Ratings based on four-star system.
‘The Box’
Rated PG-13
?
Cameron Diaz and James Marsden have a moral dilemma: Press a button on a mysterious container and they’ll get $1 million, but someone they don’t know will die. What button, on whose box, did writer-director Richard Kelly push to get the money to make this awful, preposterous thriller? Diaz and Marsden play a couple offered the box, button and deal described above by a grotesquely disfigured stranger (Frank Langella). Adapting this mess from a Richard Matheson story that was the basis of a 1980s “Twilight Zone” episode, Kelly roams ponderously beyond that tale’s snappy ending, into an installment of “The X-Files” in its post-Mulder death throes, when the show turned to rot. Kelly piles on government conspiracies, abductions, mobs of automatons controlled by forces beyond human comprehension. The hammy dialogue and hammier performances eventually start to provoke laughs as the movie shambles toward its overdue demise.

‘A Christmas Carol’
Rated PG
??
The time, not just the season, is ripe for a new version of “A Christmas Carol.” When Charles Dickens wrote his classic story, it was a cautionary tale to greedy capitalists of the 19th century (Scrooge recalls his deceased partner, Jacob Marley, as “a good man of business.”). Dickens’ story is about as sturdy a one as we’ve got — it would be nearly impossible to mar what might be the finest ghost story this side of “Hamlet.” Unfortunately, our 2009 version is defined only by its technology. Animated in 3-D, Disney’s “A Christmas Carol,” directed by Robert Zemeckis, suffocates from its design. Despite (or because of) Zemeckis’ approach to using performance-capture animation, the film comes off oddly inanimate. Jim Carrey, playing not just Scrooge but the three ghosts who visit him, clearly has the zest and range for the parts. But he — like the rest of the cast, including Gary Oldman, Colin Firth and Cary Elwes — struggles to break through the film’s excessive wizardry.

‘The Fourth Kind’
Rated PG-13
?
This flat-lining, alien-abduction thriller offers a close encounter that buries an interesting idea under a barrage of gimmicky, carnival-like hokum. The movie’s unwieldy mix of degraded pseudo-documentary footage and “Unsolved Mystery”-style re-enactments is as unconvincing as it is distancing. In a sleep-inducing performance, Milla Jovovich plays an actress re-enacting an Alaska psychologist’s research into patients’ reports of strange phenomena. Writer-director Olatunde Osunsanmi presents these events in split-screen fashion with the “real,” raw videotaped footage of patients’ recollections playing side-by-side with the actors’ reconstructions. Osunsanmi invests so much time and energy trying to convince the audience of the events’ veracity that he forgets to create even a rudimentary sense of tension. His split-screen divide between “reality” and “re-enactment” is almost as distracting as composer Atli Orvarsson’s boom-boom score.

‘The Men Who Stare at Goats’
Rated R
?? 1/2
A fun tone is undermined by disjointed storytelling in George Clooney and producing partner Grant Heslov’s romp based on Jon Ronson’s amusing nonfiction book about the U.S. military’s research into psychic warfare and espionage. First-time director Heslov crafts a hit-and-miss fictional narrative ornamented with some of the brighter anecdotes Ronson uncovered about efforts to create warrior monks who try to walk through walls or glare animals to death. Clooney plays a prodigy of this New Age militarism, with Jeff Bridges as his Dude-like mentor, Kevin Spacey as a psychic rival and Ewan McGregor as a reporter uncovering the story amid the war in Iraq. The movie opens with the promise of a Catch-22 or Strangelove-style satire, but while it maintains much of the book’s drolly incredulous spirit, the dots of absurdity just don’t connect that well. With “Star Wars” vet McGregor on hand, the repeated Jedi knight references are jarring.

‘Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire’
Rated R
????
Director Lee Daniels assembles some of the unlikeliest ingredients — Mariah Carey, Mo’Nique, and a lead actress plucked from an anonymous casting call — to create a wondrous work of art. The film isn’t easy to watch and will test your tolerance for despicable behavior as a long history of physical abuse and incest unfolds involving an illiterate, obese Harlem schoolgirl. Yet “Precious” — both the film and its grandly resilient title character — will steal your heart. Daniels crafts a story that rises from the depths of despair to a place of genuine hope. Gabourey Sidibe offers a phenomenal screen debut as Precious, who makes an utterly believable and electrifying rise from an urban abyss of ignorance and neglect. The normally lowbrow Mo’Nique delivers an Oscar-worthy performance as Precious’ viper of a mother, while great support is provided by Paula Patton, Lenny Kravitz and Carey in a small but honest role. This is great American cinema.

‘Gentlemen Broncos’
Rated PG-13
? 1/2
This latest comedy from the makers of indie sensation “Napoleon Dynamite” is so weird, so off, so simply wrong that even freakish nerd Napoleon would have a hard time lending it his catch word, “Sweet.” The husband-and-wife team of director Jared Hess and co-writer Jerusha Hess, who followed “Napoleon Dynamite” with basically the same movie in “Nacho Libre,” strain to mine another misfit story in like vein. Michael Angarano stars as an aspiring sci-fi writer whose story is stolen by his literary hero (Jemaine Clement). Clement is the lone highlight by virtue of being occasionally funny and not completely off-putting like the rest of the cast, which includes Jennifer Coolidge, Sam Rockwell, Mike White, Halley Feiffer and Hector Jimenez. The filmmakers wallow in such gags as explosive reptile defecation, gonad theft and projectile vomiting, delivering a chaotic, infuriating mess that will challenge the most-devoted of the “Napoleon Dynamite” faithful.

