MOVIES
Ratings and running times are in parentheses; foreign films have English subtitles. Full reviews of all current releases, movie trailers, showtimes and tickets: nytimes.com/movies.
★ ‘ALEXANDRA’ (No rating, 1:32, in Russian) The Russian director Alexander Sokurov makes films that are serious, intense, beautiful, at times opaque and so feverishly personal that it can feel as if you’re being invited into his head, not just another reality. Here, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, the widow of the cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, plays a woman visiting her grandson at the Chechen front. A must-see. (Manohla Dargis)
★ ‘THE BAND’S VISIT’ (PG-13, 1:29, in Arabic, English and Hebrew) The Israeli writer and director Eran Kolirin wrenches comedy out of intense melancholia in his beautifully played story about eight Egyptian musicians stranded in the Israeli desert. (Dargis)
‘THE BANK JOB’ (R, 1:50) A wham-bam caper flick, efficiently directed by Roger Donaldson, that fancifully revisits the mysterious whos and speculative hows of a 1971 London bank heist. With Jason Statham and Saffron Burrows. (Dargis)
‘BE KIND REWIND’ (PG-13, 1:41) Michel Gondry’s sweet and lackadaisical new film pays tribute to movie love, not as a grand aesthetic passion but rather as an antidote for boredom. Jack Black and Mos Def are a pair of loafers who recreate well-known films (e.g., “Ghostbusters” and “Driving Miss Daisy”) on videotape. Their art, like Mr. Gondry’s, is both silly and inspiring. (A. O. Scott)
★ ‘BOARDING GATE’ (No rating, 93 minutes) A casually beautifully, preposterously plotted, elliptical thriller from the French director Olivier Assayas starring the fascinating Italian actress Asia Argento as a woman in trouble. (Dargis)
‘CITY OF MEN’ (R, 1:51, in Portuguese) The companion piece (not strictly a sequel) to “City of God,” the Brazilian hit about youth gangs in the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, is a warmer-hearted melodrama built around the friendship of two 18-year-old boys from the favelas, both brought up without fathers, making their way into manhood. (Stephen Holden)
★ ‘CJ7’ (PG, 1:26, in Cantonese) A devilishly entertaining curveball, “CJ7” is “E.T.” as reimagined by the premier clown of Chinese cinema, Stephen Chow. Here he plays an impoverished widower whose young son (the 9-year-old actress Xu Jiao) befriends a tiny alien with magical powers. Ceding the limelight to his young co-star, Mr. Chow devotes his considerable creative energy to unexpected scenes that showcase his bizarre sense of humor. The violence is as exaggerated as vintage Hanna-Barbera, but the film’s gentleness of spirit and frequent flights of fancy ensure that no child will be left behind. (Jeannette Catsoulis)
‘COLLEGE ROAD TRIP’ (G, 1:23) Eyes popping and mouths agape, Martin Lawrence and Raven-Symoné mug their way through “College Road Trip” as a disturbingly doting father and his fed-up daughter en route to her college interview. As Dad crashes a wedding and storms a sorority house, you’ll be thankful that the movie’s target audience is too young to have heard of Freud. (Catsoulis)
‘THE COUNTERFEITERS’ (R, 1:38, in German) Stefan Rudowitsky’s film, winner of this year’s Oscar for best foreign-language film, is based on the true story of concentration camp inmates involved in a Nazi scheme to counterfeit Allied currencies. Karl Markovics gives a ferociously concentrated performance as Salomon Sorowisch, a man who brings his underworld code of ethics and his professional pride from Berlin to the Sachsenhausen camp. (Scott)
* ‘DEFINITELY, MAYBE’ (PG-13, 1:52) This unusually smart, thoroughly charming romantic comedy follows a nice guy’s involvement with three women, one of whom he will marry. Isla Fisher, Rachel Weisz and Elizabeth Banks are all wonderful as the candidates, as is Ryan Reynolds as the guy. (Scott)
‘THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY’ (PG-13, 1:52, in French) Julian Schnabel’s film, about Jean-Dominique Bauby, a French magazine editor paralyzed by a stroke, is a marvel of empathy and imagination. It is also a celebration of French sensualism and an examination of the nature of consciousness. (Scott)
‘DOOMSDAY’ (R, 1:45) In this science fiction adventure from the director Neil Marshall (“The Descent”), set 30 years after a plague-ridden Glasgow was sealed off from the rest of Britain, a stoic, one-eyed mercenary named Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra) leads a mission into the city, hoping to locate a doctor-turned-political-leader (Malcolm McDowell), find out how he managed to survive the plague along with his followers, and apply his lessons to London, where the virus has surfaced. (Matt Zoller Seitz)
‘DR. SEUSS’ HORTON HEARS A WHO!’ (G, 1:28) Much better than the recent live-action Dr. Seuss adaptations, this animated feature builds impressively on Seuss’s visual whimsy, but overloads the story — of a noble elephant protecting a tiny world — with irrelevant pop-culture clutter. Jim Carrey’s clowning, jabbering performance as Horton is especially annoying. (Scott)
‘DRILLBIT TAYLOR’ (PG-13, 1:42) Owen Wilson plays a homeless man hired to protect some high school geeks from bullies. A waste of his time and yours. (Scott)
* ‘THE DUCHESS OF LANGEAIS’ (No rating, 2:17, in French) Based on Balzac’s 1834 short novel and set against the French Restoration, Jacques Rivette’s nearly impeccable interpretation traces how a passionate affair of the heart (Jeanne Balibar and Guillaume Depardieu play the lovers) curdles into cruelty and obsession. (Dargis)
‘FLAWLESS’ (PG-13, 1:45) Michael Caine and Demi Moore are larcenous employees of a corrupt London diamond company in this period heist movie (set in 1960). It is a mildly diverting throwback. (Holden)
‘A FOUR LETTER WORD’ (No rating, 1:27) Airily directed by Casper Andreas, this romantic comedy about a swishy gay man (Jesse Archer) and his less flamboyant lover (Charlie David) explores gay relationships with low-budget verve. Explicit but never sleazy, the movie coasts on a good-natured raunchiness that nevertheless has something to say about hypocrisy and the dangers of snap judgments. (Catsoulis)
★ ‘4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS’ (No rating, 1:53, in Romanian) In this ferocious, unsentimental film from the Romanian writer and director Cristian Mungiu, the camera doesn’t follow the action, it expresses consciousness itself. This consciousness — alert to the world and insistently alive — is embodied by a young university student who in the late 1980s helps her roommate with an illegal abortion in Ceausescu’s Romania. It’s a pitiless, violent story that in its telling becomes a haunting and haunted intellectual and aesthetic achievement. (Dargis)
‘FUNNY GAMES’ (R, 1:52) Michael Haneke, remaking his own 1997 German-language shocker in English, serves up punishment for moviegoers who don’t take violence seriously enough. Not that this nasty little film can be taken seriously at all. Did I just prove his point? Oh dear! (Scott)
‘HANNAH MONTANA AND MILEY CYRUS: BEST OF BOTH WORLDS CONCERT’ (G, 1:14) This 3-D concert movie, offering musical highlights of Miley Cyrus’s recent sold-out tour, offers little in the way of revealing backstage glimpses of the star. But that won’t bother your daughter if she’s a “Hannah Montana” fan. Good luck getting tickets opening weekend. (Andy Webster)