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Movie stars: capsule reviews

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

January 08, 2012

Aasha Davis (left) and Adepero Oduye in director Dee Reess Pariah. (Focus Features via AP )

New releases

★★★ ½Hell and Back Again With some documentaries, you can feel the filmmakers hit a wall. Danfung Dennis doesn’t appear to have a limit. He’s made a combat film essentially about a wounded Marine and his flashback to Afghanistan. It’s as if Dennis has seen (or knows we’ve seen) some of these movies and understands that the flavorlessness of even the most well-meant, clearly articulated filmmaking can leave you undisturbed and indifferent to what you’re being told and shown. This is an ingenious artistic disturbance. (88 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris)

★★ In the Land of Blood and Honey An agonized romantic drama set during the Bosnian War and a credible narrative feature filmmaking debut for writer-director Angelina Jolie. Like the filmmaker’s public persona, the movie’s both strong and headstrong, invested in grit and glamour with a hazy understanding of the line separating the two. Zana Marjanovic and Goran Kostic star. In Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, with subtitles. (127 min., R) (Ty Burr)

★★★Pariah Dee Rees’s first film is a coming-of-age and coming-out drama centered on a 17-year-old Brooklyn lesbian (Adepero Oduye). It’s a movie that feels in all its vividness, specificity, and honesty - and in its amateurish screenwriting, too - like something found from the early- to mid-1990s when American independent moviemaking encouraged far more conversations than it currently does about the sexuality of young, brown girls. (88 min., R) (Wesley Morris)

★★ Paul Goodman Changed My Life An attempt to reclaim a lost counterculture mentor - a thinker-writer-activist who helped make possible the New Left of the 1960s before he was outrun by it. As documentaries go, it’s an able introduction that doesn’t make its subject as relevant to our current discontents as it could. (89 min., unrated) (Ty Burr)

Previously released

★★ ½The Adventures of Tintin Director Steven Spielberg and producer Peter Jackson bring the intrepid boy reporter of Hergé’s classic comic books into the digital new millennium with mixed results. The film’s a visual marvel that’s cold to the touch, with a chase-rinse-repeat story line that grows tiresome and motion-captured characters that lack the warmth of human beings. (107 min., PG) (Ty Burr)

★ Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked Young children may enjoy the third film in the series, bland as it is. Alvin and the other five singing chipmunks join their guardian Dave (Jason Lee) for a luxury cruise and end up stranded on an (almost) uninhabited tropical island where they learn to be more self-reliant. David Cross is also on hand, wearing a giant pelican suit, but even that’s not enough to make this fun for grown-ups over age 9. (85 min., G) (Joel Brown)