‘House of the Devil’
Rated R
2 stars
Filmmaker Ti West’s homage to low-rental 1980s horror scores points for restraint and attention to detail but defaults when the mortgage comes due with a bloody, pointless, uninspired climax. Newcomer Jocelin Donahue stars as a college sophomore on a baby sitting job for a creepy couple (Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov) who have devilish plans for her on the night of a lunar eclipse. The movie is 90 percent setup, some of it acutely observed and starkly evocative of the decade in which it’s set, yet much of it as dull and forgettable as the big-hair ’80s. At the end, when up jumps the devil and his followers at last, West’s moderation vanishes in an instant, the movie collapsing into noisy, splotchy, gory mayhem, clumsily stitched together and obscured by strobe-light effects. For mood, it’s a faithful flashback, but the movie’s about as scary as something you saw again and again way back when.

‘Amelia’
Rated PG
2 stars
Considering the risks Amelia Earhart took, losing her life in the call of aviation, Hilary Swank and director Mira Nair don’t put much on the line in their film biography of the pioneering flyer. This is a biopic on autopilot, providing the facts but not the passions of Earhart’s achievements, her marriage to her promoter (Richard Gere) and her fling with a fellow pilot (Ewan McGregor). Swank’s Earhart repeatedly tells people how she has to fly or die. Yet when she’s in the air, she’s as stiff and closed-off as a passenger stuck in a middle coach seat on a trans-Atlantic flight. As Earhart, Swank exposes what could be her prime limitation: She doesn’t have much range. Swank can tear up the screen in raw street drama such as “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Million Dollar Baby,” for which she earned Academy Awards. She’s miserably out of her skin as the stately Earhart, though — drab, distant, utterly uninvolving. In choppy fashion, the movie intercuts between Earhart’s doomed last flight around the world in 1937 and the achievements leading up to it over the previous decade — her Atlantic and Pacific crossings, her mentoring of female flyers, her efforts to establish regional passenger shuttle service. Lovely aerial images, lush landscapes and rich sets and costumes are the film’s lone strengths. In almost every other regard, “Amelia” veers off course.
‘Antichrist’
Not rated
1 1/2 stars
To say that this film is shocking would suggest that it’s effective. Certainly shocking us is Lars von Trier’s point — or we can assume it is. Doing so at least gives us something to hold onto when most of the movie seems so maddeningly pointless. The Danish writer-director has said this domestic thriller was the result of working through a bout of depression, a script he wrote as a therapeutic exercise. Watching “Antichrist,” though, that’s hard to believe; so much of it seems so gratuitous, it’s difficult to imagine it would be helpful to anybody, even its creator. Among its imagery: a little boy falling from an open window to his death; graphic, sadistic sex; bloodied woodland creatures; and genital mutilation. And as it builds to its violent crescendo, it only becomes more hilariously absurd. By now you may have heard about the moment in which an injured fox, lying in the tall grass of a forest, lifts its head and growls out the cryptic warning, “Chaos reigns!” It’s deservedly drawn both laughs and boos, and even become a bit of a catch phrase among film aficionados. As for the story itself, well, it’s pretty dull for the most part. Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg star as a married couple known only as “He” and “She,” pretentiously. Following the death of their young son in a freak accident — which they couldn’t prevent because they were too busy having artfully photographed bathroom sex — they retreat to their cabin in the woods to work through their guilt and grief. This consists of long, achingly empty stretches punctuated by moments of shrill screaming and brute violence.

‘Astro Boy’
Rated PG
2 stars
A shiny hodgepodge of “Pinocchio,” “WALL-E,” “Oliver Twist,” “Gladiator” and “Superman,” with some obvious visual touches taken from “The Iron Giant.” As its own entity, though, it’s pretty forgettable. Director David Bowers (“Flushed Away”), who co-wrote the script with Timothy Hyde Harris (“Kindergarten Cop,” “Space Jam”), gets some help from a lively voice cast that includes Freddie Highmore, Kristen Bell, Bill Nighy and Nathan Lane, and the Art Deco look of the film’s architecture has a classic appeal. But it almost feels like there are too many movies competing simultaneously in what is essentially a pretty standard tale of good versus evil. The jokes aren’t all that funny and the father-son relationship between Astro Boy (Highmore) and brilliant scientist Dr. Tenma (a typically lethargic and curiously cast Nicolas Cage) isn’t all that heart-tugging. There’s a lot going on, but none of it ever really grabs you. (Along those innocuous lines, the movie is sufficiently bright and colorful for kids of all ages without ever being too scary.) Based on a Japanese comic book from Osamu Tezuka that began in 1951, “Astro Boy” traces the origin of a young superhero. He began life as a regular kid named Toby, but after dying in a freak lab accident, his father brings him back to life as a robot containing Toby’s personality and memories (as well as some tricky gadgets and powers that are never explained). Once Dr. Tenma realizes this robot version of his child is inferior and ends him away, Toby flees the floating, gleaming Metro City and lands back on the now-trashed Earth below, where he becomes known as Astro Boy.
— Associated Press