Daybreakers is the visual opposite of Near Dark. Its upscale vampires wear tailored suits, drive luxury cars, and savour blood from wine glasses. It’s 2019, and they exist in a polished, gleaming world where amber-eyed vamps rule and humans have been hunted almost to extinction.

“Life’s a bitch, and then you don’t die,” quips hematologist Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke). If he doesn’t discover a substitute for human blood soon then he and his neck-biting brethren are toast. His experiments are carried out under the eye of his greedy boss, Charles Bromley (Sam Neill), who runs a corporation that farms humans for their precious and fast-diminishing fluid. In the glossy, blue-tinted future created by sibling Aussie writer-directors Michael and Peter Spierig, blood is the new oil, and the ramifications of “peak blood” aren’t pretty.

After an impressive first half that scores points with such timely socioeconomic speculation—plus the most entertaining exploding-body scene ever—things start to sour when the monumentally miscast Willem Dafoe shows up as a ’50s-style hipster in full-on Happy Days garb. He’s the Elvis-quoting leader of an underground militia and the only person who’s ever changed from vampire back to human, so naturally Dalton takes that as a cue to try and save the world. Around here Daybreakers’ clever streak runs out and the previously witty, refreshing film becomes a predictable action romp that’s big on over-the-top gore but lacking in everything else.

Here called Bob Ho—I kept waiting for Bing Cosby jokes, but to no avail—Chan’s superspy has been pulling a Clark Kent in suburban New Mexico, with the neighbours convinced he’s a boring salesman. This dorky ID seems to have been developed solely to alienate the three children whose blessings matter most to him. Good thing it doesn’t bother their mother, who is inexplicably played by model-turned-model-with-lines Amber Valletta.

Television director Brian Levant and his slew of screenwriters could have had fun with this role simply by casting anyone from Janeane Garofalo to Jennifer Beals or Carla Gugino (as long we’re strongly invoking the Spy Kids franchise). Instead, we get a dull stick with dyed-blond hair whose only explanation for liking Bob is that he’s “reliable”.

That word, in the narrowest sense, applies to the whole project, which also offers Billy Ray Cyrus and George Lopez, as Bob’s CIA colleagues, doing exactly what you expect from them, as well as bad guys who speak English with thick Russian accents even when they are alone. The kiddies are typical, too: overcoached with the usual precocious lines to spout; as the teenage sibling, Madeline Carroll (who held her own against Kevin Costner in Swing Vote) still manages to make some impression.

Perhaps you should know that the reels were mixed up at the media screening for this convoluted farce—and not one person bothered to complain.

This subtly crafted film centres on a broken-down singer, and Jeff Bridges’s unforgettable performance as alcoholic has-been Bad Blake is something to shout about. His portrayal of an outlaw-country star, living on whisky and thinning royalty cheques as he drives between gigs at bowling alleys and strip-mall saloons, is so complete he could be the lost drinking buddy of Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson.

What makes this more than a generic portrait of a thousand Sunday mornings coming down, though, is that Bridges actually sings, and sings well, usually accompanying himself on an old Gibson. And the clever tunes, performed live with no studio sweetening, are perfect for the lead character, for moving the slight story along, and for giving you the visceral vibe of a life spent making music. Roots king T Bone Burnett was one of the producers, and he wrote the title song and most of the others with the late Stephen Bruton.

Equally terse, and no less believable, the spoken dialogue is from first-time director Scott Cooper, working from Thomas Cobb’s novel. He’s superb with the actors, who also include Maggie Gyllenhaal as a young journalist taking a special interest in Blake, Robert Duvall as a tough-talking father figure, and (surprisingly) Colin Farrell as the new-country disciple who outdid his mentor.

In Cooper’s hands, nothing lands quite where you expect it to hit. And the stately cinematography, emphasizing both neon decay and southwestern desert grandeur, casts Bad Blake as a mythic figure from the past—one who, in the end, is capable of moving beyond myth and into the present.

Alice Sebold’s 2002 novel is told from the perspective of a 14-year-old girl who has been murdered and is watching from heaven as her family self-destructs, then rebuilds from the tragedy. Jackson, who had such success mixing human darkness and fantasy in his early film Heavenly Creatures, here goes into full, CGI–happy Lord of the Rings mode: Susie (Saoirse Ronan) inhabits a psychedelic afterlife of rolling Teletubbies fields, Middle Earth mountains, and Moody Blues–album sunrise skies. What Jackson forgets in these wildly distracting sequences is that Sebold’s novel, even though it draws on the supernatural, is very much rooted on Earth.

