New movie reviews: New York listings and showtimes

42: movie review

• Rated as: 4/5
• Critics choice

Jackie Robinson’s story is so blue-sky heroic and transcendent, it becomes hard for any filmmaker to run the bases without falling into emotional goo. (Tellingly, the first attempt, in 1950, starred Robinson himself and still felt like a fantasy.) Writer-director Brian Helgeland has somehow found a

Admission: movie review

• Rated as: 2/5

Tina Fey is done with 30 Rock and her Golden Globes gig (hopefully not for good), yet finding a niche on the big screen might be harder than she realizes—especially if she continues to lunge at awkward dramedies like Baby Mama and this one, another half-success spoiled by tonal uncertainty. Portia

21 and Over: movie review

• Rated as: 2/5

Neither as subversively fun as last year’s megadestructive Project X, nor as creative as The Hangover (on which these codirectors broke through as screenwriters), this further installment in the millennials-acting-badly genre serves as a distinctly average placeholder. Two best friends turn into

At Any Price: movie review

• Rated as: 3/5

Dennis Quaid cracks his craggy handsomeness wide open in this absorbing Iowa-set drama about competitive farmers, all of whom scheme like world-class politicians. Quaid’s Henry Whipple, a longtime seller of genetically modified “superseeds” to multiple buyers, coasts along on his corn-fed bluster.

Augustine: movie review

• Rated as: 4/5
• Critics choice

Long before it became a favorite pejorative of intolerant husbands, “hysteria” was filling 19th-century French sanatoriums with females suffering from fits, outbursts and other assorted rebellions of the body. One such working-class girl, Augustine (Soko), is interned in a prisonlike hospital due

Avatar 3D

On an alien planet, a former Marine falls in love with a blue-skinned warrior and sides with her people against humankind's encroachment on their lush world.

Becoming Traviata: movie review

• Rated as: 3/5

Giuseppe Verdi’s 1853 opera about courtesans, counts and carnal longings has been performed thousands of times; when French director Jean-François Sivadier decided to tackle La Traviata for the 2011 Aix-en-Provence Festival, however, his goal was to do something sui generis. Less was more, in

Bert Stern: Original Madman: movie review

• Rated as: 1/5

They say you can learn everything about an artist by looking at his work—and you could certainly find more insight into the mind of shutterbug Bert Stern by glimpsing his iconic pics than by watching this sloppy, narcissistic mess of a documentary. Legendary as both a photographer and a

Bidder 70

Economics student Tim DeChristopher makes a startling bid to save 22,000 acres of Utah wilderness.

Black Rock: movie review

• Rated as: 2/5

Turning the besieged male campers of Deliverance into a trio of yoga-toned gal pals—they take to grungy survivalist chic well—would seem to be missing the point of that 1972 classic. But such analysis doesn’t suit this lame, phony-feminist thriller, devoid of a larger context save the predictable