One of cinema's most constant motifs is the flawed, morally corrupt character who in the last reel listens to his conscience and decides to do the right thing. There's a good reason for this: Audiences know all too well how easy it is to be a "good German," and desperately wish it weren't so. You often know whether you're watching mainstream or art-house cinema simply by whether the protagonist changes for the better (as in "Gran Torino" or "True Grit") or stays hopelessly the same ("Hidden," "The Conformist").
Not always, though: This month sees a pair of very different films that shuffle the assumptions enough to keep you hooked to the end; both reflect the complex times in which we live by showing how even doing "the right thing" can involve collateral damage.
"The Hunter," by Australian director Daniel Nettheim, has a lot of things going for it: It's shot in the untamed Tasmanian wilderness, based on a taut novel by Julia Leigh ("Sleeping Beauty"), cut to wring every bit of suspense from the material, and featuring the craggy face of Willem Dafoe staring through the scope of his hunting rifle. The premise involves a shady contractor named Martin (Dafoe), a former spec-ops type, who is hired by a pharmaceutical firm to hunt the supposedly extinct "Tassie Tiger." His mission: find the elusive beast, kill it, and bring tissue samples back to the labs, where new genetic material holds promise.