I don't think I could find three films to talk about more different from each other than these (the Hollywood revenge-flick, the tiny American indie and the Iranian art documentary-recreation) but I want to get them out of the way so I'll talk about them now. I'll start with Hollywood, namely Man on Fire which my brother has been trying to get me to watch for months upon months. The basic set up of the plot is that Denzel Washington is a drunk with 16 years military experience who is hired on the cheap as a bodyguard by Marc Anthony who needs someone on the payroll to a/ take his daughter Dakota Fanning to school and b/ ensure his insurance policy can be renewed. So a marriage of convenience and Denzel becomes slowly but surely closer to his charge.
Fanning isn't annoying for the first time in years, but this is the Denzel show. The reason you know he's given a truly first rate performance is that he has an arc but there's never a point where you think "okay, bang, he's changed" and the script makes that mean it could easily have happened. It's a bit cheesy at the beginning but like Failan you need to see where the character was in order to see why they do what they do later, it's necessary. There are some lines which Denzel and Christopher Walken have to deliver which in lesser hands would be truly awful but they make them entertaining. The film is not unpredictable, but it is a lot of fun along the way and I can't see too many people not having a good time watching this one, unless you're out-of-your-mind drunk like my brother was and had to watch it again the next day to understand simple plot points 
.
After that I saw Close-Up, which is the second Abbas Kiarostami film I've seen. This is one of those docu-recreations where you don't quite know what's "real" and what's "recreated" in the first half hour but you do get it, it's quite simple really. It's the true story of a man (everyone plays themselves) impersonating a famous Iranian director and gaining the confidence of a family - they have him arrested and Kiarostami asks to film the trial for a seemingly trivial case as nothing was attempted overtly. It's an interesting case/defence put forward by the man as it examines the technical guilt according to the law versus the moral guilt in what he was actually doing. Certainly not the kind of film that gets made very often, much less distributed internationally, but a fascinating one which you do get lost in and is well worth your intellectual time.
Finally a film I'd usually talk about in one go, but I'll do it here - The Visitor - which came out a few months ago but had a very small release in a week when I was very busy so I missed it. The story is that a professor who is a bit of a git (refuses to grant extensions to his students, uses the same syllabus year after year changing only the date by tippex, etc.) is forced to go to New York to present a paper he "co-authored" but is in no position to because he had no hand in writing it. He gets to the apartment he used to share with his now deceased wife and finds it has been surreptitiously rented to a couple by a man called "Ivan". They offer to leave but eventually our man invites them to stay.
This is a film that then goes in a few different directions and it seems churlish to just outline the whole plot. This is an ensemble piece par-excellence, Richard Jenkins excels in his first real opportunity at a leading role, he's extremely subtle and completely believable in the role. Haaz Sleiman is wonderful as the Syrian Tarek, he tackles a wide range of emotions from beautifully natural open friendship to angry but dignified annoyance at the situation he finds himself in. Danai Gurira does a very nice job as his girlfriend and Hiam Abbass is simply nailed-on perfect in her role as Tarek's mother, trying to help her son and building a lovely on-screen pairing with Jenkins in the process.
This film deals with some very touchy issues, looking at American attitudes post-September 11th, implying moral questions about where people are in a situation that they are in the wrong in but did nothing wrong to be discovered. Jenkins just wants to help his friend. He has an arc which is very intricate and requires a tight-rope walk because there are multiple scenes towards the end where unless Jenkins has been very careful they won't fit or feel right with the character. It all just about works and that is in the main down to Jenkins and the whole ensemble playing everything so marvellously - it is well written (by writer/director Thomas McCarthy who did The Station Agent) but needs them to pull the film through and they all deliver. I really enjoyed this film on multiple levels and I would broadly and highly recommend it.