Ratings and running times are in parentheses; foreign films have English subtitles. Full reviews of all current releases: nytimes.com/movies[1].

★ 'Aferim!' (No rating, 1:46, in Romanian) This wide-screen, black-and-white Romanian quasi-western, directed by Radu Jude, takes place in the mountainous region of Walachia in 1835. A constable and his son are dispatched by a local aristocrat to hunt down an enslaved Gypsy who has run away, and their search illuminates the cruelty and sensuality of this corner of 19th-century Europe. Mr. Jude's vigorous, unsentimental humanism allows him to acknowledge decency and compassion without sugarcoating the essential awfulness of our species. (A. O. Scott)

'Anomalisa' (R, 1:30) Directed by Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson, this sad, stirringly painful stop-motion puppet whatsit centers on a floundering soul (voiced by David Thewlis) who, while on a business trip, has an affair with a stranger (Jennifer Jason Leigh). An invaluable Tom Noonan voices everyone else. (Manohla Dargis)

★ 'The Big Short' (R, 2:10) Adam McKay's adaptation of the Michael Lewis best seller is a wildly entertaining movie that leaves you nauseated and shaking with rage. That's as it should be, since Mr. McKay and his energetic cast (including Steve Carell, Christian Bale, Brad Pitt and Ryan Gosling) set out to capture both the giddy thrills of the economic bubble of the mid-2000s and the moral corruption that fueled it. Rooting for the film's designated good guys means rooting for economic collapse, and you feel the awfulness of this contradiction. (Scott)

'The Boy' (PG-13, 1:38) Lauren Cohan, of "The Walking Dead," plays Greta, an American nanny hired by a couple in a creepy British mansion to watch their son, who turns out to be a porcelain doll. For most of the way it's a psychological thriller, Greta wondering about her sanity as she begins to think the doll may indeed be alive. But a twist ending brings a sharp turn in tone. "The Boy" is still a reasonably engaging horror movie, but you may wonder what it might have been like had it stayed on course till the end. (Neil Genzlinger)

★ 'Bridge of Spies' (PG-13, 2:15) In this gravely moody, perfectly directed thriller about a real 1962 spy swap, Steven Spielberg returns you to the good old bad days of the Cold War and its fictions, with their bottomless political chasms and moral gray areas. Tom Hanks leads a terrific cast that includes Mark Rylance as a Soviet mole and Scott Shepherd as a C.I.A. operative. (Dargis)

★ 'Brooklyn' (PG-13, 1:51) Saoirse Ronan gives a remarkably lively and subtle performance as Eilis Lacey, a young woman who emigrates from Ireland to New York in the early 1950s, in John Crowley's lovely adaptation of the novel by Colm Toibin. (Scott)

★ 'Carol' (R, 1:58) Todd Haynes's gorgeous adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel stars Rooney Mara as Therese Belivet, a young woman in early-1950s New York who falls for an older suburban housewife played by Cate Blanchett. The blossoming of their love affair is related in subdued colors and whispered words, and it lingers in the air like an old song. (Scott)

'Hail, Caesar!' (PG-13, 1:46) Joel and Ethan Coen lay siege to old Hollywood in this sly, off-center comedy set against the 1950s motion-picture business. One of those diversions that they turn out in between masterworks and duds, it features some wrangling over God, art and politics and a stable of frisky stars, including Josh Brolin, George Clooney and Scarlett Johansson. (Dargis)

★ 'Creed' (PG-13, 2:13) The "Rocky" saga, revised and reborn, with the Italian Stallion in the role of the grizzled trainer, helping a young contender prepare for his shot at the title. The contender is Adonis Johnson (Michael B. Jordan), the love child of Apollo Creed, Rocky's erstwhile nemesis and eventual best friend. The director is Ryan Coogler ("Fruitvale Station"), at 29 a rising champion in his own right. (Scott)

'Daddy's Home' (PG-13, 1:36) An ugly psychological cockfight posing as a family friendly comedy, the father-stepfather competition pits a meek Will Ferrell against a feral Mark Wahlberg. It is best avoided unless a movie that has the attitude of a schoolyard bully happens to be your thing. (Stephen Holden)

'The Danish Girl' (R, 2:00) The story of a transgender pioneer, Lili Elbe, becomes a tasteful, sensitive and somewhat inert costume drama in the hands of Tom Hooper ("The King's Speech"). Eddie Redmayne plays Lili, whom we first encounter as Einar Wegener, a Danish landscape painter. His wife, Gerda (Alicia Vikander), also an artist, is the emotional center of the film, in part because Mr. Redmayne's performance, while technically flawless, keeps the audience at a distance from Lili's experience. (Scott)

