MOVIES: The New Yorker Opening Aug. 23. In limited release and as video on demand. Wong Kar-Wai directed this drama, about the life of the martial-arts expert Ip Man. Starring Tony Leung and Zhang Ziyi. In Mandarin, Cantonese, and Japanese. Ulrich Seidl directed this drama, about a Viennese woman (Maria Hofstätter) who proselytizes on behalf of her Catholic beliefs. In German. Sunshine Cinema. Claude Miller directed this adaptation of François Mauriac's novel "Thérèse Desqueyroux," about a bourgeois woman who is accused of poisoning her husband. Starring Audrey Tautou. In French. A documentary about the boxer, directed by Bill Siegel. Edgar Wright directed this science-fiction comedy, about friends on a pub crawl who find themselves in the midst of an alien invasion. Starring Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Rosamund Pike, and Eddie Marsan. A horror thriller, directed by Adam Wingard, about a family on vacation that is attacked by hidden assailants. Starring Sharni Vinson, Nicholas Tucci, Wendy Glenn, and Joe Swanberg. Not that the movie supplies much in the way of historical context, newly unearthed details, or archival footage; rather, Oppenheimer concentrates on a few perpetrators - elderly men, such as Anwar Congo and Adi Zulkadry, who committed countless crimes and have never faced justice. The director David Lowery's bighearted Texan melodrama, set in the seventies, stars Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara as a young married couple, Bob Muldoon and Ruth Guthrie, who try to shoot their way out of a corner after robbing a bank. Bob takes the rap and rots in jail while Ruth gives birth to their daughter; when Bob escapes, the small town mobilizes for his arrival - especially Sheriff Patrick Wheeler (Ben Foster), an officer and a victim of the shoot-out, who, in Bob's absence has been courting Ruth. Lowery filters the classic lovers-against-the-world plot through a romantic-modernist sensibility, fragmenting and foregrounding the action to capture shuddering depths of mood with impressionistic images and fleeting gestures, the hush of impassioned voices, and the flash of steadfast, yearning gazes. The grand emotional spectrum recalls golden-age Westerns (as with the sheriff's name, borrowed from Howard Hawks's "Rio Bravo"), and the attention to tone and texture is reminiscent of new-Hollywood classics (embodied here by Keith Carradine, as a Machiavellian patriarch), but the feel of the movie is intimate and handmade, as if Lowery were renewing, lovingly and poignantly, the landscape's ruined landmarks and infusing them with his own memories and dreams. - Richard Brody (In limited release.) This low-budget fantasy-movie milestone kicked off the nuclear-revved dinosaur craze of the fifties and marked the techie genius Ray Harryhausen's entrance into creature features. The dialogue scenes are barely functional or literate - at one point, someone refers to the Loch Lomond monster (surely he means Loch Ness?). But the director, Eugène Lourié (Jean Renoir's production designer), does some neat welding of sci-fi and documentary ambience, both when an A-bomb first rouses the beast from Arctic depths and when the beast reaches its ancestral stomping grounds in New York. Harryhausen's colossus has a handmade quality that's graver and more mysterious than the computerized swifties of "Jurassic Park," which owes something to this movie's final scene of the dinosaur trapped in an amusement park. Written by Lou Morheim and Fred Freiberger, based on a short story by Ray Bradbury. Released in 1953. - Michael Sragow (Film Forum; Aug. 27.) With Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Dice Clay, Louis C.K., and, as a Bay Area scion who attracts Jasmine, Peter Sarsgaard. - David Denby (7/29/13) (In wide release.) Written by Bret Easton Ellis. - D.D. (8/5/13) (In limited release and video on demand.) Edward O. Bland's dramatic filmmaking may be unusually crude, but his documentary-based insights into the art and politics of jazz - as seen in this short work of philosophical agitprop, from 1959 - are profound. His film opens with a party at which white jazz enthusiasts ask questions about the music that their black friends answer. This framework gives way to the director's essay-like narration, in