Away We Go A young couple (Maya Rudolph and John Krasinski) traverse North America looking for the perfect place to raise their unborn baby. It’s great to have a serious movie about people in their 30s, but does it have to be so smug? Directed by Sam Mendes. (90 min., R) (Wesley Morris)
Brüno Sacha Baron Cohen’s Austrian nincompoop comes to America seeking fame. He throws his barely concealed crotch at the camera and tries to film a sex video with an annoyed Ron Paul. Cohen is looking to exploit the hate that exists in people, but he doesn’t quite find it, and the movie just sputters. (82 min., R) (Wesley Morris)
Cheri Michelle Pfeiffer plays a Belle Epoque courtesan emotionally entangled with a young Parisian (Rupert Friend). What at first seems a waxwork parody of Merchant Ivory-style filmmaking becomes a surprisingly sharp meditation on beauty and age, both in 19th-century France and the modern film industry. (92 min., R) (Ty Burr)
Departures A young man (Masahiro Motoki) apprentices as a ritual preparer of dead bodies. It’s easy to see why this won the foreign language Oscar over better, tougher movies. It’s the kind of sentimental drama that pats its audience on the back for confronting social taboos. In Japanese, with subtitles (131 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)
(500) Days of Summer A gimmicky little romantic comedy with enough charm to get by. It’s your basic boy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) meets girl (Zooey Deschanel), boy loses girl, boy tries to get girl back again, but director Mark Webb shuffles the scenes out of sequence with sweetness, glib wit, and an awareness of the hero’s passivity. (95 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)
Food, Inc. Rob Kenner’s documentary is about the extent to which industrial food production has replaced farming in America. Like certain forms of explanatory journalism, the movie intends to assert and shame. It’s part activism, part lecture. (94 min., PG) (Wesley Morris)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Installment six merely gets us one movie closer to the series’ big finale. Harry learns more about Voldemort, the terrorist who killed his parents, and Jim Broadbent arrives as a professor who used to teach Voldemort. (153 min., PG) (Wesley Morris)
The Hurt Locker This war film focuses on the work of an Army bomb squad and one particularly gifted soldier (Jeremy Renner), who seems to have no fear of roadside bombs. We see and feel how when James disarms a bomb, it’s almost no different from watching a conductor seduce an orchestra or a chef produce a meal. (88 min., R) (Wesley Morris)
I Love You, Beth Cooper Writer Larry Doyle (“The Simpsons’’) adapts his novel about a high school geek (Paul Rust) enduring one long night with his cheerleader dream girl (Hayden Panettiere of “Heroes’’). Chris Columbus directs, and what could have been a nice John Hughes revamp ends up just another teen stu-com. (101 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs The third installment in the series offers up a stale and sketchy premise: a lost world far beneath the frozen tundra, where tropical jungles somehow thrive, Jurassic beasts roar, and the most menacing creatures are total softies once you get to know them. In 3-D. (94 min., PG) (Janice Page)
My Sister’s Keeper A shapeless, hankie-wringing reworking of the Jodi Picoult bestseller about a terminally ill teenage girl and her frayed family. Cameron Diaz is OK as the controlling mom, but Sofia Vassilieva anchors the film as the cancer victim, rebellious, serene, and life-size. With Abigail Breslin and Alec Baldwin. (109 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)
Public Enemies A disappointment from director Michael Mann, who tells the story of Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger without bothering to explain why. The fault’s not Johnny Depp’s - at this point, the actor is the definition of star power - but misguided camerawork and the lack of a story line. (143 min., R) (Ty Burr)
Soul Power The Rumble in the Jungle had a soundtrack. A few weeks before the Ali-Foreman fight, James Brown, B.B. King, Bill Withers, Celia Cruz, the Spinners, and Miriam Makeba performed in a three-day concert, discussed at the time as the “black Woodstock.’’ Culled from 125 hours of footage, the movie is a random abridgement that entertains despite its tendency to wander through a lot of terrific material. Directed by Jeffrey Levy-Hinte. (93 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)
Unmistaken Child An eerie, moving documentary about the selection of a young Nepalese boy as the reincarnation of a revered Buddhist master. Filmmaker Nati Baratz observes dispassionately, with few resorts to voice-over narration and the like, and the results both convey lasting mysteries and raise further questions. In English, Tibetan, Nepali, and Hindi, with subtitles. (102 min., unrated) (Ty Burr)
Whatever Works Minor Woody Allen, based on a 30-year-old script about a Manhattan sourpuss (Larry David, channeling the director) and the Southern-fried youngster (Evan Rachel Wood) he marries. As Wood’s mama, Patricia Clarkson is a regally smutty joy, but the film’s thin and divorced from any reality. (92 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)
The Windmill Movie A remarkable documentary about a deceased Harvard film professor named Richard P. Rogers that attempts to reconcile Rogers’s sense of personal, professional, and artistic malaise, which culminated in his decades-long attempt to make a film about his life. He left behind over 200 hours of footage but no finished movie. One of Rogers’s former students tries, audaciously, to make sense of it all. (95 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris)
An archive of movie reviews may be found at www.boston.com/movies.
