★★★★★

Dir. Woody Allen. 1977. PG. 93mins. Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts.

A sprawling screenplay that at one point included a murder mystery, a romantic subplot and heady ruminations on aging; a lengthy ten-month shoot with a number of script-deviating improvisations; a two-hours-plus first cut that marginalized the character who would eventually become the film’s heart and soul. By all rights, Annie Hall (working title, Anhedonia — the inability to experience pleasure) should have been a disaster. Yet Woody Allen’s sublime comic drama, the story of a fracturing love affair between just-turned-40 comic Alvy Singer (Allen) and his la-dee-dah gal pal Annie (Keaton), was a massive critical and commercial success, even trouncing that box-office behemoth Star Wars at the Academy Awards.

Many viewers can quote the movie chapter and verse, from lead actor (“Don’t knock masturbation. It’s sex with someone I love”) to bit player (“Hello? I forgot my mantra” — hey there, Jeff Goldblum). So take the occasion of Film Forum’s rerelease, new 35mm print and all, to bask in the tricky balance of hilarity and melancholy. As the story toggles between punch lines involving Marshall McLuhan and The Sorrow and the Pity and gut punches like Annie’s heartrending rendition of “Seems Like Old Times” or some half-recalled joke about eggs, you delight in the seeming effortlessness of a movie born out of turmoil. This is the link between Allen’s “earlier, funnier” stuff and more probing works like Interiors and Manhattan. Would that we all could build such masterful bridges.—Keith Uhlich

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★★☆☆☆

Dirs. Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman and Steve Purcell. 2012. PG. 100mins. Voices of Kelly Macdonald, Billy Connolly, Emma Thompson.

As Disney heroines go, Princess Merida (Macdonald) — the first lead female protagonist in a Pixar joint — is all hair. Her long, flowing crimson locks would make redheads from Lucille Ball to Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme quake with envy, and the animators behind this pedestrian medieval-era fantasy have clearly labored to get every strand to behave with uncannily true-to-life accuracy. Would that there were more beyond the coif, but Merida is merely a dull amalgam of modern Mouse House idiosyncrasies: plucky, rebellious and action-figure ready thanks to her ever-present bow and arrows. She’s also so not down with the traditions, sanctioned by her mother, Queen Elinor (Thompson), that go with the regal lifestyle.

Her Royal Highness is nonplussed by the princess’s radical notions. (Marry for love instead of having your hand won by a suitor?!? Ridiculous!) So is it any shock that when Merida finds herself in the presence of a wood-carving enchantress, she wishes the Queen into a, shall we say, bear of a predicament? What follows the casting of this semideadly spell is a lot of slapstick running around through stunningly detailed Scottish locations — most impressive is a foggy forest populated by ephemeral will-o’-the-wisps. Along the way, both mother and daughter attempt to undo the sorcery, learn some valuable life lessons and go horseback riding to a you-go-gals power ballad by Mumford & Sons. Ick. This isn’t the NASCAR-fellating cash grab that is the Cars franchise, but it’s still Pixar on preachy autopilot.—Keith Uhlich

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Brooklyn’s indie-centric film fest is chock-full of treasures.

Brooklyn is giving Gotham’s big-boy cinema galas a run for their money with the return of the annual BAMcinemaFest. Now in its fourth year, this indie-flick jubilee is as tightly programmed (22 features) as the New York Film Festival, with less of the intensely variable quality of Tribeca. You can catch deafeningly buzzed-about properties like Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild or Craig Zobel’s Sundance cause célèbre Compliance. But here are six more off-the-grid titles that you should quadruple-circle in your brochure calendar.

In the spellbindingly unsentimental character study Francine (June 22 at 7pm), Melissa Leo plays an introverted woman — half spinster, half savant — fresh out of prison, with a mysterious affinity for animals. She doesn’t wander so much as float through the misty, hyperreal setting (a rural small town), forging tenuous connections with people, pets and sanity. This is heightened verisimilitude at its finest, something documentary-trained writer-directors Melanie Shatzky and Brian M. Cassidy clearly honed in their preceding nonfiction feature The Patron Saints (June 25 at 7pm). There’s a bit of a Werner Herzog vibe to this dreamy, disturbing look at a U.S. nursing home where the residents seem perpetually suspended between lucidity and delirium.

