OPENING

Dogtooth. (Not Rated) A 2009 Cannes winner, Dogtooth is hyperrealist sci-fi detailing an (anti)social experiment gone awry. The matriarch and patriarch of an upper-class Greek family have taught their three nameless, college-age offspring an alternate language (“A sea is a leather armchair, like the one we have in the living room. A pussy is a big light”) to protect a larger deception: that the world outside the family’s high-walled home is so dangerous that the “kids” won’t be mature enough to explore it until one of their canine teeth falls out. The clueless guinea pigs while away their days playing mostly innocent if bizarre games of endurance and submission, often monitored by their father, who offers sparkly stickers as prizes for jobs well done—and enforces the boundaries of the closed state with violence. But this dictator’s efforts are no match for the trifecta of threats to his fascist regime: free-market trading, sex, and American popular culture. Director Giorgos Lanthimos lays out the rules largely through action rather than exposition, which allows Dogtooth to play as a richly satisfying, blackly comic mystery in spite of its delayed, horror-sourced housebreak plot.

This pastel-colored portrait of disaster capitalism was made long before the Greek economic crisis, and that’s something of a relief: Straight parable could never feel as urgent and unexpectedly moving as the eldest daughter’s desperate drive to escape into Hollywood movies—not just by watching them, but by pretending to live them. (Karina Longworth) Mao’s Last Dancer. (PG) Good fi lms about ballet can be numbered on one hand. And about Chinese dissidents? I’ve still got enough fi ngers to type this review. Based on the memoirs of Li Cunxin, Mao’s Last Dancer means well, but it stumbles between genres. Li is played by three actors as he grows from plucky peasant lad in the ’70s to grim-faced trainee at a Beijing dance academy to visiting student at the Houston Ballet. (By then, 1981, he’s portrayed by Chi Cao, a Chinese-born dancer with the Birmingham Royal Ballet, who can act a little.) Confounded by our cowboy hats, materialism and discothèques, Li feels more comfortable on stage. And there—so corny it’s true!—he gets his big break when a soloist is injured. Don Quixote earns him raves, and a convenient blond girlfriend provides the chance for a green-card marriage. Should he stay or should he go? And how will the Chinese government respond if Li defects? Director Bruce Beresford employs many fl ashbacks in this predictable, sentimental tale, but has no feel for the dance sequences, which lurch into slo-mo for each triumphant jeté. There are bits of humor at the margins, chiefly from Bruce Greenwood as Li’s arch, gay ballet master. (Kyle MacLachlan’s attorney seems like a guest star on Dallas.) The melodrama of a divided family is reliably squeezed for tears, but the movie’s best scene is one that awestruck young Li watches with us: There is Baryshnikov dancing on grainy samizdat VHS—free, glorious, yet far from home. (Brian Miller)

ONGOING

The A-Team. (PG-13) Joe Carnahan’s big-screen adaptation of NBC’s 1983 midseason-replacement-turned-three-seasons-running-hit is convoluted, overstuffed, turned up to 11, and yet, somehow, deadly dull—in other words, white noise. Rather than a reinterpretation, it’s a soulless, sloppy, smirky rerun that makes those Charlie’s Angels movies seem positively nouvelle vague; at least Drew Barrymore and crew weren’t just shouting bad impressions over the blasts. Liam Neeson is George Peppard as Hannibal Smith, cigar-chomping frontman of the band of wrongly accused Army Rangers; Bradley Cooper is Dirk Benedict as Templeton “Faceman” Peck, bullets bouncing off his perpetual smug grin; Quinton Jackson is Mr. T as B.A. Baracus, whose mohawk still pities the fool; and District 9’s Sharlto Copley is Dwight Schultz as Murdock, the howlin’ mad pilot who crashes most everything he touches. To the mix, add in Jessica Biel as the Army captain charged with bringing down the boys (complicated by the fact that Face is her ex); Patrick Wilson as the CIA agent who may or may not be setting up the team (but totally is, duh); frequent video-game voice-over actor Brian Bloom as the icky leader of a Blackwater-style operation that’s gone rogue, I tellya, rogue; and Gerald McRaney as the worst best friend in the world. The plot has something to do with counterfeiting plates, but it’s just an excuse to blow shit up for two hours. How can something this loud be this boring? (Robert Wilonsky)

