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The Bounty Hunter / *1/2 (PG-13)
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"The Bounty Hunter" (PG-13, 110 minutes). An inconsequential formula comedy and a waste of the talents of Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler. He's a bounty hunter, she's skipped bail on a traffic charge, they were once married, and that's the end of the movie's original ideas. We've seen earlier versions of every single scene to the point of catatonia. Rating: One and a half stars
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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo / **** (No MPAA rating)
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"The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" (Unrated, for adults, 148 minutes). Compelling thriller with a heroine more fascinating than the story. She's Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace), a 24-year-old Goth girl with body piercings and tattoos: thin, small, fierce, damaged, a genius computer hacker. She teams up with a taciturn Swedish investigator to end a serial killer's 40 years of evil. Based on the international best-seller. Intense and involving. The planned Hollywood remake will probably have to be toned down. Four stars
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The Runaways / *** (R)
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"The Runaways" (R. 102 minutes). A girl hard rock group is created from thin air by a Svengali rock manager, achieves stardom, and its lead singer collides with drug abuse. Persuasive performances by Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning as Joan Jett and Cherrie Currie, and a scary one by Michael Shannon as their promoter. A lot of music, but not much insight into the biographies of the performers. The recreation of a moment in time that opened hard road to women. Three stars
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Repo Men / ** (R)
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"Repo Men" (R, 111 minutes). A giant corporation will provide you with a human heart or other organ, at a high price. If you fall behind in payments, they send around a Repo Man who stuns you, slices open your body, reaches in, and repossesses the organ. The hero (Jude Law) is a repo man who finds the corporation is after his heart. The props must have cleaned out the Organ Meats cooler at a meat market. Also with Alice Braga, Forest Whitaker and Liev Schreiber. Two stars.
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Diary of a Wimpy Kid / ***1/2 (PG)
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"Diary of a Wimpy Kid" (PG, 92 minutes). Nimble, bright and funny comedy about the hero's first year of middle school. Zachary Gordon stars as the uncertain newcomer, and Robert Capron is his pudgy best pal, who still acts like a kid. Chloe Grace Moretz sparkles as the only student who's nice to them, and the movie amusingly remembers the tortures of early adolescence. Based on the books by Jeff Kinney. Three and a half stars
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Formosa Betrayed / **1/2 (R)
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"Formosa Betrayed" (R, 100 minutes). In 1983 a Chicago FBI agent is sent to Taipei to investigate the murder of a Taiwanese professor from Lake Forest. He stumbles on a situation with the roots in the postwar years, when the natives of Formosa (as Taiwan was then known) lost control of their land to the nationalist Chinese under Chiang Kai-shek. The movie's agenda is to be a thriller and simultaneously argue its anti-Chiang viewpoint; that makes it a little clunky, but possibly more involving. Two and a half stars
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Nick Nolte: No Exit / ** (No MPAA rating)
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"Nick Nolte: No Exit" (Unrated, 74 minutes). Nick Nolte interviews himself, and is less than chatty but always charismatically enigmatic. Others discuss him, including Nick Nolte, Jacqueline Bisset, Rosanna Arquette, Barbara Hershey, Ben Stiller, and Powers Boothe. Watchable, but unsatisfying. Two stars
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Green Zone / **** (R)
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"The Green Zone" (R, 114 minutes) Matt Damon and his two-time "Bourne" director Paul Greengrass team up for a first-rate thriller set early in the war in Iraq. Damon's chief warrant officer finds that U.S. intelligence is worthless, and his complaints lead him to discover the secret conspiracy intended to justify the American invasion. Greg Kinnear is the deceptive U.S. intelligence puppet-master, Brendan Gleeson is a grizzled old CIA hand whose agency has always doubted the stories sabot Saddam's WMD, and Amy Ryan plays a newspaper reporter who served Kinnear as a pipeline. Four stars
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Red Riding Trilogy / **** (No MPAA rating)
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"Red Riding Trilogy." (Unrated, for adults, 302 minutes). An immersive experience based on the infamous Yorkshire Ripper killings and the subsequent revelations about deep corruption in the Yorkshire Police Departments. Brilliantly cast, filmed in segments each offering a distinctive look and feel, beginning with a serial killer and then tangling the investigation with deep-seated local corruption. Not so much about what happens objectively as about its surrounding miasma of greed and evil. Four stars
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The Art of the Steal / ***1/2 (No MPAA rating)
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"The Art of the Steal" (Unrated, 101 minutes). The most valuable collection of modern and impression art in the rod, valued at $250 billion, was intended by its rich collector, Dr. Albert C. Barnes, to reside forever in the Barnes Foundation in suburban Philadelphia. He hired the best lawyers to draw up an iron-clad will to assure that would happen after his death. He specified it not go to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which he felt had scorned him and his collection. This absorbing documentary tells the story of how and why his art is in that museum today, the film calls it the "art theft of the century." Three and a half stars
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