The Magician (Criterion)

Standard list price: $29.95

Release date: Oct. 12

Ask 10 film scholars to name the 10 most important Ingmar Bergman films, and it’s quite likely The Magician wouldn’t make any of their lists. This is both a testament to the director’s career-long consistency in producing masterpieces and perhaps a grave oversight. Where anointed art-cinema benchmarks like The Seventh Seal and Cries and Whispers can today feel like leaden, portentous slogs, The Magician is both light on its feet and terrifyingly moody, more surface-enjoyable than the vast majority of the director’s canon while still managing to reinforce many of the metaphysical themes prevalent in his most humorless dramas.

The retrospective neglect of The Magician – mistranslated from its original Swedish title The Face – is doubly surprising considering the critical success of the film in its initial release, winning top prizes at the Venice Film Festival and the British Academy Awards. Stateside, however, it’s been one of the few remaining Bergman titles to not have a Region 1 release. Finally arriving on DVD via a luminous Criterion transfer, The Magician is now poised, with this exposure to a new generation of film buffs, to become the cult classic it always should have been.

Max von Sydow leads the cast of Bergman regulars as the title character, a supposedly mute conjurer by the name of Vogler, whom we first see leading a rickety caravan toward the baroque home of a Swedish consul. Charlatans and snake oil salesmen, Vogler and his team of assistants are about to put their misleading advertisements – promising legitimate mind-reading, profound illusions and the conjuring of spirits – to the test when they perform for the consul, a doctor and a police commissioner. The head skeptic is Dr. Vergerus (Gunnar Bjornstrand), whose belief in science trumps the existence of all things inexplicable or supernatural. He confronts the magician with undisguised scorn, establishing himself as the concrete-thinking nemesis to Vogler’s architect of the netherworld.

What transpires is an inspired, Gothic horror romp – but only after about a half-hour of jaunty sex comedy, courtesy of two giggly Swedish girls and the doctor’s supply of love potions and truth serums. The humor isn’t the stuff of high art, but it’s awfully funny, especially for its time, and it’s fascinating to watch a director immortalized for his unblinking seriousness working so deftly in comedic scenarios that wouldn’t be out of place in a Jerry Lewis picture. Though Bergman studies often overlook this element, The Magician is not alone in its sense of humor. It was released in 1958, a few years after Smiles of a Summer Night, and a few years before The Devil’s Eye and For All These Women Now, Bergman comedies that hardly fit the director’s cerebral legacy (and, unsurprisingly, still await Region 1 transfers).

But The Magician was also released a couple of years prior to The Virgin Spring, the most disturbing and nerve-rattling film of Bergman’s career. Changing courses mid-stream, the movie eventually wends into a groove of haunting atmospherics and spooky visual trickery as Vergerus’ entire belief system is threatened by Vogler’s apparent magic.

Lest you forget you’re watching a Bergman art film amid all the laughs and scares, The Magician is, per usual, an inquisition of God, albeit a more playful one than, say, The Silence. The movie’s metaphysical elements relate directly to the presence of an omniscient deity, and it contains lines that could just as easily been plucked from his more somber films: “God is silent while men babble on…”

Bergman himself has considered his profession to be that of a conjurer of magical images, and several astute critics have interpreted Vogler as the filmmaker’s on-screen surrogate, with Vergerus the stand-in for the director’s numerous detractors. Bergman scholar Peter Cowie, in an accompanying video essay included in the special features, argues this point while providing a trove of perceptive information on the film’s back story. Contemporary French filmmaker Olivier Assasyas offers an eloquent take on the same subject in a 1990 article in Cahiers du Cinema that’s reprinted in the booklet for this release, in which he adds that The Magician is Bergman’s “underground masterpiece.” Let’s hope it doesn’t stay underground much longer.

For the record, if I were one of those 10 film scholars ranking Bergman’s work, here would be my top 10.