The American. (R) Judging by the advertisements, The American is a fast-paced, stylish thriller starring George Clooney as a dashing, confl icted hero. Yet the actual movie is a deconstructed action picture in which not much happens (until it does). Directed by Anton Corbijn and adapted from Martin Booth’s novel A Very Private Gentleman, the fi lm stars Clooney as Jack, an occasional assassin, but more often armer of assassins, building custom fi rearms to exacting specifi cations. In quick order, Jack is fl ushed out of his lakeside hideaway and set on the run, landing in a remote Italian town that would be picturesque were it not so spooky. There, Jack waits for his contact (Thekla Reuten) and becomes increasingly certain that someone is after him. By slowing down the pace of what would more conventionally be a pulse-pounding chase thriller, Corbijn successfully creates a feeling of unease. Jack is trapped in his own purgatory, and well before he meets his contact for a last handoff in a dusty parking lot, Clooney’s character has given over fully to existential dread. The American becomes less about assassins and targets than about the tension between Jack’s external placidity and internal tumult. Despite the director’s insistence on pushing viewers away at every turn, there is nevertheless something exciting about a movie this uncompromised, in which the big change from book to screen actually toughens up the story instead of watering it down. (Mark Olsen) Animal Kingdom. (R) Happily sampling nasty beats and riffs from the Scorsese catalog, the new Aussie crime saga Animal Kingdom begins with a hushed but breath-holding set piece: A gawky lad watches TV on the couch next to his dozing mum . . .

Until the already-summoned EMTs arrive and the boy calmly tells them she’s OD’d on smack. As it becomes clear she’s dead, his eyes continually, habitually veer back to the stupid game show on TV. First-time writer/director David Michôd limns a dank and lost family history in just these few barely conscious gestures.

The alienated teen is Joshua (James Frecheville), who, with nowhere else to go, moves in with his garrulous grandmother Smurf and is accepted into her roiling nest of pathology. This chintzy suburban house is where up to half of the movie plays out, dominated by Smurf’s three sons: Darren (Luke Ford), a surly post-teen visibly uneasy with following the family line; Craig (Sullivan Stapleton), a tattooed coke brute; and Pope (Ben Mendelsohn), the oldest, a bank robber off his meds and hiding out from the fuzz. With Joshua’s narration, the template is GoodFellas but without the crescendos. No speeding bullet, Michôd’s fi lm luxuriates in its own exaggerated sense of tragedy, observing the family as it self-destructs under pressure. But the director’s strenuous efforts to accumulate tension are often only just that. Still, Animal Kingdom is a work of obvious ambition, and seeing a debut fi lmmaker swing for the fences like this is its own kind of satisfaction. (Michael Atkinson) Cairo Time. (PG) New York editor Juliette (Patricia Clarkson) travels alone to Cairo to meet her husband, who works for the United Nations in Gaza. When hubby gets stuck across the border,Tareq (Alexander Siddig), his former bodyguard, steps in as Juliette’s chaperone. Fluent in English and supposedly highly literate, Tareq actually says things like, “They say once you have drunk the water of the Nile, you always come back,” to which Juliette purrs, “Here’s to coming back”—a not-so-subtle reference to her own groove. A seductive (yet chaste) exotic-man-reinvigorates- middle-aged-wife’s-libido fantasy, Cairo Time spends a lot of screen time putting Clarkson in contrived situations to hammer home the culture-shock theme. Would a real journalist be so naive as to not understand that her body—identifi ably Western and comparatively exposed—would draw unwelcome attention to itself on the streets of a Muslim country? Juliette’s Stupid Tourist episodes lead to loneliness and humiliation, which in turn prompt her to seek out Tareq, who is always up for long walks and longer conversations—think Before Sunset, weighed down by awkward articulation of the central couple’s cultural differences. Happily, writer-director Ruba Nadda’s emphasis on body language ultimately trumps the clumsiness of her script. Intimate lensing turns tiny gestures —a hand on the small of a back, a friendly kiss that misses its target—into major landmarks, and the chemistry between the two leads sustains the movie’s jet-lagged, heat-dazed spell. When 50-year-old Clarkson nervously steps back to bask in Tareq’s adoration, she blushes like a teenage girl with her fi rst crush. (Longworth)

Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore. (PG) About as unremarkable as a fi lm about talking animals organized into competing intelligence agencies can be, Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore overcompensates for its pre-school premise (I don’t know if you’ve heard, but these house pets—they don’t like each other) with a steroidal storyline. Using a combination of live action and CGI that will give some audience members PTSD fl ashbacks to the recent Marmaduke (hold me), director Brad Peyton has been charged with following up the 2001 original with the sequel no one was hoping for—in pointless 3-D. The usual pop culture allusions (Bond is lamentably spoofed; Roger Moore voices a buttoned-up cat) are meant to keep moms and dads grimly entertained, but their kids will be a casualty of the overcrowded whiteboard of a plot. A hapless police dog named Diggs (James Marsden) is recruited into a doggie underground to help stop Kitty Galore (Bette Midler), a hairless cat embittered by the industrial accident that uglifi ed her, from taking over the world. A hater of both dogs and humans, Kitty has gone rogue, and apparently learned how to launch a satellite into space. Cats and dogs (and pigeons and Christina Applegate) must work together to deliver every pet-related groaner imaginable within 85 minutes. (Michelle Orange)

Centurion. (R) This highly enjoyable action-adventure, set in 117 A.D., tracks a small cohort of Roman soldiers who are trapped far north of their empire’s boundary. A triple whammy of abrupt plot twists (I’ll let the movie itself spring them) has these guys being run ragged by a vengeful posse of blue-painted Picts—primordial Brits with Scottish accents and Viking faces. Up to now, writer-director Neil Marshall has specialized in horror movies, but in Centurion he imagines and communicates a remote world with terrifi c energy and a passion for detail.

Michael Fassbender gives a magnetic lead performance here as Quintus, the most stubborn and resourceful of the Roman band. He’s backed by a strong ensemble of macho charmers with chiseled faces (Dominic West, Liam Cunningham), as well as Imogen Poots as the Druidic lass who lives as an outcast in the forest. Marshall’s excellent direction only becomes rushed when the Picts approach Poots’s hut to search for the Romans.

Their supposed fear of this beauty’s reputation for witchcraft isn’t persuasively conveyed, so you’re obliged to wonder why these otherwise relentless brutes don’t just go busting in. In the end, though, this matters little. Centurion may bring to mind such recent armored entertainments as Pathfi nder and the Bruckheimer King Arthur, but (and this is no small compliment) its craftsmanship and freedom from pretension suit it more to comparisons with Anthony Mann’s two classic pursuit-westerns, The Naked Spur and Man of the West. (F.X. Feeney)

Despicable Me. (PG) As the lights were dimming before a preview screening of Despicable Me, the six-year-old who lives in my house leaned over and said, “I hope this is funny—not like Toy Story 3.” Now don’t misunderstand: He adored that movie.
It’s just that whenever the subject comes up, the fi rst word he uses to describe the fi nal adventures of Woody and Buzz is “sad.” “Scary,” too, when further pressed. But “funny”? Not once in a month’s time. So, then, to the movie featuring fart guns, shrink rays, and squid shooters! Despicable Me is a silly antidote to Toy Story 3’s thoughtful heaviness—a cavalcade of kiddie giggles, titters, and belly laughs with as much heft as helium. It’s rather joyful and heartfelt, too—a summertime, air-conditioned Grinch, this is the story of a wannabe evil genius (Gru, voiced by Steve Carell) who learns that buried beneath his heft and hefty Mommy issues is a heart large enough to fi nd room for three orphaned girls. To that, add countless yellow, pill-shaped, one- or two-eyed “minions” who provide comic relief enough to fuel a sure-fi re spin-off show on Nickelodeon.

