New Releases
★★½ 5 Broken Cameras The title items belong to the documentary’s co-director, narrator, and principal photographer, Emad Burnat. A Palestinian
olive farmer on the West Bank, he starts using a video camera to document protests against the location of an Israeli-built barrier in his village. While the film overall can feel wayward and repetitive, Burnat’s footage is often moving, sometimes startling, and increasingly angry-making. In Arabic and Hebrew, with subtitles. (90 min., unrated) (Mark Feeney)
★Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter A joyless cinematic headache that ruins a decent (if historically sacrilegious) joke: that our 16th president was surprisingly handy with a silver-tipped axe. Benjamin Walker makes a sturdy Lincoln, but Timur Bekmambetov directs with frantic, humorless 3-D bombast. Ugly as sin, too. With Dominic Cooper, Anthony Mackie, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead (105 min., R) (Ty Burr)
★★½ Brave Uh-oh: The first Pixar movie that doesn’t feel like a Pixar movie. A lusciously animated tale of a rebellious Scottish princess (voiced by Kelly Macdonald) and the witch’s potion that turns her mother (Emma Thompson) into a bear, it has laughs, emotion, and moments of invention to offset a bizarre and scattered story line. In 3-D. (99 min., PG) (Ty Burr)
★★★ Cure for Pain: The Mark Sandman Story Filmmakers Robert Bralver and David Ferino aim to illuminate the man behind the “low-rock” sound of the revered Boston rock trio Morphine. Sandman passed away on July 3, 1999, while playing a gig in Italy. This documentary isn’t a complete portrait but it is a loving, candid look at Sandman’s life and artistry through the eyes of his friends, family, and bandmates.. (84 min., unrated) (Sarah Rodman)
★★½ Lost Bohemia There used to be 165 apartments atop Carnegie Hall designed for artists. One of the residents, Josef “Birdman” Astor, has directed this documentary about his charming, eccentric neighbors and their eviction by the Carnegie Hall Corporation. Some of these characters could have flown in from a fairy tale — or into one, assuming fairy tales can have peeling paint and end in litigation. (77 min., unrated) (Mark Feeney)
★★★ The Matchmaker Writer-director Avi Nesher manages to tell a different Holocaust story in this weaving of fable with realism and coming-of-age innocence with adult grief. Set in 1968 Haifa, a teenager Arik knows nothing of the Holocaust until he begins working for a matchmaker from the shady side of town. Despite cliches, the film’s melancholy tone coupled with the characters’ hopefulness is an unforgettable mix. In Hebrew, with subtitles. (112 min., unrated) (Loren King)
★★½ Payback This conceptually audacious, if intellectually muddled, documentary is inspired by Margaret Atwood’s 2008 book, “Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth.” The debts examined are moral even more than financial. Director Jennifer Baichwal crosscuts among an Albanian feud, Florida farm laborers, two convicted felons, the BP oil spill, and various talking heads, including Atwood. In English, Spanish, and Albanian, with subtitles. (86 min., unrated) (Mark Feeney)
★★★ Pink Ribbons, Inc. Am I a chump? That’s the question a lot of people will be asking themselves after seeing this documentary inspired by Samantha King’s 2006 book, which asserts that the pink-ribbon movement, having been co-opted by opportunistic corporations, does more damage than good. Creatively, the film is standard-issue. But it will make you want to march, not just walk or skip or sky dive, to force real changes in medicine and marketing. (98 min., unrated) (Janice Page)
★★ Seeking a Friend for the End of the World Steve Carell and Keira Knightley star in a road-trip romance set a week before a meteor hits Earth. Despite the inspired surrealism of the early scenes, writer-director Lorene Scafaria never finds a tone, and the leads go together like burgers and tea. (101 min., R) (Ty Burr)
★★ Small, Beautifully Moving Parts Sarah’s always loved tinkering with machinery. Now six months pregnant, she decides to tinker with family dynamics and visit the wacky mother she hasn’t seen in years. Anna Margaret Hollyman, as Sarah, spends much of the movie looking cutely vexed. If Renee Zellweger were still Renee Zellweger, she’d be Hollyman. Other than her performance, this bland, amiable comedy offers, well, blandness and amiability. (72 min., unrated) (Mark Feeney)
★★★ Your Sister’s Sister Two sisters and a guy in a backwoods cabin, talking and drinking and occasionally misbehaving — that’s all there is to Lynn Shelton’s low-budget comedy-drama. Yet that’s not all there is, since by the end of this graceful, funny emotional farce, you know these people and wish them the best. Mark Duplass, Emily Blunt, and Rosemarie DeWitt star. (90 min., R) (Ty Burr)
Previously released
★★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 Mac-Laine) in the back. Richard
Linklater directs it as a loopy black comedy with generous input from local “witnesses” — the movie’s bouncy, amusing, and wholly lacking in a point. With Matthew McConaughey. (104 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)
★★★ Chimpanzee Disney-
Nature’s new “animal drama” has been whittled do wn 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 Tim Burton has got his groove back. 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)
★★★ 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)
★★ Hysteria A comedy-drama about the invention of the vibrator in 1880s London. Somewhere in here is an illuminating farce about a repressed society wracked 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)
★★ The Intouchables France’s second biggest film hit tells the story of a ritzy white quadriplegic (Francois Cluzet) who hires a bald, 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)
★★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)
★★★ 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, and Samuel L. Jackson. (148 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)
★★★½ Monsieur Lazhar In a Montreal middle school, an immigrant substitute (Mohamed Fellag) helps his students cope with the suicide of their former teacher. What appears to be a gentle entry in the “To Sir With Love” genre actually has its mind on larger matters and a heart full of sorrow and rage. In French, with English subtitles. (94 min., unrated) (Ty Burr)
★★★★ 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. Anderson’s dollhouse aesthetic acquires a long-overdue soul. With Frances McDormand, Bill Murray, Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, and Tilda Swinton. (94 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)
★★★ 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)
★★ 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 Rock of Ages For those who can’t stop believin’ and fans of bizarro Tom Cruise performances. This star-studded adaptation of the Broadway jukebox musical, dedicated to the enduring power of cheesy ’80s pop-metal, alternates plastic bombast with moments of comic invention: It’s karaoke night on a Hollywood budget. Cruise plays an Axl-like rock god. (123 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)
★★★ Safety Not Guaranteed A small, charming shaggy-dog comedy about an oddball (Mark Duplass) who claims to have built a time machine and the alt-weekly intern (Aubrey Plaza) who wants to find out if he’s crazy or not. The film sticks to its droll indie aesthetic while giving Plaza (“Parks and Recreation”) the star-making role a lot of us have been waiting for. (94 min., R) (Ty Burr)
★½ That’s My Boy As a Somerville middle school kid, Donny scores with his teacher, gets her pregnant, and raises their son when she goes to jail. Now all grown up, the loser-doofus Donny (Adam Sandler) tracks down his estranged offspring (Andy Samberg) on the eve of the son’s wedding. Full of wooden writing, stereotypes, and bodily fluids, this is more raunch-fest than comedy. (114 min., R) (Ethan Gilsdorf)