'Dirty Grandpa' (R, 1:42) Dan Mazer's mindlessly crude, puerile comedy stars Robert De Niro as a horny, foul-mouthed senior dragging his uptight grandson on a spring-break-style trip. That's probably all you need to know in order to laugh — or cry — and most of the comedy is on the level of phallic graffiti on a subway poster. (Nicolas Rapold)

'Eisenstein in Guanajuato' (No rating, 1:45) Sex and death, or in the elevated language of the British director Peter Greenaway, "Eros and Thanatos" walk hand in hand in his film "Eisenstein in Guanajuato." This comedic fantasy about Sergei Eisenstein's trip to Mexico in the early '30s quotes the seminal Russian filmmaker at length, while imagining his scandalous personal life about which little is known. Eisenstein calls his working vacation "the 10 days that shook Eisenstein." (Holden)

'Fifty Shades of Black' (R, 1:32) "Fifty shades of terrible!" says Christian Black (Marlon Wayans) as he reads E.L. James's erotic best seller "Fifty Shades of Grey" in Mr. Wayans's latest movie-satire vehicle. There are other trenchant observations in this flimsy, hastily assembled comedy, but an awful lot of wading is required to find them. (Andy Webster)

★ '45 Years' (R, 1:35) Andrew Haigh's new film is a loving, devastating portrait of a long, happy marriage that encounters an unusual crisis. Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay play Kate and Geoff Mercer, whose plans for an anniversary party are disrupted by news about an old, long-dead girlfriend of Geoff's. (Scott)

'The Hateful Eight' (R, 2:48) More talking and killing from Quentin Tarantino, this time in a frontier outpost after the Civil War. Some interesting ideas about the racial politics of the Western genre peek out amid the verbiage and the violence, but Mr. Tarantino's grandstanding gets in the way. With Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Samuel L. Jackson, whose performance as a former Union officer almost lifts the film out of its self-conscious rut. (Scott)

'Joy' (PG-13, 2:04) Jennifer Lawrence, at her tough, radiant best, plays Joy Mangano, an entrepreneur stymied by her family in David O. Russell's rousing and chaotic fable of bootstrap capitalism. (Scott)

'Kung Fu Panda 3' (PG, 1:35) Jack Black again voices Po, the panda who saves China, in this beautifully animated addition to the franchise. Po is reunited with the father (Bryan Cranston) he thought was long dead and has to rediscover his panda roots to stop a soul-stealing monster. Young viewers might find the themes a bit more disturbing than in the previous two installments, but of course they'll know who's going to triumph in the end. (Genzlinger)

★ 'The Martian' (PG-13, 2:21) Matt Damon stars in Ridley Scott's space western and blissed-out cosmic high about an American astronaut who, like a latter-day Robinson Crusoe, learns to survive on his own island of despair. Funny, loose and optimistic. (Dargis)

★ 'Mustang' (PG-13, 1:37, in Turkish) Full of life, "Mustang" is a stunning debut feature by Deniz Gamze Ergüven about five sisters in rural Turkey. Confined to their grandmother's house, the girls bridle against losing their freedoms in a story grounded in both laughter and tears, and in the resilient strength of these girls against soul-deadening strictures. (Rapold)

★ 'Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict' (No rating, 1:37) Lisa Immordino Vreeland's sleek, entertaining portrait of the collector who assembled one of the great troves of modern art is well organized, with hundreds of beautiful images spanning decades of artists Guggenheim knew, galleries she ran, parties she hosted. Using tapes of interviews before she died in 1979, the documentary is imbued with Guggenheim's presence, even as art-world denizens dish on her foibles and vanities. (Daniel M. Gold)

'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies' (PG-13, 1:48) "A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony, from matrimony to zombie killing, in a moment." (Dargis)

'The Revenant' (R, 2:36) By turns soaring and overblown, this American foundation story from the director Alejandro G. Iñárritu ("Birdman") features a battalion of very fine, hardworking actors. None are more diligently committed than Leonardo DiCaprio, as a 1823 mountain man who endures a crucible of suffering. (Dargis)