Despicable Me is also one of the rare instances in the recent history of 3-D’s resurrection as The Savior of Cinema in which the technology accentuates the experience. Though, grown-ups, be warned: I had more fun watching the kid giggle through the screening than I did watching the movie itself. It’s no Toy Story 3.(Wilonsky)

Eat Pray Love. (PG-13) Lusciously shot by Oscar winner Robert Richardson (The Aviator, JFK), Eat Pray Love delivers a sensory overload as intense as Inception’s, but heavily calibrated to stir the hearts, loins, and tear ducts of women for whom love handles and spiritual bankruptcy are of equally pressing concern. Julia Roberts’s Liz leaves behind fl aky husband Billy Crudup and “Yonkers yogi” boy-toy James Franco to embark on a year-long solo walkabout, with stops in Italy, India, and Bali. Writer/director Ryan Murphy keeps emotional currents bubbling on the surface, serving up near-constant catharsis but hardly any arc—the title is a spoiler in three parts. As vicarious travelogue, EPL stumbles by fl attening its loaded locations into (beautifully photographed) set dressing. Politics and economics hardly exist; each place is populated chiefl y by wise exotics who talk funny (including Richard Jenkins’s Texan in the ashram) and exist solely to spout slogans and tell stories that make Liz’s problems seem small: “Believe in love again!” “Americans know entertainment, but not pleasure!” “It won’t last forever—nothing does!” Liz’s happily-ever-after hookup with hunky divorcé Javier Bardem should be EPL’s glorious guilty-pleasure climax; instead, it’s a rushed foregone conclusion. Though targeted at the same female fi lmgoers who fl ocked to the self-realization via food porn of Julie and Julia, EPL is a comparative downer, offering the rush of self-improvement without having to do any of the work. I cried. Mission accomplished? (Longworth)
The Expendables. (R) “If the money’s right, we don’t care where the job is.” So explains the leader of hired-gun task force The Expendables, Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone). This credo lands Ross and his team (Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Jet Li, Randy Couture, and Terry Crews in “The Carl Weathers Memorial Role”) in the Gulf of Aden as our story begins. Somali pirates staging a videotaped decapitation are pinned down by dancing laser sights—and soon, the baddies are ripped apart. A human trunk splats against the wall, and star/director/co-screenwriter Stallone slaps his cards on the table. Tipped by the presence of Rocky IV nemesis Lundgren and cameo favors called in from Planet Hollywood, The Expendables is a throwback to ‘80s run-and-gun action, when Hollywood gym rats made boffo box offi ce depopulating Third World countries. Pirates liquidated, the Expendables’ next mission concerns the fate of the South American nation of Vilena, where Generalissimo Garza grinds the populace beneath his iron heel. Garza is torn between his imperialist backers (Eric Roberts and bodyguard “Stone Cold” Steve Austin) and his idealistic daughter. As in Stallone’s last Rambo, where a good-hearted Christian woman resurrected John Rambo’s wrath to the woe of the Burmese junta, the daughter’s vague Hope gives the Expendables a purpose. Though Expendables does not have that Rambo’s . . . Let us call it focus, it tries manfully to top that fi lm’s kill-’em-all climax. If The Expendables is no classic, for about 20 minutes, it blowed up real good. (Nick Pinkerton)

Get Low. (PG-13) It’s 1938, and Tennessee hermit Felix Bush (Robert Duvall), who has been in a self-imposed exile for 40 years, decides to throw himself a funeral while he’s still alive to hear the speeches. He enlists Frank Quinn (Bill Murray, wonderful), the nearby town’s funeral director, to make plans and post ads inviting people from all over to attend. For this imperfect but rewarding fi lm, screenwriters Chris Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell, fi ctionalizing a true story, have given Felix a guilty secret that he’s ready to unburden himself of, at long last, during the funeral. Despite a third-act stumble in which fi rst-time director Aaron Schneider undercuts Duvall’s wrenchingly confessional monologue with awkward staging and choppy editing, Get Low is a pleasure to watch. Sissy Spacek plays Mattie, Felix’s old girlfriend, whose forgiveness he needs the most. Duvall and Spacek have three key scenes together, including one that finds Felix and Mattie walking together down a wooded road. Nothing much happens; they talk and laugh, and their bodies sway back and forth toward one another, like young lovers courting. After a time, he offers her his arm and she takes it, with a fi rm, happy clutch-two characters, two actors, at ease and in joy, delighting in one another’s magic. (Chuck Wilson)
Going the Distance. (R) “What really matters is what you like, not what you are like,” says John Cusack in High Fidelity, a very good romantic comedy about a thirtysomething man who can’t maintain a relationship, partially because he’s holding on to stale record-nerd dreams. Going the Distance is a not-very-good romantic comedy about the same kind of guy—Garrett (Justin Long), a frustrated A&R drone at a New York record label who falls for Erin (Drew Barrymore), a 31-year-old newspaper intern.

After a six-week fl ing, Erin returns to school at Stanford, thus forcing this couple to face the distance of the title. As Erin and Garrett struggle to stretch lust across 3,000 miles via Skype, it’s hard to maintain much interest in the fate of their union, in part because what they’re like is so predicated on what they like, and what they like—they bond over YouTube memes, bar trivia, and The Shawshank Redemption—is so fucking boring.

Speaking of “fucking,” Distance is rated R because everyone swears excessively for no reason, the supporting cast of smart comedians (Charlie Day, Jason Sudeikis) saddled with delivering painfully dumb, often unnecessarily dirty dialogue. Timely issues keep Erin and Garrett apart—the fi nancial crisis, the changing face of both journalism and the music industry—but their quasi-realistic professional problems aren’t anything a little only-in-the-movies magic and moxie can’t fi x. Nanette Burstein reminds us she was previously a director of documentaries by occasionally shooting with a handheld camera for no discernible reason. (Longworth)

The Kids Are All Right. (R) Serious comedy, powered by an enthusiastic cast and full of good-natured innuendo, Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right gives adolescent coming-of-age and the battle of the sexes a unique twist, in part by creating a romantic triangle between a longstanding, devoutly bourgeois lesbian couple Nic and Jules (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore) and the newly identifi ed, merrily free-spirited sperm donor, Paul (Mark Ruffalo), responsible for both the couple’s teenage children.

Normality, as made clear by the introductory family dinner that features two mothers acting all motherly, rules. (The moms’ designated kink is their occasional use of gay male porn as an aphrodisiac.) Whereas Cholodenko’s two previous features, High Art (1998) and Laurel Canyon (2003), each focused on an innocent young woman swept up in the glamorously baffl ing sex-and-drugs scene swirling around a charismatic older female artist, the situation here is reversed; unexpectedly drawn in to and fascinated by the ultra-domestic household created by a pair of charismatic femmes, the swinger is the straight man (literally). Premiered last January at Sundance, The Kids Are All Right triggered a lively bidding war. The enthusiasm is unsurprising: It’s actually a pretty conservative movie. Given its juicy premise, The Kids could have been played for sitcom, reality show, or soap opera—had it had been made in 1970, it might have been an Echo Park Teorema, with everyone winding up in bed together. Ten years into the 21st century, it’s a heartfelt poster for family values. (J. Hoberman)

The Last Exorcism. (PG-13) With a small, well-chosen cast, sly script, and slippery, ambivalent characters, The Last Exorcism gives a welcome twist to the demonic possession movie. A fourth-generation minister, Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian) has grown out of the trembling faith of his forebears. As The Last Exorcism begins, we follow Cotton through a day-in-the-life, shot from a documentary fi lm crew’s handheld p.o.v. The fi lmmakers have come to track Cotton on an expose mission. The end of a line of exorcists, Cotton has decided to give away the game on the practice. Cotton and crew follow a request for divine intervention to the Sweetzer farm in Ivanwood, Louisiana. When Cotton calls the backcountry “a perfect breeding ground for demons and evil,” you can hear the scare quotes around the “demons” and “evil,” antique words synonymous with ignorance. But the past isn’t past with Sweetzer patriarch Louis (Louis Herthum), concerned about daughter Nell (Ashley Bell), who’s been having mysterious blackouts, after which livestock are found slaughtered. Cotton delivers his casting-out-ofdemons spiel, then collects his payment. But this doesn’t quick-fi x Nell, now going through violent sleepwalk seizures and gymnastic contortions. A well-paced tease, the script is a succession of slow approaches to understanding what’s happening, with each new understanding revealing a false bottom. The suspense is ideological—is this a world of documentary pragmatism or horror irrationality? Either everything has a textbook explanation in shame and repression—or we must heed the immortal words of the Louvin Brothers and believe that Satan is Real. (Pinkerton)

