New releases
★½ Butter Jennifer Garner (who co-produced) gives a shrill performance as an ambitious, God-fearing Iowa power-wife in a butter-sculpting contest. The film wants to be an Alexander Payne-style social satire, but it falls flat at almost every opportunity. The ensemble cast includes Olivia Wilde, Ty Burrell, and Hugh Jackman, all flailing. (90 min., R) (Ty Burr)
★★★½ Downeast With a monk’s calm, David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s documentary immerses itself in Gouldsboro, Maine, as a Boston-based Italian immigrant, Antonio Bussone, attempts to turn a former sardine cannery into a lobster processing facility. He doesn’t have an easy time. The movie approaches the people of Gouldsboro and Bussone’s determination — to provide jobs, to succeed — with the same absorbing solemnity. (77 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris)
★★ Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare A righteous health care documentary with real filmmaking gets you something like Michael Moore’s “Sicko.” Righteousness with none of that lands an audience in the monotonous murk of the average polemic, which seeks change by simultaneously scaring you and poking you in the chest. It’s not fun, which is fine. But it’s not rousing, either. (98 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)
★★★★ Frankenweenie Tim Burton’s stop-motion tale of a boy named Victor Frankenstein and his beloved undead dog is simple yet immensely pleasurable — elegant, very funny, and haunted gently by the ghosts of monster movies past. Charlie Tahan, Catherine O’Hara, Martin Landau, Martin Short, and Winona Ryder provide voices. In black-and-white and 3-D. (87 min., PG) (Ty Burr)
★★½ The Oranges A pleasant but awfully mild ensemble comedy about suburban infidelity with a cast too good for the script. Hugh Laurie (“House”) and Leighton Meester (“Gossip Girl”) embark on a cross-generation affair that shocks their families. Catherine Keener, Allison Janney, and Alia Shawkat costar. The director and writers come from TV, and it shows. (90 min., R) (Ty Burr)
★★ Taken 2 This is the sort of sequel that seems to make perfect sense to the people who made it but none to us. The Albanian relatives of the men killed in the first movie by the former CIA operative Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) seek revenge. The first movie was the divorced dad’s revenge fantasy done up as action-movie brutality. This one is action-movie camp. (97 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)
★★ V/H/S The six shorts in this anthology attempt to infuse horror with a hipster nostalgia for the age of the video twist. Prepare ye for two hours of jittery, low-light, first-person footage of blase 20- and 30-somethings running, breathing heavy, and slitting open each other’s stomachs and throats. Two work: “Amateur Night” and “10/31/98.” But viewed en masse, “V/H/S” can’t generate the necessary suspense to truly get under your skin. (115 min., R) (Ethan Gilsdorf)
Previously released
★ 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)
★★ 10 Years A high-school reunion dramedy that’s overwhelmingly dull, like watching eight OK TV shows at the same time. The large cast includes Channing Tatum, Rosario Dawson, Max Minghella, Brian Geraghty, Justin Long, Aubrey Plaza, and Anthony Mackie. Most of them seem too old to be standing around here with almost nothing to do. (100 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)
★½ Backwards Sarah Megan Thomas wrote and stars in this story of a 30-ish rower. A former alternate on the Olympic team, can she make the boat outright this time? Can the high school girls she’s coaching qualify for the Henley Regatta? What about the school’s athletic director, who used to be her boyfriend? Can you guess the answers? If not, you might enjoy this amiable, if blandly uninspired, movie. (89 min., PG) (Mark Feeney)
★★★ Chicken With Plums Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s follow-up to their striking animated feature “Persepolis” (2007) is a bit of a letdown. Based on Satrapi’s graphic novel, it’s mostly live action. There are multiple imaginative flourishes, but overall the film’s surprisingly static. At heart it’s a fairly traditional story — a kind of fairy tale for adults — about thwarted love in mid-century Iran. In French, with subtitles. (85 min., PG-13) (Mark Feeney)
★★★ Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel In less than 90 minutes, this documentary walks us through sketches of the legendary fashion magazine editor’s private life and the formulation and decades-long execution of her philosophy in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. The energy here is a selling point. So is the reminder that clothes weren’t fashion to her. People were. (77 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris)
★★½ End of Watch The writer-director David Ayer has written what’s basically a buddy comedy/cop drama with Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña as LAPD partners. There are 6 million cop shows on television right now. On none of them will you hear two men speak to each other with as much natural affinity as these two. Why Ayer felt the need to distract from that with gimmicky hand-held camerawork is a mystery. (109 min., R) (Wesley Morris)
★★★½ Finding Nemo First released in 2003, now in 3-D. Not quite top-drawer Pixar, but still leagues ahead of other family fare. On Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, an overanxious single-dad clownfish (voiced by Albert Brooks) loses his son (Alexander Gould) to a dentist-office fish tank and must travel 1,500 miles to bring him home. The supporting cast constitutes an embarrassment of riches, and many of the sequences have a weirdly mesmerizing underwater beauty. (100 min., G) (Ty Burr)
★★½ For Ellen Another existential road movie about a disaffected rock musician, this one played by the recessive character actor Paul Dano. He’s not terribly convincing and director So Yong Kim lets her story drift, but the scenes with 6-year-old Shaylena Mandigo, as the rocker’s daughter, are worth the price of admission. (93 min., unrated) (Ty Burr)
