Movie Guide and Film Series

MOVIES

Ratings and running times are in parentheses; foreign films have English subtitles. Full reviews of all current releases, movie trailers, showtimes and tickets: nytimes.com/movies.

INTRODUCING BERT WILLIAMS Here’s to movies and records! Without them the vaudeville comedian Bert Williams would have a secure place in theater history, but he would be present to us only through the rapturous descriptions of critics and contemporaries like W. C. Fields, who called him “the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever knew.”

Williams (1874-1922), above, is generally considered America’s first black star. He broke vaudeville’s color line and recorded hit after hit for Columbia, though he made only a few movies. Two Biograph shorts from 1916 — “Fish,” a dramatization of one of his comic stories, and “Gambler,” which ends with one of his famous vaudeville bits (a wonderful pantomimed poker game) — are basically it. But if you haven’t seen them, get yourself to the Museum of Modern Art, which is showing new 35-millimeter prints on Saturday, along with a special treat: unedited footage from a mysterious romantic comedy featuring Williams. (Steven Higgins, the MoMA curator organizing the show, said not much was known about this film, from who made it to whether it was released.)

The films may be more interesting as artifacts than as art, but they offer a tantalizing glimpse of Williams in action. He’s riveting — a screen natural, who seems to understand exactly how to pitch his performance for the camera. As he did onstage, he appears in blackface, though the other black actors mostly don’t. It’s distracting at first: you can’t help thinking about the strange contortions of America’s racial obsession. But that’s fitting; it’s part of Williams’s story. And after a while you start to see only him. His melancholy humor and intelligence shine through the makeup and the films’ occasionally clumsy direction. And then you start thinking, “We wuz robbed.” In another, better world, Williams might have settled into a long, productive film career. In this world we have only hints of what might have been.

Camille F. Forbes, the author of a new critical study, “Introducing Bert Williams,” will introduce the screening. (Saturday at 6 p.m.; 212-708-9400, moma.org; .) RACHEL SALTZ

★ ‘ALICE’S HOUSE’ (No rating, 1:30, in Portuguese) Chico Teixeira’s languid, libidinous film observes a messy São Paolo apartment where Alice (the wonderful Carla Ribas) copes with an ailing mother, three teenage sons and an unfaithful husband. Simultaneously delicate and earthy, “Alice’s House” anchors its soap opera plotlines — adultery, avarice and incipient blindness — in the tired body and vaguely ruined features of its dreamy heroine. (Jeannette Catsoulis)

‘ALIENS VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM’ (R, 1:26) A not-bad next step in this hybrid of two sci-fi film series, “Requiem” begins with the crash landing of a space ship in Colorado. The aliens of the “Alien” films begin suction-cupping the faces of every Coloradoan in sight, so the predators of the “Predator” films, who hunt aliens, send one of their best to try to contain the situation. Reiko Aylesworth of “24” and Steven Pasquale of “Rescue Me” are among the humans who try to get away. The film focuses more on the humans and less on the visitors from space than the first installment of the “A.V.P.” series, which makes it more interesting. But it gives newcomers no help by providing none of the back story that links the two franchises. (Neil Genzlinger)

‘ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS’ (PG, 1:32) Adults who remember this musical cartoon franchise created by Ross Bagdasarian Sr. in 1958 may derive fleeting amusement from this update, which concerns the efforts of the title characters’ surrogate dad, Dave Seville (Jason Lee), to rescue them from the clutches of a perfidious record executive (a delightfully despicable, movie-stealing David Cross). Kids may find less to connect with: The digitally animated heroes are eclipsed by their adult, live-action co-stars, a fatal mistake. Rent the DVD, or watch it with your children on a plane flight. (Andy Webster)

‘AMERICAN GANGSTER’ (R, 2:38) The divide between the director Ridley Scott’s seriousness of purpose and the false glamour that wafts around American gangsters, and invariably trivializes their brutality, become s too wide to breach in this story about the rise and fall of a 1970s New York drug lord. Denzel Washington wears the black hat, Russell Crowe wears the white. (Manohla Dargis)

‘ATONEMENT’ (R, 2:03) Gorgeous and inert, this adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel suggests that some books are best left alone. (A. O. Scott)

