Cheri Michelle Pfeiffer plays a Belle Epoque courtesan emotionally entangled with a young Parisian (Rupert Friend). What at first seems a waxwork parody of Merchant Ivory-style filmmaking becomes a surprisingly sharp meditation on beauty and age, both in 19th-century France and the modern film industry. (92 min., R) (Ty Burr)
Departures A young man (Masahiro Motoki) apprentices as a ritual preparer of dead bodies. It’s easy to see why this won the foreign language Oscar over better, tougher movies. It’s the kind of sentimental drama that pats its audience on the back for confronting social taboos. In Japanese, with subtitles (131 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)
(500) Days of Summer A gimmicky little romantic comedy with enough charm to get by. It’s your basic boy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) meets girl (Zooey Deschanel), boy loses girl, boy tries to get girl back again, but director Mark Webb shuffles the scenes out of sequence with sweetness, glib wit, and an awareness of the hero’s passivity. (95 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)
Food, Inc. Rob Kenner’s documentary is about the extent to which industrial food production has replaced farming in America. Like certain forms of explanatory journalism, the movie intends to assert and shame. It’s part activism, part schoolteacher lecture. (94 min., PG) (Wesley Morris)
G-Force If you can’t squeeze a decent family movie out of talking 3-D super-agent guinea pigs, you may as well throw in the towel. Despite a high-end cast - Sam Rockwell, Penèlope Cruz, and Tracy Morgan provide the voices - the story line is a mishmash. The very small will like it; others beware. (89 min., PG) (Ty Burr)
The Hangover Three bachelor-party pals wake up in Vegas with a missing groom and no memory of the night before. The latest in the wave of post-Apatow Bad Lad comedies is rowdy, scurrilous, and for about three-quarters of its running time, a lot funnier than it has any right to be. (100 min., R) (Ty Burr)
Brüno Sacha Baron Cohen’s flamboyant Austrian nincompoop comes to America seeking fame. He throws his barely concealed crotch at the camera and tries to film a sex video with an annoyed Ron Paul. Cohen is looking to exploit the hate that exists in people, but he doesn’t quite find it. (82 min., R) (Wesley Morris)