RECOMMENDED

Two hardbody NYPD gloryhounds, played by Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson, open this cop buddy comedy with a high-speed chase, shoot-out and fireball at Trump Tower that amps up their celebrity status. (Outlets covering the subsequent press conference on the steps of city hall include “New York Observer, uh, online” and “TMZ, print edition!”) Way back in the background at the precinct are another duo, accountant Allen (Will Ferrell) and his partner Terry (Mark Wahlberg), who’s overeager to get out of the office and into the street. These two detectives get on the case of a global investment conman (Steve Coogan) on the verge of gutting the NYPD pension fund. Adam McKay directs a crack-up script co-written by Chris Henchy. McKay has made earlier comedies with Ferrell—”Anchorman,” “Talladega Nights” and “Step Brothers”—that draw from the same persona and playbook. “The Other Guys,” though, may get more and smarter laughs than earlier projects aiming for younger audiences with grosser tastes in yuks. The expected homosexual panic, for instance, is notably more refined in bits about ballet dancing and harp playing. (And no one gets it in the nuts.) The single vomiting occurs out of frame. This is superior “Saturday Night Live” style, without the fatal link to particular characters or routines that tripped earlier “SNL”-branded films. Linking setpieces about Ferrell’s signature insecurity and improbable potency works better in features than live sketches on the small screen, where McKay is credited with contributions to 125 “SNL” episodes. If the machinations of undoing the bad guy are underplayed, due diligence is found in end credits packed with recent statistics on bailouts, bonuses, salary ratios, 401Ks and NYPD pension payouts. With Eva Mendes, Michael Keaton, Ray Stevenson and Derek Jeter as himself. 107m. (Bill Stamets)

RECOMMENDED

By Ray Pride

A boy and girl fumble in bright, gentle light.

A miracle: like love always is, like lovemaking, like conception. Within the first instants of Rodrigo Garcia’s fifth feature, the teenager has had a child, has given it up for adoption, decades have passed. Three women and one decision are at the core of his story, patterned as if by an unflinching god. At 14, Karen (Annette Bening) placed a baby up for adoption, a decision that still shapes her days. Elizabeth (Naomi Watts), an adopted child, grew up to become an ambitious lawyer and resolute loner. Lucy (Kerry Washington) is anxious to adopt a child. Neither Bening nor Watts fears the steeliness of their fierce characters, with wrenching performances implying troubled, troubling complexity beyond the simple storytelling. Read the rest of this entry »

Astro Boy was born in 1951 as a manga, that turned into four TV series. Now Osamu Tezuka’s robot boy reincarnates as a PG animated feature by writer-director David Bowers (“Flushed Away”) and co-writer Timothy Harris (“Kindergarten Cop”). A high-energy military experiment kills the son (Freddie Highmore) of a super-scientist (Nicolas Cage). Reborn as a robot, Astro Boy is home-schooled with Immanuel Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason.” The super smarty pants learns: “I’ve got machine guns in my butt? You’ve got to be kidding!” Rejected by his creator, the weaponized boy finds new friends among runaways on the polluted dump of a planet below the pristine floating city in the sky. The bumbling Revolutionary Robot Front embraces the newcomer. Astro Boy takes on an impresario (Nathan Lane) of robot-gladiator bouts and a gung-ho general (Donald Sutherland) campaigning for re-election under the slogan “It’s Not Time For Change.” Loud action, slight comedy, kid-centric sentiment. This ain’t “A.I.” meets “Wall-E.” With the voices of Kristen Bell, Samuel L. Jackson, Bill Nighy, Eugene Levy and Charlize Theron. 94m. (Bill Stamets)

Graphic novelist Frank Miller (“Daredevil,” “Elektra,” Ronin,” “The Dark Knight,” “300″) brings to the screen the title character, created in 1940 by the late Will Eisner. Gabriel Macht plays this loner vigilante who spouts pulpy noir paeans to Central City: he nominates himself as its totemic spirit, a do-gooder ghoul. Amidst non-stop snow flurries, he dashes across rooftops at night to nab crooks in alleys and swamps. His overwrought voiceover indicates identity issues: “Am I a crazy man or a man at all? Not even a dead man. Not even a spirit.” His body suffers repeated trauma, but he self-repairs thanks to his powers of resurrection. The Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson) delivers the most tissue damage to our doleful hero in his drive to acquire some goo to gain “immortality” (“all five syllables”). Dames with comic monikers go for the dead-ish dudes. Silken Floss (Scarlett Johansson) is the smitten right-hand tentacle of The Octopus. Sand Saref (Eva Mendes) returns to the old neighborhood with some feeling for her teen squeeze, The Spirit, now disguised with a Zorro-like mask. “I’d love to do your autopsy someday,” purrs a forensics cop (Sarah Paulson). “The Spirit” is sarcastic in the juvenile vein of old-time comic books—a cloned trio of thugs wears T-shirts naming them as Logos, Pathos and Ethos—but Miller is a brash stylist, as in 2005′s “Sin City,” which he is credited with co-directing. The computer-rendered visuals, though, cannot override the doofus metaphysics of slimy evil and dicey chicks. “The Spirit” nods to Eisner’s time when evil was capitalized as Axis after the Tripartite Pact, later in 1940, and also tracks with the Nazi motifs in this cinema season: The Octopus favors Nazi-esque fashions and the German Airforce Band does “Deutschland über Alles.” With Dan Lauria, Stana Katic, Louis Lombardi, Eric Balfour, Paz Vega and Jaime King. 108m. (Bill Stamets)

