An Autumn Afternoon The fatal bargain of old age has rarely been observed as sharply as in Yasujiro Ozu's last film, from 1962. It's centered on Hirayama, a Tokyo businessman and widower whose grown daughter, Michiko, keeps house for him. Their settled routine is jolted by his plainspoken friend, Kawai, who urges him to find her a suitable husband and spare her a life as an old maid. Hirayama's growing acceptance of his solitude is challenged by the late-life happiness of another friend, Horie, a sly fox who is married to a much younger woman, and by an unhappy reunion with their aged middle-school teacher, who is in dire straits. His serenity is also troubled by the resurgence of bitter memories: a former naval captain, he runs into a shipmate whose sentimental reminiscences spark jingoistic bombast - and arouse thoughtful regret. With the bright colors of new urban landscapes (built up in the wake of wartime destruction) and the brazen clash of calmly assertive compositions, Ozu captures the ordinary desolation at the natural heart of things - and contemplates his own place on the edge of the precipice. In Japanese. - Richard Brody (Film Society of Lincoln Center; Dec. 11-12.) The Big Combo Joseph H. Lewis ("Gun Crazy") directed this rabidly amusing B movie from a Philip Yordan script. The word "combo" refers to "the Combination" (read: Mob or Mafia), here headed by one of movie gangland's old reliables, Richard Conte. Cornel Wilde stars as the police lieutenant determined to topple Conte. Wilde's real-life wife, Jean Wallace, plays a cultured blonde who is Conte's moll and Wilde's obsession. Lewis and Yordan fill the melodrama with intriguing peculiarities. A hearing aid becomes the Combo chief's prime tool of torture; his ultimate defense against exposure is a writ of habeas corpus. Lee Van Cleef and Earl Holliman, as hit men, and Brian Donlevy, as Conte's ex-boss and current flunky, form a generational study of film thughood. Lewis goes in for chiaroscuro on the cheap. It pays off when Wallace uses a spotlight to trace Conte's zigzag flight through a dark airport. Released in 1955. - Michael Sragow (Museum of the Moving Image; Dec. 13.) Frozen The new Disney film is adapted, all too freely, from Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen." In a kingdom in the Far North, a princess named Elsa (voiced by Idina Menzel) possesses an unwelcome gift: everything she touches turns to ice. There is no malice in this trick; indeed, being a kindly sort, she wears gloves in a bid to prevent it from happening. When that no longer works, she flees to the mountains and builds herself a lonely ice fortress rather than cause any trouble. Unfortunately, this renders the film villain-free; there is nothing here to match the pushy mother from Hell who bestrode "Entangled." We also get Elsa's hapless sister, Anna (Kristen Bell), and various male suitors and hangers-on, all of whom, amid the clean, hard lines of the animation, seem slightly drippy. Somehow, Disney has become the most reliable haven of what used to be called the women's picture. The directors are Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, and the musical numbers, by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, seem both soaring and headlong; when Menzel, in particular, nails a song, it stays nailed. - Anthony Lane (12/9/13) (In wide release.) In Italian. - A.L. (11/25/13) (In limited release.) At the Capitol, however, the extravagant decadence and purple-pink luxury are as puzzling as ever. Despite the title, the inner life of Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) proves a hard place to map, although we soon realize how scarred with frustrations it must be. The externals are clearer: the year is 1961, Llewyn is a folksinger, and therefore, by definition, he has a beard, a scarf, a scowl, and no coat to call his own. His tale - more of a meander than an adventure, ranging from New York to Chicago and back - is told by the Coen brothers, who, as expected, lavish unstinting care and wit on the period look. There is fine work from John Goodman, Justin Timberlake, F. Murray Abraham, and a marmalade cat; most disconcerting of all is Carey Mulligan, who smiles like a seraph and swears like a stevedore. Indeed, such is the vigor of this dramatic support that we are left uneasy by the churl at the movie's heart, who proves so adept both at annoying his friends and at fending off our sympathy that his company can feel like a burden. And yet, without fail, that awkwardness dissolves whenever he picks up his guitar and sings; only then does the lost soul find his calling and his poise. With musical supervision by T-Bone Burnett. - A.L. (12/9/13) (In wide release.) Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles The director Chantal Akerman's three-hour-plus tour de force of cinematic modernism, from 1975, puts time onscreen as it was never seen before. The title character, played by the porcelain diva Delphine Seyrig, is a middle-aged, middle-class prostitute who turns tricks in her bourgeois apartment with dapper johns who make discreet appointments. Widowed nearly six years, she is raising her adolescent son, Sylvain (Jan Decorte), alone, and handling a standard round of errands and chores - all of which play out at extraordinary length and detail, in static takes framed squarely and distantly. Whether she's making a bed, cooking a meal, taking a bath, or shopping, Seyrig evokes a dancer's intense physical discipline and clipped, angular precision. Such care for the material world borders on the obsessive, and the absence of thought behind Jeanne's