Movie Stars

The Green Hornet What if a masked crime fighter was an obnoxious lout? Star Seth Rogen and director Michel Gondry undermine every promise a superhero movie is supposed to make with subversive comic verve, but the parody becomes a train wreck in the final hour. Taiwanese pop singer Jay Chou plays Kato, who turns out to have more talent than his boss. (111 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)

Previously released

127 Hours James Franco plays hiker Aron Ralston, who in 2003 survived a horrific ordeal in the Utah desert. Director Danny Boyle (“Slumdog Millionaire’’) delivers a movie experience both grueling and transcendent. What begins as a story of survival becomes something infinitely more moving: a metaphysical journey back toward the human race. (94 min., R) (Ty Burr)

A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory A haunting little film about a ghost on the floor of Andy Warhol’s Factory. In 1966, Danny Williams, a filmmaker in Warhol’s camp, went for a swim and never returned. Four decades later, his niece, Esther B. Robinson, tries to plumb the mystery surrounding this artist written out of his own history. (75 min., unrated) (Ty Burr)

Black Swan Natalie Portman speeds around Darren Aronofsky’s commercially daring freak-out in a state of corseted frenzy. She tries to save her starring role in “Swan Lake’’ from the company’s sexy new dancer (Mila Kunis). The film really works as a study of artistic obsession, as a psychological horror-thriller. The dancer’s paranoia and narcissism overtake her. Is she dreaming or displacing? Aronofsky is very good playing the ambiguity. With Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey, and Winona Ryder. (107 min., R) (Wesley Morris)

Blue Valentine Derek Cianfrance’s time-bomb marriage movie, with Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling, aspires to high solemnity. How long until she leaves? As the film makes its way to the end of its second hour, it becomes an acutely stylized, slow-motion marital accident. You either want to call AAA or roll your eyes. That largely depends on whether you believe the filmmakers really know what they’re up to. (120 min., R) (Wesley Morris)

Casino Jack The Jack Abramoff story, courtesy of star Kevin Spacey and the late director George Hickenlooper. The movie is glib, fast-paced entertainment that barely leaves a mark — which, given the subject, is not quite right. Costarring Barry Pepper and the great Jon Lovitz as a sleazeball who gets attacked with a ballpoint pen. (108 min., R) (Ty Burr)

Country Strong That’s a title that calls to mind a pickup truck. Only in a work of science fiction would it suffice as a description of Gwyneth Paltrow, but the real problem with this movie isn’t Paltrow’s confident performance as an alcoholic country superstar. It’s the writer and director Shana Feste, who makes her heroine three or four different people. With Tim McGraw, Garrett Hedlund, and, best of all, Leighton Meester, as an aspiring singer. (111 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)

The Fighter The long-awaited Micky Ward boxing movie is this close to a triumph: a movie that steeps us in the grit of Lowell, Mass., in the 1990s and electrifyingly dramatizes Ward’s (Mark Wahlberg) battles with the family that almost loved him to death. Christian Bale effectively steals the show as Ward’s crackhead trainer brother Dicky Eklund. Warning: No Arturo Gatti and not much of an ending either. (114 min., R) (Ty Burr)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows How should we treat this? This was to be the seventh and final film of the series, but it’s been split, rather crassly, in half. “Part One’’ features the most deliriously inspired moviemaking since “The Prisoner of Azkaban,’’ from 2004, and enough bold silences and pensive glances to qualify as European art. But Rowling wrote one epic funeral that Warner Bros. now requires us to show up for twice. (146 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)

Gulliver’s Travels A migraine inducement that you’d think Jack Black had gotten out of his system years ago. Yet he still finds an excuse to fling his bodily orb like Angus Young on Guitar Hero night at the neighborhood bar. When he starts with his “School of Rock’’ performance, we know he’s on autopilot. The movie is much worse off: There’s no one in the cockpit at all. (78 min., PG) (Wesley Morris)

