Ziad Doueiri directed this drama, about an Israeli Arab man (Ali Suleiman) who discovers that his wife (Reymond Amsalem) may have been not the victim of a recent suicide bombing but its perpetrator. In Arabic and Hebrew. Opening June 21. In this drama, directed by Tobias Lindholm, a Danish ship is hijacked by Somali pirates. In Danish, Swedish, and English. The latest installment in the animated "Monsters, Inc." franchise, set in the characters" college days. Directed by Dan Scanlon; with the voices of Nathan Fillion, John Goodman, Helen Mirren, and Aubrey Plaza. Opening June 25. Marc Forster directed this horror thriller, based on the novel by Max Brooks, about a worldwide zombie invasion and the United Nations official (Brad Pitt) who tries to thwart it. Billy Wilder must have had it up to here with the suits when he made this acrid, sad-toned comedy of corporate cronyism, from 1960. With the story of C. C. (Bud) Baxter (played by Jack Lemmon), a junior accountant who climbs the executive ladder at a big Manhattan insurance firm by lending his West Sixty-seventh Street bachelor flat to married higher-ups - all men - for their extramarital trysts, Wilder depicts the establishment as predatory dinosaurs whose unchallenged reign awaits only a shift in climate to meet its welcome end. While sarcastically depicting the routine sexual harassment of women stuck in such supporting roles as secretary and switchboard operator, the director and his co-writer, I. A. L. Diamond, also catch the headwinds of sexual revolution: the apple of Baxter's eye, the elevator operator Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), is trysting with his boss, the personnel director Jeff Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), who is, she admits, not her first lover. Wilder, a bilious and mercurial wit, here becomes a wide-screen master of time, parcelling out the office hours, days, and - seemingly - years in meticulously incremental scenes; only Lemmon's eager-beaver chirpiness and MacLaine's archetypal pixified sparkle fix a smile on the grim struggle at the movie's core. - Richard Brody (MOMA; June 19-21.) In Nicholas Ray's extravagant, wide-screen, Technicolor melodrama, from 1956, the horror of middle-class decency is surpassed only by the terror of the abyss that lies beyond it. That's what Ed Avery (James Mason), a small-town English teacher and devoted family man, learns when he's stricken with a grave blood disease and treated with the "wonder drug" cortisone. When he's careless about his dosages, he suffers its main side effect: psychosis, which, in his case, takes the form of overdrive. Bursting with energy, discipline, discontent, and cruelty, Ed turns on his students, neighbors, friends, and, ultimately, his family, in one of the most fearsomely histrionic scenes ever filmed. Mason's gift for cold-eyed madness is heightened by Ray's exuberantly lurid approach. He films Ed's jaundiced world view with cocked angles and shock cuts and invokes the clash of slovenly good cheer and tyrannical order with a palette that sets decorous neutral tones against the acid colors of corrosive passion and the eerie, unearthly fluorescence of the little purple bottle at the heart of it all. Based on a 1955 article in this magazine by Berton Roueché. - R.B. (Museum of the Moving Image; June 23.) The most exquisitely crafted movie ever made about a bunch of nitwits. Drawing on Nancy Jo Sales's reporting for a 2010 article in Vanity Fair ("The Suspects Wore Louboutins"), the writer and director, Sofia Coppola, moves swiftly and elegantly through the momentous events: In 2008 and 2009, a group of teen-agers from Calabasas, a wealthy city in the San Fernando Valley, broke into the houses of select celebrities - Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Rachel Bilson, Audrina Patridge, and Orlando Bloom - and made off with three million dollars" worth of cash, Rolex watches, Birkin bags, Alexander McQueen sunglasses, and the like, and when they were arrested they became minor celebrities themselves. Coppola pulls together the trends of the last fifteen years - reality TV, TMZ, the Internet, social media - and has dramatized how, working together, they might produce an appalling new kind of teen-ager. Emma Watson plays Nicki, the most confident of the teens, who has no self; she's all arch, bullying presentation. With Israel Broussard and Katie Chang. - D.D. (6/10 & 17/13) (In wide release.) This silent film, from 1933, directed by Yasujiro Ozu, opens like a classic office melodrama, as Tokiko (Kinuyo Tanaka), a demure young secretary, is pursued by her wily boss. But after working hours she heads over to a boxing gym where her criminal boyfriend, Joji (Joji Oka), holds court. Ozu's version of a gangster movie seethes with sardonic comedy - he holds underworld swagger in unconcealed contempt - yet he adorns it with images of an uproarious visual ecstasy. His gleeful compositions put objects obsessively front and center - a drum kit, a set of dice, a row of Martini glasses, a billiard cue that pokes right at the camera - and presage the deep-focus symphonies of Orson Welles and even the vertiginous enticements of 3-D. His mobsters aren't just living in a material world, they are its unwitting pawns. Tokiko's transformation into a foulmouthed, menacing moll erupts chillingly when her man falls for a refined record-store clerk whose younger brother wants to join his gang; though the violence never uncorks and the story takes a sentimental turn, the deep shadows, the jarring angles and cuts, and the idiosyncratic whims of gesture evoke a sorry underworld that's out of joint, out of luck, and out of time. - R.B. (Film Forum; June 23.) Just as the plot threatens to run out of gas, Lin rescues the film with a spate of vastly ridiculous and therefore enjoyable set pieces, most of which involve means of conveyance designed to make the cars look puny. Co-starring Adam Driver and Michael Zegen. - R.B. (In limited release.) With extravagant yet precise performances balanced tremulously between comedy and melodrama, this short film