10. Saraband

9. Hour of the Wolf

8. Fanny and Alexander

7. Through a Glass Darkly

6. The Magician

5. Monika

4. The Virgin Spring

3. Winter Light

2. Persona

1. Scenes From a Marriage

The Secret of Kells (Flatiron Films)

Release date: Oct. 5

SLP: $21.49

I won’t make any friends with this review, but I found this lovable animated feature to be an out-and-out bore. Achieving early prominence with an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature long before it was distributed to the majority of the public, The Secret of Kells has quickly become a cult favorite for its crude yet dazzling animation style -- an anti-Pixar, anti-3D throwback – as well as its seemingly epic story. It’s a Tolkeinian fantasy, rooted in Celtic mythology, about a 9^th-century boy who becomes the proverbial Chosen One when a master illuminator needs his help to save a monastery from marauding Vikings. This bookish adventure is all a bunch of talky yada yada yada made only slightly engaging by the admittedly unique and disjointed animation. But it’s troubling when a 75-minute cartoon feels like it’s taking three hours – despite, or perhaps because, of the fact that there’s enough material in this film to comprise three features.

I Am Love (Magnolia)

SLP: $20.99

Release date: Oct. 12

To best approach Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love is to look beyond cinema. Channeling the emotional extremity of Italian opera, the layered structure of classic symphonies and the detailed sweep of the Russian novel, this torrid peek into the personal affairs and betrayals of a crumbling bourgeois family chastises its wealthy industrialists while providing one of them with a painstaking exit strategy. From the movie’s opening tableau – a lugubrious, snow-capped gathering at Milan mansion in which the Recchi family’s oldest industrialist will retire and name his successor – through the start of an unpredictable affair, a passionate respite in London, an unspeakable tragedy back home and finally a phoenix-like rise from the family’s metaphoric ashes, I Am Love lives up to its boldly presumptuous title. Cooking scenes are filmed like sex scenes, and the sex scenes are presented as if sex had never been filmed before. Guadagnino has the chutzpah to cut away from his poetic montages of fragmented, scintillating flesh to show us the steamy flora and fauna of the surrounding land, a gesture that could have been a corny attempt at soft-porn impressionism but instead suggests the epic totality of the characters’ actions. I am Love’s plot is a succession of unpredictable game-changers, and its bravura style pays homage to a century’s worth of Italian art while charting a new, inspirational path forward. And as for Tilda Swinton, speaking fluent Italian in the leading role? She’s simply a revelation.

The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (IFC)

Release date: Oct. 5

SLP: $14.99

When something is hyped as being one of the grossest, sickest, most vile things you’ll ever see, you should be wary – not because you may end up losing your lunch in the aisle of the cinema (or in this case, in the discomfort of your own home) but because you’ll probably be disappointed at the banal tameness of it all. Tom Six’s The Human Centipede (First Sequence) is one of those movies, a Z-grade schlock-horror picture about a mad German doctor (Dieter Laser) who sews together three tourists, mouth-to-anus, to form the titular experiment. The result is unpleasant to look at, to be sure, but it’s devoid of artistic merit, and it’s no more vomit-inducing than countless snuff offerings from Mondo Cane to Herschell Gordon Lewis’ oeuvre to any number of war films. Those expecting the film to go anywhere beyond its certifiably outrageous premise will be disappointed. Instead, watch the trailer: It’s pretty much the entire movie.

In Due Date, Robert Downey Jr. adds a heretofore-absent patina of acting credibility to the sophomoric cinema of Todd Phillips.

He stars as Peter, a harried architect with anger management issues who, thanks to highly improbable conceit aboard an airplane, winds up on a no-fly list, sans wallet, ID and luggage, and is forced to trek cross-country with stranger Ethan (Zach Galifianakis), the clingy aspiring actor whose actions prompted the onboard national-security crisis.

Combining the road-movie dynamic of Phillips’ Road Trip and the gotta-meet-a-deadline anxiety of his Hangover – Peter has to be in Los Angeles for his wife’s C-section by the end of the week – Due Date has all the elements of another overhyped exercise in juvenile frat-boy high jinks from modern cinema’s chief purveyor of them.

