Previously released★★½ 2 Days in New York Actress-writer-director Julie Delpy’s follow-up to 2007’s “2 Days in Paris” is an engagingly sloppy comedy about the ways our families drive us nuts. Chris Rock is the movie’s secret weapon as the star’s long-suffering boyfriend enduring a visit from her boorish French relatives. In English and French, with subtitles. (96 min., R) (Ty Burr)
★ 2016: Obama’s America Well, fair’s fair. George W. Bush got Michael Moore and “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Now Barack Obama gets Dinesh D’Souza and “2016: Obama’s America.” Both films are wildly partisan attack documentaries made by wildly partisan and generally annoying polemicists (D’Souza is more personable, actually, than Moore). The difference is that Moore is a talented filmmaker. Based on D’Souza’s 2010 bestseller, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage.” (89 min., PG) (Mark Feeney)
★½ The Apparition A young couple (Ashley Greene, Sebastian Stan) run afoul of an “entity,” as a paranormal researcher (Tom Felton) calls the supernatural whatzit. This otherwise-forgettable film has one truly inspired aspect. It’s the first Great Recession horror movie. The setting is a nearly empty development of McMansions in Southern California. So it situates a ghostly presence amid an even ghostlier absence. (82 min., PG-13) (Mark Feeney)
★★½ The Bourne Legacy If you’re going to make a “Bourne” movie without Matt Damon, Jeremy Renner isn’t a bad second choice. But Tony Gilroy’s movie is both over-plotted and underwritten, with none of the emotional grip of the earlier movies and a final 20 minutes that throw in the towel. Rachel Weisz and Edward Norton costar. (134 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)
★★ The Campaign The time is ripe for a good, nasty political comedy, but this isn’t it. Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis play two idiots facing off in a North Carolina congressional race; some bawdy laughs are there, but they’re broad as a barn, and a turn to Capra-esque sentiment in the last act is disastrous. Directed by Jay Roach. (85 min., R) (Ty Burr)
★★½ Celeste and Jesse Forever A mostly charming LA comedy-drama, co-written by star Rashida Jones with a warm, slightly blinkered insider’s eye to the city and its neighborhoods. Despite the title (and Andy Samberg’s genial performance as Jesse), it’s mostly about the furiously prim Celeste (Jones) and how she learns to accept other people’s imperfections and her own. (91 min., R) (Ty Burr)
½ Compliance Proof that something based on a true story can be gruesomely implausible. A young woman who works at a fast-food restaurant (Dreama Walker) is accused of theft. Pleading understaffing, a policeman (Pat Healy) telephones the manager (Ann Dowd). He talks her through an increasingly degrading interrogation, search of the woman’s person, and even more outrageous stuff you really don’t want to know about. (90 minutes, R) (Mark Feeney)
★★ Cosmopolis In search of a haircut, an impossibly rich young man (Robert Pattinson) riding in an impossibly elaborate limo tries to cross an impossibly congested Manhattan. Director David Cronenberg has faithfully adapted Don DeLillo’s freeze-dried dystopian novel. But DeLillo’s dark, deadpan humor doesn’t translate to the screen, nor does his oblique, aphoristic dialogue. With Juliette Binoche, Samantha Morton, and a borderline-rabid Paul Giamatti. (109 min., R) (Mark Feeney)
★★ The Expendables 2 Sylvester Stallone and his mercenary crew are dispatched to Eastern Europe on a safecracking job, but when the group is ambushed by Jean-Claude Van Damme, they’re soon ordering up a combo meal of plutonium recovery and revenge. There’s enough chunky bloodshed to equal the first installment’s grungy thrills, but what’s also the same is the disappointing lack of cleverness. With Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, and Chuck Norris. (102 min., R) (Tom Russo)
★★½ Hit & Run Charlie (Dax Shepard) is in a witness-protection program. His girlfriend (Kristen Bell) has a great job opportunity in LA. That’s where the bad guys Charlie’s hiding from are. They include a dreads-wearing Bradley Cooper. The movie has elements of romantic comedy, road movie, and raunchfest. A surprising amount of
it works. Shepard, who wrote the script and co-directed, with David Palmer, is especially appealing. (100 min., R) (Mark Feeney)
★★ The Imposter A 13-year-old disappeared in San Antonio in 1994. Forty months later, he turned up in Spain and was reunited with his family. Or was that someone else? The title of this documentary reveals the answer. The film is padded, preeningly slick, and rife with reenactments. Yet the story itself is utterly remarkable. (99 min., R) (Mark Feeney)
½ Lawless
In southern Virginia, three bootlegging brothers clash during Prohibition with a sadistic cop imported from Chicago. The movie, which is quite bloody, is very handsomely mounted, but studiedly so. Tom Hardy has serious throw weight as the chief brother. Shia Le
★★ The Odd Life of Timothy Green A strained, sentimental fable about a magic child who appears out of nowhere and teaches the saggy, baggy grown-ups the errors of their ways. CJ Adams is likable as the title character, but the movie’s really about the fears and neuroses of parents. Jennifer Garner and Joel Edgerton costar. (104 min., PG) (Ty Burr)
★★ ParaNorman The ghoulification of American family entertainment hits a dead end in this highly creative but depressingly jaded stop-motion thriller about a kid who sees dead people. For older kids only, provided they don’t mind dismembered zombies coming at them in 3-D. (And those are the good guys.) (93 min., PG) (Ty Burr)
★★★ Premium Rush The title of this movie about a Manhattan bicycle messenger sounds like an energy drink. Energy it has — too much. Trickiness, ditto. If the plot had any more gears — a romantic triangle, gambling debts, Chinatown gangsters, a race against time — it would be a mountain bike. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is smart and fast and looks just fine hunched over a set of handlebars. (85 min., PG-13) (Mark Feeney)
★★★ Robot & Frank Frank Langella plays a retired jewel thief, Frank. To help with his memory problems, his son gives him a robot assistant (the movie’s set slightly in the future). With the robot’s help, Frank unretires. The movie’s fairly negligible, but Langella is good. Even better is Susan Sarandon as his romantic interest. Peter Sarsgaard, voicing the robot, is best of all. (89 min., PG-13) (Mark Feeney)
★★★ Ruby Sparks Zoe Kazan, who wrote the script, plays the title character in this Pygmalion update. A very real Ruby emerges from the pages of Paul Dano’s novel-in-progress. Kazan and Dano, a real-life couple, have real-life chemistry. When the film isn’t being cutesy-quirky or attempting deep thoughts about free will, it’s quite winning. Annette Bening and (especially) Antonio Banderas have a ball as Dano’s mother and stepfather. (104 min., R) (Mark Feeney)
★★★ Side by Side This entertaining, enlightening, if overlong discourse about the upsides of digital moviemaking features, among others, James Cameron, George Lucas, Steven Soderbergh, and Danny Boyle counting the many ways that film, as a format, is dead. But it fails to go deeply into an inexorable irony: Digital is the future but the theater remains stuck in the past. All the director interviews are conducted by a skeptical Keanu Reeves. (98 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris)