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

'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. (A.O. 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)

★ '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)

'The Brothers Grimsby' (R, 1:18) Emphasis on the grim. (Dargis)

★ '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)

'Cemetery of Splendour' (No rating, 2:02, in Thai) The latest feature from the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul ("Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives") is another quiet surprise; a slow-paced, enigmatic account of an ailing soldier and two women looking after him. It is moving, engaging, and strangely sad. (Glenn Kenny)

★ 'City of Gold' (R, 1:31) Laura Gabbert's documentary about the Los Angeles Times food writer Jonathan Gold is a smart, ardent love letter to his city, his appetite and his art. (Scott)

'Colliding Dreams' (No rating, 2:14) The history of Zionism could easily fill multiple libraries. "Colliding Dreams" takes on the unwieldy task of condensing the topic into a feature documentary that capably if somewhat dryly covers more than a century. (Ben Kenigsberg)

'Creative Control' (R, 1:37) Benjamin Dickinson directs and stars in this frigid satire, set in Brooklyn in the near future, about a stressed-out adman whose obsession with a pair of reality-augmenting eyeglasses unwinds with heaps of style but only a smattering of substance. (Catsoulis)

'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)

'Deadpool' (R, 1:48) Jokes and bullets are tossed like confetti in "Deadpool," a feverishly eager-to-please comic-book movie about a supervillain (Ryan Reynolds) who suits up like a superhero. Bang, boom, splatter. (Dargis)

'Eddie the Eagle' (PG-13, 1:16) This film is loosely based on the real-life story of Eddie Edwards, an improbable British ski jumper in the 1988 Winter Olympics, but it has been so loaded up with fictionalized clichés that it's a bit insulting to viewers; it doesn't trust them to recognize a good underdog story on their own. At least Taron Egerton, in the title role, and Hugh Jackman, as his reluctant coach, have charm. (Genzlinger)

★ 'Embrace of the Serpent' (Not rated, 2:05) This majestic, spellbinding film is a tragic cinematic elegy for vanished indigenous civilizations in the Amazon jungle. Viewed largely through the aggrieved eyes of a shaman whose tribe is on the verge of extinction at the hands of Colombian rubber barons in the 19th and 20th centuries, this complicated mixture of myth and historical reality shatters lingering illusions of first-world culture as more advanced than any other, except technologically. (Stephen Holden)

★ 'Eye in the Sky' (R, 1:42) This suspenseful film about an American drone attack[2] on a terrorist meeting place in Nairobi, Kenya, is grim farce in which unpredictable human behavior repeatedly threatens an operation of astounding technological sophistication. Helen Mirren, in one of her fiercest screen performances, plays the chilly officer in charge of an operation to capture a radicalized Englishwoman she has been pursuing for years. But as the moment of capture arrives, her plans abruptly change when a cyborg beetle, a small surveilla nce device, reveals two inhabitants strapping on explosives for a suicide mission. (Holden)

★ '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)

'Gods of Egypt' (PG-13, 2:07) Come for the spectacle. Stay for the kitsch. (Dargis)

'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)

'Hello, My Name Is Doris' (R, 1:30) An irresistible, stealthily touching Sally Field plays an outwardly ridiculous woman in her 60s who falls in love with a much younger man (Max Greenfield). The director Michael Showalter oversells the goods, but resistance is futile. (Dargis)

'How to Be Single' (R, 1:50) In this film adaptation of Liz Tuccillo's book, an innocent postcollegiate newcomer to New York, named Alice (Dakota Johnson), disappears down a rabbit hole of deadening life lessons and half-baked screenwriting. This reheated "Sex and the City[3]" adventure flops, even with Leslie Mann and Rebel Wilson hard at work being funny. (Nicolas Rapold)

'Knight of Cups' (R, 1:58) In Terrence Malick's latest movie, Christian Bale plays a Hollywood screenwriter grappling with spiritual crisis in the company of beautiful women. The real star is the cinematographer, the three-time Oscar winner Emmanuel Lubezki, who infuses Los Angeles with a transcendental glow. (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)

'Lolo' (No rating, 1:40, in French) The actor-director Julie Delpy plays a Paris fashionista who dotes on a snooty son and finds their clingy bond getting in the way of a rejuvenating romance. Ms. Delpy's salty riffs on indulgent parenting and midlife insecurities are draped over wearisome farcical situations that fall short of her past work. (Rapold)