Two long-retired soul singers go on the road for five days, driving from L.A. to The Apollo in a vintage Caddy with a pistol and a supply of Viagra. There’s a VH-1 broadcast of a memorial service for their recently departed lead singer. And they get a slot on stage. This is mild entertainment for the middle-of-the-road tastes of the AARP set. Nostalgia with a heavy rotation of “motherfucka”s is affectionately peddled by the duo of Louis (Samuel L. Jackson) and Floyd (Bernie Mac). Director Malcolm D. Lee (“The Best Man,” “Undercover Brother,” “Roll, Bounce”) lets this couple humor themselves in a script by Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone. There’s a throwaway line linking Missy Elliott and T.S. Eliot, although an intern or assistant art director could not spell “its” on a marquee where the Soul Men play a comeback gig. The film’s theme is underscored and upstaged by the end credit dedication to the late Bernie Mac and the late Isaac Hayes, who plays himself in the storyline. With Sharon Leal, Sean Hayes, Adam Herschman, Affion Crockett, Mo’Nique, Cedric the Entertainer, Michael Clarke Duncan and Mike Epps. 103m. (Bill Stamets)

RECOMMENDED

While marketed as an upscale exploitationer about racial sparks, “Lakeview Terrace,” from a script by David Loughery and playwright Howard Korder, is another provocative Neil LaBute turn-it-on-its-head narrative. The backdrop to this story of two battling couples—cop-near-retirement Samuel L. Jackson and newly dream-housed married couple Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington—is a rising aurora of California brushfire that’s been derided by an early reviewer or two, also with the suggestion that the depiction of actions of the antagonist played by Jackson sings of racism. Phooey. What LaBute has done, ever more pertinent with this week’s cataclysmic detonation of massive-scaled mortgage massagers, is to present a tricky fable of the loss of power, of feelings of helplessness. What may seem intrinsically tricky about the power games of black, white and blue in “Lakeview Terrace”‘s schema in fact itches gainfully about the core causes of anger and rash behaviors throughout our complex culture. (Similar hurt is recalled in this week’s “Trouble the Waters,” about degrading conditions in New Orleans.) LaBute begins with “You can kill somebody just once, but in work, a relationship, you can torture them every day of the week,” which he told me a decade ago when “In the Company of Men” was released. That’s where his latest film begins, and despite some brutal third-act mechanisms to get to the finish line, LaBute’s work is sturdy and thoughtful and telling. A scene of intense theatricality may be its most cinematic, a neighborhood bar where the warring males meet after several brutal tangles, lit hellish red, red flame of candles dancing in front of them, the wildfires on the television overhead, their furies tamped but steeped in terrible portent. This is not simplistic work. 110m. Anamorphic 2.40 widescreen. (Ray Pride)

Executive Producer George Lucas adds nothing to his “Star Wars” cosmos and corpus with this CG-animated kids tale. Director Dave Filoni—and writers Henry Gilroy, Steven Melching and Scott Murphy—stick to the franchise’s fixtures: Galactic Republicans and Separatist scum, Jedi’s and Siths, mentors and apprentices, chancellors and assassins. New on the scene are “rolling death balls” and a 14-year-old Togrutan named Ahsoka Tano. This orange-creamsicle-faced knight-in-training is assigned by Master Yoda to Anakin Skywalker. Together they will free the kidnapped nephew of Jabba the Hut, and thwart intrigue by Count Dooku, Asajj Ventress and a treacherous Hut who purrs like Truman Capote. Victory means Galactic troops can access shipping routes in the Outer Rim to contain the insurgency. Mission Accomplished. The Long War. Following up a 2004-2005 Cartoon Network show about the Clone Wars period, “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” fits into the six-film saga in between Episodes II and III. “A war, by nature, is a patchwork of untold stories,” says Lucas. “We know what happens to the galaxy, but we don’t know exactly how it all came to pass. These are the stories behind the story.” There’s a badly borrowed Buster Keaton bit, and the robo-critters on the sidelines get the best quips and squeaks. “Sky Guy,” as the cheeky “youngling” tags Skywalker, is colorless. With the voices of Matt Lanter, Ashley Eckstein, James Arnold Taylor, Dee Bradley Baker, Tom Kane, Nika Futterman, Corey Burton, Kevin Michael Richardson, Samuel L. Jackson and Christopher Lee. 100m. Anamorphic 2.40 widescreen. (Bill Stamets)