelessly lost within fifteen minutes.  That doesn’t make it a bad film, per se, but it does make it a very difficult one to critique since by almost all standards normally used to judge a film, this one is a complete failure.  It does very little to establish characters or even to advance their stories.  It has no real resolution.  And it certainly doesn’t follow any familiar story structure.  Nonetheless, the seventh film in the Harry Potter series is one of the more interesting blockbusters to come along in quite some time.  Even if it’s not exactly a good film, it is a very provocative one.