'London Has Fallen' (R, 1:39) In this sequel to "Olympus Has Fallen," the president of the United States once again is snatched by terrorists, and only his favorite Secret Service agent can save the day. It's dumb and uninvolving, a collection of ugly sentiments served via clumsy dialogue. (Genzlinger)

★ 'Marguerite' (R, 2:07, in French) "The self-deception that believes the lie." That phrase from the Rodgers and Hart song "I Wish I Were In Love Again" distills the theme of Xavier Giannoli's satirical comedy "Marguerite," about a rich, tone-deaf would-be opera diva who thinks she can sing. The character, beautifully played by Catherine Frot, is inspired by the life of the American socialite and aspiring soprano Florence Foster Jenkins, who was the butt of a cruel joke that everyone got but her. (Holden)

★ 'The Mermaid' (Not rated, 1:34, in Mandarin) Stephen Chow, master of Hong Kong comedy, stays behind the camera to deliver a manic but charming sci-fi/fantasy/slapstick eco-fable/romcom. Head-spinning fun. (Kenny)

'Miracles From Heaven' (PG, 1:49) Jennifer Garner stars as a woman who loses her faith when one of her children falls ill. The movie smartly looks to be inspiring rather than preachy, and except for some mawkishness in its late scenes, comes off as unexpectedly watchable. (Ken Jaworowski)

★ 'Mountains May Depart' (No rating, 2:11, in Cantonese, Mandarin and English) The latest from the transformative Chinese director Jia Zhangke follows three ordinary people across (and beyond) a rapidly, dizzyingly changing China. Few filmmakers working today look as deeply at the changing world as he does, or make the human stakes as vivid. (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)

'Perfect Match' (R, 1:26) A largely conventional but generally agreeable ensemble rom-com set in young, affluent L.A.; its most prominent thread is the old "player meets his match" gambit, enacted by the attractive performers Terrence J. and Cassie Ventura. (Kenny)

'Race' (PG-13, 2:14) To its credit, this standard inspirational biopic of Jesse Owens, the track-and-field star of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, doesn't soft-pedal the racism that Owens encountered at every turn. But this safe, by-the-numbers movie has no visual flair in showing his amazing athletic feats. (Holden)

'Remember' (R, 1:35) Christopher Plummer turns in a fine performance, and the director Atom Egoyan proves himself an expert button-pusher, in this psychological thriller. Mr. Plummer's character, Zev, who is slipping into and out of dementia, is sent in search of a Nazi who escaped justice. Martin Landau plays the friend who is pulling Zev's strings. The ending is a bit of a cop-out, but the tension builds efficiently throughout. (Genzlinger)

'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)

'Risen' (PG-13, 1:48) Framed as a tale of religious conversion, Kevin Reynolds's clunky biblical procedural confronts the Resurrection with flat photography and a stoic Joseph Fiennes as a Roman Army tribune hunting for the vanished body of the messiah. (Jeannette Catsoulis)

'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)

★ '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)

★ '10 Cloverfield Lane' (PG-13, 1:46) Sneakily tweaking our fears of terrorism, Dan Trachtenberg's tale of a captive girl (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), her dour jailer (John Goodman) and whatever is lurking outside their shelter is a master class on narrative pacing and carefully managed jolts. (Catsoulis)

'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)

'Triple 9' (R, 1:55) This lurid genre exercise features a lot of bad men and one very bad woman (Kate Winslet as a Russian-Israeli mob wife) engaged in the usual criminal nastiness. The director John Hillcoat wastes his fine cast on nonsense spiked with questionable representations. (Dargis)

'Whiskey Tango Foxtrot' (R, 1:52) Tina Fey plays a TV journalist thrust into war-ravaged Afghanistan in this adaptation of "The Taliban Shuffle," a memoir by Kim Barker, who is now a reporter for The New York Times. Directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, the episodic film plays like a more serious extension of Ms. Fey's best-known persona as a nerdy workaholic, on more treacherous terrain and with an Afghan culture clash. Her character's rise-and-fade arc is sympathetically rendered, but Ms. Fey, though a talented comic, seems to be holding back a bit with this material. (Rapold)

