Jeff Bridges

There's a powerful symmetry at work in "Crazy Heart" that's impossible to resist. It's a parallel between protagonist Bad Blake, a country singer whose entire life has led him to a nadir of disintegration, and star Jeff Bridges, whose exceptional film choices have put him at the height of his powers just in time to make Mr. Blake the capstone role of his career. It's a mark of how fine a performance Bridges gives that it succeeds beautifully even though the besotted, bedeviled country singer has been an overly familiar popular culture staple (Rip Torn in "Payday," Robert Duvall in "Tender Mercies," Hank Williams and Merle Haggard in their own lives)

You should talk about: the "Dexter" season finale. It's one shocker after the next: Debra unearths a deeply hidden truth -- just not the one she expected to find. Rita takes a hard look at her marriage. And at long last, the Dexter and Arthur showdown is upon us. The wait for Season 5 will be a long one. (Today) You could talk about: the movie musical "Nine." Daniel Day-Lewis stars as once-great director Guido Contini in the throes of a midlife crisis, recalling all the important women -- played by Nicole Kidman, Marion Cotillard and Penélope Cruz among others -- who've affected his life.

The movie business is full of as many comeback stories as there are "Rocky" sequels, and Fox Searchlight is heading into the holiday season with two of the year's more compelling tales of redemption: the country music drama "Crazy Heart" and the fortunes of the studio itself. Fox Searchlight has experienced more 2009 highs and lows than a bungee jumper. After sweeping February's Academy Awards with "Slumdog Millionaire" and releasing the year's early triumphs "Notorious" and "(500)

Jeff Bridges, looking like a Malibu prophet with his bushy beard and seasoned surfer smile, says he had a bit of a flashback while filming "The Men Who Stare at Goats," which fictionalizes the oddball odyssey of a U.S. military program that tried to train soldiers to use mental powers as a weapon (and, yes, to snuff out farm animals by glaring at them). "I found myself remembering my own experiences in the 1970s when I hung out with John Lilly, the man who invented the isolation tank and did experiments with trying to communicate with dolphins," Bridges said.

"The Open Road" is no Grand Prix winner, but it's no six-car pileup either. It's a low-key road movie that doesn't stray far from the very, very beaten path. Justin Timberlake stars as Clayton Garrett, a struggling ballplayer apparently too thoughtful for his own good. His seriously ill mother (Mary Steenburgen) dispatches him to bring his long-estranged father, a baseball legend, to her hospital bedside. Clayton collects his beloved ex (the enchanting Kate Mara) and sets off to persuade Dad, hurt feelings and all, to see Mom. Here, the film finds its real engine: Jeff Bridges as Kyle Garrett.

Dorothy Bridges, the widow of actor Lloyd Bridges and the mother of actors Beau and Jeff, has died. She was 93. Bridges died Monday of age-related causes at home in Holmby Hills, where she and her late husband raised their two sons and their artist daughter, Lucinda, her family announced.

Johnny Depp is slated to play two iconic roles in films for the Walt Disney Co.: the Mad Hatter in a remake of "Alice in Wonderland" and Tonto in a big-screen version of "The Lone Ranger." And he's not the only star on Disney's roster. At a showcase of its upcoming projects Wednesday at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, the studio also said that Jim Carrey is performing seven parts in a 3-D motion-capture remake of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" and that Oprah Winfrey would provide one of the voices in the hand-drawn animated movie "The Princess and the Frog," which features an African American heroine, Tiana, played by Anika Noni Rose.

Movies occasionally miss their planned release dates: Thanks to production delays, "Titanic" arrived in theaters half a year late, and it hardly suffered. But "The Amateurs" may hold the record for the most postponements -- the Jeff Bridges comedy has had no fewer than six release dates, all of which have come and gone. After so many false starts, "The Amateurs" finally arrives in theaters today, opening in Los Angeles and Dallas.

IT'S endlessly tempting to use our favorite films to sum up the decades in which they were made. In the case of the reissues Tuesday of two such likable minor classics as "Breaking Away" (1979) and "The Fabulous Baker Boys" (1989), the temptation's even stronger, because each is rich with what reviewers like to call "humanity." You can't really pin either film down to being a sociological snapshot of a certain time.