Movie Guide and Film Series

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.

‘AAJA NACHLE' (No rating, 2:45, in Hindi) Madhuri Dixit, Bollywood's biggest female star of the '90s, returns to the screen after a five-year hiatus in this modest film. She looks great and dances wonderfully, but the movie doesn't quite know what to do with her. Which raises this question: What kind of heroine can a middle-aged woman be in Hindi cinema? (Rachel Saltz)

‘AMERICAN GANGSTER' (R, 2:38) The divide between the director Ridley Scott's seriousness of purpose and the false glamour that wafts around American gangsters, and invariably trivializes their brutality, become s too wide to breach in this story about the rise and fall of a 1970s New York drug lord. Denzel Washington wears the black hat, Russell Crowe wears the white. (Manohla Dargis)

‘AUGUST RUSH' (PG, 1:52) To describe this film as a piece of shameless hokum doesn't quite do justice to the potentially shock-inducing sugar content of this fatuous contemporary fairy tale about a homeless, musically gifted miracle child. (Stephen Holden)

‘AWAKE' (R, 1:28) In this loopy medical thriller, Hayden Christensen plays a young man who suffers a condition known as anesthesia awareness during a heart transplant. Likely to alarm only those responsible for paying malpractice premiums, the movie is a risible blend of unlikely surgical behavior and a horizontal star screaming voice-over variations on "Oh no, I can feel that!" (Jeannette Catsoulis)

‘BEE MOVIE' (PG, 1:40) Jerry Seinfeld as a talking bee who flees the hive, falls in love with Renée Zellweger and fights the human race for control of the world's honey supply. Disarmingly funny, especially when it lets go of the plot and buzzes aimlessly around, making jokes. (A. O. Scott)

★ ‘BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD' (R, 1:56) Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke play two desperate brothers whose scheme to rob their parents' jewelry store goes terribly wrong. The movie, directed with feverish authority by Sidney Lumet from a solid script by Kelly Masterson, gets just about everything right. (Scott)

‘BELLA' (PG-13, 1:31, in English and Spanish) This treacly urban fairy tale about a chef in a New York City Mexican restaurant and the pregnant waitress he befriends wears its bleeding heart on its sleeve and loves its unbelievable characters to distraction. (Holden)

‘BEOWULF' (PG-13, 1:54) Robert Zemeckis throws a lot of technology at the screen in his performance-capture version of the Old English epic poem, including spears, swords, blood, mucus and a naked version of Angelina Jolie, all of which will hit you square in the eye if you catch it in 3-D. This isn't your high school teacher's "Beowulf" or Seamus Heaney's. (Dargis)

★ ‘CONTROL' (R, 121 minutes) The life, music and death of Ian Curtis, lead singer of the Manchester, England, post-punk band Joy Division, beautifully realized by the director Anton Corbijn. (Scott)

‘DAN IN REAL LIFE' (PG-13, 1:35) A low-key, not-bad romantic comedy, with Steve Carell as a widowed advice columnist raising three daughters, and Juliette Binoche as the woman he falls for. The problem - one of them, anyhow - is that she's his brother's girlfriend. (Scott)

‘THE DARJEELING LIMITED' (R, 1:37) Wes Anderson's latest - in which three brothers (Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman and Owen Wilson) cross India by rail - is nothing if not precious. Which is to say that it's vain and fussy and also that, by virtue of its visual beauty and its affectionate spirit, it's a treasure. (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)

★ ‘ENCHANTED' (PG, 1:47) This unexpectedly delightful revisionist fairy tale from, of all places, Walt Disney Pictures, doesn't radically rewrite every bummer cliché about girls of all ages and their dreams. But for a satisfying stretch, it works real magic both by sending up stereotypes and through the twinkling, unwinking performance of its superb star, Amy Adams. (Dargis)

‘FRED CLAUS' (PG, 1:47) A tacky would-be comedy about family dysfunction that fronts some Scrooge attitude only to dissolve into slobbering sentimentality and canned uplift. Vince Vaughn plays naughty Fred opposite Paul Giamatti, who plays nice as Nicholas. (Dargis)

★ ‘GONE BABY GONE' (R, 1:54) For his directing debut, Ben Affleck has done right by Dennis Lehane's novel and created a satisfyingly tough look into conscience, to those dark places where some men go astray. The generally exceptional actors - notably the director's star and baby brother, Casey Affleck, and a sensational Amy Ryan - play it hard and keep it real. (Dargis)