Indeed, a cameo by Danny McBride as a wheelchair-bound Iraq War veteran is cringe-inducing in its crude farfetchedness, and the characters’ inciting incident – a kerfuffle over the use of the word “bomb” on an airplane – was a lot more relevant a decade ago when it stymied Ben Stiller in Meet the Parents. Reality is further strained when the lead actors emerge relatively unscathed from violent accidents that would have sent Superman six feet under.

That being said, there are many reasons why Due Date is the best film Phillips has ever made, starting with the obvious: It’s his only movie yet that is as funny as it thinks it is. Most of the humor is original, inspired, and appropriately outrageous, from the brutal sucker-punching of an obnoxious child to the only masturbating-dog joke that’s worth your laughter. Downey and Galifianakis’ odd-couple chemistry is infectious, sometimes charming and refreshingly erratic, to the point where nearly every action in every scene is a surprise.

There’s also the fact that Due Date is – gasp – the most mature film Phillips has made. Ethan, with his ridiculous perm and portfolio of publicity photos, harbors an ocean of melancholy under his embarrassing Hollywood aspirations. His hurt is rooted in the recent death of his father, whose ashes he carries in a coffee canister and whose funeral in Atlanta brought him on the fateful flight with Peter. The times when Phillips chips away at Ethan’s façade to get to the raw emotion underneath find the director exhibiting rare dramatic poignancy, and it suits him well.

But perhaps the strongest advancement this film has made vis-a-vis Phillips’ previous movies is its treatment of women. In Phillips’ bromances, women are generally not to be trusted beyond their sexual functionality. It’s still a man’s world in Due Date, with Peter’s wife Sarah (Michelle Monaghan) seen only when she’s communicating with her husband. But this time, the rampant sexism that has previously turned the vast majority of Phillips’ females into bitches, strippers, unfaithful girlfriends and male-neutering domesticators is gone.

And if you need another reason to admire Due Date beyond its surprisingly smart and touching affability, wait until the last scene, which finds Galifianakis appearing on an episode of Two and a Half Men, his longtime inspiration to enter the world of acting. Let’s just say that given Charlie Sheen’s recent drug-induced meltdown, Phillips proves himself to be a shrewd prognosticator of tabloid scandal.

DUE DATE. Director: Todd Phillips. Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Zach Galifianakis, Michelle Monaghan, Jamie Foxx, Juliette Lewis. Studio: Warner Brothers. Rated: R. Opens: Friday. At area theaters.

A few years ago, when Clint Eastwood directed Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima – his sobering companion films about World War II, told evenhandedly from both sides of the conflict – it seemed the best time to reflect on Eastwood’s directorial canon.

At the time, I analyzed Eastwood’s evolution from a two-dimensional icon of Western-movie chauvinism and hard-right vigilante justice to a behind-the-camera artist with profound sensitivities toward the socially outcast and whose complex, ever-shifting political leanings belie his personal conservatism more than reinforce it.

But at least in his style, Eastwood remains to this day a conservative filmmaker – a classicist more than a modernist and a craftsman more than an auteur, whose invisible directorial hand preserves an old-fashioned Hollywood tenderness (or mawkishness, per his detractors). In an era of 3D ubiquity, CG showmanship and style-over-substance film-school maverickism, the Eastwood style of classical restraint is a vanishing art.

Yet it’s one that keeps me continually absorbed by even his lesser, flawed efforts of late – like Changeling and Gran Torino – and when the 80-year-old director eventually dies or, less likely, retires, there won’t by anyone left to carry the torch.

And though Eastwood is not slowing down his productivity just yet – he’s currently in pre-production for a J. Edgar Hoover biopic starring Leonardo DiCaprio – his touching latest release, Hereafter, is an acceptance of both the inevitable and the spiritual from an artist in his twilight years. The film finds the director peering through clouds of death for the silver linings of hope and rebirth, and it’s impossible not to read Hereafter as a meditation on mortality. It discovers a deeply rooted, if nondenominational, faith in an afterlife that may upset the apple cart of supposedly godless Hollywood liberalism – which is to say it’s the next confounding step in Eastwood’s chameleonic political-cinematic trajectory.