Keith Miller’s moody and mesmerizing Welcome to Pine Hill (June 23 at 4:30pm) begins with a blunt-force sequence in which a white Brooklynite out walking his dog runs into a hulking black man who insists the canine belongs to him. But their argument doesn’t go in the simplistic directions one would assume. Miller (who plays himself) based this interaction on an actual incident that happened to him, and he convinced the other party, Shanon Harper, to act as a scene partner in the filmed re-creation. After the adroit curtain-raising sequence, this deeply human feature follows only Harper’s character, Abu, as he receives some life-altering news and makes a spiritual pilgrimage to his upstate hometown.

The teenage protagonist of The Unspeakable Act (June 24 at 9:30pm) is also in crisis, for a reason most would find repellent: Jackie (the superb Tallie Medel) is madly in love with her brother, Matthew (Sky Hirschkron). Rest assured, it’s not that kind of movie, as this revelatory third feature by Dan Sallitt (full disclosure: a friend) is about dealing with the unsettling emotions raised by unconsummated desire — a uniquely bracing take on the coming-of-age drama.

No less sui generis is the foreigner-abroad antiromance The International Sign for Choking (June 26 at 9:30pm). Writer-director Zach Weintraub stars as an American journalist in Argentina, searching for a lost love and neglecting the new girl (Sophia Takal) he takes up with. The film upends expectations at every turn, from the defiantly nontouristic views of Buenos Aires to the tough, unsparing conclusions the story reaches about its adrift protagonist. Much more enchanting, though just as incisive, is Tim Sutton’s Pavilion (June 28 at 7pm), a lyrical look at a teenage boy (Max Schaffner) who flits through an eventfully uneventful summer in both a wooded upstate New York paradise and an arid Arizona suburb. It’s suffused with poignant, lazy-day melancholy — the half-audible closing line is a killer — and like many of the discoveries one makes at BAMcinemaFest, is a deceptively small movie that feels larger than life.—Keith Uhlich

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★★☆☆☆

Dir. Pawel Pawlikowski. 2011. R. 85mins. In French and English, with subtitles. Ethan Hawke, Kristin Scott Thomas, Joanna Kulig.

Tom Ricks (Hawke) is a dour, gravel-voiced American author who’s come to Paris to be with his young daughter. The problem is, his ex-wife has taken out a restraining order (“You know why,” she says with seething, cryptic malice), and he’s quickly kicked to the curb. One long bus ride later, Tom finds himself in the Gallic boondocks, so he takes a room at a seedy hotel run by a glad-handing gangster. This new bruiser acquaintance enlists Tom for an enigmatic task — to watch over an underground bunker several evenings a week where really bad things seem to be happening. If that weren’t enough, our hero meets a slinky woman (Scott Thomas) at a literary soiree, and the two go back to her bizarrely sparse 5th Arrondissement apartment for some soul-baring sex sessions that get increasingly perilous.

How do these disparate threads connect? Hardly at all, though Pawel Pawlikowski’s train wreck of a thriller, based on a novel by Douglas Kennedy, initially teems with promise. The actors are alluring and committed, the images mesmerizingly prismatic, and most scenes play out in tense long takes that would make Hitchcock proud. But as the mysteries start to be answered (often in ways that resemble failed parodies of Euro art-film pretension), all that goodwill evaporates. Irritated, you realize you’ve been watching an object that’s all surface, no soul.—Keith Uhlich

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★★★☆☆

Dir. Adam Shankman. 2012. PG-13. 123mins. Julianne Hough, Diego Boneta, Tom Cruise.

Small-town girl, livin’ in a lonely world Sherrie Christian (Hough) arrives in Los Angeles circa 1987 with twinkle-eyed dreams of stardom and less than 20 bucks to her name. Within minutes of stepping off the bus, she meets bartender-cum-aspiring-musician Drew Boley (Boneta), who gets her a waitressing job at the Bourbon Room, a rock-music haven likely on its last legs. Romance blossoms — in a Tower Records, no less, where the hot-to-trot duo belts out a mash-up medley of “Juke Box Hero” and “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll.” But admit it: You’re not coming to Adam Shankman’s peppy screen adaptation of the popular Broadway jukebox musical for the vapid fresh faces. (As singing lovers go, these two are less Nancy Spungen and Sid Vicious than one of those insipid warbling duos who sapped the energy out of many a Marx Brothers movie.) You’re here to see a bunch of game A-listers play celebrity karaoke with the ’80s glam-band tunes of Def Leppard, Journey, Twisted Sister and others.