How Do You Know James L. Brooks wrote and directed this romantic comedy about two strangers (Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd) whose separate crises bring them together. In addition to forgetting a question mark, Brooks has also misplaced his point. The movie doesn’t ring quite true with a cast that feels as lightweight as this one does. With Owen Wilson and Jack Nicholson. (116 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)

I Love You Phillip Morris Jim Carrey performs the same mugging and gymnastics he did in “Liar, Liar’’ and “Yes Man.’’ This new movie adds a psychology to the perpetually incarcerated gay con man he’s playing. The mugging has a point. The grin he wears in just about every scene here is a mask. This isn’t great farce, but it’s more than good enough. And Carrey is more than good enough in it. With Ewan McGregor as Phillip, the inmate he falls in love with. (97 min., R) (Wesley Morris)

Inception This is basically a caper film. Instead of robbing a rich man’s casino, Leonardo DiCaprio and his extraction team raid the man’s subconscious to plant a thought in his head. Writer and director Christopher Nolan uses cinematic devices to evoke or rework the mechanics of dreams. He expends little apparent effort, even in the orchestration of the film’s centerpiece heist. It lasts for 80 minutes, involves at least two dreams within one dream, and goes off with nary a hitch on Nolan’s part. (148 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)

Inside Job A masterpiece of investigative nonfiction moviemaking — a scathing, outrageous, depressing, comical, horrifying report on what and who brought on the current financial crisis. Charles Ferguson’s movie succeeds at upsetting you not by losing its cool, the way so many similar films do, but by slow-cooking. (109 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)

The King’s Speech Colin Firth as King George VI, afflicted with a nasty stammer until a man-of-the-people speech therapist (Geoffrey Rush) cures him in time for WWII. This art-house crowd pleaser may win Oscars (deservedly so in Firth’s case), but it’s complacent tosh that lacks the bite of “The Queen.’’ With Helena Bonham Carter. (118 min., R) (Ty Burr)

Little Fockers Manic, unfocused, seriously crass, and only fitfully funny, this second spinoff of “Meet the Parents’’ is the multiplex equivalent of a cash grab. The quality of the talent involved is cause for depression: De Niro, Stiller, Danner, Streisand, and Hoffman return (the latter two only briefly), and new recruits include Laura Dern, Jessica Alba, and De Niro’s long-ago sparring partner Harvey Keitel. (98 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)

Love & Other Drugs WARNING: Prolonged exposure to this romantic comedy-drama about a go-go pharmaceutical salesman (Jake Gyllenhaal) and the ailing woman he loves (Anne Hathaway) may result in overwhelming sensations of slickness and impacted chick-flick cliches. Hathaway’s by-now-undeniable star quality, a solid Gyllenhaal, and a refreshing frankness in matters sexual are the active ingredients. (113 min., R) (Ty Burr)

Mao’s Last Dancer Historical ballet camp. The movie tells the story of the dancer Li Cunxin (Chi Cao), but portraits of Mao get as many close-ups as the actors. The movie jerks back and forth between Li’s childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, which is spent in 1980s Texas. There are some nice touches, namely Bruce Greenwood as the retired dancer Ben Stevenson. But the dramatic highpoint — set in a mansion and featuring a bunch of people standing around — looks like a game of Clue. (117 min., PG) (Wesley Morris)

Megamind How do you make a big entertainment about dissatisfaction? Hire Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, and Brad Pitt to do the voices, then ask them to enjoy themselves. The comical evil-genius title character (Ferrell) gets bored after vanquishing his flamboyantly noble archenemy (Pitt). The bliss of “Megamind’’ is the way it pursues a solution for the tired problems of both superheroes and movies about them. (96 min., PG) (Wesley Morris)

Nora’s Will From Mexico, a witty, deceptively wispy tale of family grievances and reconciliation. The title character is dead by her own hand, but she set the Passover table before she went, leaving her relatives grappling with whether to celebrate her flaws or sweep them under the rug. A wise film that doesn’t insist on its wisdom. In Spanish, with subtitles. (92 min., unrated) (Ty Burr)

