American Gangster: Ridley Scott's would-be crime epic just kind of lies there, like an embalmed corpse. Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe star as the real-life Harlem drug lord Frank Lucas and the cop who brought him down in the early-'70s, but we don't know much more about these two at the end than we did at the beginning.
In the Valley of Elah: Tommy Lee Jones plays a retired Army sergeant who tries to figure out what happened to his son, an infantryman back from Iraq whose body was found in a field. Director Paul Haggis allows the movie's sadness to seep into our bones, and Jones does another of his beautifully calibrated withholding acts.