When the movie returns to that Earth, it is often moving. Jackson does a perfectly detailed job of evoking the late ’70s—from the split-level houses and woody station wagons to the David Cassidy posters, photo cubes, and Archie comics that litter Susie’s room. This is important: this is a story about the loss of innocence, and the era was a time when no one believed that bad things would happen to them.

The characterizations are also mostly strong, too, centred around Ronan’s ice-blue-eyed teen, a nonsaccharine mix of sweetness and naiveté. Stanley Tucci’s psychopath is truly sinister in his unassuming comb over and windbreaker, and Susan Sarandon’s steely granny is a treat too: a woman who can juggle a vacuum, drink, and smoke at the same time. But we need more from Rachel Weisz’s catatonic, absentee mother, and Mark Wahlberg is one-dimensionally bug-eyed in his rage.

Still, my biggest fear about the film adaptation, that Susie’s rape and murder might somehow become explicit, is never realized: Jackson, like Sebold, handles it in deft impressions. If only he could have shown such restraint with his hobbit-tinged heavens.

Eli (Denzel Washington) has what might well be the last King James Bible in the world. It’s 2043 and, after the “flash”, all such texts have been destroyed on the grounds that they were bad influences on the human race. Now he must protect this scriptural treasure from the clutches of Carnegie (Gary Oldman), the megalomaniacal mayor of a burned-out desert town. (In his upstairs saloon office, this scenery-chewing Oldman looks uncannily like Larry King pretending to be Deadwood ’s dangerously mercurial Al Swearengen.)

Rarely has a movie worn its cultural references so baldly on its sleeve. As Eli heads west down Cormac McCarthy’s “road”, he must deal with violent bikers straight out of George Miller’s The Road Warrior . The townscapes are pure Heavy Metal (the illustrated fantasy magazine, not the much-disparaged musical style), and Eli himself bears more than a passing resemblance to a Japanese pop-culture hero (think samurai; despite the omnipresent radiation damage, I am obviously not referring to Godzilla).

Ultraviolent but full of pious platitudes, The Book of Eli seems to have been made primarily for Baptists with a guilty yearning for sleaze. To be sure, body parts roll and loose women abound, but that won’t keep these viewers out of church on Sunday morning. Who knows? This movie might actually appeal primarily to those who are accustomed to thinking of Hollywood as a limb of Satan.

“Another Day” is unique because it features legendary singer Lenny Kravitz, meaning it’s one of the first collaborations to surface since Jackson’s death (the first major song leaked was “This is It”). Kravitz mentioned back in June that he had been working with Michael on an unreleased track:

“I got to work with Michael on a track that has not been released and it was the most amazing experience I’ve had in the studio. He was funny. Very funny and we laughed the whole time.”

The leak isn’t the complete song, though. The YouTube video only lasts 1 minute and 24 seconds, leaving us wanting to see and hear the rest.

For the most part, he now takes what he can get.

Presumably, this is why he agreed to direct Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Clearly inspired by Abel Ferrara’s 1992 feature of almost the same name, this Big Easy crime drama was clearly meant to reproduce the same demonic energy that drove the original across the borders of exploitation and into the realm of art. To be sure, Terence McDonagh southern style has most of the vices of his New York counterpart (originally played by Harvey Keitel)—he’s a sexually abusive, corrupt, addicted train wreck waiting to happen—but, as portrayed by Nicolas Cage, he lacks the essential tragic gravitas.

Herzog is not exactly renowned for his gunfights, grope sessions, or other exhibitions of urban depravity, so it’s hard to figure out why he was asked to helm this flick. To make matters worse, although he speaks English perfectly, he has no ear for accents, so his actors’ line readings are often atrocious. He does try to include a personal touch here and there (the repeated references to reptiles, for instance), but this is a failed face-saving gesture at best.

As an artist torn between Friedrich Nietzsche and Christ, between family values and unbridled lust, between heroin and art, Ferrara is at his best when telling stories about damnation and partial redemption.

Raizo (Korean pop star Rain, of Speed Racer and “Colbert Report” fame) was once an orphan, raised by a secretive clan to, um, assassinate as, well, a ninja would. One forbidden fling and one shamed father later, and our pariah protagonist is off to Berlin in order to save Europol* agent Mika Coretti (Naomie Harris) from the grisly fate that her criminal investigations have inevitably drawn.