Girlfight (Karyn Kusama, 2000)

Michelle Rodriguez in Girlfight

Cast: Michelle Rodriguez, Jamie Tirelli, Paul Calderon, Douglas Santiago, Ray Santiago, Victor Sierra, Elisa Bocanegra, Shannon Walker Williams. Screenplay: Karyn Kusama. Cinematography: Patrick Cady. Production design: Stephen Beatrice. Film editing: Plummy Tucker. Music: Gene McDaniels, Theodore Shapiro. 

An attractive cast and intelligent camerawork and editing help make Girlfight watchable even for someone who dislikes boxing and finds sport movies boringly predictable. And yes, Girlfight is predictable. The protagonist is Diana Guzman (Michelle Rodriguez), who lives in a tough Brooklyn neighborhood with her father, Sandro (Paul Calderon), and brother, Tiny (Ray Santiago). Sandro is a macho bully whom Diana suspects of abusing her mother, who committed suicide. He takes little interest in her, putting his hopes on Tiny, whom he forces to train as a boxer, even though Tiny really wants to be an artist. After getting in trouble for fighting at school, Diana thinks that she might want to try to learn to box, too, so she persuades her brother's coach, Hector (Jamie Tirelli), to coach her. When she turns out to be good at it, Hector sets her up with a sparring partner, a guy named Adrian (Douglas Santiago), who wants to be a professional boxer. And of course Diana and Adrian fall in love, which presents a problem when through a series of plot contrivances they find themselves fighting each other in an important amateur competition. With the help of solid performances, writer-director Karyn Kusama makes all of this more interesting than it sounds in summary. That she named a character Adrian and has someone comment that it's usually a girl's name shows that she knows her sports movies and doesn't mind the comparisons. 

Widows (Steve McQueen, 2018)

Elizabeth Debicki, Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, and Cynthia Erivo in Widows

Cast: Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Cynthia Erivo, Colin Farrell, Brian Tyree Henry, Daniel Kaluuya, Garret Dillahunt, Liam Neeson, Robert Duvall, Carrie Coon, Jacki Weaver, Lukas Haas, Jon Bernthal, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Kevin J. O'Connor. Screenplay: Gillian Flynn, Steve McQueen, based on a TV series by Lynda LaPlante. Cinematography: Sean Bobbitt. Production design: Adam Stockhausen. Film editing: Joe Walker. Music: Hans Zimmer.

A solid dark thriller with a powerhouse cast, Widows tells the story of four women married to professional thieves who are bereaved when a major heist goes wrong and the van the men are in goes up in a fiery explosion. The problem is that the loot was also incinerated and it belonged to a powerful Chicago politician and crime boss, Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry), who shows up at the home of one of the women, Veronica (Viola Davis), demanding repayment. Veronica, who had no part in her husband's crimes, is desperate to raise the money, but her husband's chauffeur had the key to his safety deposit box, in which she discovers a notebook full of detailed plans for all of his heists, including one he had yet to pull off. Eventually, she concludes that the only way to raise the necessary millions is to do that heist herself, for which she enlists two of her fellow widows. The film casts fine actors like Liam Neeson, Daniel Kaluuya, Robert Duvall, Carrie Coon, Lukas Haas, and Jon Bernthal in secondary roles as the complications and surprise twists ensue. Steve McQueen's no-nonsense direction and the skill of his cast make the whole thing mostly plausible, mainly by not giving you time to question some of the plot's weaknesses. There's a subplot about the election battle between Jamal Manning and Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell), the scion of an old Irish political family, which is tied to the main plot by some fairly tenuous threads, a few of which are blatant contrivances. But the focus is on Veronica and her crew, played superbly by Davis, Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Rodriguez, and Cynthia Erivo.

Avatar (James Cameron, 2009)

Sigourney Weaver in Avatar

Jake Sully: Sam Worthington
Neytiri: Zoe Saldana
Dr. Grace Augustine: Sigourney Weaver
Col. Miles Quaritch: Stephen Lang
Trudy Chacón: Michelle Rodriguez
Parker Selfridge: Giovanni Ribisi
Norm Spellman: Joel David Moore
Moat: CCH Pounder
Eytukan: Wes Studi
Dr. Max Patel: Dileep Rao

Director: James Cameron
Screenplay: James Cameron
Cinematography: Mauro Fiore
Production design: Rick Carter, Martin Stromberg
Film editing: James Cameron, John Refoua, Stephen E. Rivkin
Music: James Horner

When it first appeared, James Cameron's Avatar was as much an event as a movie. People flocked to see its groundbreaking 3D and motion-capture CGI effects and to marvel at its colorful creation of a distant world. Even most of the critics raved, caught off-guard yet again by Cameron's expensive audacity, as they had been with Titanic in 1997. But as with Titanic, the passing of time has taken some of the glamour off of the film. Cameron had certainly excelled his contemporaries as a technological innovator, but 3D is beginning to become passé (as it did in its first insurgence in the 1950s) and motion-capture has become a standard technique. So it's possible to concentrate on Avatar as movie, and thus to find it wanting. For one thing, it's shamelessly derivative. The central plot, of a soldier "going native," is that of Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves (1990). The Na'vi belief in the mystical unity of all things is identical to the Force from the Star Wars movies. And the gung-ho Marines and villainous representatives of the military-industrial complex are borrowed by Cameron from his own Aliens (1986). Even the Na'vi, with their elongated torsos, big eyes, flat noses, and long round tails, remind me oddly of the Pink Panther. Except blue. The characters are stock: Sigourney Weaver is again playing the tough, adversary whom the exploitative bad guys underestimate. Sam Worthington's Jake Sully is the white man savior of the native peoples. And Stephen Lang's bull-headed Col. Quaritch is the hissable villain with no apparent redeeming qualities. Cameron even calls the material being sought by the earthlings in the movie "unobtanium," a variant spelling of the impossible substance that has been called "unobtainium" by engineers since the 1950s. The Marvel Studios screenwriters at least have the wit to call their minerals "adamantium"  and "vibranium." But maybe that's quibbling: Avatar remains an influential and extremely watchable movie, even if it's predictable and overlong -- cuts of the film range from 162 to 178 minutes.