★★½ Hotel Transylvania In a 3-D animated creature feature, Adam Sandler voices Dracula as a fretful father sheltering his daughter (Selena Gomez) from humans. He builds his monster resort as an elaborate means to that end, but complications ensue when they’re visited by a backpacker (Andy Samberg). Some might say there isn’t enough that’s fresh, even if every generation of trick-or-treaters deserves its monster mash. Still, there’s likable energy throughout, and smart touches add up. (90 min., PG) (Tom Russo)
★★★★ How to Survive a Plague The director David France and his crew have sculpted years of old broadcast news stories and home video into a narrative of an era that is impressionistic in its scope but coherent in its feeling. This movie is alive — hot, really — with the political seething at the federal government’s failure to help combat the spread of AIDS with effective medical treatments. (115 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris)
★★★½ Knuckleball! This documentary on the curious baseball pitch and the curious men who throw it hits the sweet spot. Directors Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg focus on Tim Wakefield of the Red Sox and R.A. Dickey of the Mets, but the movie connects those players with the eccentric fraternity of knuckleballers who have preceded them and finds poetry in their motion. (93 min., unrated) (Ty Burr)
★★★ Liberal Arts Newly single, 35-year-old Jesse (Josh Radnor, who also wrote and directed) returns to his Midwestern college campus for the retirement party of a beloved professor (Richard Jenkins). Filled with nostalgia, Jesse begins a cautious flirtation with Zibby (Elizabeth Olsen, intelligent and radiant), a sophomore theater major. It’s a bit talky, but the film is smarter, if more sentimental, than the typical college comedy about frat house hijinks and hooking up. (97 min., unrated) (Loren King)
★★★ Looper Rian Johnson’s time travel brain-twister features Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a hired assassin killing victims from the future and Bruce Willis as the assassin’s older self. Overloaded with cinematic style, “Matrix”-wannabe cool, and action sequences that click into place like a Rubik’s Cube, the movie’s something to see yet ultimately less than the sum of its parts. (118 min., R) (Ty Burr)
★★½ Manhattan Short Ten movies from 10 countries compete for a paying audience’s vote. It’s about the discovery of new talent. These movies have been shot with nice cameras so they look great. They’re just raw and unfinished. You don’t always know what the filmmakers are up to. They’re calling-card movies that shout at you. In assorted languages, with subtitles. (131 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris)
★★★★ The Master Another ambitious, powerfully acted achievement from Paul Thomas Anderson. In 1950 or so, a simple drifter (Joaquin Phoenix) falls in with the leader (Philip Seymour Hoffman) of a new spiritual movement and becomes its unwitting but eventually willing test subject. The movie is said to be loosely about Scientology, but it’s more generally concerned with the masks of performance and limits of faith in the absence of evidence. With Amy Adams. (137 min., R) (Wesley Morris)
★★★½ The Perks of Being a Wallflower Author Stephen Chbosky adapts and directs his young adult cult novel into a moving, if visually drab, portrait of unhappy teens finding sustenance in each other. It’s frank enough to shock the parents but also genuinely and uniquely kind to all its characters. With Logan Lerman, Ezra Miller, and Emma Watson making a credible move beyond Hogwarts. (103 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)
★★½ Pitch Perfect Anna Kendrick stars in this college singing-group comedy in which the throwaway lines are so many and so expertly deployed that you basically spend the whole movie digging through the trash. But the scenes of crassness, broadness, and projectile vomit point to the exasperating possibility that the movies have learned the wrong lesson from “Bridesmaids.” (88 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)
★ Solomon Kane Times are grim, grim, grim in early-17th-century England. Also bloody, bloody, bloody. They’re a cross between the Middle Ages and a post-apocalyptic future. In other words, a video game. James Purefoy is the title character, a freebooter torn between God and the Devil. Based on the 1930s pulp character created by Robert E. Howard. (104 min., R) (Mark Feeney)
★★½ Stars in Shorts A short-filmmaking collection with a shameless gimmick — come see Colin Firth, Keira Knightley, Julia Stiles, Lily Tomlin, and Judi Dench. But the actors just contribute an air of professionalism. They point the films in the direction of competence. Otherwise, it’s the writing that takes most of these seven movies to interesting places. (120 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris)
★★★ Step Up to the Plate Paul Lacoste’s fine but unfortunately titled documentary patiently watches Michel Bras as he attempts to retire from the chic family restaurant that he’s placing in the hands of his son Sébastian. The movie’s patient in the way of “El Bulli: Cooking in Progress” or “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.” That’s where culinary nonfiction is right now — sleepy, observant. And, for the most part, that’s OK. In French with subtitles. (88 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris)
★★½ Trouble With the Curve A congenial but formulaic drama about an aging baseball scout (Clint Eastwood) and his last season on the road. Eastwood lets his longtime producer Robert Lorenz take a crack at directing, which is nice. So’s the movie, but that doesn’t mean it’s very good. With Amy Adams and Justin Timberlake. (111 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)
★★ Won’t Back Down This inspirational fable about the need for parents to take back failed schools is long on gumption and short on particulars — a made-for-TV message movie with a high-end cast that includes Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis as a mom and teacher who fight bureaucracy and that mean old teachers’ union. (119 min., PG) (Ty Burr)
Find an archive of movie reviews at www.boston.com/movies.