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In post-apocalyptic films, survivors are gleaners who improvise their wardrobes and weapons from pre-apocalyptic debris. In “The Book Of Eli,” screenwriter Gary Whitta likewise proves resourceful in recycling a gamut of bits from prior films for a robust genre exercise directed by Allen Hughes and Albert Hughes, the twins who brought us “From Hell,” “American Pimp,” “Dead Presidents” and “Menace II Society.” Eli (Denzel Washington, “American Gangster,” “The Siege”) is a loner armed with a long blade and keen senses of hearing and smell. Trekking westward for three decades across a despoiled landscape after “the war” and “the flash,” he clutches a weighty leather-bound tome locked with a clasp. “The Book of Eli” is a literal Western for its itinerary, but includes a frontier town run by  Carnegie (Gary Oldman), a sort of an American pimp from hell menacing society where the president is dead. Ensconced in his office above a saloon called The Orpheum, he’s introduced with a copy of R. J. B. Bosworth’s biography “Mussolini” prominently in view. Carnegie, maybe named for the patron of public libraries, dispatches illiterate bikers to find a copy of one special book he covets. The latest foray only yielded “The Da Vinci Code” and a well-preserved issue of Oprah’s O magazine. Knowing the location of freshwater springs gives him dominion over the thirsty townfolk and his thugs. Finding a King James Bible, though, will let him expand his power. “I grew up with it,” he tells Eli, who is passing through town to recharge the battery for his iPod. “I know its power. So do you. That’s why they burned them after the war.” This is Whitta’s most inspired idea: two men fighting over a text that can reboot America, though with opposed agendas. “It’s not a fucking book–it’s a weapon,” thunders Carnegie. Eli finds allies in Carnegie’s blind common-law wife Claudia (Jennifer Beals) and her sighted daughter Solara (Mila Kunis), perhaps named after a rusting Toyota. “The Book of Eli” is a far more fun than the “The Road.” References include the rowboat in “Children of Men,” the bibliophilia of “Fahrenheit 451″ and the attuned dexterity of “Zatoichi.” The biggest debt is owed to “The Postman” (1997) wherein an itinerant bard starts to restore a post-apocalyptic America by reciting Shakespeare. Eli is a former K-Mart clerk with voices in his head and burns all over his back who undertakes a similiar mission. Why it takes this holy wanderer thirty years to reach a city upon a hill is the least of this action film’s revelations. The best that can be said about the outsized score is that Atticus Ross composes in the key of self-parody. With Ray Stevenson, Tom Waits, Michael Gambon and Frances de la Tour. 118m. (Bill Stamets)

Spanish videogamer Jorge Blanco directs his debut, a passable PG-rated animated sci-fi comedy, with co-directors Javier Abad and Marcos Martinez. Joe Stillman (two “Shrek”’s and “Beavis & Butt-Head Do America”) writes a snarky tale rife with references to flying-saucer films. The third installment of the alien-invader film franchise is about to open on the planet Glipforg when American astronaut Captain Chuck Baker (Dwayne Johnson) lands. Planting the U.S. flag on what NASA identifies as uninhabited Planet 51, he interrupts a backyard barbeque. On the run from General Grawl (Gary Oldman), Buck finds an ally in Lem (Justin Long), the 16 year-old Junior Assistant Planetarium Curator who’s failing to impress girl-next-door Neera (Jessica Biel.) The planet is set in the 1950’s, with long-haired protest singer- guitarist Glar (Alan Marriott) driving a VW bus. Indigenous pop culture is full of mind-control conspiracy paranoia. The human alien, though, can hide in an alien look-alike contest at the premiere of “Humaniacs III.” Twix candy bars are out of place, as are gags about plugs to block anal probes by aliens. Cutest behavior belongs to the robot dog Rover, modeled on the moon and Mars rovers. This frantic jokey fare is engineered to distract kids and their handlers alike. Music quips go from “Macarena” to “Also Sprach Zarathustra.” With more voices by Seann William Scott, John Cleese Freddie Benedict, Alan Marriott, Mathew Horne and James Corden. (Bill Stamets)

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Robert Zemeckis (“The Polar Express,” “Back to the Future”) adapts Charles Dickens’ tale of Ebenezer Scrooge, a cheap mean old man shocked into decency on Christmas Eve by three ghosts who forcibly transport him from his bed to revisit his past, eavesdrop on his employee and nephew in the present, and foresee his miserable demise. CGI allows Jim Carrey to play Scrooge at four ages, as well as the three ghosts administering the radical short-term immersive humanizing therapy. Actually, the night terrors Scrooge experiences smack of alien abduction. He plummets and plummets and plummets through night skies. These nocturnal set-pieces, as well as a terrestial chase by snorting black stallions, evoke Hitchcock’s perverse panics. Carrey fans and Disney stock watchers may not expect the fidelity to Dickens’ prose in the dialogue, nor the morbid supernatural tone. It’s forty minutes of grim before Scrooge zooms through sunny London skies with cheerful music. The hybridized live-action amalgam creates a kind of actorized animation. Disney over-sells this 3D holiday product as “a multi-sensory,” although I only counted two: sight and sound. That’s all Zemeckis needs to remake a classic by taking nice risks. With Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Bob Hoskins, Robin Wright Penn, and Cary Elwes. 96m. (Bill Stamets)

