New releases

The Big Year A sloppy and rather sweet human comedy about competitive bird-watching, based on Mark Obmascik’s 2004 nonfiction book and starring Owen Wilson, Jack Black, and Steve Martin as birders trying to amass the most sightings in a year. The stars tamp down their worst impulses; they’re good company and so, in its fubsy way, is the movie. (103 min., PG) (Ty Burr)

Blackthorn Playing the aging outlaw Butch Cassidy, Sam Shepard is the nominal star of this directorial debut by Spanish screenwriter Mateo Gil (“Open Your Eyes,’’ “The Sea Inside’’). Shepard is fine - grizzled and laconic in the best western tradition - but he keeps getting upstaged by Juan Ruiz Anchía’s dazzling cinematography. (102 min., R) (Ty Burr)

Footloose The tiny town that doesn’t dance is back, so is the kid who liberates it from repression with moves that belong in a Coke commercial. As a remake of the 1984 Kevin Bacon launchpad, it’s fun, it’s long, it’s pointless. With Stoughton’s Kenny Wormald in the Bacon role. (115 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)

NO STARS The Human Centipede II: Full Sequence Just imagine the least pleasurable things you can do to a body and then stay home. (88 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris)

Savage Memory The latest in the Documentaries-About-My-Screwed-Up-Family genre. Boston-area filmmaker Zachary Stuart examines the mixed legacy of his pioneering great-grandfather, Bronislaw Malinowski, on both the field of anthropology and his own family. Fascinating viewing, even if Stuart doesn’t really make his case. (75 min., unrated) (Ty Burr)

The Thing The makers of this sci-fi fright flick frame their story as a prequel to the 1982 John Carpenter movie of the same name, rather than as a remake. Mary Elizabeth Winstead (“Scott Pilgrim’’) plays a paleontologist fighting a shape-shifting alien chiseled out of the Antarctic ice. Some lean suspense, but also some slavishness. (103 min., R) (Tom Russo)

Toast The coming of age of a British foodie, based on the memoirs of writer-chef Nigel Slater. The conflict between the boy (Freddie Highmore) and his tawdry stepmother (Helena Bonham Carter) doesn’t work - she’s adorable, he’s a prat - and the obnoxiously “sensitive’’ music score is an active turnoff. (96 min., unrated) (Ty Burr)

Trespass What would happen if Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman played a fraying married couple in a domestic-terrorism thriller directed by Joel Schumacher, the man who made “Batman & Robin’’ and “The Phantom of the Opera’’? Here’s the answer - one of those movies that an audience knows is terrible the minute it starts. (91 min., R) (Wesley Morris)

Weekend Where in the movies have the chaos and mess gone? This romance between two gay strangers - Tom Cullen and Chris New - brings a lot of it back. It’s both a movie about sex and love and a movie about sex and love in other movies. Either, way: wow. Written and directed by Andrew Haigh. (95 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris)

The Women on the 6th Floor To some, this French film will seem a life-affirming fable about a stodgy businessman who reconnects with his joy by getting to know the Spanish maids upstairs. To others, it will play like Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s idea of a romantic comedy. What’s French for ick? In French and Spanish, with subtitles. (103 min., unrated) (Ty Burr)

Previously released

1911 The centenary of the revolution that overthrew China’s last imperial dynasty provides the inspiration for an epically didactic epic. The film alternates battle scenes and speeches, explosions and slogans. Jackie Chan, who stars as a revolutionary general, co-directed. The camera moves around a lot more than he does, which is the reverse of what you want in one of his pictures. In Mandarin, with English subtitles. (120 min., R) (Mark Feeney)

3 A funny, fearless, suspenseful sex comedy that returns the director of “Run Lola Run,’’ Tom Tykwer, to his native Germany. The film is about three adult Berliners - a woman and two men - and their shifting amorous relationship. Tykwer now seems like a dog off its leash. The movie is bursting with intelligence, filmmaking, and sex. It’s a pleasure to be in the presence of a filmmaker who appears to have found himself again. In German, with English subtitles. (119 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris)

