Sometimes a franchise runs too long, becoming repetitive and joyless. That’s the feeling I had sitting through the nearly three hours of The Dark Knight Rises in which even the villain seemed depressed and, truth be told, only mildly interested in his goal to explode a nuclear device in New York.

When Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees director David O. Russell signed on to make The Fighter, he certainly knew boxing films clichés and had no intention of merely repeating them. What he, stars Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, and Melissa Leo have delivered does include some obligatory moments but also probes family dynamics in surprising and gratifying ways.