‘HITMAN' (R, 1:40) Based on the video game franchise of the same title, this waste of time exploits every action-flick cliché imaginable and still manages to be dull. It's bang, boom, blah. (Dargis)

★ ‘I'M NOT THERE' (R, 2:15) Hurling a Molotov cocktail into the biopic factory, Todd Haynes uses six different actors and an astonishing range of looks and styles to meditate on the life, work and cultural impact of Bob Dylan. Inspired and inexhaustible. (Scott)

★ ‘INTO THE WILD' (R, 2:20) In his adaptation of Jon Krakauer's best seller, Sean Penn explores the life and death of Christopher McCandless, a young wanderer who perished in the Alaskan wilderness in 1992. The story is sad, but there is something almost exuberant in Mr. Penn's embrace of it - and in Emile Hirsch's brilliant performance as McCandless. Rarely has the radical, romantic American attachment to the wilderness been explored with such sympathy and passion. (Scott)

★ ‘JOE STRUMMER: THE FUTURE IS UNWRITTEN' (No rating, 2:04) The life of the Clash frontman, told through a montage of clips and reminiscences that add up to something far richer and more moving than the usual rock star documentary. (Scott)

‘LARS AND THE REAL GIRL' (PG-13, 1:46) Part comedy, part tragedy and 100 percent pure calculation. Ryan Gosling stars as a sensitive loner who finds redemption by way of a sex doll and the magnanimity of his small town. (Dargis)

★ ‘THE LIFE OF REILLY' (No rating, 87 minutes) This bare-bones documentary by Frank Anderson and Barry Poltermann is built around a video recording of "Save It for the Stage," a one-man show by Charles Nelson Reilly, an actor, showbiz gadfly and Tony Award-winning theater director. Throughout, Mr. Reilly's exuberant deployment of his reedy voice and expressive hands proves the acting teacher's cliché that the body is the only prop a performer needs. (Matt Zoller Seitz)

‘LIONS FOR LAMBS' (R, 1:28) Career Politicians, the Fourth Estate and Disaffected Youth all earn a stern knuckle rapping in this big-screen lecture about civic responsibility and its absence in the Age of Iraq. Robert Redford directs and acts (and lectures), and the odd-couple Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise provide some sparks. (Dargis)

‘LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA' (R, 2:00) This picturesque screen adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez's masterpiece is faithful to the outlines of the novel. But without Mr. Márquez's heady narrative voice, it is a weightless, episodic gloss. (Holden)

‘MARGOT AT THE WEDDING' (R, 1:32) Family warfare from Noah Baumbach ("The Squid and the Whale"), with Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh (both scary and excellent) as bickering sisters. The film is unsparing, often funny, but Mr. Baumbach finally loses control of his characters, and the audience is likely to lose patience with them. (Scott)

‘MARTIAN CHILD' (PG, 108 minutes) Man meets boy, surrenders heart. Some will sigh "aw"; others will reach for the barf bag. Menno Meyjes directs, and John Cusack and Bobby Coleman star. (Dargis)

★ ‘MICHAEL CLAYTON' (R, 1:59) A slow-to-boil requiem for American decency from the writer and director Tony Gilroy in which George Clooney, the ultimate in luxury brands and playboy of the Western world, raises the sword in the name of truth and justice and good. Well, someone's got to do it. (Dargis)

‘THE MIST' (R, 2:07) Until the director Frank Darabont decides that he's saying something important instead of making a nifty horror movie about a creepy mist and some even creepier townsfolk, this shivery story works your nerves nicely, in large part because it understands that nothing scares moviegoers better than our own overactive, reactive imaginations. (Dargis)

‘MR. MAGORIUM'S WONDER EMPORIUM' (G, 1:33) Dustin Hoffman is the goofball proprietor of a magic toy store in this family comedy, whose ingenious concept is executed erratically. (Holden)

‘NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN' (R, 2:02) Mean, violent and impeccable, Joel and Ethan Coen's adaptation of a pulpy, compact novel by Cormac McCarthy lives and breathes in the central performances of Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem, who chase one another, million and metaphysical truth through the Texas back country. (Scott)

‘PROTAGONIST' (No rating, 1:30) The four articulate men who relate their life stories in "Protagonist," Jessica Yu's enthralling documentary exploration of the obsession with control and self-mastery, are disillusioned true believers who when they were younger were certain they had found the Answer. Connecting these parallel narratives are scenes from Euripides portrayed by wooden rod puppets. (Holden)

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