Paul Greengrass, the director of "United 93" and two chapters from the peaceful life of Jason Bourne, brings us yet another exercise in almost intolerable tension. Tom Hanks plays the title character - the captain of a massive cargo ship, bound for Kenya, that is boarded by Somali pirates. They take the crew hostage and demand a ransom; in response, American warships and special forces are dispatched to regain the vessel and deliver Phillips from the hands of his enemies. The story is based on real events from 2009. The movie works for two reasons, which tug against each other and add to its exhausting appeal. First, the Greengrass manner - quivering and quick, darting between details but determined to keep hold of a clear narrative line - is in fine working order. And, second, Hanks proves himself to be in full command of being lost at sea. His gray-bearded character is resourceful but anxious, and also (unusually for Hanks) not especially warm; despite all the trimmings of a thriller, this sense of a naturally unheroic hero takes us far from the land of Bourne. With Barkhad Abdi, relaxed but menacing, as the pirate chief. - Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue of 10/14/13.) The Dawn Patrol Battling better trained and better equipped German fliers, the stalwart British airmen of Howard Hawks's First World War drama, from 1930, are measured by a stern code of self-mastery and energized by a youthful bravado that places courage under the sign of play. Under the command of Major Brand (Neil Hamilton) and the moral leadership of the tight-lipped pilot Courtney (Richard Barthelmess), young recruits are sent airborne toward certain death, but Hawks locates a strange joy in their grim fate. This song-filled early sound film is a virtual war musical, with the most exotic performance reserved for a number that includes a captured German pilot who is welcomed like one of the boys. The laughter that sends off the dead and the ribald jokes about a near-fatal bullet hole "five inches from the behind" are of a piece with the pilots" wild aerial exploits. Yet their death-defying antics are matched by their flatline glower (a specialty of the haunted Barthelmess) in the face of impossible orders issued by implacable, invisible authorities - a cosmic blankness that the fliers face down with games of love and chance. - Richard Brody (Museum of the Moving Image; Oct. 19.) In her new comedy, set in Los Angeles, Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), a divorced masseuse with an adored daughter about to go off to college, starts an affair with a divorced museum curator, Albert (James Gandolfini), who also has a daughter heading for school. Eva's new client, Marianne (Catherine Keener), is a flossy highbrow poet who, during and after massage sessions, endlessly badmouths her ex-husband's body and habits. Gandolfini, without bullying his way through scenes or hiding his need for love, makes Albert a proud man who knows that dignity is something you must hold on to if any relationship in life is going to work at all. - David Denby (10/7/13) (In wide release.) Even without the knowledge that much of the director Randy Moore's eerie fantasy was filmed surreptitiously at Disney World and Disneyland, a viewer might shudder at the risqué leers with which Moore infuses this black-and-white, lo-fi romp through a children's paradise. Hatari! Howard Hawks's African adventure, from 1962, starts out with a trapper being gored by a rhinoceros, but his big-game hunters" main - and most dangerous - prey is the opposite sex. The sprawling, rowdy story concerns a motley international troupe of freelance adventurers (and their boss, a young woman) led by a hot-tempered Irishman, Sean Mercer (John Wayne), who are thrown into emotional disarray when a woman photographer (Elsa Martinelli) shows up. Though the roughhousing young actors Gérard Blain and Hardy Krüger serve up a comic allegory of Franco-German reconciliation, politics take a back seat to sex, served up in a dazzling wealth of innuendo. Hawks sets the tone when Krüger, pressed close behind the French actress Michèle Girardon while zipping up her dress, says he's "afraid of ripping something." There's plenty of drinking, joshing, fighting, and intimate maneuvering, along with exciting scenes of animal trapping, which were filmed on location with the stars involved. A woman-hunting elephant provides a Freudian jolt, set to Henry Mancini's jaunty music, and Red Buttons is moving as a Brooklyn cabdriver in exile whose heart does a U-turn. - R.B. (Museum of the Moving Image; Oct. 20.) Parkland Peter Landesman's movie is a jigsaw puzzle, assembling a profusion of characters and locations to create a composite picture of the assassination of J.F.K., in November, 1963, and of the succeeding days. We follow, for instance, Abraham Zapruder (Paul Giamatti), who starts by filming the motorcade and ends up selling his footage to Life magazine; attention is also paid to the assassin's brother Robert (James Badge Dale), who cuts a quietly agonized figure, and, at the other end of the spectrum, to his mother (Jacki Weaver), who loudly declares that Lee should be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. The title refers to the Dallas hospital where medical staff - played by, among others, Zac Efron and Marcia Gay Harden - try to save the life of the President and then, more reluctantly, that of his killer. But the movie adds up to less than the sum of its parts; Zapruder's story, by itself, might have repaid further exploration, but Landesman is too busy looking for the next piece of the puzzle. The horror and the screwups of that week are, to say the least, well known; to what end should they be restated