★ 'The Witch' (R, 1:32) This finely calibrated shiver of a movie from Robert Eggers follows a Puritan family that, in 1630, sets off to live alone in the New England wilderness. Something wicked this way comes. (Dargis)

'The Young Messiah' (PG-13, 1:51) An enervated adaptation of an Anne Rice best seller, "The Young Messiah" touches on New Testament basics in its story of the 7-year-old Jesus. But despite the addition of a Roman centurion character (Sean Bean) not in the novel, it fails to generate dramatic tension. (Andy Webster)

'Zoolander 2' (PG-13, 1:42) The extravagantly overproduced, chaotic, not very funny comic circus that is the tepid sequel to the 2001 hit has enough plot for several movies. They are so sketchy and jammed together that they more or less cancel each other out. (Holden)

★ 'Zootopia' (PG, 1:48) This smart, funny animated film from Disney tells the story of a determined bunny named Judy Hopps who wants to become the first of her kind to be a police officer in Zootopia, a metropolis where animals live and work together, having set aside their genetic tendencies to eat one another. There are witty jokes for all ages and messages about inclusion and intolerance that are more nuanced than in most such fare. (Genzlinger)

Film Series

American International Pictures, Part 3 (through Monday) 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[4]. (Ben Kenigsberg)

'Baby Face' (Saturday) In what may be the most eyebrow-raising star turn in the years before the enforcement of the Production Code, Barbara Stanwyck plays a young woman from a Pennsylvania town who brazenly sleeps her way to the top of a trust company in New York. Fans of Ms. Stanwyck (and double entendre) know what to do. Film Forum has placed this 1933 feature on a double bill with "Red-Headed Woman" (1932), in which Jean Harlow uses her wiles to similar effect. Both movies are part of "It Girls, Flappers, Jazz Babies & Vamps," a series devoted to Hollywood's contributions to the decline of American morals in the 1920s and '30s. 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village, 212-727-8110, filmforum.org[5]. (Kenigsberg)

Welcome to Metrograph: A-Z (Friday through Sunday) In a sophisticates' Film History 101, the new Metrograph theater on the Lower East Side is working its way alphabetically through films that its programmers consider canonical — most presented on good old-fashioned celluloid. This weekend's selection includes the 1942 "Cat People" (Friday), in which the director, Jacques Tourneur, conjures atmosphere on a low budget, simply through creative use of shadows, and Stanley Kubrick's 1975 "Barry Lyndon" (Friday and Sunday), whose cinematographer, John Alcott, devised new ways for film cameras to photograph candlelight. Also on the docket is "The Age of Innocence" (Sunday), the star-studded 1993 Edith Wharton adaptation that is basically Martin Scorsese's run at a "Barry Lyndon" equivalent. (The series continues through Dec. 31.) Metrograph, 7 Ludlow Street, 212-660-0312, metrograph.com[6]. (Kenigsberg)

New Directors/New Films (through March 27) The New York Film Festival[7] junior, this annual collaboration between the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center is devoted exclusively to showing by up-and-coming directors — not that novelty is ever any selection's defining feature. Last year's edition put a spotlight on such adventurous fare as "The Fool" and "Court." This year's lineup ranges from expected flash points like "Weiner," a documentary portrait of Anthony Weiner's campaign for mayor, to "Happ y Hour," a five-hour Japanese drama. A full schedule is at newdirectors.org[8]. At Museum of Modern Art Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters, 212-708-9400, and Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center, 165 West 65th Street, 212-875-5601, newdirectors.org. (Kenigsberg)

See It Big! Jack Fisk (through April 1) Nominated for an Oscar for "The Revenant," the production designer Jack Fisk may not have won this year, but his place as one of the great visionaries of movie scenery is secure. Few designers have created sets so integral to the work of so many auteurs. The Museum of the Moving Image is showing Mr. Fisk's collaborations with David Lynch (including "Mulholland Drive"), Paul Thomas Anderson ("There Will Be Blood") and Brian De Palma (not just "Carrie," but "Phantom of the Paradise," a wild, glam-rock version of "The Phantom of the Opera," showing Sunday). The series will also include all seven features Mr. Fisk made with Terrence Malick. At various times, 35th Avenue at 37th Street, Astoria, Queens, 718-784-0077, movingimage.us[9]. (Kenigsberg)