by Dustin Guy Defa packs the emotional amplitude of a feature film into its fifteen minutes. On a New York street, the young title character (Hannah Gross) unleashes sentimental rage on her ex, Bruce (Josh Safdie), who returns the rage double and stalks off. Diana (Dakota Goldhor), a solitary traveller who witnesses the fight from the other side of a café window, comforts Lydia and accompanies her home with promises of solace and revelry. When a couple of men join them, comic riffs à la Woody Allen on the New York Jewish psyche press threateningly close to old-school prejudice, and free-spirited spontaneity veers into calculated runs at madness. Gross laces her feverish pain with surprising menace, and Goldhor's smoldering performance has a controlled ferocity - she turns the word "drunk" into three syllables and "cigarette" into a soliloquy, blending derisive artifice and agonized candor in a style akin to that of the young Gena Rowlands. Defa nudges his actors into the discomfort zone and, with the help of Sean Price Williams's lucid, luminous cinematography and a canny sound design, parses the afternoon's physically simple but riotously expressive fumblings into poignant, potent memories. - R.B. (BAM; June 20.) When Superman returned to the movies, back in 1978, Mario Puzo, Robert Benton, and David Newman worked on the screenplay, and Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder played Superman and Lois Lane. All these people knew they were working on pop, and the material was edged with irony - as Superman and Lois flirted, the movie was even sexy. Thirty-five years of superhero movies followed, saving the studios financially (while wrecking the aesthetics of big movies), and the tone of the new Superman movie is now portentous and solemn. The story is an origins myth, which turns into another war-of-the-worlds battle epic, this time between Earth and the dying Krypton, with Superman on our side. Once again, Manhattan gets levelled (don't worry: Brooklyn is spared). The movie consists of endless declamation, endless violence. With the muscular Henry Cavill, baring his chest, as Superman; Amy Adams, as Lois Lane; and Michael Shannon, as General Zod, the military chief of Krypton. Written by David S. Goyer. Directed, with a heavy hand, by Zack Snyder. - D.D. (In wide release.) Complicated nonsense about four professional magicians caught up in an elaborate revenge plot. Again and again, one character tells another that he's a step behind what's going on, and it's as if the movie were saying to the audience, "You think you get it, but you don't. But the director, Louis Leterrier, and the writers, Edward Ricourt, Ed Solomon, and Boaz Yakin, hardly seem to realize that viewers" delight in cleverness and shape-shifting invention has measurable limits. Someone must have told Leterrier in his youth that everything in a film should move, because he shoots even the simplest expository scenes with multiple cameras swirling around the actors. With Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher, and Dave Franco (who looks like Tom Cruise's kid brother but is actually James Franco's), as the four con artists; Mark Ruffalo, as a relentless officer of the law; and Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman, who punch the clock in meaningless roles. - D.D. (6/10 & 17/13) (In wide release.) The main secret that is dug up by Polley's investigations regarding her own origins is somehow more invigorating than traumatic, although there are hints of collateral anxiety among her brothers and sisters; the very ordinariness of the saga, however, becomes its strength, and, if viewers leave the screening feeling destabilized, determined to chip away at the apparently fixed narratives that sustain their own families, then the movie's job is done. - A.L. (5/20/13) (In wide release.) This poised, involuted micro-drama concerns the daily struggle of a lonely sixtyish divorcé (Paul Eenhoorn), an Australian immigrant, to find his footing in Reno, Nevada. His job, as a counsellor to prisoners awaiting release, brings him into connection with Travis Holloway (Richmond Arquette), who is freed after serving a twelve-year sentence and is in need of friendship as well as guidance. The writer and director, Chad Hartigan, transforms the potentially maudlin premise into a luminous reach for grace. As the spare, sharp dialogue and tensely searching performances elicit lives filled with pain and loss, Hartigan's images (realized by the cinematographer, Sean McElwee) capture a serene spiritual bounty that shines through the daily grit and grind. Despite the small scale of the action - Travis's effort to reconnect with his daughter (Sam Buchanan), Martin's poignant attempt at speed-dating - the movie plays for high stakes. Roiling beneath the surface of the action is the question of what makes life worth living; the story pivots on a crisis of faith, and Hartigan audaciously offers practical advice for facing the unbearable - and presents, in a full-circle pan shot of Travis in his first dawn of freedom, vision itself as the garden of earthly delight. - R.B. (BAM; June 20, and in limited release.) THE PURGE: In wide release. 32 Second Ave., at 2nd St. (212-505-5181) - "Auto Cinema." June 21 and June 24-25 at 7:15 and 9 and June 22-23 at 5:30, 7:15, and 9: "Kuichisan" (2011, Maiko Endo). 30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn (718-636-4100) - BAMcinemaFest 2013. "Peaches Does Herself" (2013, Peaches), followed by a live performance by Peaches and Sandy Kane. (212-727-8110) - The films of Yasujiro Ozu. Walter Reade Theatre, Lincoln Center (212-875-5610) - The films of Jackie Chan. June 25 at 12:30, 4, and 7:30: "Wings of Desire" (1987, Wim Wenders). 35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria (718-784-0077) - "See It Big!" 200 Hudson St., at Canal St. (212-601-1000) - Special event. June 25 at 7: A discussion with the director Paul Feig, moderated by the programmer David Schwartz. 150 W. 17th St. (212-620-5000) - "Cabaret Cinema." June 21 at 9:30: "Monsieur Verdoux" (1947, Charlie Chaplin).