Capsule reviews: 'Capitalism' and others

"The Boys Are Back" — This true-life drama delicately and deftly finds a balance that's hard to strike: It depicts death, and the way a family rebuilds and redefines itself afterward, without any mawkishness. Director Scott Hicks' film, with its dreamlike, sun-splashed landscapes of Southern Australia, is visually arresting (the work of cinematographer Greig Fraser, who recently shot Jane Campion's luminous "Bright Star"). But the content of Allan Cubitt's script, based on the memoir by Simon Carr, is meaty and straightforward, which gives it an unexpected power. This is easily Hicks' best film since the Oscar-winning "Shine" way back in 1996 (since then his work has included the admirable but uneven "Hearts in Atlantis" and "No Reservations"), and much of the allure comes from Clive Owen's complex performance. As a man learning how to function as a single father after the death of his wife, Owen shows great liveliness but also a natural vulnerability. His character, sportswriter Joe Warr, takes a "Just Say Yes" attitude in raising his 6-year-old son (Nicholas McAnulty, disarming in his film debut), which makes for a lot of fun but it also results in chaos. Joe's frustration in figuring out this whole parenting thing by himself provides inescapable reminders of Dustin Hoffman in "Kramer vs. Kramer": Once again we have two men sharing a home, realizing they don't really know each other and unsure of how to relate as they work through their grief. But then the arrival of Harry (George MacKay), Joe's teenage son from his first marriage, changes the dynamic all over again. PG-13 for some sexual language and thematic elements. 104 min. Three stars out of four.

— Christy Lemire, AP Movie Critic

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"Brief Interviews With Hideous Men" — The "brief" part is one of the biggest problems here. In adapting the late David Foster Wallace's book of the same name, writer-director John Krasinski spends so little time with each of the male "subjects" being interviewed about their fears and fantasies, it's hard to connect with any of them or feel intrigued or moved by their stories. They mainly come off as neurotic, obnoxious or both. And the actors playing them are so self-consciously performing, their soliloquies feel stagey and false. By contrast, the woman questioning them for her doctoral thesis in anthropology, the reserved Sara (Julianne Nicholson), exhibits so little personality, she's a cipher. Krasinski makes his debut behind the camera here, but the star of TV's "The Office" is actually more effective in front of it. He appears in one of the stronger sequences in this scattershot production as Ryan (or "Subject No. 20," as he's known scientifically), the man who's come in and out of Sara's life and inspired her study. But then he undermines his own performance with copious jump cuts, a distracting and gimmicky device he uses far too frequently. Krasinski intersperses the interviews with dramatic segments showing Sara interacting with her various subjects, but neither approach provides much insight into the male psyche. Too often, we get cliches: Men view women as objects, they have commitment issues, they don't understand what women want. Timothy Hutton, Dominic Cooper, Bobby Cannavale and Josh Charles are among the ensemble cast. Not rated but contains language and sexual content. 80 min. One and a half stars out of four.

— Christy Lemire, AP Movie Critic

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"Capitalism: A Love Story" — How do you make a movie about the country's current economic crisis and actually get people to see it? Two obstacles most obviously arise: illustrating such a potentially dry subject in a compelling way, and persuading audiences to pay money for information they can get at home — and feel depressed about — for free. Having Michael Moore as our guide certainly helps. Twenty years after he took on General Motors with his powerful debut "Roger & Me," the proud provocateur is taking aim at the same sorts of targets with his latest documentary. It's vintage Moore, reflecting both the filmmaker's fondness for manipulation and his strengths as a showman. As he did with "Sicko" and "Fahrenheit 9/11," he typically oversimplifies a complicated topic to make it accessible for the broadest possible audience, but he also tells moving stories of specific families who've lost their homes to foreclosure. With a big assist from his crack team of archivists, he brilliantly juxtaposes 1950s footage of wholesome guys and gals extolling the virtues of capitalism with all-too familiar shots of contemporary hardship. But we also see home movies of a young, towheaded Moore, excitedly visiting Wall Street from his home in Flint, Mich., which will become even more relevant when Moore returns to the economic vortex in the film's final, dramatic moments. In making the argument that capitalism is evil, Moore is all over the place, and he doesn't even make the vaguest attempt at finding balance journalistically. But at least he's equal opportunity, blaming politicians on both sides of the aisle for allowing the influence of Wall Street to lead us into the troubles we're in today. R for some language. 126 min. Three stars out of four.

— Christy Lemire, AP Movie Critic

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"Coco Before Chanel" — The young Coco Chanel noticed style everywhere, even in the crisp white and basic black of the nuns' habits at the orphanage where she was raised. "Coco Before Chanel" has a similarly keen eye for appearances, but there's not a whole lot of passion or insight beneath the surface. Director Anne Fontaine's film, which she wrote with her sister, Camille, traces the early years of the fashion designer who would come to define a bold kind of feminine style throughout the 20th century, one that was as no-nonsense as the woman herself. We see her in her early 20s as a struggling seamstress and part-time singer fending off advances from drunken soldiers, then as the live-in lover to a playboy racehorse owner, and finally as an independent woman honing her skills and refining her look. Audrey Tautou has great appeal as Gabrielle Chanel — Coco, as she was known — presenting the designer's feistiness not as bravado but as a straightforward reflection of how she felt. Of course, Tautou looks adorably chic in Chanel's clothes, with her petite, androgynous frame and big, brown eyes. Still, you wonder what moved her, aside from the simplicity of the men's outfits that would inspire her own suits and hats. While living with the randy Etienne Balsan (Benoit Poelvoorde), functioning as his "geisha," as he liked to call her, she supposedly was in love with his friend, Arthur "Boy" Capel (Alessandro Nivola), but even her involvement in that relationship seems almost passive. PG-13 for sexual content and smoking. 110 min. Two stars out of four.

