The Boys Are Back Clive Owen plays a successful Australian sportswriter whose life gets turned upside down when his wife dies of cancer, leaving him with two boys (Nicholas McAnulty and George MacKay). It’s a solid entry in the Bad Dad Gets It Together genre and Owen is quite touching, but director Scott Hicks pretties away the rawness. (104 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)
Bright Star A quiet, watchful, transporting film about the romance between the 19th-century poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and the seamstress Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). Director Jane Campion stands biopic clichés on their head by making Brawne the subject and Keats the limpid love object; the result is a woman’s film in deep and profound ways. (119 min., PG) (Ty Burr)
Capitalism: A Love Story Michael Moore goes after the entire US economic system. His documentary is long on damning stories of helpless families and officials profiting from the abuse of their power. But in creating this air of unstoppable cosmic economic oppression, he makes us seem a little more helpless than we actually are. (108 min., R) (Wesley Morris)
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs This 3-D animated romp is more than an extrapolation of the 1978 children’s book about a town where food falls from the sky. It’s a glossy spoof of a disaster movie that looks nothing like the original but creates a vibrant - if derivative - world all its own. Bill Hader voices a nerdy inventor, and James Caan is appealing as the voice of his gruff, misunderstanding dad. (81 min., PG) (Joanna Weiss)
Coco Before Chanel In which we learn about the life of the legendary fashion designer when she was just a skinny young hat-making courtesan named Gabrielle. Having Audrey Tautou play her is a good idea, since it gives her an occasion she can rise to. It’s unclear what the director and co-writer, Anne Fontaine, thinks fashion means to Chanel. The movie fails to find any joy in her creations. With Benoît Poelvoorde and Alessandro Nivola as two of her lovers. (105 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)
Aliens in the Attic