On that front, this spiritedly superficial movie delivers more often than not, as the wispy plot — revolving around a save-the-venue performance by satanic rocker Stacee Jaxx (Cruise) — allows for a series of headbanging set pieces. Moralistic mayor’s wife Patricia Whitmore (Catherine Zeta-Jones) kicks it to Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot”; Bourbon Room owners Dennis (Alec Baldwin) and Lonny (Russell Brand) do a hilarious romantic duet to REO Speedwagon’s “Can’t Fight This Feeling”; and a creepily-in-character Cruise comes damn close to actual pathos with his longing cover of Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is.” Fans of Moulin Rouge–esque repurposing will be in hog heaven. Everyone else will want to hop that midnight train going anywhere pronto.—Keith Uhlich

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★★★★☆

Dir. Stephen Kessler. 2011. N/R. 87mins. Documentary.

It’s quite the résumé: writer of hit songs for the Carpenters, Barbra Streisand and the Muppets; delightfully villainous costar of Brian De Palma’s cult classic Phantom of the Paradise; one of Johnny Carson’s favorite guests. Paul Williams has lived a life most would envy, but according to Stephen Kessler’s revealing documentary, he’s only just begun. This isn’t your standard talking-heads hagiography. Kessler began filming as a fan first, attending a Williams concert in Canada after he discovered his childhood idol, long out of the Hollywood limelight, was still alive and well. He slowly works his way into the legendary singer-songwriter’s confidence, accompanying him to a variety of events — celebrity golf tournament, autograph signings, performances around the globe — and probes his subject about his colorful past.

Williams is candid about his struggles with alcohol and drug addiction, and sharp-tongued whenever his interviewer tries to fit him into the standard fallen-celebrity template. (Carpenters and Carsons be damned, the tireless, two-decades sober Williams is doing just fine, thank you.) It’s to Kessler’s credit that he’s more than willing to play the fool in this collaborative pursuit of the unvarnished truth, most notably during an eventful recital in the Philippines, where the filmmaker is sure they’ll be killed by Al-Qaeda operatives. The oft-hilarious push-and-pull between director and subject — Williams wryly notes that the film is turning into “the Steve and Paulie Show” — effectively hacks away at the celebrity-enthusiast divide. By the end of this perceptive dual portrait, both men are content to merely be human.—Keith Uhlich

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★★☆☆☆

Dirs. Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod. 2012. R. 102mins. Robert Pattinson, Uma Thurman, Christina Ricci, Kristin Scott Thomas.

He’s a vampire of a different sort now: Twilight star Robert Pattinson brings his captivatingly mangy broodiness to a dull, dutiful adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s novel about Parisian social climber Georges Duroy, nicknamed Bel Ami. When we first meet him, he’s the embodiment of destitution, with tattered clothes, days-old scruff and three francs to his name. Then Duroy pays a fateful visit to a red-light establishment, where he runs into an old army acquaintance. Faster than you can say bonne chance, this grungy status seeker is granted access to several upper-class salons, where he meets the women — Clotilde (Ricci), Madeleine (Thurman) and Virginie (Thomas) — who will become his mistresses-cum-stepping-stones.

Duroy callously round-robins his way among the ladies, going so far as to eject one of his paramours from his “love nest” while preparing for the arrival of another. Yet the satire rarely stings, as first-time feature directors Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod give a polite Masterpiece Theatre gloss to this most impolite of tales. Scenes accumulate in vague CliffsNotes fashion (Duroy’s near-sadomasochistic relationship with Thurman’s high-class widow is meant to be revealingly caustic, but merely comes off as improbable), and the performers tend to indulge their worst instincts, as in a camptastic sequence in which Thomas’s emotionally fragile middle-ager dons a midnight-black gown for a wedding. De Maupassant’s story was subtitled “The History of a Scoundrel”; this is more like “The Summary of a Scamp.”—Keith Uhlich

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★★☆☆☆

Dir. Daryl Wein. 2012. R. 87mins. Greta Gerwig, Joel Kinnaman, Hamish Linklater, Zoe Lister-Jones.