which he defines jazz in terms of African-American experience; relates its form and sound - and the existential edge of black musicians" performances - to politics; explains the music as a variety of oral history; and, remarkably, predicts both the aesthetic of free jazz and the music's role in the civil-rights movement. Filmed performances of the Chicago-based visionary Sun Ra and his band (highlighting the great saxophonist John Gilmore) illustrate Bland's theses and spark the director's keenest visual engagement. Bland's ideas are provocative and stimulating; the movie, which is as heartfelt as it is analytical, suggests a new dimension in music criticism. - R.B. (BAM Cinématek; Aug. 22.) This brisk and exuberant comedy, directed by Joe Swanberg, is powered by a strong current of romantic melancholy. It's a modern-day "Elective Affinities" that's centered on two pert, still-youngish Chicago couples. When the jovially brash Luke (Jake Johnson), who runs a microbrewery, and his quiet, vulnerable girlfriend, Jill (Anna Kendrick), a schoolteacher, spend a weekend with Luke's ebullient marketing director, Kate (Olivia Wilde), and her earnest boyfriend, Chris (Ron Livingston), a producer, at the latter's rustic Michigan house, the pairs of lovers find their bonds weakening and their preferences shifting. The aggressive but jokey workplace flirtations of Luke and Kate turn serious in isolation, and Jill and Chris, near-strangers, find common ground in their nervous gravity. When they return to the city and their routines, their lives feel changed forever. Swanberg seems to reinvent his methods and himself with every film; here, he guides his charismatic performers through sparkling improvisations set like gems by perceptive editing, yet, despite the actors" charm and substance - and the story's blunt physical practicality - the results have an awe-inspiring abstraction. The filmmaker borrows his cast's megawatt presence to take a step back and look with Olympian detachment and bitter wisdom at the vagaries of love and the unfulfilled desires, missed opportunities, and hard renunciations on which it depends. - R.B. (In limited release and video on demand.) Neill Blomkamp's busy and indignant new film is set in the year 2154. The title refers to a space station: a haven for the wealthy, spinning just beyond the limits of our polluted planet, and clearly related to the elegant wheel that turned in "2001: A Space Odyssey." Not that Blomkamp's manner owes much to Kubrick; where the latter's movie finds serenity and wonder, the new film fidgets with anxiety, and the camera cannot hold still for long. Our hero is Max (Matt Damon), who, like the majority of humans, toils and sweats on Earth, where the cops are intemperate robots. After an accident at work, and with nothing to lose, he takes on a reckless task, assailing an evil billionaire (William Fichtner) and winding up on a shuttle to Elysium, hellbent on this artificial heaven and a quest for justice. The sequence of events is light on logic, yet such is the director's urge to muscle us along that we barely notice. Politically, his movie flames with insurrectionary fervor, but its most cogent virtue is one of texture; rather than viewing a future world from a distance and admiring its digital enhancements, we feel thrust into the thick of it with such immediacy and sensory impact that, like most of its inhabitants, we can only dream of escape. With Jodie Foster, miscast as a frosty villainness, and Sharlto Copley, well cast as a maniacal rogue. - A.L. (8/12 & 19/13) (In wide release.) Michael Roemer's bold independent film, from 1964, about the awakening of righteous anger in response to social and institutional racism, stars Ivan Dixon as a black laborer in the South whose relationship with a schoolteacher and minister's daughter (the singer Abbey Lincoln) is threatened by his rising activism. The movie was co-produced by its cinematographer, Robert Young, and its sound recordist, Robert Rubin, and their contributions add surprising dimensions to the film's dramatic and political power. The subtly burnished, calmly monumental images put the action in a virtual 3-D relief that lends the magnificent cast (mainly of black actors) an intense physical presence, and the soundtrack