The presence of God’s machine in the events leading up to the characters’ investigation of the afterlife may be less easily acceptable for believers than the film’s more spiritually rosy conclusions, and the random tragedies that incite this story implicitly confront a frequent problem for theists: Why does God kill innocent people? The film opens on an idyllic beachside town, where a tsunami will obliterate hundreds of thousands of people within seconds. One of the few survivors will be French television reporter Marie LeLay (Cecile de France), whose near-death experience in the disaster will profoundly affect her life going forward.

Meanwhile, in England, a young boy loses his twin brother to another random accident brought on by a wrong-place, wrong-time confrontation with some local bullies. His attempts to communicate with his recently deceased kin lead him to a number of sham psychics. Meanwhile in the United States, Matt Damon plays George Lonegan, a honest-to-goodness psychic whose ability to communicate with ghosts developed from a childhood illness. A factory worker with penchants for Italian cuisine and Charles Dickens, Lonegan has given up his paranormal career after it played havoc on his personal life.

The three principal characters will circuitously coalesce in the final act, which I won’t

spoil. Suffice it to say that Hereafter is one of the most sensitive films ever made about the most sensitive subjects of our, or anyone’s time – life, death, faith, forgiveness, acceptance. Yes, the violins may weep at the appropriate times, and in lesser hands, this material could have been a cornball weepie.

But Eastwood’s hands are not lesser, and Hereafter is one of the year’s most exquisitely calibrated and emotionally unforgettable experiences.

Studio: Warner Brothers; Rating: PG-13; Director: Clint Eastwood; Cast: Matt Damon, Cecile de France, Frankie McLaren, George McLaren, Thierry Neuvic, Bryce Dallas Howard, Jay Mohr; Opens: Friday; Venue: Most commercial houses

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? (First Look)

Standard list price: $18.99

Release date: Sept. 14

The Killer Inside Me (MPI)

SLP: $13.99

Release date: Sept. 28

Two movies by major filmmakers exploring the minds of killers debuted on DVD recently, and the results are so divergent they might as well be filed under different categories in the video store. The first of these, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? is the latest gonzo feature from Werner Herzog, shot for about 20 bucks for David Lynch’s production company. A couple of weeks later, the more high-profile film, The Killer Inside Me, hit shelves as the second film adaptation of Jim Thompson’s pulp classic of the same name.

For many cinephiles, the Herzog-Lynch coproduction is a match made in disturbia, and indeed, the final product suggests the macabre weirdness of both. It begins as an audience-winking police procedural not unlike Herzog’s more widely distributed 2009 film, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans, with police detectives played by Willem Dafoe and Michael Pena called to investigate a murder in a suburban home. But the story soon focuses on Michael Shannon’s Brad McCullum, the killer. We discover within 10 minutes that Brad, an actor in a local production of Aeschylus’ Greek trilogy Oresteia, murdered his mother with the antique sword that served as the play’s prop.

Mystery solved, the story becomes a matter of luring Brad from his tacky Southwestern-designed home, wherein he claims he’s holding hostages. From this point on, the plot is rather conventional: The detectives interview the people close to Brad, from fiancée Chloe Sevigny to theater director Udo Kier, whose stories Herzog reveals in a series of flashbacks that lead to Brad’s psychotic episode. We learn that Brad’s mother (Grace Zabriskie) is a skin-and-bones freakshow right out of Eraserhead, concocting hideous gelatins and infantilizing her clingy son, resulting in Brad’s Oedipus-meets-Norman Bates response. An adventurous trip to a Peruvian rainforest, meanwhile, sees Brad’s conversion to Islam, as he attains a sort of a spiritual nirvana when he forecasts the accidental deaths of his companions. Later, we see him obtain the murder weapon from his uncle, a backwoods, ostrich-raising rancher portrayed by a sufficiently crazed Brad Dourif.

Borrowing liberally from the real-life story of a San Diego man who stabbed his mother with a saber in a slaying inspired by the same Greek tragedy, Herzog casts a peculiar comic spell that runs counter to the film’s now conventional Citizen Kane-like structure. Brad’s mental breakdown is also the film’s comedic apex: He shows up at an army hospital declaring that he wants to help “the sick,” an unsubstantiated request that baffles everyone at the hospital. “The sick. In general,” is his only clarification.

