Movie Stars

The Blind Side Sandra Bullock plays a Memphis woman who takes in an enormous, athletic African-American. He thrives. She thrives. The film is hard to resist. But it’s another Hollywood movie about a black male rescued from God knows what either by nice white people or sports. Here it’s both. How good we feel is directly proportional to how blind we’re willing to be. (125 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)

Bronson The life and crimes of Michael Peterson (jailhouse name: Charles Bronson), Britain’s most notorious prisoner. A brutally stylized piece of work that confirms Danish-American director Nicolas Winding Refn’s talent and delivers a star in actor Tom Hardy. Too bad we come out knowing as little about Peterson as when we went in. (92 min., PG) (Ty Burr)

The Messenger A forcefully acted and peculiar emotional drama about two soldiers (Ben Foster and Woody Harrelson) who inform the next of kin of soldiers killed in service. The movie, which Oren Moverman directed and co-wrote with Alessandro Camon, devotes itself more to the notifiers than the notifications, which in themselves are powerful, and opens into a strange, fraught universe of the men’s downtime. (88 min., R) (Wesley Morris)

Planet 51 A digitally animated family film about an astronaut (voiced by Dwayne “The Rock’’ Johnson) visiting a planet where he’s the alien. Fast, shiny, short, and cheerful; also obnoxious, unoriginal, and potty-mouthed. Young children and adults with a high pain threshold will enjoy the movie during its brief pause on the way to your On Demand menu. (88 min., PG) (Ty Burr)

Precious: Based on the Novel “Push’’ by Sapphire Is America, in fact, ready for a movie about a poor, fat black girl (Gabourey Sidibe) who can’t read and is pregnant, for the second time, with her absent father’s baby? Who cares? It’s here, and it’s very much alive. In its own determined way, this is a work of immense, astonishing joy. It believes that in this girl’s wide, brown face and bleak little life there’s a reason to live. Mo’Nique brings down the house as her mother. (110 min., R) (Wesley Morris)

The Twilight Saga: New Moon The second installment in Hollywood’s adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s mega-selling vampire romance series is an anemic comedown after the full-blooded swoon of last year’s “Twilight.’’ Director Chris Weitz is stuck with a sequel that’s a morning-after mope-fest, but Taylor Lautner is relaxed and likable as Native American wolfboy Jacob Black. (130 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)

Astro Boy The latest iteration of the rocket-propelled superboy takes its cues from the original Japanese manga rather than the 1960s TV cartoon and is all the more interestingly weird for it. Freddie Highmore voices the computer animated hero, a Pinocchio-in-reverse who was a little boy and is now a robot. Nicolas Cage, Kristen Bell, and Donald Sutherland also aurally appear. (94 min., PG) (Ty Burr)

The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day Ten years after Troy Duffy’s “Boondock Saints’’ - an unwatchable Boston gangster comedy with an inexplicable cult audience - comes the sequel. It isn’t art but it is an improvement: a scurrilous, lowdown, sub-Tarantino action comedy that, unlike the first film, doesn’t make you want to claw your eyes out. (117 min., R) (Ty Burr)

The Box In the new movie from Richard Kelly (“Donnie Darko,’’ “Southland Tales’’), James Marsden and Cameron Diaz, looking like a Pan-Am flight attendant, play a nice Virginia couple who receive a box that, should they press its red button, will make them rich (for 1976, anyway) but cost the life of one stranger. The beauty of Kelly’s imaginatively conceived science-fiction thriller is how what seems so cosmic turns out to be of this diabolical world - yet hard to unravel all the same. With Frank Langella, missing a lot of his face. (118 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)

A Christmas Carol Robert Zemeckis’s second try at 3-D motion-capture holiday storytelling (after 2004’s dire “The Polar Express’’) is a marked improvement: A darkly detailed marvel of creative visualization that does well by Dickens and right by audiences. Jim Carrey (or his digital facsimile) gives a sharp, reined-in performance as Scrooge, and while the film sometimes panders, it just as often soars. Too scary for the little guys, though. (96 min., PG) (Ty Burr)

An Education A charming, intelligent coming-of-age tale set in early-’60s London. Carey Mulligan is hugely appealing as a levelheaded teenage girl who gets involved with a mysterious older man (Peter Sarsgaard). Nick Hornby adapted the script, Lone Scherfig directed, but the movie belongs to its star. (95 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)

The Fourth Kind Silly, cynical, incompetent, dull. Half the movie claims to feature found video footage of alien abductions and spiritual possessions. The rest has Milla Jovovich playing an alleged actual psychologist in Alaska, who, while interviewing a rash of supposed abductees, winds up abducted herself. The money you left at the box office will know just how she feels. (98 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)

Good Hair A documentary spurred by Chris Rock’s dilemma over how he would care for his two young daughters’ hair. Would he keep it natural? Would he have it relaxed? The film is the antic, free-ranging culmination of his crisis, in which Rock finds great comedy in what still lingers as a tragedy over the black compulsion to strive for a kind of whiteness through hair care. (95 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)

Law Abiding Citizen Jamie Foxx is a lawyer in the Philadelphia district attorney’s office harassed by a nut (Gerard Butler) angry that the killers of his wife and children didn’t suffer enough. The script forgoes the primacy of revenge fantasy and leans on military-grade weaponry that turns Philadelphia into sections of Afghanistan. (108 min., R) (Wesley Morris)

Michael Jackson’s This Is It A compilation of footage from rehearsals for what would have been the late singer’s 50 concerts in London. The film arrives with an eerie taint. Yet watching Jackson pop, lock, rock, writhe, thrust, and clutch his crotch, we often see someone who’s vibrantly, reassuringly human. He’s a life force. He’s the Wiz. (98 min., PG) (Wesley Morris)

Paranormal Activity An invisible force bedevils a San Diego couple - and it’s all captured on videotape! The microbudget Slamdance sensation aims to conjure the “Blair Witch’’ terror of being lost in the woods, but director Oren Peli manages only to serve up mild unease in an underfurnished home. (85 min., R) (Justine Elias)

Pirate Radio A rowdy, mostly hilarious British comedy-drama about the offshore radio stations that blared rock ’n’ roll to a desperate UK audience in the 1960s. Writer-director Richard Curtis has made a party, not a movie, and if the party goes on too long, at least the guests are great company and the host’s taste in music is impeccable. With Philip Seymour Hoffman and Bill Nighy. (120 min., R) (Ty Burr)

A Serious Man The Coen brothers remake the Book of Job in 1967 suburban Minneapolis. It’s Jewish Bergman and one of their very best films - a pitch-black Old Testament farce in which God is either absent, absent-minded, or mad as hell. Love it or hate it, it’ll haunt you for a long time. Michael Stuhlbarg plays the hapless hero. (105 min., R) (Ty Burr)

2012 “Apocalypse Really Soon’’ or “Airport 2012.’’ Director Roland Emmerich (“The Day After Tomorrow’’) imagines global apocalypse as a state-of-the-art multiplex circus whose special effects stagger the senses and play like a video game, and whose human drama aims for the cosmic and lands waist-deep in the Big Silly. John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Amanda Peet are among the humans. (157 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)

(Untitled) The New York art world does such a wonderful job of satirizing itself that further assistance hardly seems necessary. Writer-director Jonathan Parker takes for granted the trumped-up stakes, the humorlessness, and the artists’ capacity for opportunism and willful absurdity. The players in this movie are cynical, but Parker, amazingly, is not. With Adam Goldberg, Marley Shelton, Eion Bailey, and Vinnie Jones. (98 min., R) (Wesley Morris)

See an archive of reviews at www.boston.com/movies. Theaters are subject to change.