The Other Guys

Release Date: August 6, 2010

Genre: Action, Comedy

Set in New York City, "The Other Guys" follows Detective Allen Gamble (Will Ferrell), a forensic accountant who's more interested in paperwork than hitting the streets, and Detective Terry Hoitz (Mark Wahlberg), who has been stuck with Allen as his partner ever since an embarrassing public incident with his quick trigger finger. Allen and Terry idolize the city's top cops, Danson and Manzetti (Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson), but when an opportunity arises for the Other Guys to step up, things don't quite go as planned.

Studio: Columbia Pictures (Sony)

Director: Adam McKay

Screenwriter: Adam McKay, Chris Henchy

Starring: Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, Eva Mendes, Michael Keaton, Steve Coogan, Ray Stevenson, Samuel L. Jackson, Dwayne Johnson, Rob Riggle, Damon Wayans Jr.

Mesrine: Killer Instinct

Release Date: August 13, 2010 (LA, NY) 

Genre: Crime, Drama

"Mesrine: Killer Instinct" - the first of two parts - charts the outlaw odyssey of Jacques Mesrine (Vincent Cassel), the legendary French gangster of the 1960s and 1970s who came to be known as French Public Enemy No. 1 and The Man of a Thousand Faces. Infamous for his bravado and outrageously daring prison escapes, Mesrine carried out numerous robberies, kidnappings and murders in a criminal career that spanned continents until he was shot dead in 1979 by France's notorious anti-gang unit. Thirty years after his death, his infamy lives on.

Mesrine was helped along the way by beautiful and equally reckless Jeanne Schneider (Cécile de France), a Bonnie to match his Clyde. Mesrine made up his own epic, between romanticism and cruelty, flamboyance and tragedy. Both a thriller and a biopic, "Killer Instinct" explores the man behind the icon.

Studio: Music Box Films

Director: Jean-François Richet

Screenwriter: Abel Raouf Dafri

Starring: Vincent Cassel, Cecile de France, Gerard Depardieu, Roy Dupuis, Gilles Lellouche, Elena Anaya, Michel Duchaussoy, Myriam Boyer, Florence Thomassin

Animal Kingdom

Release Date: August 13, 2010

Genre: Crime, Drama

Welcome to the Melbourne underworld. Following the death of his mother, seventeen year–old Joshua 'J' Cody (newcomer James Frecheville) moves in with his hitherto–estranged family, under the watchful eye of his doting grandmother, Janine 'Smurf' Cody (Jacki Weaver), and her three criminal sons – the Cody boys. Eldest son and armed robber, Andrew 'Pope' Cody (Ben Mendelsohn) is in hiding from a gang of renegade detectives. Middle brother Craig (Sullivan Stapleton) is a successful but volatile drug dealer, whilst the youngest Cody, Darren (Luke Ford), naïvely follows his elder brothers' lead. Just as 'Pope's' business partner and best friend, Barry Brown (Joel Edgerton), decides that he wants out of the game, recognising that their days of old–school banditry are all but over, tensions between the family and the police explode. 'J' finds himself at the centre of a cold–blooded revenge plot that turns his family upside down and which throws him directly into the path of senior homicide detective, Nathan Leckie (Guy Pearce). "Animal Kingdom" is a powerful crime drama exploring the tense battle between a criminal family and the police, and the ordinary lives caught in the middle.  

Studio: Sony Pictures Classics

Director: David Michod

Screenwriter: David Michod

Starring: Ben Mendelsohn, Joel Edgerton, Guy Pearce, Luke Ford, Jacki Weaver, Sullivan Stapleton, James Frecheville

Centurion

Release Date: August 27, 2010 (limited)

Genre: Thriller

AD 117. The Roman Empire stretches from Egypt to Spain, and East as far as the Black Sea. But in northern Britain, the relentless onslaught of conquest has ground to a halt in face of the guerrilla tactics of an elusive enemy: the savage and terrifying tribes known as the Picts.

Quintus, sole survivor of a Pictish raid on a Roman frontier fort, marches north with General Virilus' legendary Ninth Legion, under orders to wipe the Picts from the face of the earth and destroy their leader Gorlacon.

But when the legion is ambushed on unfamiliar ground, and Virilus taken captive, Quintus faces a desperate struggle to keep his small platoon alive behind enemy lines, evading remorseless Pict pursuers over harsh terrain, as the band of soldiers race to rescue their General, and to reach the safety of the Roman frontier.

From writer/director, Neil Marshall, "Centurion" is a gripping survival thriller set against a background of conquest and invasion; a pursuit movie in the vein of Deliverance, Last of the Mohicans and Apocalypto.

Studio: Magnet Releasing (Magnolia Pictures)

Director: Neil Marshall

Screenwriter: Neil Marshall

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Dominic West, Olga Kurylenko, David Morrissey, Noel Clarke, Riz Ahmed, JJ Field, Liam Cunningham, Imogen Poots