New releases

★★ Bel Ami “Twilight” heartthrob Robert Pattinson stars in a period piece about the rise of a rake in 1880s Paris. The actor’s too young and callow for the role and the movie doesn’t capture the sting of the Guy de Maupassant novel, but it’s a watchable melodrama with good performances by Uma Thurman, Christina Ricci, and Kristin Scott Thomas. (102 min., R) (Ty Burr)

★½ Beyond the Black Rainbow In his debut feature, writer-director Panos Cosmatos shows a knack for mood and tone. It’s 1983, and the setting is a futuristic institution that seems to be medical, but feels penal. The movie has a doomy, dreamy, druggy, draggy feel that’s impressively sustained — until it becomes oppressive, then pointless, then laughable. (109 min., R) (Mark Feeney)

★★ Hysteria A comedy-drama about the invention of the vibrator in 1880s London. Somewhere in here is an illuminating farce about a repressed society racked by urges it doesn’t dare name. So why does director Tanya Wexler insist on stamping it out with moralizing? Stick with playwright Sara Ruhl’s “In the Next Room.” Starring Hugh Dancy and Maggie Gyllenhaal. (100 min., R) (Ty Burr)

★★½ Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted There’s some bona fide big-top wonder in this team-up between ragtag European circus critters (notably Bryan Cranston and Martin Short) and our Central Park Zoo expat heroes (Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, David Schwimmer, and Jada Pinkett Smith). Cascading, colorful 3-D performance sequences are sufficiently dazzling that you may forgive an act wasted on convoluted setup, and those relentless circus-afro ads. (93 min., PG) (Tom Russo)

★★★ Nobody Else But You What if Marilyn Monroe had never made it out of the sticks? That oddly inspired notion is explored in a playful French meta-mystery that’s occasionally too proud of its own cleverness. Jean-Paul Rouve plays a thriller writer investigating the death of a small-town sex goddess (Sophie Quinton). In French, with subtitles. (103 min., unrated) (Ty Burr)

★ Peace, Love & Misunderstanding Catherine Keener (who should know better) is an uptight Manhattan lawyer and Jane Fonda her hippie-dippy Woodstock mother in this limp culture-clash comedy with a heart of patchouli. Shallowly written and unevenly directed (by Bruce Beresford), it’s crystals and smugness all the way. With Elizabeth Olsen and Chace Crawford (96 min., R) (Ty Burr)

★★ Prometheus Like opening a gift box from Tiffany’s to find a mug from the dollar store. Ridley Scott’s return to the “Alien” franchise is impeccably produced but increasingly scattered. It’s officially a prequel but it feels like a remake: We’ve been here before, with lesser technology but more purpose. Starring Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, and Charlize Theron, all quite good. (119 min., R) (Ty Burr)

★★½ We Still Live Here Can a people without words truly be a people? That unanswerable question no longer applies to the Wampanoag, thanks to one of its members, Jessie Littledoe Baird. Anne Makepeace’s modest documentary focuses on Baird’s immodest achievement. She single-handedly resuscitated the tribe’s spoken language, which for many decades had survived only in written form. (56 min., unrated) (Mark Feeney)

Previously released

★½ Battleship Taylor Kitsch (“John Carter”) plays a ne’er-do-well who joins the Navy just in time to fight an alien armada that lands off Hawaii. If only there were more genuine rah-rah fun, instead of seen-it-all-before mayhem. (131 min., PG-13) (Tom Russo)

★★½ Bernie Jack Black dials back the boorishness to play Bernie Tiede, a real-life Texas funeral director and community pillar who in 1996 shot his aged companion (Shirley MacLaine) in the back. With Matthew McConaughey. (104 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)

★★½ Bully Lee Hirsch’s documentary applies a gloss of lyricism to the ugliness of adolescent torment. The movie doesn’t need research or great filmmaking or narrative focus, per se. It needs only the shaming power of its relentlessness and a young audience open to feeling that shame. (94 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)

★ Chernobyl Diaries All that appears to be motivating anybody in “Chernobyl Diaries” to do anything is paltry screenwriting. Chris and Amanda and Natalie visit Chris’s brother, Paul, in Kiev. Paul thinks it would be fun to go to the site of a town abandoned after the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster. This is a “don’t go in there” movie in which all you think is, “Please, go in there. We want to go home.” (88 min., R) (Wesley Morris)

★★★ Chimpanzee DisneyNature’s new “animal drama” has been whittled down from a wealth of wildlife footage into a pleasant, occasionally scary picture-book narrative aimed at 6-year-olds. Tim Allen provides jokey narration and lite-jazz songs bop along to images of frolicking baby chimps. The movie’s astonishing and blandly condescending, often in the same shot. (78 min., PG) (Ty Burr)

★★★ Dark Shadows This big-screen revamp of the much-loved (if ridiculous) late-’60s Gothic soap opera is both sendup and homage, and it recaptures the show’s doomy vibe with blissful comic precision. Johnny Depp is great fun as Barnabas Collins, an 18th-century vampire having trouble adjusting to the polyester 1970s. With Michelle Pfeiffer and Eva Green. (113 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)

★★½ The Dictator The despot here is a tall, fit, flamboyantly bearded North African goofball (Sacha Baron Cohen) who winds up working in a Brooklyn food co-op. That’s the best idea in the movie, which lacks the cultural tension in “Borat” and “Bruno,” satires that Cohen and director Larry Charles previously made together. (88 min., R) (Wesley Morris)

★★★ First Position Another kiddie-competition documentary, but more gripping than usual because the competitors — six young ballet dancers vying for awards and contracts in the 2010 Youth America Grand Prix — are so driven and so talented. (90 min., unrated) (Ty Burr)

