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Writer-director Carlos Cuarón, brother of Alfonso Cuarón, tells the colorful tale of the soccer-loving Verdusco brothers: Beto (Diego Luna, “Y tu mamá también,” “Milk”) plays a goalkeeper with the nickname “El Rudo” (“The Tough”), and Tato (Gael García Bernal, “Bad Education,” “Babel”) is a goal-scorer with the nickname “El Cursi” (“The Corny”). They toil on a banana plantation and star on the local team. “Here’s where I enter the story,” narrates Darío “Batuta” Vidali (Guillermo Francella), an Argentinean scout who recruits the brothers for pro teams. The brothers soon find themselves living the high life in Mexico City. Tato indulges in his dream of scoring fame as a pop singer and makes a tacky music video. Beto’s off-field indulgence is gambling. To get out of debt, he agrees to fix a game whose final score will dash their glory. With a wry take on Mexican celebrity, class and corruption, Cuarón entertains with a plot of brotherly love and rivalry. There’s a recurring bit about being your brother’s goalkeeper for balls kicked to or from the right. Their sister Nadia (Tania Esmeralda Aguilar) marries Don Casimiro (Alfredo Alfonso.) This drug-dealer builds the big house for her mother Elvira (Dolores Heredia) that her brothers never could. The new member of the clan also enables their post-scandal careers, as the closing titles update their stories. The narrating recruiter resumes scouting the backroads for new prospects. The brotherhood of Mexican talent behind “Rudo y Cursi” includes the producing team of Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo del Toro, who named their company “Cha Cha Cha.” With Adriana Paz, Jessica Mas, Salvador Zerboni, Joaquín Cosío. 102m. (Bill Stamets)

Cary Fukunaga follows up his 2004 short “Victoria para Chino,” about Mexicans smuggled into Texas in a semi, with his feature that observes two teens riding trains through Mexico. Sayra (Paulina Gaitan, “Innocent Voices”) is a Honduran traveling to New Jersey with her father and uncle. Riding atop a freight train, she encounters Willy (Edgar Flores) from the Mara Salvatrucha gang brotherhood who crossed his boss, Lil’ Mago (Tenoch Huerta Mejía) by lying about a girlfriend, Martha Marlene (Diana García), outside the gang. During a predatory raid on train travelers, Willy kills Lil’ Mago. Now on the run from his crime family, Willy finds an ally in Sayra. Although the sentiments and fates may be familiar, “Sin Nombre” is dense with ethnographic detail about gang organization and labor migration. This first feature deserved the directing and cinematography awards it won at Sundance this year. Fukunaga has cited the lustrous landscapes of “Days of Heaven” as one inspiration. Mexican vistas envelope an upbeat adventure for better futures, an on-the-road romance, reportage on the human economy of our hemisphere and a suspenseful chase by a vengeful brotherhood. Executive produced by Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal from “Y Tu Mamá También” and the upcoming “Rudo y Cursi.” With Kristian Ferrer, Karla Cecilia Alvarado, Giovanni Florido, Gabriela Garibaldias and Liliana Martinez. 107m. (Bill Stamets)

RECOMMENDED

Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in the U.S., was named to San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors in 1977 and assassinated one year later along with the city’s mayor. “Milk,” Gus Van Sant’s powerful and moving account of his career, marks a return to more conventional storytelling after his “Death” trilogy (“Gerry,” “Elephant” and “Last Days”) and last year’s impressive “Paranoid Park.” It begins with Milk (Sean Penn) still in New York, turning 40, sick with the regret of not having done much with his life. He meets Scott Smith (James Franco) in a subway; in bed he promises the much younger man he won’t make it to 50, but they inspire one another still, head west, start a movement. Penn’s monumental, passionate performance anchors Van Sant’s biopic—it’s been some time since the actor, often called the finest of his generation, has played a wholly likeable character—and he’s surrounded by a focused and truly supporting ensemble, with Franco, who is, in ways, the film’s emotional center, and also Emile Hirsch, Joseph Cross, Alison Pill and Diego Luna. James Brolin’s troubled and distressed Supervisor Dan White marks another memorable character and performance in the actor’s resurgence; he’s much more worrisome here than he ever could be as a chuckling George W. Bush. Elliot Graham’s phenomenal editing blends real-life footage and Van Sant’s interpretation with seamless splendor; screenwriter Dustin Lance Black’s structure maximizes Milk’s message. The recent Prop 8 atrocity will be on your mind. “You gotta give them hope,” Milk says. He did. 128m. (Tom Lynch)

After a number of years in a number of wildernesses, Tennessee wild-boy Harmony Korine is 35 and back with his clear-eyed third directorial venture, “Mister Lonely.” While Korine’s first two features, “Gummo” and “Julien Donkey-Boy,” trafficked in transgression as well as occasional images of startling beauty and surprising absurdity, “Mister Lonely” seeks a statelier plane, with widescreen framings and lingering takes that sup at landscape and faces. Diego Luna plays Paris’ loneliest Michael Jackson impersonator; one day he meets a Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton) who invites him to a commune in the Scottish highlands where she lives with her husband, Charlie Chaplin (Denis Lavant), the Three Stooges, Sammy Davis, Jr., The Queen (Anita Pallenberg), a Tourettic Abe Lincoln (Richard Strange) and Little Red Riding Hood (Korine’s wife, Rachel Simon). Most striking may be James Fox’s “dirty Pope,” whose features I could watch for days. A parallel narrative, linked only thematically, finds a priest in Central America teaching nuns how to fly, jumping from his supply plane. Several of the images from this strand, one involving a bicycle and another at film’s end, are simply thrilling, and less studied than the book-ended extreme-slow-motion images of Luna on a tiny stunt motorcycle. Many will take “Mister Lonely” as another Korine ode to post-adolescent male self-pity, but he finds tenderness, beauty and painted eggs that sing along the way. Lost auteur Leos Carax is on hand as Luna’s therapist; designer and film philanthropist Agnes b. produced. Marcel Zyskind’s cinematography is swell. Music by Jason Spaceman and the Sun City Girls. 112m. Anamorphic 2.40 widescreen. (Ray Pride)

“Mister Lonely” opens Friday at the Music Box. Korine is scheduled to appear Friday and 7pm and 9:45pm and Saturday at the 2pm show.