Movie Stars

November 07, 2009

New releases

American Casino Leslie Cockburn’s solid if unexceptional documentary about the causes and consequences of the financial meltdown shares Michael Moore’s politics, but, thankfully, not his methods. Along with news footage and interviews with experts, we meet ordinary people (mostly in Baltimore) threatened with foreclosure or who have actually lost their homes. (89 min., unrated) (Mark Feeney)

Brief InterviewsWith Hideous Men For his first film as a director, the actor John Krasinski has strip-mined David Foster Wallace’s 10-year-old story collection. What was once a disturbance of the literary peace is now just a painful date-night literalization: “He’s Just Not That into You - for Now.’’ Clogged with actors (including Timothy Hutton, Dominic Cooper, Max Minghella, Christopher Meloni, Chris Messina), the movie is dull despite itself. Krasinski’s taken Wallace and put him in a food processor. (80 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris)

A Christmas Carol Robert Zemeckis’s second try at 3-D motion-capture holiday storytelling (after 2004’s dire “The Polar Express’’) is a marked improvement: A darkly detailed marvel of creative visualization that does well by Dickens and right by audiences. Jim Carrey (or his digital facsimile) gives a sharp, reined-in performance as Scrooge, and while the film sometimes panders, it just as often soars. Too scary for the little guys, though. (96 min., PG) (Ty Burr)

Crude Joe Berlinger’s documentary follows a class-action lawsuit filed by 30,000 Amazon tribespeople against a US petro-giant for contaminating an area of land the size of Rhode Island. The film comments lucidly on the way worthy causes have to court the media and woo celebrities to get even a second of our attention. Featuring Sting. (See what I mean?) (105 min., unrated) (Ty Burr)

The Fourth Kind Silly, cynical, incompetent, dull. Half the movie claims to feature found video footage of alien abductions and spiritual possessions. The rest has Milla Jovovich playing an alleged actual psychologist in Alaska, who, while interviewing a rash of supposed abductees, winds up abducted herself. The money you left at the box office will know just how she feels. (98 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)

Gentlemen Broncos The third movie from “Napoleon Dynamite’’ director Jared Hess runs his Middle American-gothic schtick into the ground. Michael Angarano plays a nerdy teen hero whose science fiction epic is stolen by a preening celebrity writer (Jemaine Clement, the best thing in the movie). It’s a parade of freaks unleavened by any larger idea or vision. (90 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)