The Fighter; Brighton Rock; Howl; West is West; Rabbit Hole; How Do You Know?
Christian Bale, left, with the understated Mark Wahlberg in The Fighter. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar Allstar/Sportsphoto Ltd

Receiving a Golden Globe for his hyperkinetic best supporting actor turn as a washed-up pugilist in The Fighter (2010, Momentum, 15), Christian Bale graciously acknowledged that he couldn't have got away with a performance that "big" without a sounding board as quiet and understated as Mark Wahlberg – and he's right. The pair play Dicky and Micky, real-life boxing half-brothers from Lowell, Massachusetts the former of whom coulda been a contender until KO'd by junk. When Micky becomes the family's new rising star, his unreliable sibling (who is now being followed by a documentary crew) hangs on to his coat-tails, promising to coach him to success. Can Micky put aside his fearsome family – which includes Melissa Leo's tough-as-nails matriarch and a rogues gallery of Budweiser-chugging sisters – and strike out on his own with new love Amy Adams? Or will this tight-knit brood ironically prove to be his secret sucker punch?

The fact that the stoical Wahlberg (who also produced) failed to gain an Oscar nomination for his lead role in The Fighter while his colleagues walked away with gongs tells you something about awards juries. Unlike his more showy contemporaries, the artist formerly known as Marky Mark has the ability to do very little and do it very well. As for the film itself, it comes across as a punchy but lightweight companion piece to The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky was originally slated to direct), and was tellingly advertised as the "best boxing movie since Rocky" rather than Raging Bull. Extras include commentaries, deleted scenes, and an hour-long documentary, "The Warriors Code", which tracks the film-makers' fast-and-loose progress on the streets of Lowell, and features the real-life faces behind the feisty fairytale action.

There's something so apparently foolhardy about remaking a Boulting brothers classic that it's easy to overlook what's actually interesting about Rowan Joffe's Brighton Rock (2010, Optimum, 15). Even co-star John Hurt, who plays Phil Corkery in the new version, was recently quoted as saying he could never understand why anyone would want to work in the shadow of a near perfect original. Joffe's primary innovation, of course, is to move the action of Graham Greene's source novel from the 40s to the 60s, and to play out Pinkie's increasing moral torpor against a backdrop of rioting mods and rockers. As such, the movie's greatest debt is not to the Boultings but to Franc Roddam; entire sequences from his enduring cult hit Quadrophenia are all but replayed as Control star Sam Riley wrestles with what remains of Pinkie's decrepit soul, his gangster threads blending with the battling mods' sharp suits. It's a smart bit of casting, with Riley's strikingly youthful face perfectly suiting the old-before-his-years role (there's a touch of Phil Daniels's charisma about him too), while Andrea Riseborough excels as the naive waif he woos for foul ends. Flawed, then, but not without a certain anachronistic charm.

There's precious little that's cinematic about the act of writing; watching film-makers attempting to dramatise the creative process often reminds one of that Monty Python sketch which offered a ball-by-ball sporting commentary on Hardy attempting to pen the first sentence of The Return of the Native. Howl (2010, Soda, 15) does a better job than most, intercutting shots of James Franco's eerily convincing Allen Ginsberg tapping away at a typewriter with animated visions of his primal screams and courtroom melodrama taken from the ensuing obscenity trial. The animations are particularly effective, reminding us of the route Alex Cox might have taken with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas had he not fallen out of favour with Hunter S Thompson. As for the legal proceedings, it remains astonishing that such a comparatively innocuous work could have produced such a brouhaha. How times have changed.

A belated sequel to the surprise homegrown hit East is East, West is West (2010, Icon, 15) follows Om Puri's immigrant patriarch as he travels from northern England to Pakistan, wayward son Sajid in tow, to be reunited with the wife and family whom he abandoned decades earlier. Although the idea of reversing the culture-clashes of the original seems enticing, this lacks both the clarity and the comedy of its predecessor. The sights are vibrant, the performances enthusiastic (particularly newcomer Aqib Khan), and the final movement genuinely engaging, but there's a lot of ground to be covered before the disparate strands come together, with the audience's patience being occasionally tested en route.

In Rabbit Hole (2010, Metrodome, 12), from David Lindsay-Abaire's Pulitzer prize-winning play, Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart play a couple torn apart by the loss of a child, a tragedy which affects each of them very differently. Unable to move on, he seeks recourse in the rekindling of physical affection while she develops an obsessive relationship with the teenager who holds the key to her bereavement. Wearing its worthiness on its sleeve, this could easily have become a trial, yet Eckhart (who is shaping up as a modern day Fred MacMurray) lifts the proceedings with yet another effortlessly awkward portrayal of the dysfunctional urban male.

If only the same could be said of Paul Rudd, whose irksome presence is the very least of the shortcomings of How Do you Know? (2010, Sony, 12). A woebegotten middle-aged, middle-brow, middle-class muddle from James L Brooks, this casts Reese Witherspoon as an unfairly shelved sportswoman torn between Rudd's beleaguered businessman and Owen Wilson's narcissistic jock. Jack Nicholson does some obligatory scenery chewing as Rudd's rancid dad, effectively reproducing his grumpy schtick from As Good As It Gets, and while the end result may not be quite as bad as it gets, it's pretty damned close.