Life During Wartime. (Not Rated) Daring the discomfi ted viewer to laugh at shame and suffering, and then wonder why we’re laughing, Todd Solondz is back. Life During Wartime shows the misanthropic moralizer as confounding and trigger-happy as ever, his big clown thumb poised over a garish assortment of hot buttons—race, suicide, autism, sexual misery, self-hatred, Israel, and, his old favorite, pedophilia. Life During Wartime is both sequel and remake to Solondz’s Happiness (1998). The three Jordan sisters—banal Trish, high-strung Helen, and hapless Joy—are back, albeit played by an alternate trio of actresses (Allison Janney, Ally Sheedy, and Shirley Henderson, respectively). Trish has relocated from New Jersey to Florida, where fragile little Joy arrives for a visit. Newly separated from her husband, Joy is increasingly disassociated. Trish, however, is only a smidge chastened—even though Happiness ended with her model husband, Bill, en route to prison for drugging and raping several of his son Billy’s fifth-grade classmates. Now, Bill (Ciarán Hinds) is about to be released just as younger son Timmy (Dylan Snyder), who’s been told his father is dead, is preparing to become a man with a bar mitzvah speech full of quasi-religious masochistic imagery. Does the fi lmmaker have compassion or contempt for his characters? Is it possible to feel both? Solondz’s sensibility has obvious affi nities to such masters of cruelty as Neil LaBute or the Coen Brothers—but he is less smugly punitive and more obviously tormented. A humanist he’s not, but he does seem allergic to hypocrisy. (Hoberman)

Lottery Ticket. (PG-13) Midway through Lottery Ticket, a teencomedy- cum-wish-fulfi llment fantasy, the movie’s hero, Kevin Carson, goes on a spending spree. The holder of a $370 million lottery ticket that he can’t cash in until after the July 4 holiday, Kevin accepts a $100,000 loan from a local gangster, and proceeds to spend it all in one night. Because Kevin is played by the rapper Bow Wow (né Lil’ Bow Wow), it’s tempting to view this section of the fi lm as aspirational autobiography. This is basically how Bow Wow lives most of the time, right? The kids at my screening cheered wildly for every scene of Kevin’s cash frenzy. It would be pretty sweet to have that much money! Credit Lottery Ticket for honesty, I guess, in never making an argument against being fabulously wealthy. The theme of this formulaic but vibrant comedy could best be described as a paraphrase of Biggie’s well-worn credo. Mo’ money, mo’ problems— but mo’ money, yeah, defi nitely. Lottery Ticket works best when it uses the housing project to orchestrate zany collisions of broad comic types, all played by familiar faces: the neighborhood gossip (Charlie Murphy); the hysterical granny (Loretta Devine); the avaricious preacher (Mike Epps). Ice Cube plays a retired ex-boxer named Thump, and watching him putter around telling stories of bygone days is a sorry reminder of just how very, very long it’s been since Friday, the movie that perfected the template from which Lottery Ticket was drawn. (Kois)
Machete. (R) Things you should know going in: Mexicans like hydraulics in their cars, and white people assume all Mexicans are janitors or gardeners. Created by Robert Rodriguez for Danny Trejo, Machete—a leather-faced, ex-Federale turned down-and-dirty hitman turned violent crusader on behalf of his fellow illegal immigrants, a would-be superhero envisioned as a “Mexican Jean- Claude Van Damme or Charles Bronson”—fi rst appeared in Grindhouse’s trailer for a Machete fi lm that didn’t exist—yet. In the trailer, Machete is hired by slick operative Jeff Fahey to kill an anti-immigration senator, only to be “set up, double-crossed, and left for dead.” Machete the movie stretches the narrative to 105 minutes, fi lling the extra space with PG-13 suggestions of sex, social satire, and star power and is made with a laziness that’s so overt it seems to be part of the joke, to the point where certain shots are straight recycled from the fake trailer, including an orgy scene in a pool featuring an uncredited blonde playing the character played by Lindsay Lohan in other scenes. When Machete isn’t laugh-out-loud funny, it’s deadly boring. The best that can be said is that its makers are self-aware about its superfi ciality, and even nod to it in an exchange between Jessica Alba and Trejo in the fi nal scene. “You can be a real person,” she says. His response: “Why would I want to be a real person, when I’m already a myth?” (Longworth)