'Ride Along 2' (PG-13, 1:42) A lot like the first "Ride Along," only less so. Ice Cube and Kevin Hart reprise their oil-and-water buddy-cop routine. Nothing new to see, but not too painful either. (Scott)

'Room' (R, 1:58) Brie Larson and an exceptional child actor, Jacob Tremblay, play mother and son in the adaptation of Emma Donoghue's novel. Written by Ms. Donoghue and directed by Lenny Abrahamson, the movie flickers with grace and imagination during its initial half but devolves into a dreary, platitudinous therapy movie in its second. (Dargis)

'Son of Saul' (R, 1:47, in Hungarian, German, Yiddish and Polish) This debut feature from the 38-year-old Hungarian filmmaker Laszlo Nemes is a powerful but ungainly blend of allegory and thriller set in a Nazi death camp. Saul (Geza Rohrig) is a member of the Sonderkommando, Jewish inmates assigned to assist in the murder of their fellow prisoners in exchange for meager privileges. In his company, the viewer is given a tour of horror that is unnerving both for its harshness and for the sense of slick, self-congratulatory artifice that lurks around the edges of the frame. (Scott)

'Spectre' (PG-13, 2:28) Bond, James Bond, etc. (Dargis)

★ 'Spotlight' (R, 2:07) A team of Boston Globe investigative reporters — played by Michael Keaton, Brian d'Arcy James, Rachel McAdams and Mark Ruffalo — takes on the local archdiocese in this powerful fact-based newspaper procedural, directed by Tom McCarthy. The movie, with a superb cast and a tightly constructed script, is an unflinching investigation of systemic moral rot and a rousing defense of the values of professional journalism. (Scott)

'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' (PG-13, 2:15) It's good! (Dargis)

'The Club' (No rating, 1:37, in Spanish) Directed by Pablo Larraín ("Tony Manero," "No"), this grim drama examines the lives of a group of disgraced priests — guilty of sexual abuse and other crimes — who share a house in a quiet town on the Chilean coast. An effective, if unpleasant, psychological inquiry, the film loses its way when it tries to become a parable of penitence and grace. (Scott)

'The Finest Hours' (PG-13, 1:57) The waterlogged disaster movie is a moderately gripping whoosh of nostalgia that shamelessly recycles a '50s cliché of the squeaky-clean all-American hero. In this Disney movie, adapted from a book by Michael J. Tougias and Casey Sherman and based on real events in February 1952, Chris Pine plays a Coast Guard sailor based in Chatham, Mass., who leads a next-to-impossible rescue mission during the most fearsome nor'easter this side of "The Perfect Storm." (Holden)

'13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi' (R, 2:24) A pummeling slog, Michael Bay's latest revisits the 2012 attack on the diplomatic mission in Libya that resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. Mr. Bay again proves that coherency (visual, etc.) isn't a prerequisite for his style of blunt-force cinema. (Dargis)

'Trumbo' (R, 2:04) This clunker about the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) tells a great-man story with a patchwork of fact and fiction, mixing in the odd bit of newsreel with a great many dull, visually flat and poorly lighted dramatic scenes. Jay Roach directed. (Dargis)

'Tumbledown' (R, 1:43) Rebecca Hall plays the writer widow of a beloved singer, and Jason Sudeikis is a New York academic looking to write her late husband's biography. When he visits her in Maine, a weakly acted city-country dramedy results, dawdling along with a generic story of love after grief. (Rapold)

Film Series

American International Pictures, Part 3 (through March 21) Concluding a series that began last summer, Anthology Film Archives continues its retrospective on American International Pictures, a B movie studio known both for the speed and stinginess of its productions from the 1950s through the 1970s, as well as for nurturing then-rising talent like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. This installment of the program covers the company's transition from horror pictures, like "Scream and Scream Again" and the racy "The Vampire Lovers," to the blaxploitation films of the 1970s, including "Blacula" and "Foxy Brown." 32 Second Avenue, at Second Street, East Village, 212-505-5181, anthologyfilmarchives.org< small>[2]. (Ben Kenigsberg)

'The Band Wagon' (Sunday) With a shine on his shoes and a melody in his heart, an aging song-and-dance man of the screen (Fred Astaire) aims for a comeback on Broadway, in a movie musical that — like "Singin' in the Rain" a year earlier — finds Hollywood reflecting on its own history. The movie is showing as part of the Dance on Camera Festival at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Although Michael Kidd's choreography is a delight, the film is also a showcase for the director Vincente Minnelli's dexterity with Technicolor. At 8 p.m., Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center, 165 West 65th Street, 212-875-5601, filmlinc.com[3]. (Kenigsberg)

