Movie Stars

November 13, 2009

Previously released

Amelia

It’s Oscar season: Time to wheel out Hilary Swank for her annual viewing. This biopic of aviator Amelia Earhart is a big, hollow white elephant with a sharp idea struggling to get out: How does a woman marketed to the public as a star turn herself back into a human being? Richard Gere and Ewan McGregor play the men in her life. (111 min., PG) (Ty Burr)

Astro Boy The latest iteration of the rocket-propelled superboy takes its cues from the original Japanese manga rather than the 1960s TV cartoon and is all the more interestingly weird for it. Freddie Highmore voices the computer animated hero, a Pinocchio-in-reverse who was a little boy and is now a robot. Nicolas Cage, Kristen Bell, and Donald Sutherland also aurally appear. (94 min., PG) (Ty Burr)

The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day Ten years after Troy Duffy’s “Boondock Saints’’ - an unwatchable Boston gangster comedy with an inexplicable cult audience - comes the sequel. It isn’t art but it is an improvement: a scurrilous, lowdown, sub-Tarantino action comedy that, unlike the first film, doesn’t make you want to claw your eyes out. (117 min., R) (Ty Burr)

The Box In the new movie from Richard Kelly (“Donnie Darko,’’ “Southland Tales’’), James Marsden and Cameron Diaz, looking like a Pan-Am flight attendant, play a nice Virginia couple who receive a box that, should they press its red button, will make them rich (for 1976, anyway) but cost the life of one stranger. The beauty of Kelly’s imaginatively conceived science-fiction thriller is how what seems so cosmic turns out to be of this diabolical world - yet intriguingly hard to unravel all the same. With Frank Langella, missing a lot of his face. (118 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)

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)