50/50 Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a young man battling cancer and Seth Rogen is his best friend in a movie that tries to deepen the raunchy bromance genre. Too contrived to be the Oscar bell-ringer early reports have claimed, the movie’s most affecting when it shows young dudes struggling to come to terms with the ultimate party crasher. With Anna Kendrick. (99 min., R) (Ty Burr)

Abduction Taylor Lautner (“Twilight’’) plays a high schooler who finds out he’s on a missing-kids website, then learns he’s spent his whole life unwittingly tangled in a web of international black-ops intrigue. The movie is an opportunity to assess Lautner’s potential as a general-purpose action hero once his emo-goth run wraps. Not a good bet. (106 min., PG-13) (Tom Russo)

Apollo 18 It must have been a simple pitch: “The Blair Witch Project’’ on the moon. The movie claims to consist of found footage from the secret Apollo 18 moon mission. Two astronauts land on the lunar surface only to find a damaged Soviet spacecraft and some non-human tracks. The actors do their best to portray space heroes in extremis. But the script is built entirely with tired horror-movie tropes. (88 min., unrated) (Joel Brown)

Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 Göran Olsson spent years editing footage from Swedish television journalists covering black Americans during the civil rights era and the Vietnam War. He then showed that material both to activists and to iconoclastic musicians who, in Olsson’s thinking, connect the two eras. The movie manages, mostly, to let the astounding footage speak for itself. (95 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris)

Buck A documentary by first-time filmmaker Cindy Meehl about Buck Brannaman, the real-life “horse whisperer’’ on whom the 1995 novel (and 1998 movie) was based and a plain-spoken cowpoke whose communion with animals is almost holy. Unfocused and draggy, the movie’s still a crowd pleaser because Brannaman is. With Robert Redford. (88 min., PG) (Ty Burr)

The Debt A Mossad team captures a Nazi in 1966 East Berlin and struggles with the aftermath in 1997 Tel Aviv. A remake of a 2007 Israeli film, it’s a potboiler but a gripping one, and it leaves you chewing on both nuances and implausibilities. With Helen Mirren, Sam Worthington, and Jessica Chastain. In German, Ukrainian, and English, with subtitles. (113 min., R) (Ty Burr)

Dolphin Tale An excellent family film that lightly fictionalizes the tale of Winter, the wounded Florida dolphin with a prosthetic tail. Nathan Gamble plays the boy who befriends her, and Ashley Judd, Harry Connick Jr., and Morgan Freeman play the nearby adults. Winter plays herself, winningly. Charles Martin Smith directs in unobtrusive 3-D. (113 min., PG) (Ty Burr)

Drive In Nicolas Winding Refn’s action thriller, Ryan Gosling plays a getaway-car driver who goes soft for the woman next door (Carey Mulligan). Refn finds so many perfect ways to disturb with the combination of utter stillness and grisly violence that the urge to applaud the achievement is involuntary. With Bryan Cranston, and, a very good, very vicious Albert Brooks. (100 min., R) (Wesley Morris)

The Guard A post-Tarantino salt-and-pepper cop yarn transposed to the middle of nowhere, Ireland. The wickedly smart script (by director John Michael McDonagh) keeps you on your toes, and Brendan Gleeson gives a star performance of almost cruelly funny mastery. More profane enjoyment than a body should have. With Don Cheadle. (96 min., R) (Ty Burr)

The Help Cognitive dissonance. It’s possible both to like this movie - to let it crack you up and make you cry - and to wonder why we need a broad dramatic comedy about black maids in 1962 Jackson, Miss., and the white housewives they work for. The movie is too pious for farce and too eager to please to comment persuasively on the racial horrors of the Deep South at the time. (139 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)

Horrible Bosses As one of the title terrors, Colin Farrell reinvents himself as a vicious little freak with the aid of hair and makeup. If only the rest of the movie lived up to that level of engaged nastiness. Instead, it’s another frantic bad-boy comedy, with a decent premise rendered inane by characters whose behavior barely makes sense. (100 min., R) (Ty Burr)

The Ides of March George Clooney has some shocking news: Politics is a dirty business. The actor directed, co-wrote, and costars in this entertaining but hollow moral drama about a young campaign whiz (Ryan Gosling) learning the facts of life from his boss (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and the presidential candidate (Clooney) they’re trying to get elected. With Paul Giamatti and Evan Rachel Wood. (101 min., R) (Ty Burr)

