M. Night Shyamalan directed this futuristic drama, about a father and son (Will and Jaden Smith) who crash-land on an abandoned Earth. Co-starring Zoë Kravitz and Isabelle Fuhrman. Opening May 31. Jen and Sylvia Soska, the Twisted Twins, directed this horror film, about a medical student (Katharine Isabelle) who becomes an underground surgeon. Opening May 29. A drama, directed by Louis Leterrier, about the hunt for a group of magicians who pull off a series of robberies. Starring Morgan Freeman, Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, and Mark Ruffalo. James Marsh directed this drama, set in Belfast in the nineteen-nineties, about an I.R.A. member (Andrea Riseborough) who is forced to become a spy for Great Britain. Co-starring Clive Owen, Gillian Anderson, and Domhnall Gleeson. The latest in Richard Linklater's series of garrulous films about a Franco-American romantic alliance. Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke), who first met when they were very young, in "Before Sunrise" (1995), parted, then got back together, in "Before Sunset" (2004), and now have twin daughters and are spending the summer in beautiful Messinia, in southern Greece. The self-consciousness that was both charming and irritating in the earlier films has given way to the toughened egotism that allows people to survive. Delpy has developed a hard set to her mouth and a prickly temper; Hawke speaks in a leathery, deep voice and throws himself into clowning, satire, and sudden rages. After a long walk though ruins, the two settle into a hotel for a night and fall into an extraordinary half-hour quarrel, which, in its bitterness, complication, and psychological revelation, recalls episodes from Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage." As always, Linklater works in virtuoso long takes that extend duration in a way that's rarely attempted in Hollywood filmmaking. - David Denby (Reviewed in our issue of 5/27/13.) The subject of the twenty-five-year-old Orson Welles's lightning bolt of cinematic modernism is the making of a movie - a newsreel about the late Charles Foster Kane, a fallen media mogul, whose famous last word sends a reporter in the documentary producer's employ scurrying far and wide in search of clues to its meaning. Kane's life emerges mainly in flashbacks that highlight Welles's suavely domineering performance - as well as his foreshadowing of doom resulting from his own vast ambitions. The story of a big man humbled, of preternatural energy come to grief through hubris and humiliation, is told by means of an ecstasy of light and shadow, of clashing textures and graphic forms, such as hadn't been seen since the silent era. No one but Charlie Chaplin and Erich von Stroheim had ever made the cinema such a one-man show; Welles brought to the display his own willfully hyperexpressive and janglingly playful delight in technical wizardry, as well as an impulsive exuberance, tragic self-consciousness, and reflexive immediacy. He grabbed the keys to the kingdom as casually as one might take the keys to Dad's car, and suddenly other directors felt free to grab them, too. He made them all seem young and brash - or instantly old. Released in 1941. - Richard Brody (MOMA; June 1.) This absurdly superficial and tendentious drama, directed with no distinction, wastes a superb cast in the interest of self-righteous attitudinizing. Brit Marling stars as an F.B.I. agent turned investigator for a corporate-security firm who infiltrates a group of anarchist eco-terrorists and finds that they have reason to be upset: a pharmaceutical company is aggressively marketing a drug with devastating side effects, and an energy firm is grievously polluting local waters. As her sympathies shift, her extended leaves of absence from her husband become all the more stressful, owing to her attachment to the group's charismatic leader (Alexander Skarsgård). A few action scenes offer baseline suspense, but the story, the context, and the characters are all stuck at the surface of the filmmakers" proud intentions. Directed by Zal Batmanglij, who co-wrote the script with Marling; co-starring Ellen Page and Toby Kebbell. - R.B. (In limited release.) But the baby survives, and Shira and Esther's mother, Rivka (Irit Sheleg), schemes to marry Shira off to her widowed brother-in-law, Yochay (Yiftach Klein). The intense focus on ritual and tradition is deep and narrow, and their infiltration into the most intimate corners of life is the source of the drama. Shira, an emotional soul, has been raised on a strict code of "modesty" and self-restraint, which silences her at the moment that the course of her life and the promise of happiness are on the line; her inhibition has the cast of tragedy. Sticking very close to her actors, Burshtein gets taut and subtle performances, but also cuts the characters off from the wider world even more decisively than they do themselves. Gerwig's Frances - an eternal fledgling dancer at twenty-seven, with dwindling status, shrinking income, an evaporating love life, and a fraying best-friendship with Sophie (Mickey Sumner), her soon-to-be ex-roommate - is, in effect, being flayed alive in the big city and somehow manages to smile through it all. A narrow-bore bio-pic, centered on the philosopher's