The King's Speech posterIt’s that time of year when the ser­i­ous Oscar con­tenders start rolling out. The plan is usu­ally to release a film between the Golden Globes (or the Oscar noms) and the Academy Awards night, max­im­ising the atten­tion before your films turn into losers (as most of them will). So, it’s going to be a busy few weeks for those of us who appre­ci­ate qual­ity, and we can expect a few com­mer­cial pal­ate cleansers at the same time.

This week’s con­tender is The King’s Speech, dir­ec­ted by Tom Hoop­er (The Damned United) and star­ring Colin Firth and Geof­frey Rush. I’m for­tu­nate enough to have seen this one already and it’s easy to recom­mend. In fact, while it does­n’t demon­strate the fire­works of films like The Social Net­work, True Grit or Black Swan this is a film that’s very hard to argue against.

Firth plays King George VI (known to the fam­ily as Ber­tie), second son to George V (Michael Gam­bon) and who grew up with a chron­ic stut­ter. This would­n’t have been a prob­lem except – it was the dawn of the radio age and the people expec­ted to hear from their lead­ers and his dubi­ous older broth­er (Guy Pearce) was not only tak­ing up with a divorced woman but was also sym­path­et­ic towards the fas­cist men­ace across the chan­nel.

All tra­di­tion­al treat­ments hav­ing failed, Mrs King (later the Queen Mum), played by Helena Bon­ham Carter, finds a failed Aus­trali­an act­or turned speech ther­ap­ist (Rush) to try and save the day. Play­ing all over town (Empire, Light­house Petone, Read­ings, Pent­house, Para­mount, Event Cinemas Queens­gate and Embassy) from today, you’re going to find it hard to escape over the next few weeks.

The Fight­er is the true story of “Irish” Micky Ward, a jour­ney­man box­er who over­came adversity to become some­thing of a legend in the 80s. Already the win­ner of two Golden Globes (for what they are worth), The Fight­er is a bit of a van­ity pro­ject for Mark Wahl­berg as Ward, Chris­ti­an Bale plays his trainer/brother, and there are two strong women involved – Amy Adams and Melissa Leo. Light­house Petone, Read­ings, Pent­house and Event CInemas Queens­gate.

More fun than that sounds, The Green Hor­net is a super­hero com­edy writ­ten by the team that gave us Super­bad in 2007 – Seth Rogen and Evan Gold­berg. Rogen him­self plays play­boy media heir Britt Reid who for larks invents a masked iden­tity to fight crime but dis­cov­ers that LA gang­sters (includ­ing Inglouri­ous Bas­terds Oscar win­ner Chris­toph Waltz) play for keeps. Fel­low Wel­ling­tonista Robyn and I checked this out earli­er this even­ing and were effi­ciently enter­tained. The Green Hor­net is in 3D and 2D at Read­ings and Queens­gate and 3D only at the Empire in Island Bay.

As is so often the case, the poor old Para­mount brings up the rear but they have an inter­est­ing look­ing biop­ic of the great French pop legend Serge Gains­bourg. It was in the Fest­iv­al last year and Bill Gos­den said, “Car­toon­ist Joann Sfar proves a bold and inspired choice as dir­ect­or, inter­pol­at­ing occa­sion­al pup­pet action into a pacey account of the defin­ing dra­mas – and greatest hits – of Gainsbourg’s lur­id life.”

All these films, plus advance looks at Black Swan and The Hopes and Dreams of Gazza Snell, will be reviewed at Funer­als & Snakes next Tues­day and in the Cap­it­al Times the fol­low­ing day. Tell us what you’ve enjoyed at the movies in the com­ments.