Killer Elite Based on a true story and about a half-dozen Jason Statham movies. Conveniently, it stars Statham as an assassin-for-hire who wants out of the assassin-for-hire business but is dragged back in for One More Job after an Omani sheik kidnaps his old buddy and partner in vigilantism (Robert De Niro). Any scene that fails to involve the revving of motors or the breaking of bones is dead. With Clive Owen as a peevish British agent. (100 min., R) (Wesley Morris)

The Lion King 3D Has the world been clamoring for the story of Simba to be as visually deep as it is wide? No expense has been spared in making this the best-looking post-production 3-D job to date, but it’s still a post-production 3-D job, and it still doesn’t look quite right. The movie hasn’t aged all that well either. (89 min., G) (Ty Burr)

Moneyball A tersely hilarious baseball drama set in the front office. Adapting Michael Lewis’s book about the 2002 season of the Oakland A’s, director Bennett Miller shows where love of numbers connects with love of the game, and Brad Pitt does his best and sneakiest work yet as GM Billy Beane. (133 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)

Mozart’s Sister Yes, Mozart had a sister, and the sneaking suspicion has always been that if she’d been a man we might speak of her in the same breath as her brother. Alternately rapturous and overly passive, René Féret’s speculative period piece emphasizes the gulf between the middle-class Mozarts and the bejeweled royalty they entertain. In French, with subtitles. (120 min., unrated) (Ty Burr)

My Afternoons With Margueritte In Jean Becker’s fine little movie, Gérard Depardieu plays a small-town handyman who forges a bond with a tiny, elegant older woman (Gisèle Casadesus). Depardieu operates on the quiet side of his stardom. We tend to think of him at his best when he’s pouring it on. Here, he holds the sauce and gets as much done. In French, with English subtitles. (88 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris)

Real Steel In some not-too-terribly-distant future, the public gathers to watch great big robots beat the screws out of each other, while we watch Hugh Jackman and a kid named Dakota Goyo play father and son with a lot of razzle-dazzle. They train an underdog robot. You know the rest. Yet you don’t know how entertaining the rest actually is until it’s happening to you. (126 min., PG) (Wesley Morris)

Sarah’s Key Kristen Scott Thomas plays a modern journalist in this well-made but distractingly noble attempt to turn the French Vel’ d’Hiv roundup of Jews in 1942 into a kind of historical mystery that ping-pongs between then and now and pivots on the tragic life of a girl who survived. Scott Thomas’s radiance works well here. But the movie over-manages it, turning a searchlight into a beacon. (111 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)

Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness Writer-director Joseph Dorman offers a vigorously intelligent look at the life and work of the Yiddish master whose work inspired “Fiddler on the Roof.’’ The documentary doubles as a portrait of both the world of the Eastern European shtetl and the man who so famously recorded it. (93 min., unrated) (Mark Feeney)

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil A cheerfully subversive horror parody that casts Tyler Labine and Alan Tudyk as two backwoods rednecks who are not chainsaw-wielding psychos but are mistaken for same by a crew of idiot college students. It’s fast, it’s cheap, it’s funny, and it (mostly) works. With Katrina Bowden. (89 min., R) (Ty Burr)

The Way Emilio Estevez wrote and directed this drama about an uptight American dad (Martin Sheen, the filmmaker’s father) completing his late son’s 500-mile trek along Spain’s pilgrimage route, The Way of St. James. The movie’s earnest, inspirational, nice, and dull - a pedestrian tale, literally - but the performances are good and the locations stunning. (115 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)

What’s Your Number? Formula chick-flickery - about a woman lamenting her colorful sexual history - that reminds us that Anna Faris lives on Planet Farce and not in Katherine Heigl land. Even so, the application of her fake-ditz lunacy to the pursuit of love has its amusements, mostly when they’re aimed at Chris Evans, a generic hunk whose secret weapon is that he knows how to use his genericness for comedy. He and Faris are ideal for each other. They just need a better movie. (106 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)