Carefree 29-year-old Gothamite Lola (Gerwig) never expected to be dumped by her fiancé, Luke (Kinnaman), just three weeks before their wedding. But here she is, suddenly manless, before the opening credits of Daryl Wein’s flimsy romantic comedy have even finished rolling. At first, the shock is all-consuming — she doesn’t even have the motivation to feed herself a potato chip. But Lola’s scatterbrained spunk (a Gerwig character hallmark) slowly returns as she reluctantly reenters the dating pool.

You could describe the shenanigans that ensue as “mumblecore Sex and the City” if HBO’s Girls hadn’t already stolen Lola’s thunder on that front. Guffaw as our flighty heroine trolls downtown Manhattan bars with her snappy, saucy best friend (cowriter Lister-Jones). Cringe as her parents (an ill-used Bill Pullman and Debra Winger) offer up romantic advice that’s either way too intimate or several generations out of date. Feel the suspense as she waffles over whether or not to take up with her ex’s hipster-musician best bud (Linklater). Gerwig is plenty charming, considering the rote stuff she has to work with (props to the performer for very nearly selling Lola’s “this is, like, you know, what I’ve learned” climactic speech). Yet this still feels like a real devolution — hopefully short-lived — after her distinctively eccentric turns in Greenberg and Damsels in Distress.—Keith Uhlich

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★★☆☆☆

Dir. Chris Eyre. 2011. PG-13. 88mins. Josh Lucas, Ayelet Zurer, James Cromwell.

Time heals all wounds, and so do boats if Chris Eyre’s absurdly pretentious character study is to be believed. A man known only as the Young Mariner (Lucas) — yeah, it’s that kind of movie — shuffles into the first of the film’s many glum-gray sequences. He’s clearly carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, and he’s just purchased a rusted, rickety sailboat that embodies on the outside what he must feel inside. We won’t discover what’s eating him until a climactic melodramatic-screaming-face flashback (ludicrous in every detail). Until then, the YM stares sorrowfully at the horizon, slowly fixes his ragged vessel, and rebuilds his shattered social skills with the help of, wait for it, the Waitress (Zurer) and the Ancient Mariner (Cromwell).

Hide Away’s hollowness — the original title was the eye-rolling A Year in Mooring — isn’t immediately apparent. Scenes proceed elliptically, with a lot of hypnotic long takes and moody fades that collapse the passage of months into the blink of an eye and build an initially intriguing air of mystery. Most riveting is the YM’s strangely reticent, uncomfortably intimate interactions with the checkout girl at a local supermarket — ultimately the one of the narrative threads that feel truly, profoundly ambiguous in the ’70s cinema vein that Eyre strives to emulate. Otherwise, this is a man-versus-nature parable heavy on the sappy existentialism that’s very much of our time. Call it Nicholas Sparks’s The Grey.—Keith Uhlich

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★★☆☆☆

Dir. John Stalberg. 2010. R. 93mins. Matt Bush, Sean Marquette, Adrien Brody, Michael Chiklis.

Straight-A high-school student Henry Burke (Bush) has a likely lock on valedictorian and early admission to MIT. But he’s just smoked his first-ever joint, the day before the insanely uptight principal (Chiklis) has instituted mandatory drug testing. Only one thing to do: Get the whole school high. But how? That’s where stoner extraordinaire Travis Breaux (Marquette), a gourd-pummeled drug dealer named Psycho Ed (Brody) and a mountain of pot brownies come in.

