Scott Cooper’s Crazy Heart is a grand pedestal for Jeff Bridges as a bloated, washed-up boozehound country-and-western singer called “Bad” Blake. What makes the performance such a beauty is the contrast between Bad when he’s onstage and off. In his cups, he staggers around seedy venues, top-heavy and reeling; but when he slings his guitar around his neck, he leans back so that its weight literally centers him. His music centers him, too. He sings like he’s making his last stand against the universe. Bad’s songs, written by T-Bone Burnett, have an authentic drive: They’re all that’s left of his life. At least they’re all that’s left until he meets a journalist and single mom played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who he thinks could be wife No. 5. Why she thinks the same for even a millisecond is one of the movie’s more movie-ish conceits, but Gyllenhaal has such a delectable spaciness that you almost believe she sees something we don’t. The movie turns out to be another ode to the healing powers of AA (Robert Duvall co-produced—or maybe his Tender Mercies character did), and the final scene is a cornball stinker. But there’s a grounded and shockingly credible turn by Colin Farrell as a Toby Keith–like superstar who throws Bad a lifeline—and the way Bridges looks at it, with both rage and relief and then rage at his own relief, would make a great C&W song.

Nancy Meyers’s comedies make me feel like someone put itching powder down my shirt—but that’s partly, I admit, the result of envy. Her characters are absurdly affluent and never seem to think about money, and I get the feeling Meyers doesn’t, either, since she never uses their disconnect from the other 99.999 percent of the world satirically, the way Preston Sturges or Paul Mazursky did. It’s Complicated is the most accomplished but also the least self-aware of her films. On the surface, it’s about the mixed-up feelings of a long-divorced couple, Jane (Meryl Streep) and Jake (Alec Baldwin), when they get drunk and have smashing sex on the eve of their son’s college graduation—after which Jake begins to show up on her doorstep panting for nookie. A successful caterer and gourmet-market owner, Jane is, on one level, thrilled, since Jake had abandoned her for a slinky young woman. But suddenly she has another suitor: Adam (Steve Martin), a sweet, divorced architect designing an extension for her (already huge) house. What to do, what to do? Turns out It’s Complicated is not so complicated after all. It’s an older woman’s emasculating revenge fantasy. Meyers lingers on Jake’s girth, the bitchiness of his young wife, and his humiliating infertility, while Jane grows more radiant with each scene. Adam, meanwhile, is a dear. The nice thing about Martin is that he’s so smooth and white and shy that you can project whatever you like on him. Here he is mostly soulfully morose. (I get the feeling it’s his natural temperament.) Baldwin comes on like a rocket but plays the same scene over and over and finally runs out of invention.

It’s Complicated is a celebration of Streep—normally the queen of artifice—as a Natural Woman. And buoyed by her worshipful co-stars, she does look like she’s having a ball. It’s not that ghastly giddiness of Mamma Mia! but something deeper. I think this is the first time onscreen that Streep—famously insecure about her looks—has truly felt beautiful.

The Belgian animated feature, A Town Called Panic, plays as if one day its directors, Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar, smoked very strong hashish and stumbled on a chest of old plastic toys—a little cowboy and an Indian in a headdress, a horse, some cows and pigs and a farmer (and his wife), and piles of other bric-a-brac—and free-associated a demented scenario against cutout scenery about roommates Cowboy and Indian wanting 50 bricks for a barbecue for Horse’s birthday and accidentally ordering 50 million and wrecking their house and rebuilding it but having the walls stolen every night by sea creatures and chasing them underwater and getting captured by mad scientists and on and on ad absurdum … and hilarium. The blurty voices and jerky animation recall South Park (which I mean as a high compliment), but the film has a transcendent silliness all its own. Kids might not go for it; all the subtitled French babble could be bewildering. The rest of us will want whatever Aubier and Patar were smoking.

For a royal biopic, The Young Victoria is fleet, modest, and unfussy, which makes it hardly the sort of grandiose wallow that fans of stuffed turkeys like Elizabeth go in for. But the rapport between Emily Blunt as the pre-coronation Victoria and Rupert Friend as her German suitor Albert is witty and mischievous and transporting. They have a meeting of minds, with bodies to follow (in time). With her genuinely poetic beauty—her long neck, cleft chin, and faraway blue eyes—Blunt requires no suspension of disbelief to be taken for a queen. It’s everyone else that’s a stretch.

E-mail: filmcritic@newyorkmag.com.

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