— Christy Lemire, AP Movie Critic

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"The Damned United" — You don't have to be a soccer expert, or even know much about the sport, to get sucked into the competing personalities and personal dramas depicted here. Sure, it probably helps in terms of appreciating some of the details and nuances, especially if you're a fan of British football. But director Tom Hooper doesn't include very much action on the field: "The Damned United" is more about the larger-than-life figures behind the scenes, mainly Brian Clough, the real-life manager of Leeds United for a brief and tumultuous period in 1974. And you don't even have to know who Clough was to care about him. As he did with his brilliant and underappreciated supporting work as Tony Blair in "The Queen" and David Frost "Frost/Nixon," Michael Sheen brings this cocky coach vividly to life. It is such a joy to see him grab hold of a starring role like this, and to see him work once again with screenwriter Peter Morgan, who wrote those earlier films. Morgan has an uncanny knack for taking powerful and polarizing leaders and making us see them in a totally new and humanistic light. He did it with Queen Elizabeth II, Richard Nixon and, in "The Last King of Scotland," Idi Amin. Clough won't be nearly as well-known to American audiences but Morgan shows us his foibles, his vulnerability, which should make him compelling to anyone. Based on David Peace's novel, "The Damned United" jumps back and forth between Clough's hiring as the new Leeds coach, after the departure of the beloved Don Revie (Colm Meaney) for the English national team, and the unlikely rise Clough enjoyed with perennial cellar-dwellers. R for language. 98 min. Three stars out of four.

— Christy Lemire, AP Movie Critic

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"Fame" — This "reinvention" of the 1980 high school musical — please, people, don't call it a remake — stays faithful to the spirit and structure of Alan Parker's original while sucking out all the raciness. There's no nudity in the new "Fame," no one gets an abortion. No one even lights a single cigarette. But at the same time, dancer and choreographer Kevin Tancharoen, making his feature directing debut, doesn't turn "Fame" into the kind of slick, overly edited eye candy you might expect. It's stylized, yes, and it movies really fluidly while still maintaining some urban grittiness. And in a world where people aspire for instant recognition by making idiots of themselves on reality TV, there's something sort of quaint about the idea of working hard for artistic glory. Starting with Debbie Allen's famous "You got big dreams, you want fame" speech over the opening titles, "Fame" follows a group of aspiring singers, dancers, actors and musicians from their auditions for New York's High School of Performing Arts until their graduation four years later. Among the familiar types are Denise (Naturi Naughton), a classically trained pianist who longs to branch out creatively; shy actress Jenny (Kay Panabaker); the privileged dancer Alice (Kherington Payne); the shticky wannabe film director Neil (Paul Iacono); and the misunderstood actor-rapper Mailk (Collins Pennie). Among the faculty are Kelsey Grammer as the stern but fair piano teacher; Bebe Neuwirth, formidable as always as a dance instructor, Megan Mullally as a voice coach and Allen herself, in all of two scenes, as the school's principal. PG for thematic material including teen drinking, a sexual situation and language. 107 min. Two and a half stars out of four.

— Christy Lemire, AP Movie Critic

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"Surrogates" — Itself a kind of surrogate, "Surrogates" is a stand-in for many of the sci-fi movies of the recent past: In it, you'll recognize the ideas of "Blade Runner," ''Minority Report" and even "WALL-E." In a quasi-present day Boston, nearly everyone has a surrogate — a younger, thinner, cosmetically perfect robotic version of themselves. They're controlled while you're reclining at home and plugged into a machine. This means, most importantly, that we have a blond Bruce Willis on our hands. Willis is an FBI agent who, along with his partner (Radha Mitchell), is trying to solve two murders which, though committed on surrogates, also "liquefied" the brains of their human operators. Having a robotic stand-in has some obvious perks: Sexuality is less inhibited. If you fall, you don't scrape your elbows. And if your helicopter crashes, you don't die. But this crime-less utopia is also a superficial wasteland, devoid of meaningfulness. "Surrogates," directed by Jonathan Mostow ("Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines"), is adapted from a graphic novel by Robert Venditti. Graphic novels are — for better or worse — the new pulp fiction. Like those hard-boiled novels of the '40s that Hollywood couldn't get enough of, graphic novels are fueling what once would have been called B-movies. At its best, that's what "Surrogates" is: a quality B-movie, pulpy and reflective of its times. The film isn't shy about its feelings about technology — it's time to unplug. But dreams of a computer-less society are as much fantasy as a blond Bruce Willis. PG-13 for intense sequences of violence, disturbing images, language, sexuality and a drug-related scene. 88 min. Two stars out of four.

— Jake Coyle, AP Entertainment Writer