John Stalberg’s scattershot ganja comedy is the sort of crudely offensive farce that derives laughs from profane exegeses of William Shakespeare, look-who-it-is stunt casting (Booger himself, Curtis Armstrong, is one of the faculty) and an Asian character named Phuc (Ph sounds like f). Stalberg is very adept at two- or three-person interactions: There’s an Abbott and Costello–worthy exchange involving Henry, Travis, and Ed’s slaphappy repetition of the word what (initially croaked by a doped-up frog). But the film becomes sluggish whenever focus expands to the spaced-out students, who shuffle around with unconvincing purposelessness; they don’t seem genuinely narcotized so much as marking time between camera setups. Spurts of loony inspiration aside — Chiklis rivals Animal House’s Dean Wormer for pure hissable self-righteousness — this is mostly all reefer, no madness.—Keith Uhlich

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★★★☆☆

Dir. Rupert Sanders. 2012. PG-13. 127mins. Kristen Stewart, Chris Hemsworth, Charlize Theron.

Ready for another taste of poison apple? Mere months after Mirror Mirror — Tarsem Singh’s frenetically hyperstylized take on the beloved bedtime story about a fair maiden, an evil queen and seven dwarfs — comes first-time feature director Rupert Sanders’s surprisingly solemn retelling. A too-bustling prologue shows how Queen Ravenna (Theron, camping it up) usurped power, poisoned the land and imprisoned her stepdaughter rival, Snow White (Stewart, a delight). But then the film finds surer footing and proceeds with a deliberateness rare in a big-budget franchise starter; you can sense the hand of coscreenwriter Hossein Amini (Drive) in the story’s always involving, slow-build structure.

The very strong early scenes are practically a chamber drama, as Ravenna skulks around the castle longing for everlasting power and beauty (her mirror on the wall is a burnished disc that strikingly morphs into a faceless golden figure) and Snow figures out a way to escape captivity. Yet once the scope widens to include the dwarfs — creepily played by a bunch of normal-height British character actors with their heads transposed onto small bodies — and the loutish huntsman (Hemsworth) who proves to be our heroine’s Prince Charming, the movie becomes a more conventional fantasy adventure in the Lord of the Rings vein. The rousing speeches and booming battle scenes are all well done as far as blockbuster spectacle goes, but you can’t help but feel the filmmakers’ resistance to the story’s grimmer undercurrents. The moral is clear: Indulge the baser desires of the multiplex masses above all else.—Keith Uhlich

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★★☆☆☆

Dir. Debbie Goodstein. 2012. R. 80mins. Chazz Palminteri, Andie MacDowell, Jodelle Ferland.

It’s the 1970s, and gruff factory owner Joe Fine (Palminteri) is moving his Holocaust survivor wife (MacDowell) and two daughters from Brooklyn to New Orleans for a fresh start. Joe has a legendary temper that keeps his ladies in cowering check, while his business acumen is so off track that he borrows large sums of money from a local mafioso. What will it take for him to change his evil ways? Despite a committed performance from Palminteri (ripping through scenes like an aged bulldog), Debbie Goodstein’s loosely autobiographical drama is as nondescript as made-for-pennies independents come. Its most distinctive aspect, unfortunately, is the hilarious sight of MacDowell struggling to speak German-accented English.—Keith Uhlich

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★★☆☆☆

Dirs. Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano. 2011. N/R. 112mins. In French, with subtitles. François Cluzet, Omar Sy, Anne Le Ny.

Interested to see what’s popular in France these days? The Weinstein Company’s got your back. Harvey and friends picked up stateside distribution rights to this watchable yet completely inconsequential Gallic dramedy after it shattered box-office records in its home country. A simple plot description should raise liberal-guilt-wary eyebrows and set off schmaltz alarms: Philippe (Cluzet), a wheelchair-bound white millionaire, hires Driss (Sy), an ex-con black male nurse, to take care of him. Friendship and enlightenment follow, as do comic misunderstandings (if you pour scalding water on a quadriplegic, does he make a sound?), soul-baring nighttime conversations with sides of hookers and pot, and a high-spirited paragliding sequence that could have been ported over directly from The Bucket List.

There isn’t a rough-edged subtlety that the film — based on a true story — doesn’t make every effort to soften for mass consumption: Driss’s home life is like a sub-Dardennes melodrama with all the usual po’folks signifiers (deadbeat younger brother, scolding know-it-all aunt, drug dealers in black SUVs), while almost all his interactions with Philippe (such as some cross-class schooling in the wonders of Hector Berlioz and Earth, Wind & Fire) are played for the kind of broad laughs that possess cheap-seats levels of insight. Cluzet and Sy nonetheless make for ingratiating foils; the extended opening sequence in which the duo outwits a pair of cops like a hell-raising Laurel and Hardy could be a stellar short comedy if it weren’t married to the deadly self-serious shtick that follows.—Keith Uhlich

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Wes Anderson adds feeling to the fussiness in his youthful romance.

