Amreeka A Palestinian divorcee (Nisreen Faour) and her bright teenage son (Melkar Muallem) move in with her sister’s upper-middle-class family in a small Illinois town. The movie flirts with too-muchness, but the first-time writer and director Cherien Dabis has a strong, authentic sense of scale and talent for working with her actors. The cast includes Yussef Abu Warda, Alia Shawkat, Joseph Ziegler, and Hiam Abbass. (93 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris).

The Baader Meinhof Complex Uli Edel’s drama about Germany’s urban guerrilla outfit, the Red Army Faction, is swift, brutal, lurid, usually overheated, and occasionally comical. But it is also a serious, well-acted, and unromantic reckoning with the rise and demise of a terrorist gang whose radicalism ultimately reached beyond the quartet of young men and women who set it in motion. (150 min., R) (Wesley Morris)

Bright Star A quiet, watchful, transporting film about the romance between the 19th-century poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and the seamstress Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). Director Jane Campion stands biopic clichés on their head by making Brawne the subject and Keats the limpid love object; the result is a woman’s film in deep and profound ways. (119 min., PG) (Ty Burr)

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs This 3-D animated romp is more than an extrapolation of the 1978 children’s book about a town where food falls from the sky. It’s a glossy spoof of a disaster movie that nooks nothing like the original but creates a vibrant- if derivative- world all its own. Bill Hader voices a nerdy inventor, and James Caan is remarkable appealing as the voice of his gruff, misunderstanding dad. (81 min., PG) (Joanna Weiss)

Disgrace A harsh, sometimes ugly tale of post-apartheid South Africa, based on a novel by J.M. Coetzee. John Malkovich plays a decadent Cape Town professor who loses his job and wanders through a metaphorical landscape of humiliation and acceptance. (120 min., unrated) (Ty Burr)

Fame In this sugarless update of the 1980 movie, innocent songs and unsuspecting dance routines are hacked to bits. Like its predecessor, the 2009 edition is also set at a performing arts high school where a clan of fresh young faces descend for four years of, of - well, that’s part of the problem. We don’t know if these kids have talent or not. I’m gonna live forever? Not this time. (99 min., PG) (Wesley Morris)

I Can Do Bad All By Myself The best Tyler Perry movie to date -- his most confident mixture of uplifting black middle-class melodrama and low-down comedy. It’s put over by a terrific Taraji P. Henson as a selfish neighborhood girl learning to love and by musical guest shots by Marvin Winans, Mary J. Blige, and Gladys Knight. (113 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell Web author and novelist Tucker Max brings his bad-boy tales of binge-drinking and serial fornication to the screen. For a remake of “The Hangover’’ that appears to be made by drunk, entitled frat boys on a budget consisting solely of their parents’ credit cards, it’s slightly better than you’d expect. (105 min., R) (Ty Burr)

The Informant! The true story of corporate whistle-blower Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) is given a bright, shallow satiric spin by director Steven Soderbergh. Damon is terrific as the delusional hero, and the movie’s fun to watch, but you can tell it was a lot more fun to make, and that’s a problem. (108 min., R) (Ty Burr)

Jennifer’s Body Not a disaster but a meh: A teen horror comedy that’s neither funny enough nor terribly scary. The script by Diablo Cody (“Juno’’) swaggers but doesn’t bite, and Megan Fox is too generic to make her demonically possessed high school queen bee very interesting. Amanda Seyfried is more fun as her nerd-grrl pal. “Heathers’’ it ain’t. (102 min., R) (Ty Burr)

Love Happens A self-help guru (Aaron Eckhart) in denial over his wife’s death meets a free-spirited florist (Jennifer Amiston). It’s being sold as a romantic comedy but it’s really a Big Cry movie, and it progresses from an acceptably cute to shamelessly sticky. With Dan Fogler, Judy Greer, and Martin Sheen. (109 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)

9 Shane Acker’s vividly downbeat work of animation brings us a story of a world on its last leg, only this one, imaginatively enough, is populated only by machines and a collection of nine living puppets. It’s thrilling how much care Acker has put into realizing his vision. You want to reach out and touch this movie as much as watch it. And, no, it’s not in 3-D. (79 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)

Pandorum Director Christian Alvart and screenwriter Travis Malloy must have seen “Aliens’’ in the cradle, for they’ve digested it with love and delivered a highly effective sci-fi thriller that will please more than genre fans. Even Dennis Quaid, playing yet another astronaut, this time on a mission to colonize a newly discovered planet, seems genuinely creeped out. (108 min., R) (Justine Elias)

Paris A touching but muted ode to the city, from writer-director Cédric Klapisch (“L’Auberge Espagnole’’). The film introduces us to a handful of characters and lets them roll around Paris like marbles, colliding and ricocheting off each other. With Juliette Binoche and Romain Duris. In French, with subtitles. (129 min., R) (Ty Burr)

The September Issue One of the most revealing movies you’ll see about work. R.J. Cutler’s documentary is set at the Manhattan offices of American Vogue. Cutler treats it all seriously, but not too seriously. The people who work at Vogue work hard. They’re serious, really thinking about fashion, how it evolves, and where exactly it belongs in a woman’s life. The best stuff involves the editor, Anna Wintour, and her creative differences with creative director Grace Coddington, who’s the movie star. (90 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)

Still Walking In Japanese writer-director Hirokazu Koreeda’s latest film, a family uneasily meets for its semiannual re-union. The eloquently static camera sense of emotional restraint owe much to Ozu. Other than the family patriarch’s boorishness being overdone, there’s hardly a false note here- and many that ring unnervingly true. (114 minutes, unrated) (Mark Feeney)

Surrogates In the future, we’ll all have robot surrogates, and won’t that be fun? The latest Bruce Willis futuristic action rama-lama is a pretty watchable sci-fi B movie, a case of a good director (Jonathan Mostow) and some intriguing ideas struggling to overcome formula plotting, limp dialogue, and a serious case of the sillies. (88 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)

An archive of movie reviews can be found at www.boston.com/movies.