Movie Listings for Dec. 6-12 Full reviews of all current releases: nytimes.com/movies. "About Time" (R, 2:04) Anglophile bait from Richard Curtis ("Love, Actually"), with Domhnall Gleeson as a fellow with limited time-traveling abilities. He uses them to woo an American woman (Rachel McAdams) and to ensure his own continued self-satisfaction and the audience's intermittently amused boredom. ★ "All Is Lost" (PG-13, 1:46) Robert Redford, nameless and all but silent, struggles with the elements after his sailboat is rammed by an errant shipping container somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Directed by J.C. Chandor ("Margin Call"), this film has the stark power and swift action of a classic seafaring tale, but it is also a moving and subtle allegory of human existence in the modern world. "The Best Man Holiday" (R, 2:03) The writer-director Malcolm D. Lee gathers the crew of friends from his 1999 debut, "The Best Man," for a Christmas reunion. If the movie's soapy dramas feel predictable and tilted against the women, the appeal of the cast (which includes Taye Diggs, Monica Calhoun and Terrence Howard) helps. And Mr. Lee's film is more traditional than its sexually frank humor might indicate, with faith and friendship ultimately given pride of place, right alongside human pettiness. Nicolas Rapold "Black Nativity" (PG, 1:35) Directed by Kasi Lemmons and largely set in present-day Harlem, this reworking of the Langston Hughes "gospel song-play" of the same title relates the Nativity story with black characters, telling it partly through traditional carols and spirituals as well as passages from the Gospel and Hughes's writing. The cast, which includes Jennifer Hudson, is uneven but the singing helps smooth the rough edges. ★ "Blue Is the Warmest Color" (NC-17, 2:59, in French) This wrenching and enthralling love story - winner of the Palme d'Or in Cannes - is already notorious for the sex scenes between its two lead actresses, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux. But the film's real glory is its emotional immediacy. Following its main character, Adele (Ms. Exarchopoulos) from adolescence into adulthood, the director, Abdellatif Kechiche, tracks the awakening of her consciousness with exquisite empathy. He also, perhaps more remarkably, grounds her emerging sexuality within a precisely rendered tableau of contemporary France, where traditional republican ideals coexist with multicultural realities. ★ "Blue Jasmine" (PG-13, 1:38) A brilliant, shattering Cate Blanchett plays a wealthy woman brought devastatingly low - think of Ruth Madoff by way of Blanche DuBois - in Woody Allen's most sustained and satisfying film since "Match Point." The excellent, characteristically Allen-eclectic cast includes Alec Baldwin, Sally Hawkins, Louis C.K., Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Dice Clay, Peter Sarsgaard and Michael Stuhlbarg. "The Book Thief" (PG-13, 2:05) This shameless piece of Oscar-seeking Holocaust kitsch, adapted from Markus Zusak's immensely popular young adult novel, is too sweet by half. "Breakfast With Curtis" (No rating, 1:22) Desultory, dauntingly DIY, but secretly efficient, "Breakfast With Curtis" is something like a leafy summer afternoon in movie form. In her third, micro-indie feature, the director Laura Colella shows family and friends hanging out in and around a couple of houses as a teenage boy comes out of his shell. Rapold "Bullett Raja" (No rating, 2:18, in Hindi) This dim all-guns-blazing Hindi movie directed by Tigmanshu Dhulia stars Saif Ali Khan as a man forced to be an outlaw in a crooked world. Our hero is supposed to be the Last Honest Man, but seems like any other cold killing machine. Rachel Saltz ★ "Captain Phillips" (PG-13, 2:14) In his latest, the director Paul Greengrass revisits the true story of Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks), an American taken hostage in 2009 by Somalis who commandeered his cargo ship in the Indian Ocean. Surprising and satisfyingly complex, it opens as a tale of men and work, then revs up into a camera-shuddering thriller, only to deepen. It's a tough, political look at power and the wretched of the earth. "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2" (PG, 1:35) The food on Swallow Falls island comes to life and has an appetite. Lacking the clever characterization and plot of the previous animated feature, this sequel about an island of living food products instead offers beautiful color, almost psychedelic bits of plotting and some of the weirdest cute critters (a pet strawberry and a family of emoji-style marshmallows) in memory. Miriam Bale "Dallas Buyers Club" (R, 2:00) Skinny and fierce, Matthew McConaughey brings terrific energy to the role of Ron Woodroof, a Texan who receives a diagnosis of H.I.V. in the mid-1980s. The film, directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, chronicles Ron's transformation from a homophobic hedonist into a medical crusader, bringing experimental (and at the time unapproved) drugs to desperate patients. It is an inspiring story, but the movie, Mr. McConaughey's performance notwithstanding, is too predictable and conventional to do justice to its political and social dimensions.