★★★★☆

Dir. Wes Anderson. 2012. PG-13. 94mins. Jared Gilman, Kara Hayward, Bruce Willis, Edward Norton.

Back into the Wes Anderson toy chest we go. The dapper auteur behind such idiosyncratic and polarizing works as The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited opens his latest feature, a continuously surprising and delightful adolescent romance set in 1965, in what appears to be a dollhouse. Everything down to the miniature chairs and oval area rugs is placed with utmost (some might say fanatical) care, and Robert D. Yeoman’s ceaselessly tracking camera takes in all the sights while moving along the usual rocket-science-precise axes. Call it a gift to fans and a riposte to detractors: The cowriter-director (he collaborated on the script with Roman Coppola) gives everyone what they expect up front — all the preciously fussed-over details that are very much in keeping with Anderson’s shoebox-diorama aesthetic — and once that’s out of the way, life seeps into frame.

As it turns out, this is the human-size residence of Suzy Bishop (Hayward), a dour 12-year-old with sad raccoon eyes who spends her time reading filched library books, listening to Benjamin Britten compositions and peering longingly through an ever-present pair of binoculars. She lives with her unhappily married lawyer parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand) and her younger brothers in the small island community of New Penzance, New England (the film was shot off the coast of Rhode Island), where, as a loquacious onscreen narrator (Bob Balaban) stiffly informs us, a devastating storm is due to hit in three days.

Suzy has little time for such concerns; there’s enough of a rebellious tempest brewing inside her, which makes her a kindred spirit of outcast Khaki Scout Sam Shakusky (Gilman). They meet, appropriately enough, during a church pageant performance of Britten’s biblical opera Noye’s Fludde (“What kind of bird are you?” Sam pointedly asks his soon-to-be sweetheart), and strike up a yearlong correspondence that ends with them running away into the forest.

Most of the movie’s bewitching first half details the duo’s adventures as they work their way toward one of New Penzance’s seaside inlets, avoiding capture by the melancholy local police captain (Willis), an inept scout leader (Norton) and Sam’s own armed-to-the-teeth troop. Anderson is fully in his element, lending a storybook quality to the lushly verdant setting, while still maintaining a very real sense of danger. Even in the most idyllic sequences, as when Suzy and Sam do a hilariously awkward Badlands-esque beachside dance to a Françoise Hardy pop song, the threat of physical and emotional violence is always present, and does occasionally erupt. (One stunning shot of a crimson-stained pair of scissors reveals what will always separate Anderson from his many second-rate imitators: His characters bleed.)

After the adults catch the young lovebirds, the film becomes more frenetic and scattered, a disappointing, though not ultimately damaging loss of focus. Tilda Swinton pops up as a too-cartoonishly villainous character named Social Services, and there’s some scout-troop sneaking around that comes off as a weak-tea cousin to the jailbreak climax of the director’s stop-motion-animated Fantastic Mr. Fox. But there’s also plenty that moves the spirit in that uniquely Andersonian way, from the endearing amateurishness of young newcomers Hayward and Gilman (their natural fumbling is perfect for a story about naive first love) to the stellar support lent by Murray, McDormand, Norton and Willis, who each convey a lifetime of concealed hurts with every gesture and deadpan-absurd line reading.

Like its obvious antecedents (François Truffaut’s Small Change or Louis Malle’s Zazie dans le Métro), Moonrise Kingdom is a story of childhood from a wizened vantage point. A lesser movie would attempt to set the two precocious protagonists on a grown-up path, or alternatively posit the characters’ callow smarts as an enlightened state of mind for all to aspire to. But as shown by its spectacular sturm-und-drang finale (imagine the church-steeple confrontation in Metropolis as directed by Dr. Seuss), Anderson’s romantic fantasia is after something much more complicated and profound — an ever-renewing balance between the hopes of youth and the disappointments of age.—Keith Uhlich

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★★★☆☆

Dirs. Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky. 2011. N/R. 94mins. Documentary.

