Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Burt Young, Milo Ventimiglia, Antonio Tarver, Geraldine Hughes
Director: Sylvester Stallone
Scheduled release: January 11

When last we saw Rocky Balboa, our prized overachieving contender (played to monosyllabic perfection by Sylvester Stallone) had prevailed in a street fight against his protégé, Tommy "Machine" Gunn (Tommy Morrison).

The Italian Stallion may have triumphed that day, but the feel-good franchise long since had thrown in the towel. Rocky V did more damage to the character's legacy than Ivan Drago, Clubber Lang, and Apollo Creed combined. It issued a crushing TKO to a collection of films that celebrated victory in the face of impossible odds, and it left a horrible taste in fans' mouths. By all accounts, the final bell had rung on Rocky.

But if we've learned anything about Balboa over the years, it's that he never stays on the mat for long. After each significant beating, the thick-skulled bruiser digs deep into his immeasurable heart to find the resolve to stand up, keep fighting and win in the end. Rocky Balboa has to be the boxer's final round. Stallone, writing and directing this proper goodbye, single-handedly infuses the film with an overpowering will to go the distance. And by every account, it is a fantastic Rocky sequel, a melancholic victory lap down memory lane for the iconic underdog.

That doesn't mean Balboa is a great movie. It has its share of flaws. Burt Young returns as Paulie, whose temper tantrums have always been a wart on the uplifting story line. Newcomer Milo Ventimiglia steps in to play Rocky's son, a Philly stock trader living in his dad’s shadow, but the underdeveloped character only shows up when our hero – now 60 and running a restaurant named for his dead wife – starts to gain a little confidence and needs an obstacle to bring him back down to earth. Here he's fighting the current champion, Mason "The Line" Dixon. But the guy gets precious little screen time; he's the least developed Rocky villain of all.

But Stallone makes enough wise decisions to keep Balboa above water. He returns to the character-driven formula of the first Rocky, spotlighting the man's emotional baggage outside of the ring. (The film contains approximately 10 minutes of boxing, which is more than enough.) Balboa generates sufficient nostalgia, lacing Bill Conti's fist-pumping score behind the familiar training montage. You'll swear it is 1976 all over again.

A candid Stallone has admitted in interviews that his dissatisfaction with Rocky V inspired him to craft Balboa, so the people's champion - and the character he's most often associated with – could exit the ring with his head held high. Mission accomplished. Sean O'Connell

Starring: Denzel Washington, Val Kilmer, Paula Patton, Bruce Greenwood, Adam Goldberg, Jim Caviezel
Director: Tony Scott
Scheduled release: January 4

The last time I could use ‘smart’ to describe a Tony Scott movie, a bathrobed Will Smith was dodging satellites and thwarting conspirators in the taut Enemy of the State. As it spun a textured man-on-the-run mystery, that ready-made blockbuster pushed the envelope of technological surveillance. Having Smith, Gene Hackman, and Jon Voight on hand certainly helped. Scott resumes his techno tricks for Déjà Vu, a police procedural with science-fiction tools.
ATF agent Doug Carlin (Denzel Washington, impressive as always) arrives at a New Orleans harbour where terrorists have exploded a ferry boat, killing more than 500 military officers and civilians. Carlin’s investigation uncovers the charred remains of Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton), an apparent bomb victim, whose body, we learn, was discovered downriver minutes before the boat blew.
That’s when things get interesting. A team of agents, led by Val Kilmer and Adam Goldberg, approaches Carlin asking for help. They’re using a government-funded surveillance system that permits them to see four days into the past. The given explanation touches on wormholes and manipulation of the space-time continuum (no, this isn’t The Matrix), but the how is less important than the why.
The investigators can’t manipulate the timeline, they can only observe (and record) the past as they search for clues. Carlin directs them to Kuchever, the loose end in his ongoing case. Pressed for time, the agents experiment by sending a written warning to the past. When that fails, they contemplate sending a human volunteer to stop the bombing.
Bill Marsilii’s screenplay (touched up by script doctor Terry Rossio) makes up its time-warping rules as it goes. First, the team can only monitor subjects in a given range. Later, Carlin can track his chief suspect (Jim Caviezel) across town, so long as he drives a Hummer with a portable time-manipulation rig. Far-fetched is a generous term, but it makes for some bang-up stunts, and Déjà Vu more than entertains as the manhunt connects the past with present day.
The movie flirts with a very serious subplot, though the reference is subtle and easy to overlook. For all its masochistic violence and blaring guns, the story finds its tension in a philosophical conundrum – if you could communicate with someone who was about to be killed, would you risk everything to warn and possibly rescue them? The question takes on new meaning with the film’s New Orleans setting, the hurricane-ravaged region still devastated after warnings went unheeded. Whether intentional or not, the subtext gives Carlin’s predicament an unexpected but appreciated weight.
As for Scott, the director reeled off a string of disappointments after Enemy, including the convoluted Spy Game and the awful one-two punch of Man on Fire and Domino. This film puts him back on track, but only a time machine looking to the future can confirm whether or not he’ll stay there. Sean O’Connell