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Casey (Odette Yustman, “Cloverfield”) is a North Shore college student with much to learn about her past: how her placenta strangled her twin brother in the womb, what made her mom make a silent 16mm horror film about a old door and then kill herself, and why her mom’s mom killed her own twin in 1944 after Dr. Josef Mengele (Braden Moran) tried to change the boy’s eye color to an Aryan shade of blue in Auschwitz. Who knew? Underlying all this horror is a dybbuk, a rootless entity seeking a homeland in chosen souls. Casey—who also seems to now learn she’s Jewish—learns how to fight the dybbuk after stealing a medieval how-to tome and imploring Rabbi Sendak (Gary Oldman) to translate it from Hebrew. Now he can perform a “Jewish exorcism” with an assist from a basketball-playing Episcopalian minister (Idris Elba). So goes “The Unborn,” a dumbish horror tale shot in abandoned Barat College buildings. Writer-director David S. Goyer overuses aerial shots and too often cuts to a dybbukized tyke popping out of mirrors to shriek like a rabid howler monkey wearing blue contact lenses. His earlier screenwriting credits include “Jumper,” the two latest “Batman”s and all three “Blade”s. You’d expect better shocks from editor Jeff Betancourt (“The Exorcism of Emily Rose,” both of “The Grudge”s and “The Ruins”). Specious disclaimer in the end credits: “No actual Torah scrolls were destroyed or damaged in the making of this motion picture.” Huh? Neither virtual nor actual Torahs were ever in peril in Goyer’s plot. Even with all the possessed potato bugs and mean dogs with upside-down heads running around. “The Unborn” ends with an implied endorsement of abortion as a lesser evil when ancient chants fail against a greater evil. With Meagan Good, Cam Gigandet and Jane Alexander. 87m. (Bill Stamets)

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Now here’s a city I could imagine living in: Christopher Nolan’s Gotham City, a justbarelynot Chicago. “The Dark Knight” captures Gotham City as a nightscape that surpasses the gleam and hazard of Hong Kong, a setting that makes literal the divide between wealth and poverty, of comfort and peril. It starts with the elevation of Bruce Wayne’s abode to a penthouse overlooking the Chicago River on Wacker Drive and continues through the film’s many swooping, gliding perspectives of the city by sky by dark, contrasting with the sustained chase scenes that descend to the welter of warrens of Lower Wacker Drive. Pick a metaphor, make an analogy. More allegory than simply gory, Nolan, writing with his younger brother Jonathan and with Wally Pfister again shooting, makes “The Dark Night” a story comprised less of arcs than dovetailing dualities, oppositions that hardly rise to dialectic but suggest primal symptoms: good and evil, light and dark, the moral-settled mind versus the disordered, insane one, to suggest only a few. The look is central, and Pfister’s skills echo those of Gordon Willis (“The Godfather,” most of Alan J. Pakula’s paranoiac gems) and Mark Lee Ping-Bin (“In the Mood For Love,” “The Vertical Ray Of the Sun”): Chicago stories high, insanely crisp, almost painful indelibility. You can fall from the sky, you can fall from grace, and the light is always creeping toward gloom. And, too, Bruce Wayne is an oligarch, a plutocrat, a beneficent billionaire: Gotham City is very post-Soviet. But in later complications (which I’ll only hint at), this reportedly $180 million production becomes more than brooding, kinetic brutalism, but a blunt political allegory for many choices the U.S. has made since 9/11, involving moral responsibility and thinking oneself absolved when others make choices: “In their desperation, they turned to a man they didn’t fully understand.” What does the Joker say? “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” There is a major subplot involving surveillance that is a direct echo of the Fourth Amendment-violating actions by telecommunications companies, which were retroactively pardoned the day after “The Dark Knight”’s first Chicago screening. Gateman? Alluded. The temptation to act unilaterally, as a vigilante, in times of hazard? Check. “That’s too much power for one person!” Spoken aloud. The placement of the line “No one wants to get their hands dirty” is eminently suggestive of the timing of the Vice-President’s cry that it was our turn to explore “the dark side.” Heath Ledger’s Joker? Man, oh man. No backstory. No explanation. The embodiment of terror: what do you want? Fear. Ledger mingles old-fashioned Cagney-style intonations with a lovingly observed Bridgeport-type Chicago inflection. A good listener, he was. Still, the look is the second most seductive element, with Nolan’s insistence on the “practical,” that is, locations, settings and stunts that are done physically rather than through digital smearing. Gary Oldman, as Commissioner Gordon, is keenly quiet. Morgan Freeman’s skepticism is matched by Michael Caine’s doubt. Aaron Eckhart, hair much like his director’s, demonstrates the fine line between zealotry and payback. (Maggie Gyllenhaal? Present.) Brutal, yet piercing, “The Dark Knight” is a necessary fable. “You thought we could be decent men in an indecent time.” Yes. Yes, we did. 152m. Anamorphic 2.40 widescreen or widescreen/IMAX blended. (Ray Pride)