Generation NES has come of age, and it’s giving the corporate bigwigs a run for their money. Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky’s engaging if superficial doc profiles the independent game designers behind Super Meat Boy, Braid and Fez — all of which were in varying stages of development or release during the film’s shooting. Fez creator Phil Fish’s story is most involving, in large part because of his paranoid perfectionism (he unveiled an acclaimed demo of the game in 2007, yet is still tweaking it four years later), and there are several Zen-insightful comments from Braid mastermind Jonathan Blow about the perils of success. Otherwise, this is a movie about a subculture, made for that subculture; only hard-core Xboxers need apply.—Keith Uhlich

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★★☆☆☆

Dir. Kirk Jones. 2012. PG-13. 110mins. Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Lopez, Elizabeth Banks.

Any movie that opens with Cameron Diaz tossing her cookies on the set of a Dancing with the Stars-esque reality show can’t be all bad, right? That’s the mother of all rhetoricals, and speaking of mothers: This mostly laugh-free pregnancy comedy, adapted from Heidi Murkoff’s pop-parenting best-seller, is at least a slight step up from director Kirk Jones’s last effort, 2009’s claw-your-eyes-out-awful Robert De Niro vehicle Everybody’s Fine.

Diaz plays one of five foxy ladies — the others are Jennifer Lopez, Elizabeth Banks, Brooklyn Decker and Anna Kendrick — who find themselves with child (Lopez avoids the prosthetic paunch, since her character is going the Brangelina adoption route). Their respective significant others react to the stork’s-on-the-way news with everything from glassy-eyed shock to “it’s all good” shrugs; most of what hilarity there is comes from the gents’ befuddlement with impending fatherhood. Best in show is a clearly delighted Dennis Quaid as Decker’s race-car-driving, Jimmy Buffett–loving beau. His alpha-aggressive effusiveness (masking a soft heart) gives a movie populated with time-marking A-listers and up-and-comers some genuine life.

The rest of this vignette-heavy piffle, which follows each of the couples from conception to delivery, milks the worst kind of newborn-fetishizing sentiment (how many ways can we talk about the “miracle” of childbearing without seeming too religious?) while inspiring eye rolls aplenty (laziest use of the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Hypnotize” ever!). If What to Expect represents the best tearjerking laugh-machine that Hollywood can birth, it’s probably time to get those story ideas implanted in vitro.—Keith Uhlich

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★★★☆☆

Dir. Maïwenn. 2011. N/R. 127mins. In French, Italian, Romanian and Arabic, with subtitles. Maïwenn, Karin Viard, Joey Starr, Marina Foïs.

A policeman’s lot is not a happy one: Consider the flatfoots assigned to Paris’s Child Protection Unit, where the daily grind consists of processing a steady stream of child molesters and abusive parents, while also attending to the fragile emotional needs of victims barely into their teens. The job wears down patience and spirit, and tensions are consistently high. More than most of his colleagues, the self-righteous Fred (Starr) seems primed to start a shouting match with anyone in sight, be it his take-no-shit spouse or the shy photographer (cowriter-director Maïwenn) who’s been sent to document the division’s exploits.

If there’s one thing this Cannes-feted drama portrays incisively, it’s the porousness of the characters’ existence: Work bleeds into life and life into work, wreaking havoc on their respective moral compasses. The rest is overly familiar for any cop-fiction obsessive, yet still frequently compelling: Jittery digital cinematography slathers a patina of “real” onto the reel (there’s a gaspworthy moment when a mother on the run drops her baby), and the plot is overstuffed with enough incident — higher-up corruption! office catfight! abortion! — to fill out a three-season television series. Unfortunate, then, that Polisse builds to one of the most hilariously misguided climaxes ever conceived; let’s just say that this soapy symphony of squalor literally doesn’t stick the landing.—Keith Uhlich

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★★★★☆

Dir. Larry Charles. 2012. R. 83mins. Sacha Baron Cohen, Anna Faris, Ben Kingsley.