Nanny McPhee Returns. (PG) Disney’s dictum that external appearances refl ect internal character is promoted by Universal’s Nanny McPhee Returns. In director Susanna White’s sequel to the 2005 Nanny McPhee, the titular ugly nanny (played, under unsightly makeup, by star/writer Emma Thompson) appears in wartime on the doorstep of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s harried mother, whose efforts to control three unruly kids and their snooty visiting cousins is complicated by her soldier husband’s absence, as well as by her sniveling brother-in-law’s (Rhys Ifans) attempts to make her sell the poo-covered family farm. Imparting life lessons with a bang from her magic cane, Thompson’s intimidating caregiver is a charmless snooze. As the children’s bad habits disappear so, too, do McPhee’s hairy moles and snaggletooth, and just as every book can be judged by its cover in this English countryside-set fable, every source that the fi lm futilely strives to emulate proves transparent. Awash in CG pandemonium involving synchronized-swimming pigs and burping birds, McPhee’s latest saga neither conjures the humanistic heart of Babe nor addresses father-son separation issues with the sobriety of The Water Horse. Instead, it’s merely a compendium of photocopied elements, cartoonish special effects, and easy-bake happily-everafters. (Nick Schager)

The Other Guys. (PG-13) After obligatory helicopter views of New York’s skyline open Adam McKay’s The Other Guys, we’re introduced to Danson and Highsmith (Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson), a duo of unfl appable supercops who keep the city exciting, if not safe, with law enforcement by the Michael Bay book. The Other Guys aren’t them. This is the fourth feature collaboration between McKay and Will Ferrell, who make baggy improvisational comedies about utter boobs (Anchorman’s Ron Burgundy, Talladega Nights’ Ricky Bobby) like Detectives Allen Gamble (Ferrell) and Terry Hoitz (Mark Wahlberg). Gamble is an emasculated Prius owner transferred from forensic accounting. Loose-cannon Hoitz seems to have been partnered with Gamble as punishment — he’s been the departmental black sheep since a humiliating incident that earned him the nickname “Yankee Clipper.” Laying out its premise, The Other Guys is loose and funny. But as it progresses, the leads are given little to do but trade off one-liners while treading the waters of an increasingly choppy plot. Gamble and Hoitz catch the scent of something big during a routine pickup of a Wall Street hustler (Steve Coogan), and, following the clues, The Other Guys turns more hectic than antic.
Somebody didn’t pack enough comedy for this long trip, and if there were a computer program that automatically generated generic action scenes after you punch in participating actors’ names — and there may well be! — the product would look like The Other Guys’ shoot-’em-ups. (Pinkerton)

Piranha 3D. (R) An earthquake has opened an undersea chasm, unleashing a gazillion piranha fi sh near an Arizona resort town that just happens to be jammed with spring-break partiers anxious to frolic in the pretty blue lake. Horny horror-movie revelers tend to deserve what’s coming to them, a sentiment French-born director Alexandre Aja embraces with maniacal glee in a third-act massacre that’s downright ruthless (as was Aja’s debut feature, High Tension, and his remake of The Hills Have Eyes). The human prey get fi lleted in 3-D, no less, a technology that’s deployed effectively—as when one piranha or another is plucked from the computer-animated horde and paraded past the moviegoer’s nose—but also shamelessly, as when a naked woman points her breasts directly at the camera and shimmies. Irredeemable, and yet, the movie, written by Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg, is too funny and the filmmaking too self-aware to be truly offensive.
Some wonder why the Oscar-nominated Elisabeth Shue agreed to star in such obvious trash, but maybe when she read the part in the script where the piranha deliver a riotously gruesome but poetically just comeuppance to the story’s most egregiously misogynist, she laughed her way to saying, “Yes.” (Wilson)

Restrepo. (R) Amid a glut of amped nonfi ction fi lms about the U.S. at war, journalists Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger’s documentary about their 2007 stay with an American platoon in a Taliban-infested region of Afghanistan raises its voice by lowering it. Stripped almost bare of mood music, input from experts or Army poobahs, this hyper-vérité fi lm belongs to the soldiers whose daily routines it follows as they hole up in a valley that turns them into “fi sh in a barrel” for Taliban snipers. The warrior drama unfolds organically, without artifi cial suspense. The fi lm moves to the rhythms of a combat soldier’s life in the field, which consists of long periods of unspeakable tedium interrupted by the confused mayhem of battle with an unseen enemy. Were it not punctuated with post-deployment testimony from the absurdly young surviving soldiers back at their base in Italy, the fi lm would unfold almost without formal structure. If Restrepo shares the sympathy for its raw young subjects that marks most current fi lms about the U.S. military abroad, it is neither romantic nor sentimental about the impossibly contradictory tasks with which these men have been charged, and the sometimes clueless ways in which they try to maintain good relations with local communities even as they bomb the crap out of their villages. Talk about the fog of war. (Taylor)

