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)
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)
Good Hair A documentary spurred by Chris Rock’s dilemma over how he would care for his two young daughters’ hair. Would he keep it natural? Would he have it relaxed? The film is the antic, free-ranging culmination of his crisis, in which Rock finds great comedy in what still lingers as a tragedy over the black compulsion to strive for a kind of whiteness through hair care. (95 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)
The Maid A taut, unnervingly ambiguous Chilean film about a housemaid (award-winner Catalina Saavedra) who may or may not be having a psychotic breakdown. The tension doesn’t just derive from wondering where the story’s going to go but to which genre - horror? humanist drama? - the movie even belongs. In Spanish, with subtitles. (95 min., R) (Ty Burr)
Michael Jackson’s This Is It A compilation of footage from rehearsals for what would have been the late singer’s 50 concerts in London. The film arrives with an eerie taint. Yet watching Jackson pop, lock, rock, writhe, thrust, and clutch his crotch, we often see someone who’s vibrantly, reassuringly human. He’s a life force. He’s the Wiz. (98 min., PG) (Wesley Morris)