After a quick shout-out to the recently deceased Kim Jong Il, Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest provocation launches headfirst into a brisk, hilarious jeremiad against Middle Eastern foreign policy, American chutzpah and organic grocery stores. The gangly British comedian responsible for rabble-rousing characters Ali G and Brüno plays General Admiral Haffaz Aladeen, ruthless ruler of the fictional North African nation of Wadiya and celebrity-bedding playa (his Polaroid wall of conquests includes LiLo, Oprah and the former Governator). But during a visit to the United Nations to defend his country’s nuclear program, the general’s second-in-command (Kingsley) stages a coup, replacing the execution-happy dictator with an idiot imposter (also Baron Cohen).

Off into the five-borough wilds our protagonist goes, though this time, the shtick is much more clearly scripted. Yet even minus the element of Borat-style surprise, the laughs come at a furious clip: Gut-busting scatological sight gags are prevalent (much comic mileage is wrung from a severed head on a stick and an INT:VAGINA-cam), while a game Anna Faris, as Aladeen’s health-food-store-running love interest, parries every insult (“lesbian hobbit!”) with fearless flair. Sheer stupidity is the order of the day — as in a Weird Al–worthy sequence scored to a Middle Eastern gibberish version of “Everybody Hurts” — and viewer amusement is sure to vary. But even the stoniest face will crack when Aladeen sums up our cultural moment in a rousing, uproarious climactic speech worthy of both Chaplin and Team America.—Keith Uhlich

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★★★☆☆

Dir. Hirokazu Koreeda. 2011. PG. 128mins. In Japanese, with subtitles. Koki Maeda, Ohshirô Maeda, Ryôga Hayashi.

Japanese brothers Koichi and Ryunosuke (real-life siblings Koki and Ohshirô Maeda) are worlds apart. Not literal worlds: Both boys, who mostly communicate via cell phone, live on the same island — Kyushu — but in separate cities with different parents, the result of divorce. Hirokazu Koreeda’s pleasingly paper-thin dramedy spends much of its first half sketching the disparate lives of the young duo, and of several others around them, in ways that alternate between poetic (Koichi’s teacher pats him on the shoulder with equal parts concern and condescension) and tedious (a cloyingly padded-out plotline about an introverted young girl who wants to be an actor). It’s an uneasy mix of keen verisimilitude and phony uplift — sort of the best of Ozu melded with the worst of Spielberg.

Fortunately, the film improves immeasurably after Koichi and Ryunosuke hatch a family-reuniting plan that involves making a wish at the exact point when two bullet trains pass each other. With a clear goal in sight, the movie suddenly takes on an engrossing urgency. Shots of the kids and their friends running around unfamiliar environments have the fantastical qualities of Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are, minus the forced whimsy. And the quest builds to a beautifully knotty resolution that makes you wish Koreeda had found a way to completely excise the earlier mawkishness.—Keith Uhlich

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★★☆☆☆

Dir. Nadine Labaki. 2011. PG-13. 110mins. In Arabic, Russian and English, with subtitles. Claude Baz Moussawbaa, Leyla Hakim, Labaki.

Tensions are simmering in a remote Lebanese village where Muslim and Christian neighbors have struck an uneasy truce. The mosque and the church may stand side by side, but a fight is likely to erupt over the smallest thing (such as which channel to watch on the communal outdoor television). It’s mostly the men who come to near-blows; the women, who are more apt to break into song and dance, do their best to distract the alphas with everything from feigned miracles to a bused-in gaggle of Russian erotic dancers. But when an unexpected death threatens to tear the village apart, what are these headstrong, harmony-inclined ladies to do? Why, put on Sectarian Violence: The Musical!

Director-cowriter Nadine Labaki — who also stars as one of the beleaguered dames — displays an assured hand with her performers, especially saucy first-timer Yvonne Maalouf, who’s an absolute delight as the mayor’s wisecracking wife. But the filmmaker’s grasp on this inherently uneasy material is much less confident: The tone swings awkwardly between endearingly light-comic (a whimsical romantic subplot between Labaki’s character and a hunky handyman) and confrontationally mournful (the accidental killing of one character becomes an audience-hectoring ploy). And by the time the film takes a glib turn into role-switching farce — as Muslims become Christians and Christians become Muslims — the overall toothlessness of the satire becomes damningly apparent.—Keith Uhlich

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