Starring: Russell Crowe, Marion Cotillard, Didier Bourdon, Abbie Cornish, Albert Finney, Freddie Highmore
Director: Ridley Scott
Scheduled Release: January 4

Proper casting can make or break a film. A savvy producer knows not to hire Sylvester Stallone for a Shakespearean tragedy. Successful studio heads understand that the charismatic Will
Smith is the wrong choice to play a nebbish wallflower incapable of getting the girl. So someone should have objected to the casting of the versatile but intense Russell Crowe in the lively country lark A Good Year.
Nothing against Crowe. The talented actor routinely throws himself at challenging roles and rarely plays the same type twice. He has proven he can do a lot on screen, but Year demonstrates with certainty that devilish wit and boyish charm are not the sharpest weapons in his acting arsenal. Crowe is rugged but hardly warm. George Clooney could have owned this project but he’d probably demand the Coen brothers write and direct it.
Instead we get Crowe and his frequent collaborator, Ridley Scott (Gladiator), as they attempt to spin Peter Mayle’s beloved novel into a dreamy, male-oriented bit of escapism.
London stock trader Max Skinner (Crowe) sees things in monetary values and hardly finds time to mourn when his uncle Henry (Albert Finney), a father figure, passes away. Being Henry’s only known relative, Max inherits the eccentric entrepreneur’s fatigued vineyard in the south of France. The prodigal Max returns with the intention to sell, but Marc Klein’s adaptation of Mayle’s work conspires to keep the number-cruncher on the estate for a week.
Unless Year happens to be your first film, you’re likely to find the outcome of Max’s journey astonishingly predictable, so we’re meant to enjoy the picturesque ride through France’s heavenly countryside. The exquisite setting dresses up the flat, overdone fable of the workaholic reprogrammed to appreciate the good life. The lazy script takes every generic and dreadfully corny step possible, though I’m unfamiliar with the book and so unsure whether to blame Klein or Mayle.
Scott, for his part, paces Year with the buoyancy of a comedy but neglects to include any funny dialogue. The movie has a tendency to repeat what it considers jokes. Max sings Lance Armstrong’s praises every time he passes a pack of French cyclists. At least three characters overreact when they find scorpions in their bedrooms – how hilarious. And I stopped counting spit takes after I reached five.
The highlights in this exaggerated travelogue are few and far between. Feisty and sultry Marion Cotillard holds her own as village hottie Fanny Chenal, Max’s main motivation for staying near his chateau. Finney appears in flashbacks and speaks only in bite-sized pearls of wisdom. But Year lulls us to sleep as it wallows in the cultural divide (hey, Ridley, get in line behind Borat and Babel), and it systematically insults the French, the English, and Americans... and all audiences in between. Sean O’Connell

Starring: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael García Bernal, Rinko Kikuchi
Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Scheduled Release: January 11

