Movie Listings for Dec. 7-13 Movies Full reviews of all current releases: nytimes.com/movies. ★ "Anna Karenina" (R, 2:10) Joe Wright's version of the Tolstoy novel, with a script by Tom Stoppard, is wildly, sometimes dizzily theatrical, taking place mostly on a series of elaborate stage sets. The story of Anna (Keira Knightley), her humorless husband (Jude Law) and her lover, Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) becomes a lush melodrama, counterpointed by the delicate romance of Kitty (Alicia Vikander) and Levin (Domhnall Gleeson). Not a faithful adaptation, by any means, but something better: a bold, lively and ardent reimagining of the book. ★ "Argo" (R, 2:00) A bearded Ben Affleck directed, and stars in, this smart, jittery thriller about a real if stranger-than-fiction chapter of the Iranian hostage crisis that brought together a smart American intelligence officer, some plucky Canadians and two jaundiced Hollywood veterans (the funny tag team of John Goodman and Alan Arkin) to save the day. "Back to 1942" (No rating, 2:26, in Mandarin) The Chinese director Feng Xiaogang uses the classic epic format to convey what happened when war met famine in the Henan Province of China in 1942. It's a grim collision grimly depicted, but the film doesn't do well at humanizing the characters who are overrun by these historical forces - their agony is duly noted but not felt. Neil Genzlinger "Beware of Mr. Baker" (No rating, 1:32) The life and times of the great rock drummer Ginger Baker - of Cream, Blind Faith and a bunch of other bands - filtered through interviews with friends, colleagues, ex-wives and the man himself, visited at some peril by the filmmaker Jay Bulger. Not a nice man, Mr. Baker, but a fascinating study in musical discipline, personal recklessness and postwar British history. ★ "Brooklyn Castle" (No rating, 1:41) The director Katie Dellamaggiore's irresistible documentary offers an up-close, personal and political look at the wee chess champs at Intermediate School 318 in Williamsburg, whose winning streak continues on screen. ★ "California Solo" (No rating, 1:34) Neatly sidestepping the fissure of redemption, Marshall Lewy's wry, mournful study of midlife crisis finds depth and shade in the story of a broken-down British musician (perfectly played by Robert Carlyle) driven by tragedy to a farm outside Los Angeles. "The Central Park Five" (No rating, 1:59) Directed by Ken Burns, David McMahon and Sarah Burns, this documentary revisits the 1989 rape and beating of the white woman known as the Central Park jogger and the five black and Latino teenagers accused of assaulting her. The five were imprisoned but later exonerated; the filmmakers look back at what happened and why. "Certainty" (No rating, 1:44) Tackling marriage, morals and Roman Catholicism, Peter Askin's exhausting dramedy, based on Mike O'Malley's 2003 play, turns a mandatory church retreat into a grating round robin of connubial dysfunction. ★ "Chasing Ice" (PG-13, 1:16) The timing couldn't be better for this documentary about the work of James Balog, who set out to provide visual evidence of the effects of global warming by taking time-lapse photographs of melting glaciers. The images are as beautiful as they are important. Genzlinger "Cloud Atlas" (R, 2:52) David Mitchell's wondrous novel - a six-stranded tour de force spanning centuries of past and future history and nearly every novelistic genre under the sun - seems an unlikely candidate for a movie, to put it mildly. And this adaptation, from Tom Tykwer and Lana and Andy Wachowski, does not quite dispel the impression that the book is fundamentally unfilmable. The filmmakers have taken Mr. Mitchell's ideas and techniques seriously, and put together a master's thesis on his themes that is by turns diverting, touching and preposterous. Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Ben Whishaw, Doona Bae and other members of the energetic cast take on multiple roles, changing genders and races to suggest both the mutability and the continuity of identity over time. But for all its ingenuity and ambition, the film has a plodding, explanatory quality, and falls short of rising to the mind-blowing grandeur it so clearly intends. "The Collection" (R, 1:22) Directed by Marcus Dunstan, this sequel to "The Collector" features a masked serial killer who relishes racking up high body counts and breaking down (quite literally) his kidnapped victims. Nicole Herrington