The Switch. (PG-13) A loose adaptation of a Jeffrey Eugenides story called “Baster,” The Switch stars Jennifer Aniston as Kassie, who, having failed to fi nd a husband by the age of 40, informs her sad-sack best friend Wally (Jason Bateman) that she’s on the hunt for a sperm donor. Though wholly devoted to Kassie, Wally doesn’t have the genes of the blond, studly Roland (Patrick Wilson), who Kassie hires to provide her baby-making “ingredient.” Blackout drunk, Wally hijacks the sperm cup, replacing Roland’s high-quality DNA with his own. When Kassie returns to New York, seven years later, with her young son, Sebastian (Thomas Robinson, excellent), Wally can’t help but notice the similarities between himself and the boy. The Switch’s confi dent tone is not ha-ha funny; the sperm switch scene is the closest it gets to slapstick, and despite its sympathy for the socially awkward, it avoids the halting comedy of discomfort that’s currently trendy (The Offi ce, Cyrus). Saddled with the responsibility of carrying the fi lm, Bateman acquits himself admirably by playing it straight, developing a genuinely convincing and affecting chemistry with Robinson and taking his character’s repression seriously. There are a lot of beauty-fi ltered close-ups of Aniston, looking every bit the fl awless yoga goddess with lush hair the same golden tone as her tanned skin, Forever 30 despite the fact that her character would logically be in her late 40s by the fi lm’s end. The Switch is generally uninterested in who Kassie actually is. (Longworth)

Takers. (PG-13) “Come drink with me from the goblet of destruction,” quotes T.I.’s bank robber (from Genghis Khan!) Before Takers’ big heist kicks off—and he’s not joking. Acting as both producer and plot fulcrum, T.I. is the big human attraction in Takers, possessing the raw energy that charisma vacuums Paul Walker and Hayden Christensen (front and center) lack. Director John Luessenhop works around them in this cheerfully derivative attempt to merge the epically ponderous L.A.-scapes of Michael Mann’s Heat (criminals versus police, with equal screen time for both) with the digital blur of Michael Mann’s Collateral, but with far more fi repower. At least a third of the running time is taken up by car and foot chases (Chris Brown still can’t act, but his parkour is excellent), long Entourageesque stretches fetishizing expensive clothing, and a generous dose of explosions. The editing is Bourne-fast but mostly coherent, and the plot reversals (no matter how fl atly acted) actually do surprise. Gravel-voiced cop Matt Dillon (evidently aging into his Clint Eastwood years ahead of schedule), in pursuit of T.I.’s merry band, is the only other person as compelling as the impeccable action. That’s more than enough to entertain; this is the best baseline-competent action movie to come out all summer. (Vadim Rizov)
Vampires Suck. (PG-13) Writer-director team Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer continue to act as the drain trap to our pop-culture toilet. The Date Movie and Meet the Spartans collaborators have made a career of low-overhead channel-surf bricolages catering to ninth-graders with nothing else to do on a Friday night, movies not meant to be watched so much as texted during. (Smart money says Friedberg and Seltzer never sit through these movies in entirety.) Their Vampires Suck isn’t a spoof of vampire movies as a genre, which would demand an audience whose collective memory reached beyond 2008, but of the fi rst two Twilight movies specifi cally, with iconic scenes re-enacted and laced with gags. Many of the fi lm’s jokes, such as they are, consist of mentioning the titles of contemporary reality-TV shows, which should be a riot for viewers who think that their cable channel guide is the soul of wit. Jenn Proske provides a reasonable facsimile of Kristen Stewart’s soulful lip-gnashing and eyebrow fl uttering, and there’s a giggle-worthy bit with a Segway, but SNL’s “The Franks” parody had more laughs, and the distinct advantage of being only two minutes long. If you’ve ever read a single book—we’ll include Stephenie Meyer—you’re probably better than this. (Pinkerton)