Movie Stars

December 15, 2009

Previously released

Armored

Matt Dillon, Laurence Fishburne and Columbus Short star in a heist flick set inside and around a pair of armored trucks. The kind of unpretentious, character-based B-thriller no one bothers make anymore, the film establishes the American-born Hungarian director Nimród Antal as a no-frills craftsman to be reckoned with. (88 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans Nicolas Cage is back in his high lunatic mode as a New Orleans police detective investigating a murder while high and corrupt. He’s working with the hellion, Werner Herzog. Their pairing is about as perfect a meeting between a director’s sense of mischief and an actor’s license to misbehave as a moviegoer could hope for. With a never-better Eva Mendes as Cage’s hooker girlfriend. (88 min., R) (Wesley Morris)

½Black Dynamite In the spoof that bears his name, Black Dynamite (Michael Jai White) sports every outfit in the blaxploitation look book: leather, denim, Afro. The movie, meanwhile, strikes many of the genre’s poses. And for its first 50 minutes, it’s as intentionally funny as “Shaft in Africa’’ and “Dolomite’’ are accidental comedies. Tedium overtakes the movie - one corny martial-arts sequence turns out to be plenty - and all the good jokes start to dry up. (84 min., R) (Wesley Morris)

Brothers When a US Marine (Tobey Maguire) is presumed killed in action, his ex-con brother (Jake Gyllenhaal) steps up to help with his widow (Natalie Portman) and daughters. The movie jerks between scenes of military torture on one side and scenes of domestic frolic on the other, then becomes an emotional potboiler. (110 min., R) (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 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)

La Danse The great, tireless documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman spent a recent season with the Paris Opera Ballet and merged with the dancers, instructors, administrators, and choreographers. The result is a unique kind of magic: a film about the work in art that is itself a work of art. In French, with subtitles. (153 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris)