In James Mangold’s stark new western “3:10 to Yuma,” Dan Evans (Christian Bale) and his son William (Logan Lerman) must transport a prisoner Ben Wade (Russell Crowe), the notorious leader of an outlaw gang, to a prison train in order to collect a reward and save the Evans family farm. Wade’s gang, led by Ben Foster’s prissy yet sadistic Prince, engage in a a scorched-earth campaign to get their boss back at all costs. Evans and Wades journey takes them across a grim, pre-PC Old West that more closely resembles a dry, lifeless moonscape than the green vistas of travelogue-style oaters like the recent “Open Range.” There are no noble Native Americans here, only vicious “Injuns” who wait and watch in the darkness for their chance to steal and scalp.

Along the way, Wade repeatedly tries to bribe the simple farmer in order to gain his freedom. But Evans never accepts, because he didn’t take on this mission just for the money. Evans’ troubled son has becomes increasingly seduced by the smoothly charismatic Wade. His father’s hard-scrabble farm life pales in comparison to Wade’s seductive tales of whiskey and women. Evans sets out to show his son that justice can survive, even in this hard, hopeless land. I realize this may seems trite, but Bale and Crowe’s amazing performances bring a credibility to the message.

While the journey they take is largely enjoyable, it sometimes feels broken up into disjointed episodes. Evans and Wade reach one place, fight, then narrowly escape. Again and again. Don’t get me wrong. The gunfights and horse chases are vintage Western fun, but sometimes Wade’s repeated escapes can feel a little numbing.

But the film’s greatest weakness is its unlikely ending, in which Wade makes a last minute about-face that completely strains credulity. This rosy ending is especially irritating, given that the rest of this film is so wonderfully bleak and gritty.

In “The Kingdom,” an elite FBI unit led by Agent Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx) is dispatched to investigate a devastating terrorist attack on American oil workers living in a compound in Saudi Arabia. To find the killers, the investigators must learn to work with conservative Muslim locals who oppose the American presence in their Holy Lands.

Given the provocative premise and locale, I wondered going in whether to expect another entry in the recent spate of thoughtful meditations on terrorism (”Munich,” “Syriana,” etc.). Instead, director Berg and screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan serve up a paint by the numbers criminal procedure that, except for its opening and closing action set pieces, feels as if it was produced for episodic TV.

Yes, all the “CSI: Riyadh” jokes you’ve heard about the film are apt. Beautiful, earnest detectives poke and prod at corpses, frown at pieces of evidence, and all too easily figure out whodunit. All and all, the cast does fine with what they have. Jason Bateman gives his FBI investigator an ascerbic wit that gives the film some much needed comic relief (In the name of full disclosure, I should say that any time a former cast member of either “Arrested Development” or “Freaks and Geeks” gets work, I cheer). The biggest standout is Chris Cooper who plays the unit’s bomb expert as a cackling, deep south auto mechanic who’s gone a little crazy from the heat.

I was doubly disappointed by the film after its fascinating opening montage promised more than the film could deliver. In it, stock footage and eye-popping graphics cut together at break-neck speed lay out the history of Saudi Arabia, from its independence from colonial powers to its discovery of oil to its government’s strained relationship with the extremist Muslim Wahabi sect which dominates the country. I honestly learned something and hoped the rest of the film would dig just as deep.

However, as the film progresses, culture clash takes a back seat to the uninspired investigation plot. Col. Faris Al Ghazi (played with a winsome charm by Ashrof Barhom), the Saudi police officer charged with guiding the unit through its investigation, sheds some light on his country and his religion, but he’s too easily won over by the unit’s can-do spirit and Hollywood smiles. Had there been more conflict between Al Ghazi and the unit, more light could have been shed on their nations’ varied perspectives.

The ending is the most disappointing aspect of the film. When the terrorists kidnap a member of the unit with the intention of videotaping his beheading, the unit, with military automatics a-blazing, shoots up an entire city block to get him back.

SPOILER ALERT: If you have not seen the film, please do not read the following italicized paragraph. Miraculously, the unit saves their comrade from being beheaded and, in the process, stumbles across and kills the Osama Bin-Laden stand-in responsible for the attacks, all without killing a single innocent Arab or losing a single (white) man.

Instead of examining the complexities of America’s role in the Middle East, the film’s simplistic tone reminds me of “The Green Berets,” John Wayne’s ill advised attempt to inject a World War II chest-thumping bravado into the dark morass that was the Vietnam War. Or “Rambo: First Blood Part II,” in which Sly Stallone returns to Southeast Asia in the mid-1980’s in order to, at long last, win that war. The ending of “The Kingdom” is a cynical exercise in wish fulfillment, and while not exactly offensive, it renders the film utterly irrelevant.

This turbulent decade has borne out the old adage that good art arises out of bad times. While the peace and prosperity of the late nineties brought us toothless best picture winners like “Titanic” and “Shakespeare in Love,” (Damn you Bill Clinton!), today’s films roil with a new, bracing cynicism. The frenetically, paranoid “Syriana” held up a mirror to America’s addiction to oil and the Middle East entanglements that it has engendered. “Good Night and Good Luck” was a stinging indictment of the Post-September 11 press and its failure to confront a government running rough-shod over the rights of its people. “Hostel’s” effective torture porn took its brutal set pieces from the disturbing images that seeped out of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Now writer-director Tony Gilroy’s sharp, new drama “Michael Clayton takes on corporate avarice in the new millenium. George Clooney plays the titular character, a “fixer”" at a top law firm who cleans up the legal messes caused by his elite clients. The self-loathing Clayton slumps through life, sickened by the knowledge that every institution meant to protect us can be short-circuited to please the powerful.

When Clayton’s friend Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), a senior partner at the firm, goes off his anti-psychotic medication, he threatens to expose a major corporate client that sold cancer-causing pesticides and is now enmeshed in a massive class action lawsuit. When Clayton is summoned to “handle” the situation, Edens refuses to back down, saying that torpedoing the corporate client and avenging its victims is his only path to redemption.

The film’s antagonist is not an individual or even a corporation. Instead, Gilroy targets the hyper-competitive economic era in which we all live and the corrosive effects of its “win at all costs” ethos. The closest we get to a villain is Karen Crowder (the wonderfully twitchy Tilda Swinton), the corporate client’s legal counsel. But she’s a mess, too. The first time we see Crowder, she is suffering from a panic attack in a restroom stall. She clings to her status as a hot shot executive, even as she feels her soul slipping from her fingertips. As she approves increasingly aggressive methods to rein in Edens, Clayton is forced to decide between protecting his friend and serving his masters.

Clooney gives the best performance of his career. Seeming to be as tired of his “Danny Ocean” smirk as the rest of us, he exposes a wounded vulnerability that he rarely exhibits onscreen.

And Wilkinson is fantastic. He is charged with simultaneously playing a nut job and the film’s moral center. He shifts seamlessly from incoherent ramblings to spot-on moral pronouncements without losing the audience’s sympathy.

I hope that you appreciate this newly vital period of filmmaking, because there’s no guarantee it will last. While I would welcome a new President, an end to the war, and a full reinstatement of the Bill of Rights, I am not looking forward to the return of the Merchant Ivory film.