Shannon seems to be channeling Brecht more than Aeschlyus, acknowledging the camera’s presence in oddball self-referential asides that seek to hijack the narrative at hand. This tendency, combined with the drained-out color scheme – the film looks as if someone poured bleach all over the master print – all help to assert this minimalist anti-thriller’s compelling but limited appeal as a strict niche film for Herzog and Lynch devotees.

Herzog’s recent m.o., exemplified by My Son, My Son, is the rejection of realism. The Killer Inside Me, Michael Winterbottom’s take on Jim Thompson’s cult book, takes the opposite approach, even when the source material doesn’t warrant it. Where Herzog’s film is a bloodless psychological journey into a sick mind, Winterbottom’s Killer, about a small-town sheriff (Casey Affleck) who flies off the deep end after involving himself with a blackmailing prostitute, is a gory descent into a sick mind, garnering some controversy for the brutally realistic pummeling of its two chief female characters, Jessica Alba’s Joyce Lakeland and Kate Hudson’s Amy Stanton.

A cold-blooded neo-noir despite its sun-baked desert settings, The Killer Inside Me is a faithful adaptation of Thompson’s text with a major climactic exception: Winterbottom films the action too literally, achieving none of the existential, open-ended insanity that left the thrilling novel open to interpretation. Events that may have conspired only in the killer-narrator’s mind are rendered onscreen as fact, even if they come across as patently ludicrous. Moreover, the wicked humor that characterized the book is all but absent from Winterbottom’s morose vision. He could learn a thing or two from Herzog’s approach – movies about psychopaths don’t have to be mirthless.

Nightmares in Red, White and Blue (Kino)

SLP: $26.99

Release date: Sept. 28

Directors: Life Behind the Camera

SLP: $21.99

Release date: Sept. 21

Two DVDs about movies hit stores recently, one analyzing film from the theory and criticism perspective and the other from the production standpoint. Nightmares in Red, White and Blue narrows its focus on the evolution of the American horror film, drawing on top filmmakers and experts to help justify the artistry of a genre that for many is still rooted in B-movie kid’s stuff. Director Andrew Monument traces the lineage of the American horror film, connecting it the real-life barbarity of World War I, the apocalyptic anxiety of the Cold War era, the expansion of women’s rights, the excesses of the 1980s, the self-reflexivity of the ‘90s and the torture porn of the ‘00s. The film rightly identifies horror films as social, cultural and political barometers for the country at large, but Monument sometimes goes too far: It’s funny and observant when a mention of Richard Nixon’s silent majority segues into a discussion of Dawn of the Dead, but when a theorist considers Freddy Kreuger to be the fictional embodiment of Ronald Reagan, it’s a bit much.

Directors: Life Behind the Camera, compiled by the American Film Institute, is not so much a documentary as it is an instruction manual for aspiring filmmakers. With four hours of material stretched over two discs, this completely interactive experience lets viewers select both the topic – from “humble beginnings” to screenwriting to working with actors to financing – and up to 30 filmmakers within that topic, who dispense their knowledge in bite-sized, two-to-five-minute chunks.

Which means that if you’re like me, you’ll love the option to skip over the Chris Columbus, Rob Reiner and Penny Marshall comments and jump right to the Terry Gilliam, David Lynch and Martin Scorsese material. This is an indispensable resource.

The Oath (Zeitgeist)

SLP: $19.99

Release date: Sept. 28

The second in filmmaker Laura Poitras’ unofficial trilogy of post-9/11 documentaries, The Oath surpasses its predecessor – My Country, My Country, a film about the trials of a Sunni doctor running for office in the new Iraqi government – in its ambiguous moral center, grand sweep and savvy storytelling acumen.

