With a name like Fighting, you would think that you’d be in for a rock ‘em-sock ‘em exercise in big-screen brawling with little on its brain other than four-knuckled fist-to-face action. However, what lies at the heart of this picture is far from the silly affair that the title would make it seem to be. If anything, this straight-from-the-streets tale should be called “Talking” — or better yet, “Yawning.” Packing a dramatic punch rather than a violent one, Fighting is a chameleon flick — one that’s been sold in one way, while at the same time harboring a secret dramatic streak with very few surprises up its sleeve. In fact, there’s nothing in Fighting that viewers have not seen before, which would be acceptable if it lived up to its simplistic title — yet it doesn’t. Instead, this low-key production leans on its tepid dramatic muscle, which is too bad, given its better-than-average cast.

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With remake madness comfy in its position as the current thing to do in these times of economic strife and unoriginal film ideas, it doesn’t seem like there would be much shame in out-and-out remaking Fatal Attraction. Sure, it wouldn’t match up to the original, and yes, it would probably suck, but it would have a chance at integrity, albeit a convoluted sort that probably wouldn’t justify the ticket cost. Still, it would have not being Obsessed going for it, and hopefully self-awareness enough not to take itself so seriously that its multiple forays into laughable ridiculousness are prevented from actually being laughable.

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When The Soloist was originally intended to be a 2008 Oscar hopeful, the initial advertising campaign made it look like a cross between Shine and A Beautiful Mind. And the setup certainly smacks of Oscar bait: Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.), recovering from an especially nasty bike accident, meets the homeless Nathaniel Anthony Ayers (Jamie Foxx) during a walk through the park. Because Nathaniel plays a violin with just two strings — and plays it rather well — he catches Steve’s eye, and Steve, always on the lookout for a story, strikes up a conversation. When the obviously mentally ill Nathaniel mentions that he went to Juilliard, Steve decides to investigate the man’s life, and discovers that the onetime cello prodigy suffered a schizophrenic breakdown while he was at the school, leading to a life on the street. Steve proceeds to write a column about Nathaniel, and the overwhelmingly positive response to the story prompts the gift of a cello from a reader. After delivering the present to Nathaniel, Steve slowly finds himself, almost against his nature, trying to make life better for the man.

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Author Bret Easton Ellis built his career on fictional exposés about the shockingly selfish behavior of the Reagan era’s cocaine-snorting, Ray-Ban-wearing, L.A. jet set — and The Informers, adapted from a collection of his short stories, is no exception. Director Gregor Jordan, working from a script by Ellis and Nicholas Jarecki, populates the film with a number of soulless Angelinos including powerful film producer William Sloan (Billy Bob Thornton), who treats his wife, Laura (Kim Basinger), and his mistress (Winona Ryder) with equal contempt; William’s privileged, bratty, twentysomething son, Graham (Jon Foster), and his circle of oversexed, over-drugged friends; a criminal (Mickey Rourke) willing to kill a child if it will get him the cash he needs; and a rock star (Mel Raido) who’s grown so bored with fame and celebrity that he’d rather punch a naked groupie in the face than have sex with her. Their lives begin to intersect after a young man dies in a freak accident at a party, throwing Graham into an existential funk — now that he’s glimpsed death, he finally begins to recognize the emotional emptiness at the heart of his coke- and orgy-fueled life.

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Mike Tyson would probably be the first person to tell you — though he would have a lot of competition for that place in line, and have to at least elbow his way to the front — that he is not a very nice guy. What seems to be the case, however, as made by the boxer in Tyson - James Toback’s cinematic portrait of the former heavyweight boxing champion - is that he is the nicest guy that he knows how to be. Given where and how he was raised, and the lack of anyone with decent impulses in his early life save one (coach/trainer Cus D’Amato, who died too early), the fact that Tyson never killed anyone is probably a positive outcome of his life so far — that, and the fact that he’s still alive in 2009 and may have developed some of the awareness he needs to become a better person.

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The producers of Planet Earth bring the award-winning nature series to the big screen with Earth, a visually spectacular, occasionally heart-wrenching nature documentary tracing the migrations of three animal families over the course of one year. And though the perilous journeys taken by these persevering creatures forms the crux of Earth’s storyline, the film’s secondary message may be its most crucial: in order to ensure that the delicate balance of nature remains, humankind must take serious measures to reduce our ecological footprint before the damage done to our environment becomes irreversible. It should come as no surprise that Earth arrives in theaters courtesy of Disney, the same studio that brought us Nature’s Half Acre approximately 50 years prior, because both films employ innovative filming techniques to explore our natural surroundings even if the stories here are told on a much grander scale, and the end product will appeal just as much to wide-eyed youngsters as it will to environmentally conscious adults.

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So Yong Kim’s Treeless Mountain starts out on a sad note, as a mother (Soo Ah Lee) is forced to all but abandon her children, Jin (Hee Yeon Kim) and Bin (Song Hee Kim), to their uncaring aunt (Mi Hyang Kim). But something magical happens, for the audience watching as well as the children — what should be a near-tragic set of circumstances in the lives of these two girls instead becomes a lyrical and seductive look at childhood resiliency.

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With the haunting Lemon Tree, director Eran Riklis establishes himself as one of the most exciting filmmakers in Israeli cinema. Riklis begins with the most straightforward premise — that of a Palestinian woman whose cherished grove of lemon trees risks being cut down by the Israeli establishment — and handles it so gracefully, poetically, and even-handedly that he elevates this material to the level of a masterwork, blessed with levels of complexity and ambiguity.

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