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)

'Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip' (PG, 1:26) The latest big-screen adventure of the unkillable singing chipmunks, the fourth in the franchise, features a simpler plot than the previous two films. It also puts the focus back on Alvin, Theodore and Simon, leaving the female trio, the Chipettes, in the background. The boys are worried about what they think are the engagement plans of their human minder, Dave, and take a road trip to disrupt them. Catchy songs abound. (Neil Genzlinger)

'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. (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)

'Concussion' (PG-13, 2:03) This fact-and-fiction hybrid stars Will Smith as a crusading doctor — the real Dr. Bennet Omalu — who sets out to discover why some professional football players are dying too young. Written and directed by Peter Landesman, the movie has a cause and heart but not enough real tension. (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)

'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)

'Jane Got A Gun' (R, 1:38) A movie in which a talented convocation of filmmakers — including its director (Gavin O'Connor), star (Natalie Portman) and co-star and screenplay contributor (Joel Edgerton) — whiff the opportunity to make a rousing revisionist Western, but turn in a muddled slog instead. (Glenn Kenny)

'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)

'Lazer Team' (PG-13, 1:42) This crowd-funded comedy falls flat thanks to a wan script poorly acted. Four bumblers find a high-tech suit of armor that is supposed to be Earth's best defense against a coming invasion from space. Each puts on a different piece and can't get it off, so they have to learn to work together to become planet-saving heroes. It's all too stupid to be amusing. (Genzlinger)

'Macbeth' (R, 1:52) The best reason to see this slick version of the sanguineous tragedy is Michael Fassbender's exceptionally fine title performance, though the writing isn't bad, either. A mushy-mouthed Marion Cotillard co-stars; Justin Kurzel directed. (Dargis)

★ '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)

'Norm of the North' (PG, 1:33) An entirely misbegotten animated movie about a "funny" polar bear trying to block condos in the Arctic. "The Revenant," which is no kind of kid's movie at all, is nevertheless a better kid's movie. (Kenny)

★ '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)

'Rabin, the Last Day' (No rating, 2:33) Amos Gitai's film about the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel combines documentary footage with dramatic reconstructions of events before and after the killing. It's not an easy film to watch, less because of the upsetting subject matter than because Mr. Gitai seems unable to rise above his own frustration and despair. Twenty years later, it's still hard to understand what happened. (Scott)

★ 'Requiem for the American Dream" (No rating, 1:15) The leftist social critic Noam Chomsky leads a timely teach-in on the election-year theme of financial inequality, reassembling previous writings to construct a sobering vision of a society in an accelerating decline. Mr. Chomsky never raises his voice in a briskly paced, engrossing seminar on "10 principles of concentration of wealth and power," even as you wonder, given all the challenges he cites, whether he believes they can be halted. (Gold)

'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)

'Sisters' (R, 1:58) It's always fun to watch Amy Poehler and Tina Fey together, but it would be more fun if this movie weren't such a cobbled-together mess of tired raunch and weak sentimentality. (Scott)

'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 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)

'Youth' (R, 2:04) Paolo Sorrentino follows the luxurious melancholy of "The Great Beauty" with this weary rumination on aging, set in a spectacular Alpine resort. Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel play old friends — a composer and a filmmaker — who feel their erotic and creative powers waning as the world goes on its decadent way. (Scott)

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 spans 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[2]. (Ben Kenigsberg)

'Belle de Jour' (Wednesday) An art house sensation in the late 1960s, "Belle de Jour" is still one of Luis Buñuel's best-known and most daringly ambiguous films, a tale of a sexually repressed housewife (Catherine Deneuve) who clandestinely spends afternoons moonlighting as a prostitute at a high-end brothel. There, she adopts the nickname "belle de jour" and caters to the desires of a variedly perverse clientele (and possibly herself). In French, with English subtitles. At 7:30 p.m., Nitehawk Cinema, 136 Metropolitan Avenue, near Berry Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 718-384-3980, nitehawkcinema.com[3]. (Kenigsberg)

