My latest batch of movie annotations, humbly submitted, and on time, too!

Ballast, a homegrown indie, observes the tentative attempts at human connection between three emotionally wounded working-class individuals in rural Mississippi. Almost defiantly (and certainly unfashionably) subdued, it draws its strength from the bleak expressiveness of the locale—overcast skies, muddy fields, rows of depressing trailer homes, and other such mundanities. Lance Hammer, the debuting writer-director, shows promise as an image-maker, taking some of the more annoying trends in low budget filmmaking (an unsteady camera, wobbly focus) and using them to his advantage. As a storyteller he is on less sure footing (a subplot involving a gang of drug dealers is awkwardly ditched), and the film turns out to be something of a mixed blessing. Better than no blessing at all.

Slumdog Millionaire is a rags-to-riches drama, very much in the style of a Bollywood crowd-pleaser, about a teenaged street urchin’s unlikely surmounting of the Indian Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? game show, in order to reunite with the love of his life. Part treatise on the horrors of Indian slum life, part pie-eyed love story, the film is flashily directed by the always-energetic Danny Boyle, who struggles to find an appropriate style to match his subject. A little more sobriety would have been appreciated, but a formula this surefire rarely goes awry, and it doesn’t.

Quantum of Solace is a watchable if uninspired addition to the undying Bond canon, which lately has insisted on an illusion of realism while serving up scene after scene of death-defying action. A little too edgily edited and mechanically plotted to be truly exciting, it nevertheless preserves the attractive image of 007 as a wounded knight, and Daniel Craig has the screen presence to back up such a conceit. Mathieu Almaric, too, has a moment or two of inspired treachery as the rodenty villain. Directed by Marc Forster.

Australia is a grand swing-and-a-miss for Baz Luhrmann, a two-and-three-quarters-hour epic covering a cross-country cattle drive, the plight of the “stolen generation” of aboriginal half-castes, and the bombing of Darwin, Australia by Japanese forces. Luhrmann’s unwillingness to work with the natural beauty of the landscape (a normal sunset won’t do; everything has to be enhanced with CGI) is the least of his troubles—he struggles with basic storytelling. (How do Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman ever get out of Never Never desert?) Through all the artifice, David Wenham makes a strong impression as a greedy rancher with a sadistic streak.