captures the life-worn grain of their voices with a frank intimacy that pulls viewers up close to the action. The story turns on such practicalities as unionization, school integration, the devastating family legacies of subjugation and humiliation, and the constant threat of violence, which the drama renders agonizingly personal. Even as Roemer (who co-wrote the script with Young) clearly decries injustice and makes history in real time, there's nothing abstract or editorializing about the results: he and his collaborators create images and sounds, characters and situations, that embody the title's existential affirmation. - R.B. (BAM Cinématek; Aug. 24.) It's hard to decide which habit is more offensive. - A.L. (7/29/13) (In wide release.) A terrible event took place in Belgium in 2007. It was widely reported at the time, and it now forms the basis of Joachim Lafosse's film. Such a project could be construed as morally troubling or opportunistic in its haste, but, as though to counter any such qualms, Lafosse tries to frame his narrative with the coolest possible eye. Émilie Dequenne, always a sympathetic performer, plays Murielle, a young teacher who falls in love with Mounir (Tahar Rahim), a Moroccan, and marries him. They are encouraged and materially supported by Dr. Pinget (Niels Arestrup), Mounir's adoptive father - so forcefully, indeed, that the older man's presence comes to seem restrictive and overbearing. The climactic act unfolds out of sight, which is something to be thankful for; the emotional pressures leading to it have been hard enough to take. Some viewers will come away more confounded than comprehending, but one thing is plain enough: Arestrup, operating here at maximum intensity, is one of the best and most daunting actors on the modern screen, all the more so because his voice, like that of a confessor, is so rarely raised. In French. - A.L. (8/12 & 19/13) (In limited release.) The second feature by Destin Daniel Cretton, set in and around an intake facility for evaluating troubled teens, looks closely at its fascinating characters to get at the notion of character itself. The story centers on Grace (Brie Larson) and Mason (John Gallagher, Jr.), two of the young adults who are the day-to-day, hands-on guardians. Their ill-defined jobs entail everything from physical restraint and police-like snooping to quasi-therapeutic interventions - and even seriocomic pursuits, through city streets, of youths who slip past the gate. The teens in their care fit a familiar, tightly defined array of ethnicities and personalities, but Cretton - who worked in such a facility - narrowly skirts the risk of stereotyping through the force of imagination. His dialogue is wondrously energized, suggesting impulses and experiences that range far beyond the confines of the plot's problems, and Grace and Mason - a droll and sensible couple whose relationship is tested by their work - remain passionately loose-ended and casual, embodying the rare ideal of peaceful people you'd follow into battle. Subtly inverting the story's point of view, Cretton sees his protagonists through the eyes of the teens and gets to the ineffable core of trust. - R.B. (Sunshine Cinema.) 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 (as in a full-circle pan shot of Travis in his first dawn of freedom) vision itself as the garden of earthly delight. - R.B. (IFC Center.) IN A WORLD . . .: In limited release. PARANOIA: In wide release. 32 Second Ave., at 2nd St. (212-505-5181) - "That's Sexploitation!" Aug. 21 at 6:30, Aug. 23 at 9, and Aug. 25 at 6:15: "That's Sexploitation!" 30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn (718-636-4100) - "A Time for Burning: Cinema of the Civil Rights Movement." (212-727-8110) - "Son of Summer Sci-Fi Fantasy Horror." Walter Reade Theatre, Lincoln Center (212-875-5610) - "Cinema of Resistance." 323 Sixth Ave., at W. 3rd St. (212-924-7771) - "Lone Star Cinema: Texas On Screen." Aug. 23-25 at 11 A.M.: "A Perfect World" (1993, Clint Eastwood). 155 Freeman St., Brooklyn (lightindustry.org) - Special screening. Aug. 27 at 7:30: "The New Moscow" (1938, Aleksandr Medvedkin; in Russian). Aug. 22-23 at 7, Aug. 24 and Aug. 26 at 4, Aug. 25 at 2, and Aug. 27 at 6:30: "The Student" (2011, Santiago Mitre; in Spanish).