reporting for this magazine on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel and the controversy that her articles and the subsequent book sparked. The style is unreflective naturalism, the conflicts are spelled out onscreen as if in large type, and the director, Margarethe von Trotta (who co-wrote the script with Pam Katz), indulges in some facile diagnostics by way of flashbacks to the young Arendt's affair with Martin Heidegger (played by Klaus Pohl), who is depicted as a cad turned Nazi. The caricatural depiction of early-sixties New York makes "Mad Men" look like a work of neorealism; Arendt (played by Barbara Sukowa) and her husband, the professor Heinrich Blücher (Axel Milberg), scurry about and cuddle in their Upper West Side apartment like Lucy and Ricky, and Arendt's friendship with Mary McCarthy (Janet McTeer) is admirably strong but superficial. Von Trotta includes actual footage of Eichmann's trial, simultaneously trivializing it and diminishing the rest of the movie to the vanishing point. In English and German. - R.B. (Film Forum.) The director and co-writer is Shane Black, who made "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" (2005) and is clearly most comfortable with backchat and rug-pulling; there is one twist here that is designed, and pretty much guaranteed, to land an audience squarely and cheerfully on its ass. That is not Black's forte, and his movie duly slumps into a mess. - Anthony Lane (5/6/13) (In wide release.) In 1996, the filmmaker Zhao Liang began documenting Chinese citizens who converged on a government office in Beijing to present their written complaints regarding unredressed official injustices - and who there met with further injustices that matched or surpassed those they were protesting. Zhao kept at it for more than a decade, and the result is a concert of stifled voices that, together, make a brave and angry cry for democratic representation and the rule of law. Faced with absurd obstacles and delays, petitioners spend years rewriting and resubmitting their complaints, all the while living in shanties, under bridges, or in tunnels, and enduring violence at the hands of "retrievers," government officials sent from their home villages. Despite the threat of arbitrary arrest and internment in detention centers, prisons, and punitive psychiatric hospitals, the petitioners audaciously speak out - distributing flyers in Tiananmen Square, shouting from towers, writing tracts, and holding parades, all of which result in more arrests. Zhao reveals the sham and the shame of the 2008 Olympics, which served as an official pretext to demolish the petitioners" settlements, and he shows that discontent with abusive one-party rule isn't the domain solely of disaffected intellectuals but also of ordinary people who are tired of being, as one of them says, the "new slaves of socialism." Released in 2009. In Mandarin. - R.B. (MOMA; May 31.) A strange, cold, sordid movie about a strange, cold, sordid gangster. In this historical film noir about the Prohibition era, from 1960, the director Budd Boetticher presents Diamond (the glossy, marmoreal Ray Danton) as a ruthless, icily determined go-getter in a glamour-free Mob milieu that runs solely on money. This elemental view of the gunman's appalling trajectory lays bare its absurdity: Diamond's daring deeds to force open the doors of criminal power have the gee-whiz wonder of silent-comedy slapstick, but their ends are so amoral as to stifle laughter. Tested by tough times and tough guys, Diamond lacks even a thief's honor to fall back on: he comes from nowhere, ends up nowhere, and leaves nothing but a trail of blood and legend. With Jesse White, the Maytag Repairman, as a crook with a hearty appetite. - R.B. (MOMA; May 29-31.) Abrams cuts from surprisingly mushy scenes of emotional unveiling to vast, grandiloquent bouts of aggressive action, with almost nothing in between; most of the logic has leached away from this movie, and with it half the fun. A few more sequels in this vein, and we could have a mutiny on our hands. - A.L. (5/20/13) (In wide release.) EPIC: In wide release. THE ICEMAN: In wide release. WE STEAL SECRETS: In limited release. May 31 and June 3-4 at 7 and 9 and June 1-2 at 5, 7, and 9: "The Student" (2012, Darezhan Omirbayev; in Kazakh and Russian). 30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn (718-636-4100) - "An Evening with Joss Whedon." May 31-June 2 at 2, 4:30, 7, and 9:30 and June 3-4 at 4:30, 7, and 9:30: "Nostalghia" (1983, Andrei Tarkovsky; in Russian and Italian). Walter Reade Theatre, Lincoln Center (212-875-5610) - "Indie Night." June 4 at 8:30: "Radio Free Albemuth" (2012, John Alan Simon). 55 E. 59th St. (212-355-6160) - "Highlights of the Cannes Film Festival." June 4 at 12:30, 4, and 7:30: "Histoires de Festival" (2004, Gilles Jacob), "Les Marches, Etc." (2004, Jacob), and "Femmes au Miroir" (2009, Jacob). June 2 at 2: "Nissan Ariana Window" (1969), "Flo Rounds a Corner" (1999), and "Cyclopean 3D: Life with a Beautiful Woman" (2012). 200 Hudson St., at Canal St. (212-601-1000) - "Rip Off Cinema: Italian Edition." May 29 at 7:30: "High Crime" (1973, Enzo Castellari; in Italian). 150 W. 17th St. (212-620-5000) - "Cabaret Cinema." May 31 at 9:30: "Pursued" (1947, Raoul Walsh).