★★½ The Five-Year Engagement A pleasant but predictable and overlong romantic comedy about a couple (Jason Segel and Emily Blunt) whose relationship suffers when he follows her from San Francisco to Michigan for her career. One of the softer offerings from the Judd Apatow production factory, it gets laughs while having virtually no dramatic tension. With Alison Brie. (124 min., R) (Ty Burr)

★★★ Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story If Colonel Yonatan “Yoni” Netanyahu has faded from public consciousness outside Israel since he died in the famous Entebbe hostage rescue mission he led in 1976, this documentary should rectify that. His brother, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and others recount Netanyahu’s childhood in Israel, his years at Harvard, and his military leadership. But his own words, in letters and poems, are the most memorable. (87 min., unrated) (Loren King)

★½ Headhunters A sleek Norwegian crime thriller about an Oslo executive-by-day/art thief-by-night (Aksel Hennie) who gets in over his head. Based on a novel by the best-selling Norwegian author Jo Nesbo, it’s crisp Tom Ripley-esque entertainment even as the bodies and plot absurdities pile up. In Norwegian, with English subtitles. Costarring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Synnove Macody Lund. (100 min., R) (Ty Burr)

★ HIGH School Like a lot of recent comedies, this would like to be a Judd Apatow movie, but lacks the inventiveness to give its familiar characters lifelike quirks. When overachiever Henry and pothead Breaux scheme to avoid expulsion for smoking pot by getting their whole school stoned, the few laughs come mostly from bit players: middle-aged teachers and elderly school board members spouting druggy profanities or lurid fantasies. (93 min., R) (Jeremy C. Fox)

★★★ The Hunger Games The millions more who haven’t read Suzanne Collins’s books will be entertained while wondering what the fuss was all about. It’s not a movie on fire, and it should have been. With Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss. (142 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)

★★ The Intouchables France’s second biggest film hit tells the story of a ritzy white quadriplegic (Francois Cluzet) who hires a Senegalese-born thug (Omar Sy) to take care of him. All the white people do in this movie is flatter and spoil and humor the caretaker. He spouts his crass, egotistical crap, and all anyone does is laugh. America has a racial guilt problem. France’s might be more insidious. In French, with subtitles. (113 min., R) (Wesley Morris)

★★★ The Kid With a Bike A young boy (Thomas Doret) is abandoned by his father. It sounds tragic in outline, and Belgium’s Dardenne brothers film it in their usual minimalist style, but this Cannes prizewinner is, remarkably, about hope — about the connections people forge when the ones they’ve been given desert them. With Cécile de France. In French, with English subtitles. (87 min., unrated) (Ty Burr)

★★★ Marvel’s The Avengers If you like Joss Whedon’s superhero extravaganza (really, there’s almost nothing to dislike; it’s as close as a movie can come to the fantastical reality of a good comic book), stick around for the closing credits. As fun as it is to watch the actors playing superheroes, the real stars are the hundreds of men and women who’ve closed the gap between what’s doable in comic books and the movies based on them. With Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, Jeremy Renner, and Samuel L. Jackson. (148 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)

★★★★ Moonrise Kingdom When two 12-year-olds (Kara Heyward, Jared Gilman) plot a secret getaway to a remote part of their fictitious New England island, the adults in their lives come looking for them. Wes Anderson directed and co-wrote the movie with Roman Coppola, and it feels utterly real, vividly dreamt, and totally remembered. With Frances McDormand, Bill Murray, Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, and Tilda Swinton. (94 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)

★★★ The Pirates! Band of Misfits The animators at Aardman (“Wallace & Gromit”) have a knack for leaving us smiling almost as goofily as one of their claymation creations. They do it yet again with this genial, 3-D genre sendup, featuring Hugh Grant as a swashbuckler informed by Darwin (David Tennant) that his “parrot” is a dodo, and their ticket to glory. (88 min., PG) (Tom Russo)

★★★★Polisse An electrifying epic emotional thriller about an endangered child-protection unit in the Paris police department and the tight, tense bond among the detectives. Directed and co-written by Maïwenn, who costars. In French, with English subtitles. (127 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris)

★★½ Snow White and the Huntsman Entertainingly schizophrenic, this re-engineering of the classic fairy tale feels like it was made from pieces of every fantasy-action movie ever made. It barely holds together but there are daft pleasures, from Charlize Theron’s rampant overacting as the evil queen to Kristen Stewart’s surprising underplaying as Snow. Directed by Rupert Sanders. (116 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)

★★½ To the Arctic 3D The latest IMAX nature documentary stars Meryl Streep as a real live polar bear. OK, I made that up. But do any of us doubt that she could have played the mama bear if she’d wanted? Instead, Streep narrates — delivering pious lines aimed at Prius owners — and we wonder what she might have made of a script better matched to the unforced drama of the cinematography. (40 min., G) (Janice Page)

★★★ What to Expect When You’re Expecting It’s all in the delivery. The movie turns the best-selling pregnancy guide of the title into one of those glib all-star comedy-dramas with multiple story lines and predictable dilemmas, but the writing is sharp and the performances bright, and there are laughs to be had for those who’ve been there. (110 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)

★★★ Where Do We Go Now? How can women ever get men to stop killing each other? Director/co-writer/costar Nadine Labaki (“Caramel”) envisions a dusty Lebanese village where the women, Christian and Muslim alike, join forces to foil their husbands’ bloodymindedness. It’s “Lysistrata” in the desert, overly diffuse but full of heart, laughter, and sorrow. In Arabic, Russian, and English, with subtitles. (110 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)