Rabbit Hole It sounds like must-miss entertainment — a story about suburban parents (Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart) coming to terms with the death of a child — but John Cameron Mitchell’s film, based on a play by David Lindsay-Abaire, is a pained, often beautiful tragicomedy of loss. Tonally, it’s just down the street from “Little Children.’’ Kidman has rarely been this good. (91 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)

Season of the Witch In the 14th century, Nicolas Cage carts around a young woman (Claire Foy) locked in a rolling jail. Her crime is being a witch – OK, it’s being a woman. If only the studio had been a little more upfront. But, to be fair, ”Season of Misogyny” isn’t much of a title, either. (98 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)

The Social Network David Fincher’s brilliantly assured, blithely fictionalized drama about the founding of Facebook is about belonging and wanting to belong. Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay moves from Harvard to the geek battlefields of Silicon Valley with wide-ranging wit, and Jesse Eisenberg comes of age playing Mark Zuckerberg as a sort of Charles Foster Kane with Asperger’s. With Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake. (121 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)

Somewhere Sofia Coppola invites us to spend an hour and a half or so in the company of a famous actor (Stephen Dorff). He languishes in a suite at Los Angeles’s Chateau Marmont hotel, which under the circumstances doubles as a kind of celebrity halfway house. After 20 minutes with him, we’re no longer moviegoers. We’re baby sitters. (98 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris)

Tangled, Disney’s animated musical sugars, spices, and 3-Ds the tale of “Rapunzel,’’ and it’s on edge the whole time. It seems almost ashamed of how old-fashioned it is. When Rapunzel (the voice of Mandy Moore) or Rapunzel’s mother (Donna Murphy) breaks into song, the movie tries to cram in a sight gag or a joke in the lyrics. But the movie’s senses of cleverness and innovation merely underscore how shopworn the rest is. (92 min., PG) (Wesley Morris)

The Tourist A slow and silly action-comedy-romantic-thriller, in which Angelina Jolie seduces then tries to ditch a disheveled Johnny Depp in Venice. She’s being hunted by different factions of men in black leather and gray wool. Is there another kind of Angelina Jolie movie? This is the sort in which she has something or is someone of great interest to a lot of people. Why does this woman constantly require question marks and interrogation sequences? (100 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)

Tron: Legacy This petrified sequel to the ravishing 1982 original doesn’t know what it thinks of itself. For one thing, it looks like the three most recent “Star Wars’’ movies. Our hero, played by a dud-stud named Garrett Hedlund, finds none of what he sees impressive. At an alleged cost of $200 million, that’s some yawn. If he can’t be thrilled, what hope do we have? With Jeff Bridges reprising his role from the first movie, which, judging from the robes, was Obi-Wan Kenobi. (127 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)

True Grit Less a Charles Bronson thriller than a straightforward western. It’s spiced with the sort of comedy one expects from Joel and Ethan Coen and driven by the kind of sincerity one doesn’t. Jeff Bridges plays alcoholic US marshal Reuben “Rooster’’ Cogburn, hired by a deadly serious 14-year-old (Hailee Steinfeld) to capture the man (Josh Brolin) who killed her father. This isn’t a rousing movie as much as a reassurance. With a perfectly hammy Matt Damon as a Texas Ranger. (110 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)

Typeface The most sideways film in the Art on Film series at the Museum of Fine Arts is a little documentary about the increasingly evaporating art of wood type. It’s not the filmmaking that’s sideways. Justine Nagan’s filmmaking is straightforwardly basic. But the idea of any series including an hourlong immersion into bygone craft is inspired. (60 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris)

Yogi Bear Unbearable. (83 min., PG) (Ty Burr)

An archive of movie reviews can be found at www.boston.com/movies. Theaters are subject to change.