The Bible gives us the story of the tower of Babel, the magnificently tall structure whose height was deemed offensive and impertinent by God. To punish humanity for its architectural hubris, God decided to drive a linguistic wedge between the nations of the world who, until then, had spoken the same tongue.
In Babel, directed and co-written by Alejandro González Iñárritu (21 Grams, Amores Perros), a clutch of characters from a range of cultures and walks of life attempt to build a towering film of meaning from coincidence and portent; unfortunately, in the end it is the viewer who is punished for the filmmaker’s hubris. It is, after all, a film whose director had the good sense to cast Cate Blanchett, but the inexcusably bad taste to have her then spend the bulk of her screen-time unconscious or barely coherent.
Blanchett plays Susan, a rich Californian tourist roaming around Morocco with her husband Richard (a pleasantly grizzled Brad Pitt). As their bus wends its way through the mountains, a pair of young shepherds above are testing a new rifle’s accuracy with the abandon of immature brothers. In a scene heartstopping for its matter-of-factness, a bullet smacks through the bus window, seriously wounding the sleeping Susan.
This accident ripples out through Babel’s ramshackle quartet of stories as a loose and mostly ineffective linking device that becomes more strained the further the film goes. Richard struggles to find medical care in the remote region for the dying Susan. The shepherd boys are terrified to discover the shooting has been classified as a terrorist attack by an overeager American embassy, and cops are fanning out through the mountains. Back in America, Richard and Susan’s maid, Amelia (Adriana Barraza), desperate to attend her son’s wedding in Mexico, without Richard’s permission takes the two blonde children in her charge to the nuptials in a car driven by her erratic nephew Santiago (Gael García Bernal). And, in the film’s most needless addition set in Tokyo, deaf-mute teenage girl Chieko (the disarming Rinko Kikuchi), indulges in risky, rebellious acting-out while the police keep coming around asking for her father.
Given the film’s title, language and cultural barriers make up most of its dramatic frisson, with unfortunate misunderstandings providing plenty of weighty tragedy. With all the stories happening more or less simultaneously (the timeline jumps back and forth, for no apparent reason), Iñárritu has a lot of balls to juggle; unfortunately he doesn’t seem to mind letting them fall. The editing has a jarring tendency to cut away from one story just as dramatic tension has begun to build, and so the film piles on incident after incident with little cohesive structure, turning to interminable mush not long after the midway point. Iñárritu is more skilled than this – some moments with the shepherds are wonderfully observed, and the Mexico wedding is just sheer exuberant delight. But these are exceptions, easily outweighed by the aimless drift of most of the film, especially the Tokyo sequence awash in creepy voyeurism and which drags on forever before clueing us into its connection with the shooting.
Babel has the material of greatness – vast scope, humane vision, fine actors – but sadly not the ability to make it all into something beyond mildly pretty and pretentious blather. In striving to recreate the chaotic din of a God-cursed global humanity, it succeeds only in making noise. Chris Barsanti

Starring: Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, Jack Black, Jude Law
Director: Nancy Meyers
Scheduled Release: January 4

Nancy Meyers officially replaces Sleepless in Seattle director Nora Ephron as the crowned queen of winsome, middle-concept romantic comedies.
Granted, the writer-director has been staffing a cache of headstrong and heartfelt female characters since she penned Private Benjamin in 1980. But it’s the back-to-back-to-back musings of What Women Want, Something’s Gotta Give, and her current affair The Holiday that elevate her to the summit of palatable sap.
Meyers’ screenplays light gentle fires under our hearts. As a director, she shoots very bright and clean – shadows have no place in her optimistic imagination. The only thing Meyers doesn’t know how to do is time her pleasant excursions. Women beat its one joke (a man can read ladies’ thoughts) for an eternity, and my patience eventually gave with Give. The same problem plagues Holiday, which largely entertains, but has no business being two hours and 15 minutes long.
A grass-is-always-greener concept finds workaholic women Amanda (Cameron Diaz) and Iris (Kate Winslet) trading abodes for two weeks. Standoffish So-Cal princess Amanda flees to a quiet cottage outside London, while insecure wallflower Iris hopes the warm California sun can melt away thoughts of her possessive ex-boyfriend (Rufus Sewell). Amanda enters a whirlwind romance with Iris’s ridiculously charming older brother, Graham (Jude Law). And Iris goes Hollywood by striking up friendships with two film-industry professionals – veteran screenwriter Arthur Abbott (a wise Eli Wallach) and endearing musician Miles (Jack Black).
Meyers targets (and connects with) easy jokes all age ranges can find humour in. She shoots scenic locations we dream of visiting, from England’s rustic countryside to Los Angeles’s palatial gated communities. Her characters hold dream jobs (Graham is a wealthy book editor, Miles composes film scores), and have problems that can be fixed in the allotted time frame.
The charming male suitors make out better than the ladies they pursue through Holiday. A relaxed Law is at his most debonair, letting the humour in each situation come to him. This is the best I’ve seen him in some time. Black, meanwhile, keeps his boisterous frat-boy personality in check to find the vulnerable and appreciative side of his character. As for Diaz and Winslet, they recycle emotional riffs each has played before in rival comedies.
Right around the time you start to feel Holiday’s length, though, Meyers pulls back the curtain on a soft surprise and the charming endeavour reapplies its spell. Holiday is a pleasant diversion, a comedy as adorable as it is comfortably predictable.
Sean O’Connell