The subjects are two former Jihadist warriors recruited by Osama bin Laden prior to the Sept. 11 attacks: Abu Jandal, bin Laden’s onetime bodyguard and now a chatty taxi driver in Yemen; and bin Laden’s chauffeur Salim Hamdan, whom you may remember as the first suspect to face United States military tribunals after being shuttered in Guantanamo Bay for nearly seven years without a trial. Poitras’ structure creates surprises around every corner, crafting her documentary in the shell of the thriller: She cuts between the controversy surrounding Hamdan’s tribunal and sentencing and his brother-in-law Jandal’s day-to-day rituals as an international spokesman of jihad turned Western-media-loving guru – and she also jumps back and forth in time between unearthed Al Qaida videos, her modern fly-on-the-wall reportage and Jandal’s gradual timeline of perceived change of heart after a three-year-prison sentence (during which 9/11, an attack he once supported only to later condemn, took place).

Many themes, from an examination of the Bush administration’s misguided “enhanced interrogation techniques” to a look at the rigid theologies of Sharia law, orbit around this film’s central satellite, a questioning of the possibility of change and redemption, even for one of Islamic jihad’s true believers. You leave this conversation-sparking film with a lot of questions, and Poitras, to her credit, doesn’t poison the debate with her own opinions.

Conceiving Ada (Microcinema)

SLP: $17.99

Release date: Sept. 28

Conceiving Ada, the experimental 1997 feature debut by video artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, may boast the historical footnote of being the first movie to employ virtual sets, but today Leeson’s feminist science-fiction snoozer comes off impossibly dated – the product of a mind rooted in muddled ‘80s fascinations of the omniscient perils of technology and pre-Internet global connectivity. The confounding progeny of Sally Potter and David Cronenberg, Conceiving Ada borrows liberally from both while channeling the passion and drive of neither. Francesca Faridany stars as Emmy, a modern-day “computer genius” who has developed a way to communicate with figures of the past through computer waves. She eventually manages to speak directly, and through, Ada Byron King (Tilda Swinton, compelling even when she reads a phone book, as the cliché goes), the real-life Victorian countess who first developed the idea of a computer language. The film exists somewhere between stilted historical biography and stilted tech fantasy, as emotionally hollow as it is intellectually ludicrous. This dreck is so pretentious it resembles a parody of a self-absorbed art film, its fruits hardly worth the director’s seemingly audacious labor. Microcinema’s new transfer makes this an even tougher slog. The image is absolutely execrable; most well-worn VHS tapes look better. The audio is piss-poor, and there is no option for English subtitles to wade through the aural muck.

We are willing to look ahead at future film releases, but only as far as the end of the calendar year. Even then, the crystal ball gets fuzzy, as these release dates are highly likely to change as Hollywood strategizes and counter-programs.

Nevertheless, there are bound to be Oscar nominees within these subjective picks of what will hit screens in the next three months (because there were few award-worthy movies in 2010’s first nine months).

Among the A-list directors trawling for statuettes are Eastwood, the Coens and Coppola (well, Sofia at least). And for some reason, there are several films about family members trying to clear the names of their convicted relatives. No, we have no idea why that would be. Still, here is a rundown of what to look for during that small window of time before these are all available on DVD:

Nowhere Boy (Oct. 8) -- In 1955 Liverpool, a young lad named John Lennon (Aaron Johnson) is in search of himself and his musical expression, as two women -- his influential aunt and his prodigal mother -- clash over him, in this cinematic view of the lead Beatle’s early years.

Secretariat (Oct. 8) -- What, you thought Seabiscuit had an interesting history? Wait ’til you see the biography of the 1973 Triple Crown winner, the housewife (Diane Lane) who inherited him and the trainer (John Malkovich) who took him to the winner’s circle.

Stone (Oct. 8) -- The acting lessons begin when Robert De Niro and Edward Norton hit the screen as a corrections officer and the scheming inmate who is under his supervision. Norton is a convicted murderer who has to argue his case for parole to De Niro. Hey, you pleadin’ to me?

Conviction (Oct. 15) -- Tony Goldwyn directs this tale of a sister’s (Hilary Swank) unwavering devotion to her brother (Sam Rockwell), who has been sentenced to life in prison. So she puts herself through college, then law school, in a quest to have his conviction overturned.