'Greed' (Friday, Monday and Thursday) One the pinnacles of silent film, Erich von Stroheim's 1924 adaptation of Frank Norris's "McTeague" ran something on the order of eight to 10 hours (most of which are lost) in early cuts. If it is hard to watch "Greed" today without being conscious of the missing pieces, the Death Valley finale brings the full weight of the story's tragedy — involving a lug of a dentist (Gibson Gowland), his marriage to a patient (ZaSu Pitts) and lottery winnings that go unspent — to bear. At 7:15 p.m., Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue, at Second Street, East Village, 212-505-5181, anthologyfilmarchives.org. (Kenigsberg)

'The Heartbreak Kid' (Friday and Sunday) In the highlight of Anthology Film Archives' annual "Valentine's Day Massacre" series, a new husband (Charles Grodin), suddenly horrified by his wife (Jeannie Berlin) and her undainty manhandling of an egg salad sandwich, immediately starts chasing a Minnesota shiksa (Cybill Shepherd) — a relentless, possibly futile and almost painfully funny courtship that is perfectly suited to the off-kilter comic rhythms of Elaine May, who directed from a Neil Simon script. Friday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 8:45 p.m., 32 Second Avenue, at Second Street, East Village, 212-505-5181, anthologyfilmarchives.org. (Kenigsberg)

'Native Son' (Sunday) Showing in a new restoration, this 1951 adaptation of Richard Wright's 1940 novel has to qualify as one of the most unusual page-to-screen translations in movie history: Mr. Wright not only wrote the screenplay but also stars as his own protagonist, Bigger Thomas, an African-American from the South Side of Chicago who takes a job as a chauffeur and accidentally kills the daughter of his employer. Shot outside of Hollywood by the European director Pierre Chenal, the movie resourcefully substitutes Argentina for Chicago and also infuses Mr. Wright's story with a remarkable film noir mood and sense of fatalism — an example of one of the great cinematic styles informing a great work of literature. Part of the Museum of Modern Art's "Death Is My Dance Partner: Film Noir in Postwar Argentina," continuing through Tuesday. At 2 p.m., Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters, 212-708-9400, moma.org[4]. (Kenigsberg)

Pioneers of African-American Cinema (Sunday through March 7) Film Forum's series focuses on what are sometimes called "race films," early movies by African-American directors that were made and distributed independently. On Monday, Film Forum will show "Within Our Gates" (1920), which is often regarded as the earliest surviving feature by an African-American director, Oscar Micheaux. It contains at least one sequence — an attempted rape with a black victim — that is clearly intended as a reply to the racism of D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" (1915). Other films in the series are "The Blood of Jesus" and Hell-Bound Train," Sunday at 1 p.m.; "Birthright," March 6 at 1:10 p.m.; and "Dirty Gertie From Harlem U.S.A.," March 7 at 7 p.m. 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village, 212-727-8110, filmforum.org[5]. (Kenigsberg)

See It Big! Documentary (through Feb. 21) Whatever your experience with documentaries may be, this all-nonfiction edition of the Museum of the Moving Image's recurring "See It Big!" series means to broaden your horizons. The selections are, without a doubt, designed for the immersion of a theater. They include Errol Morris's "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control," a four-strand character study whose subjects, among others, are a robot designer and a topiary gardener; "Lessons of Darkness," Werner Herzog's survey of burning Kuwaiti oil fields; and "Leviathan," Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel's abstract portrait of life on a fishing vessel. 35th Avenue at 37th Street, Astoria, Queens, 718-784-0077, movingimage.us[6]. (Kenigsberg)

Witches' Brew (Tuesday through Feb. 29) A ready-made Halloween event that has somehow turned up in February, this witch-themed retrospective from the Brooklyn Academy of Music invites viewers to pick their poison: The program puts stylish Italian horror ("Suspiria") alongside a Roald Dahl adaptation ("The Witches") and the more spiritual, introspective work of Carl Theodor Dreyer ("Day of Wrath"). The series begins on Tuesday with the new film "The Witch" (opening Feb. 19), a sustained immersion in 17th-century New England that suggests that the Salem Witch Trials were onto something (tickets are standby-only). At various times, a full schedule is at bam.org[7]. BAM Rose Cinemas, 30 Lafayette Avenu e, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100. (Kenigsberg)