rigid, orderly, compartmentalized regime is exactly the point: this living perpetual-motion machine can't bear the slightest immobility, and when the fixed boundaries of her life give way to her work, the results are catastrophic. Akerman's chillingly sardonic feminist fable - which also bears the weight of unspoken wartime trauma - is built on a sublime paradox, the elusive identity of someone who, as the title suggests, is so easily identified. In French. - R.B. (Museum of the Moving Image; Dec. 14.) But Cooke finds the roots of his drama in his very nickname, claiming that "Lenny" was as much an invention of his basketball handlers as his athletic identity was (his name is Leonard). Josh Brolin stars as a swaggering corporate buck and hard-drinking, philandering divorcé who awakens from a one-night stand to find himself in a motel room that turns out to be a solitary-confinement cell in a private prison. The extreme yet horrific artifice of the setup pulls backstory to the fore and reveals, as if in a sociological X-ray, several lifetimes" worth of privilege abused, opportunities squandered, and energy (and resources) misspent, and places the blame squarely on enablers who blindly encourage destructive behavior and disablers who, with an emblematic lack of compassion, punitively compound and perpetuate the destruction. This inexorably grim melodrama, set in a fading Pennsylvania steel town, is about a returning Iraq War veteran (Casey Affleck) who takes up bare-knuckle boxing to make a little money, the older brother (Christian Bale) who tries to protect him, and the vicious promoter/drug dealer (Woody Harrelson) who controls the underground circuit of matches. As directed by Scott Cooper, the movie has an undeniable, dour force, but it's basically conventional macho filmmaking, and it's extremely violent. Harrelson's portrayal of an amused and amusing crime boss - a king in his own petty domain - is the best thing in the film. With Zoe Saldana and Sam Shepard. - D.D. (In wide release.) There are all kinds of ways in which Stephen Frears's film could have turned out mushy or merely splenetic, yet it keeps its poise and draws you into its moral quandaries, thanks to the controlled performances as well as the screenplay, by Coogan and Jeff Pope. American Hustle Opening Dec. 13. The Crash Reel A documentary, directed by Lucy Walker, about the snowboarder Kevin Pearce, who suffered grave injuries while training for the 2010 Winter Olympics. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug The second film in the fantasy trilogy, about a magical battle against a dragon. Directed by Peter Jackson; starring Martin Freeman, Ian McKellen, and Benedict Cumberbatch. A Madea Christmas Tyler Perry directed and stars in this comedy, as a matriarch who accompanies a friend on a holiday trip. Co-starring Tika Sumpter and Chad Michael Murray. Nuclear Nation Atsushi Funahashi directed this documentary, about residents of the Japanese city of Futaba who were displaced by the Fukushima disaster. Opening Dec. 11. Film Forum. Saving Mr. Banks A comedy, directed by John Lee Hancock, about the making of "Mary Poppins" and the conflicts between the book's author, P. L. Travers (Emma Thompson), and Walt Disney (Tom Hanks). Co-starring Paul Giamatti, Jason Schwartzman, and Colin Farrell. Caught in the Web: In limited release. 32 Second Ave., at 2nd St. (212-505-5181) - "Delmer Daves Redux." Dec. 12 at 6:45 and Dec. 14 and Dec. 17 at 9:15: "The Hanging Tree" (1959). • Dec. 13 at 6:45 and Dec. 16 at 9:15: "Susan Slade" (1961). • Dec. 14 at 3:45 and Dec. 15 and Dec. 17 at 6:30: "Youngblood Hawke" (1964). 30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn (718-636-4100) - "Migrating Forms." Dec. 12 at 7: "From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf" (2013, Ashok Sukumaran). • Dec. 13 at 7: "The Unity of All Things" (2013, Daniel Schmidt and Alexander Carver). • Dec. 14 at 9:45: "See You Next Tuesday" (2013, Drew Tobia). (212-727-8110) - The films of Barbara Stanwyck. Dec. 11 at 3 and 7: "East Side, West Side" (1949, Mervyn LeRoy). • Dec. 12 at 1:30, 5:30, and 9:30: "The File on Thelma Jordon" (1950, Robert Siodmak). • Dec. 13 at 1, 4:30, and 8: "No Man of Her Own" (1950, Mitchell Leisen). • Dec. 14 at 1, 4:50, and 8:40: "Ball of Fire" (1941, Howard Hawks). Dec. 11 at 1:45 and Dec. 12 at 4: "Equinox Flower" (1958, Yasujiro Ozu). • Dec. 11 at 6 and Dec. 12 at 8:30: "An Autumn Afternoon." • Through Jan. 7: The films of George Cukor. Dec. 13 at 1:15 and 6:30 and Dec. 14 at 4:30: "The Women" (1939). • Dec. 13 at 4 and 9:10: "The Chapman Report" (1962). • Dec. 14 at 7:15 and Dec. 16 at 1: "Adam's Rib" (1949). • Dec. 15 at 2: "Sylvia Scarlett" (1935). • Dec. 15 at 6:15: "Two-Faced Woman" (1941). • Dec. 16 at 3:15: "Pat and Mike" (1952). • Dec. 17 at 1: "Camille" (1936). • Dec. 17 at 3:30: "Keeper of the Flame" (1942). 55 E. 59th St. (212-355-6160) - The films of Max Linder. Dec. 17 at 12:30 and 4: "The Man in the Silk Hat" (1983, Maud Linder). • Dec. 17 at 7:30: "Yoyo" (1965, Pierre Étaix). Roy and Niuta Titus Theatres, 11 W. 53rd St. (212-708-9480) - "An Auteurist History of Film." Dec. 11-13 at 1: "Le Joli Mai" (1963, Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme) and "La Jetée" (1962, Marker). • "Our Town: Baltimore." Dec. 16 at 4:30: "Pink Flamingos" (1972, John Waters). Dec. 13 at 7: "The Big Combo." • Dec. 14 at 2: "Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles." • Dec. 15 at 2: "Down by Law" (1986, Jim Jarmusch). • Dec. 15 at 4:30: "The Night of the Hunter" (1955, Charles Laughton). • Dec. 15 at 7: "Suspiria" (1977, Dario Argento).