The Company Men (Oct. 29) -- Here’s a tale for our times. Ben Affleck is a rising corporate executive who gets laid off in an economic downsizing move, so he has to learn to redefine his life building houses for his brother-in-law (Kevin Costner).

Hereafter (Oct. 22) -- Clint Eastwood tosses his hat into the Oscars race with this supernatural thriller, with a screenplay by Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon), about three people touched and profoundly changed in different ways experiences with death. Matt Damon and Bryce Dallas Howard star as individuals whose belief in the hereafter go through a reassessment.

Fair Game (Nov. 12) -- Naomi Watts plays Valerie Plame, a CIA agent investigating the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. When her husband Joe Wilson (Sean Penn) decides to blow the whistle and write a New York Times editorial column, Plame is outed and her life put in danger.

Unstoppable (Nov. 12) -- A runaway train carrying toxic chemicals is chased by another locomotive that tries to bring it under control before it derails and spills its deadly cargo. Denzel Washington stars, in a role that sounds awfully similar to the part he played in The Taking of Pelham 123 remake.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 (Nov. 19) -- Harry, Ron and Hermione, before checking into an old age home, head off from Hogwarts to battle the Horcruxes, on their way to a final battle with the Dark Lord, Voldemort. Either to encompass everything in the series’ final novel or just to squeeze every penny they can from the book, the filmmakers have divided this last adventure into two halves.

The Next Three Days (Nov. 19) -- A college professor (Russell Crowe) makes a last ditch effort to save his wife (Elizabeth Banks), who was wrongly convicted of murder, plotting to break her out of the prison where she is incarcerated. Hey, that’s what good husbands do. Yes, it sounds hokey, but the movie is directed by Paul Haggis (Crash), so it probably plays better than its synopsis.

The King’s Speech (Nov. 24) -- King George VI (Colin Firth), whom history buffs know gained the throne after his brother Edward VIII abdicated, has to learn to be an orator, so he is assigned an Australian speech therapist/vocal coach (Geoffrey Rush), who succeeds so well that he eloquently leads Great Britain into war. (Gee, didn’t George W. Bush do the same without any speaking ability?)

Tangled (Nov. 24) -- Disney dips its toe again into the pond of animated musicals with this fractured fairy tale version of Rapunzel and her adventures with a daring bandit. Mandy Moore supplies the voice of the lass with 70 feet of magical golden hair and Alan Menken (Beauty and the Beast) supplies the original score. (Relax, Toy Story 3, the Oscar is still coming your way.)

The Fighter (Dec. 10) -- A drama about Irish boxer Mickey Ward (Mark Wahlberg), who works his way up to the world lightweight championship, and his half-brother (Christian Bale), who chooses a life of crime, then goes straight and helps Mickey win the title.

TRON Legacy (Dec. 17) -- A follow-up to the first digital live-action film, 25 years ago, in which Jeff Bridges was sucked into a world of computer programs and gladiators. Now, his 27-year-old son investigates his dad’s disappearance and is pulled into that same world. The original movie is generally acknowledged to be ahead of its time, but is the sequel behind the time?

Gulliver’s Travels (Dec. 22) -- Your English lit teacher would probably be appalled, but Jack Black has been cast as Jonathan Swift’s oversized traveler. With improvements, of course. This time around, Gulliver is a mailroom clerk who accidentally lands in the Bermuda Triangle and finds that among little people he is a relative giant.

Somewhere (Dec. 22) -- Do not be turned off by this plot, which is something about an out-of-control actor (Stephen Dorff) who has to change his lifestyle when his daughter (Elle Fanning) unexpectedly arrives at the Chateau Marmont to stay with him. Yeah, it sounds like it was tailor-made for Dwayne (“The Rock”) Johnson, but we reassessed and got interested when we heard it is directed by Sofia Coppola.

True Grit (Dec. 25) -- Joel and Ethan Coen love to defy our expectations, as they do again with a remake of the 1969 John Wayne vehicle about an aging marshal and a 14-year-old girl who travel to hostile Indian territory to track down her father’s killer. That is what the earlier movie was about. Any resemblance to what the Coens make of it -- with a cast that includes Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon and Josh Brolin -- is likely to be mere coincidence.