‘BEAUFORT’ (No rating, 2:05, in Hebrew) Joseph Cedar’s tense drama takes place at a fortress in Lebanon captured by Israel in the 1980s. The last group of Israeli soldiers is preparing to withdraw, under attack from Hezbollah and with decided ambivalence. The movie’s earnest sobriety helps it through passages of tedium and occasional bouts of combat-picture cliché. (Scott)

★ ‘BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD’ (R, 1:56) Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke play two desperate brothers whose scheme to rob their parents’ jewelry store goes terribly wrong. The movie, directed with feverish authority by Sidney Lumet from a solid script by Kelly Masterson, gets just about everything right. (Scott)

‘THE BUCKET LIST’ (PG-13, 1:38) In this preposterous feel-good comedy about two men with terminal cancer, Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman slip into their stock personas without adding a note we haven’t seen before. (Stephen Holden)

‘CASSANDRA’S DREAM’ (PG-13, 1:45) A well-matched Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell play brothers in blood and deed in Woody Allen’s London-based, dark-hearted, effective tragedy. (Dargis)

★ ‘CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR’ (PG-13, 1:36) Tom Hanks plays the hard-drinking, skirt-chasing Texas congressman who helped finance the Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation in the 1980s. Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman are terrific as his co-conspirators in this remarkably jaunty excursion into cold war covert operations. (Scott)

‘CLOVERFIELD’ (PG-13, 1:24) OMG! It’s, like, totally the end of the world!! (Dargis)

‘THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY’ (PG-13, 1:52, in French) Julian Schnabel’s film, about Jean-Dominique Bauby, a French magazine editor paralyzed by a stroke, is a marvel of empathy and imagination. It is also a celebration of French sensualism and an examination of the nature of consciousness. (Scott)

‘DOC’ (No rating, 1:38) This nonfiction feature recounts the life of the novelist, inventor and cult figure Harold Louis Humes, known as Doc. Born in 1926 and died in 1992, he came of age in Paris during the 1950s. He wrote the politically radical novels “The Underground City” and “Men Die”; helped create the New American Cinema Group with Jonas Mekas and others; founded The Paris Review with George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen; advocated massage and marijuana; designed a fireproof, waterproof paper house; and gave lectures to anyone, anywhere, at the drop of a hat. Lovingly assembled by Mr. Humes’s daughter Immy Humes and jam-packed with interviews with notable 20th-century cultural figures (including Mr. Plimpton, Norman Mailer, William Styron and Timothy Leary), “Doc” is one part cultural analysis, three parts home movie. (Matt Zoller Seitz)

★ ‘EASTERN PROMISES’ (R, 1:40) The humanism of Steve Knight’s script clashes in interesting ways with the ruthless formal rigor of the director, David Cronenberg, in this clammy, unsettling underworld tale. Viggo Mortensen is magnetic and enigmatic as a Russian mobster who shows some signs of conscience. (Scott)

★ ‘ENCHANTED’ (PG, 1:47) This unexpectedly delightful revisionist fairy tale from, of all places, Walt Disney Pictures, doesn’t radically rewrite every bummer cliché about girls of all ages and their dreams. But for a satisfying stretch, it works real magic both by sending up stereotypes and through the twinkling, unwinking performance of its superb star, Amy Adams. (Dargis)

‘FIRST SUNDAY’ (PG-13, 1:36) Ice Cube and Tracy Morgan rob a church and find redemption. Meanwhile Katt Williams, as the flamboyant choir director, steals the movie. (Scott)

★ ‘4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS’ (No rating, 1:53, in Romanian) In this ferocious, unsentimental film from the Romanian writer and director Cristian Mungiu the camera doesn’t follow the action, it expresses consciousness itself. This consciousness — alert to the world and insistently alive — is embodied by a young university student who in the late 1980s helps her roommate with an illegal abortion in Ceausescu’s Romania. It’s a pitiless, violent story that in its telling becomes a haunting and haunted intellectual and aesthetic achievement. (Dargis)

‘THE GREAT DEBATERS’ (PG-13, 2:03) The wonder is that “The Great Debaters” transcends its own simplifying and manipulative ploys; it radiates nobility of spirit. (Holden)

‘HONEYDRIPPER’ (PG-13, 2:03) This movie is agreeable, well-intentioned and very, very slow. Sadly, it illustrates the difference between an archetype and a stereotype. When an archetype falls flat, it turns into a stereotype and becomes a cliché. (Holden)