Jane and Charlotte Forever (through Sunday) The Film Society of Lincoln Center's generation-bridging retrospective covers the careers of not one but two of the screen's most adventurous Anglo-French actresses: Charlotte Gainsbourg and her mother, Jane Birkin. Among this weekend's highlights is "Love on the Ground" (showing on Friday), by Jacques Rivette[4], who died on Jan. 29. At various times, Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center, 165 West 65th Street, 212-875-5601, filmlinc.com[5]. (Kenigsberg)

'The Keep' (Tuesday) In the Brooklyn Academy of Music's retrospective "Heat and Vice: The Films of Michael Mann," the oddest duck is "The Keep" (1983), Mr. Mann's seldom-shown second theatrical feature. The plot — a story of Nazis in the Carpathian Alps who take control of a fortress that locks in a supernatural presence — is far from the "Heat" and "Miami Vice" director's wheelhouse. Even hard-core fans of Mr. Mann would hesitate to suggest that this often-cheesy genre hybrid, a victim of visible mangling, is some sort of misunderstood classic. But it is an intriguing outlier, a showcase for Mr. Mann's outsize dialogue ("Where are you going in such a hurry?" "Into the past"), an eerie score by Tangerine Dream and an eclectic cast, including Scott Glenn, Alberta Watson, Jürgen Prochnow and, as a Romanian Jewish medieval scholar, Ian McKellen. (The "Heat and Vice" series continues through Feb. 16, a full schedule is online.) At 9:30 p.m., BAM Rose Cinemas, 30 Lafayette Avenue, at Ashland Place, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100, bam.org[6]. (Kenigsberg)

Lhomme Behind the Camera (Tuesdays through Feb. 23) This series on the cinematographer Pierre Lhomme, who worked with such essential filmmakers as Chris Marker and Robert Bresson, continues with the 1962 black-and-white film "Le Combat dans l'île," shown in 35 millimeter and introduced by Mr. Lhomme (late screening only). At 4 and 7:30 p.m., Florence Gould Hall, French Institute Alliance Française, 55 East 59th Street, Manhattan, 800-982-2787, fiaf.org[7]. (Kenigsberg)

Modern Matinees: A Pioneer Cowboy (through Feb. 26) Even in the 1910s, when stage-trained actors with unconventional looks could mosey their way onto the big screen more easily, William S. Hart and his melancholy woodcarving of a face cut a jarring figure. An acquaintance of Wyatt Earp and an accomplished Shakespearean actor on Broadway, Hart didn't arrive in Hollywood until he was 49. He made up for lost time, appearing in more than 60 films in just over a decade. This Museum of Modern Art retrospective includes the boisterous 1916 Western "Hell's Hinges," in which Hart's gunman sees the light when a preacher and his sister arrive in the titular territory, described in the film's intertitles as "a gun-fighting, man-killing, devil's den of iniquity that scorched even the sun-parched soil on which it stood." On various days, a detailed schedule is at moma.org[8]. (Eric Grode)

'Native Son' (Thursday and Feb. 14) 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 Feb. 16. Thursday at 6:30 p.m. and Feb. 14 at 2 p.m., Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters, 212 -708-9400, moma.org. (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[9]. (Kenigsberg)

'Trouble in Paradise' and 'The Marriage Circle' (through Tuesday) As part of "Modern 'Matinees': Fashionably Late," a series focusing on its early cinematic acquisitions, the Museum of Modern Art will screen two superb comedies from the director Ernst Lubitsch. In "Trouble in Paradise" (Friday and Sunday), possibly Mr. Lubitsch's greatest film, two thieves (Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall) fall in love after simultaneously picking one another's pockets and conspire to rob a wealthy Parisian (Kay Francis). In the 1924 silent "The Marriage Circle" (Sunday and Tuesday), a Viennese woman (Marie Prevost) caught in an unhappy marriage to a professor (Adolphe Menjou) pursues her friend's new husband (Monte Blue), a doctor who wants to remain faithful — not that anyone believes him. Museum of Modern Art Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters, 212-708-9400, moma.org. (Kenigsberg)