The Fighter

Overall The Fighter is a touching, soulful knockout of a movie.

Both Wahlberg and Bale are excellent in their different registers, as are Melissa Leo and Amy Adams as the differently calibrated women.

Wahlberg, always so physically solid, is deep inside himself in this role.

The Fighter looks at first as if it is going to be a far more interesting movie than the straightforward and even rather undemanding drama we finally get.

Russell throws so much at the screen that there is little time to make your mind up.

[A] rickety, unfocused contraption of a film that sputters and chugs along without offering any hint of why its director thought it was worth making.

While at its core, The Fighter does become a predictable boxing comeback film building to that Hollywood ending, the performances and acting clinic in action are worth your attention and audience.

Bale, Leo, and Adams are exceptional, and Russell’s ability to imbue a conventional underdog premise with his high-strung eccentricities gives the film a unique texture.

The film falls somewhere between bare-knuckle and blue collar, brought to the screen with that docu-style handheld-camera that indie filmmakers so love to use for bracing reality, and Irish family melodrama...

Russell displays incredible versatility with The Fighter, leaving his signatures on a film that didn’t start out as his project, but turned into one of the best films of 2010.