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I'm an Oil Man
Daniel Day-Lewis (Last of the Mohicans, Gandhi) won a Best Actor Oscar this year for his powerhouse performance as an oil magnate in Paul Thomas Anderson's (Boogie Nights, Punch Drunk Love) There Will Be Blood. Lewis moves in to claim an "ocean of oil" beneath a small community, in opposition to the young local preacher (Paul Dano: Little Miss Sunshine, The Girl Next Door), and finding his way to ruthless success, he must make difficult choices regarding his son and half-brother. There Will Be Blood was a sweeping critical success, winning
Best Cinematography and Best Actor awards, and picking up Oscar nominations for Director, Writing, and Best Picture.
The Wrong Son Died
A comedy that mocks the deadly-serious conventions of the Oscar-aiming musical biopics, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. John C. Reilly (Prairie Home Companion, Chicago) is Dewey Cox, as he traverses the usual music icon's path: born to a poor family, tragedy in his youth, rising fame, drug addiction, and redemption. Jenna Fischer (Blades of Glory, Employee of the Month) plays his musical co-star and inevitable second wife as Dewey traverses the musical landscape meeting Elvis, Buddy Holly, and The Beatles.
Important Drama™
Robert Redford (The Horse Whisperer, Out of Africa) directs and stars as an idealistic professor in Lions for Lambs, a political suspense thriller focused on current events in the Middle East. 
Meryl Streep (Evening, Death Becomes Her) plays a reporter interviewing a Senator (Tom Cruise: Magnolia, Top Gun) about war strategy in Iraq, and the way their lives interconnect with Redford's professor and his former students now stationed in the Middle East.
A story about loss, guilt, and revenge, Reservation Road stars Joaquin Phoenix (Walk the Line, Buffalo Soldiers) and Jennifer Connelly (Labrynth, Blood Diamond) as a couple who experiences a tragic loss, and the consequences felt by the person responsible for the couple's state.
Partition is a picture set against the 
splitting of India Pakistan into separate states in 1947 as, a Sikh ex-soldier (Jimi Mistry: Ella Enchanted, The Guru) risks everything to save a Muslim woman from a violent mob. Also staring Neve Campbell (The Company, Drowning Mona).
Ron Livingston (Winter Solstice, Office Space) plays the real-life Richard Pimentel in Music Within, a veteran who returns from Viet Nam with severe hearing damage and went on to change the lives of Americans with disabilities.
Josh Hartnett (The Black Dahlia, Pearl Harbor) plays a sportswriter who finds a career-making story in a now-homeless former boxing champion (Samuel L. Jackson: Pulp Fiction, S.W.A.T.) in Resurrecting the Champ, only to find that his story will have consequences.
As children are being recruited as soldiers in 1980's El Salvador, and eleven-year-old boy becomes the man of the house in Innocent Voices. A single mother fights to protect her children, and Innocent Voices becomes a story of hope and peace as the landscape becomes both a playground and a warzone.
A few more classic stories are new on the wall this week. The most recent adaptation of Jane Austen's (Northanger Abbey, Persuasion) Sense & Sensibility, aired last week, and another George Elliot (Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda) adaptation, Adam Bebe, starring Iain Glen (Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Resident Evil: Extinction) in the title role.
Andrew Lee Potts (1408, Return to the House on Haunted Hill) has one bad day in Dead Fish, as he accidentally crosses paths with an emotionally stunted hitman (Gary Oldman: Sid & Nancy, Batman Begins) while trying to dodge this loudmouth bookie (Robert Carlyle: The Full Monty, 28 Weeks Later), and has to survive a wild cast of oddball characters in order to set his life right.
Rachel Nichols (The Woods, Shopgirl) is trapped and terrorized in a parking garage in P2, and the security guard (Wes Bentley: Ghostrider, American Beauty) on duty has a strange connection with her.
A handful of new documentaries are new this week as well, including the Leonardo DiCaprio (The Departed, What's Eating Gilbert Grape?) narrated environmental warning 11th Hour, about the current state of the world. Fog City Mavericks documents the history San Francisco filmmakers, including George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. A pair of National Geographic documentaries are also new: Eden at the End of the World, about Patagonia at the southern tip of South America, and Six Degrees Could Change the World, projecting what the development of the globe would be if the earth's average temperature rose six degrees by the year 2100.
Our family film this week is Waterhorse: Legend of the Deep about a young boy who finds an egg on the shores of Loch Ness. When the egg hatches, the boy has a mysterious new friend that isn't too easy to keep secret.
Our new TV shows this week include the fourth season of the Canadian comedy Trailer Park Boys, and the follow-up to 1998's anime Kite, Kite: Liberator.