anew? - A.L. (10/14/13) (In limited release.) Like "Mystic River" and "Zodiac," this somberly impressive thriller digs into the dark cellars of American paranoia and aggression. Two very friendly couples, one African-American (Terrence Howard and Viola Davis) and one white (Hugh Jackman and Maria Bello), are celebrating Thanksgiving when their two young daughters leave the house to play and immediately vanish. The great Roger Deakins does the eloquently bleak cinematography. - D.D. (9/23/13) (In wide release.) Until recently, Formula One motor-racing drew scant attention from filmmakers, not least because of its fitful popularity in America. The result is a certain stiffness in the dramatic conceit; Howard tries to stoke things up by having his cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle, shoot each race not as a procession, as it often seems on TV, but as a deafening trip, spitting with fiery details. With Olivia Wilde and Alexandra Maria Lara, as the heroes" worried wives. - A.L. (9/30/13) (In wide release.) A Touch of Sin With a discerning eye for the whiplash symbol, the director Jia Zhangke sets four shocking crime-blotter episodes in China's Wild West landscape of pop-up cities and lays bare its psycho-political panorama of ruthlessness. In tales of a villager who challenges corrupt officials and predatory businessmen, a brazen drifter who abandons his overbearing family and stalks the new bourgeoisie, and a lonely woman pressed into prostitution at work, Jia sees new layers of outrages piling upon older, still unredressed injustices. In an unlivable tangle of despoiled nature, unwholesome shanties, and oppressive towers, the law - whether with a heavy hand or a cavalier absence - preserves cruel family traditions even as families are wrenched apart by economic despair and raw indifference and a young man's romantic bildungsroman becomes a blanked-out cry into a futureless void. In Jia's methodically furious vision, the ambient violence of unchecked power erupts among the insulted and injured with a horrific yet liberating sense of destruction and self-destruction. In Mandarin. - R.B. (In limited release.) You Ain't Seen Nothin" Yet Digital technology meets lyrical drama and classical myth in this puckishly daring work of docu-theatre from the ninety-year-old director Alain Resnais. A baker's dozen of France's greatest actors - including Michel Piccoli, Sabine Azéma (Resnais's wife), Pierre Arditi, and Mathieu Amalric - play themselves, as guests at a rural mansion for the funeral of a friend, the (fictitious) playwright Antoine d'Anthac (Denis Podalydès), who addresses them posthumously in a video that also shows a youthful theatre company's rehearsal of his play "Eurydice." It had, years earlier, been a vehicle for the assembled mourners, and, as the video unfolds, they launch an impromptu performance of the play. The villa's expanses become the living stage of memory: long-ago love affairs, wrenching separations, wild jealousy, and violent death surge forth from the past and, in the process, revive the veteran actors" youth. Revisiting the artistic shocks and personal passions of his own youth, Resnais pays loving tribute to cinematic landmarks he passed along the way and sets up - with some deliciously jolting special effects - a darkly whimsical new one on strange, uncharted ground. In French. - R.B. (Anthology Film Archives; Oct. 18-24.) All Is Lost Opening Oct. 18. American Promise A documentary by Joe Brewster and Michele Stephenson, about two African-American boys (one of whom is their son, Idris) at a New York private school. Camille Claudel 1915 A drama, based on the true story of the artist's internment in a mental institution, starring Juliette Binoche. Directed by Bruno Dumont. In French. Opening Oct. 16. Carrie Kimberly Peirce directed this adaptation of the novel by Stephen King, about a teen-age girl with telekinetic powers, starring Chloë Grace Moretz and Julianne Moore. The Fifth Estate A drama about WikiLeaks, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, as Julian Assange. Directed by Bill Condon; co-starring Daniel Brühl, Carice van Houten, and Alicia Vikander. Kill Your Darlings A drama, directed by John Krokidas, about the early years of the Beat poets, starring Daniel Radcliffe, as Allen Ginsberg; Dane DeHaan, as Lucien Carr; Jack Huston, as Jack Kerouac; and Ben Foster, as William S. Burroughs. 12 Years a Slave As I Lay Dying: In limited release. The Dirties: In limited release. Romeo and Juliet: In wide release. 32 Second Ave., at 2nd St. (212-505-5181) - In revival. Oct. 18-24 (call for showtimes): "You Ain't Seen Nothin" Yet." 30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn (718-636-4100) - The films of Karen Black. Oct. 18 at 2, 4:30, 7, and 9:30: "Five Easy Pieces" (1970, Bob Rafelson). • Oct. 19 at 2, 4:30, 7, and 9:30: "Easy Rider" (1969, Dennis Hopper). • Oct. 20 at 2, 5:30, and 9: "Nashville" (1975, Robert Altman). • Oct. 21 at 4:30, 7, and 9:30: "Born to Win" (1971, Ivan Passer). Oct. 16 at 1, 2:55, 4:50, and 9: "Model Shop" (1969). • Oct. 16 at 7: "Three Seats for the 26th" (1988). • Oct. 17 at 1, 5:20, and 9:40: "Lola" (1961). • Oct. 18-21 at 1, 2:50, 4:40, 6:30, 8:20, and 10:10 and Oct. 22 at 1, 2:50, 4:40, 6:30, and 10:20: "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" (1964). Special screening. Oct. 22 at 8:20: "Last Year at Marienbad" (1961, Alain Resnais), introduced by the critic J. Hoberman. Walter Reade Theatre, Lincoln Center (212-875-5610) - The films of Jean-Luc Godard. Oct. 17 at 3 and Oct. 18 at 1: "Nouvelle Vague" (1990). • Oct. 17 at 4:45: "Wind from the East" (1969). • Oct. 18 at 5: "JLG/JLG" (1994) and "Germany Year Ninety Nine Zero" (1991). • Oct. 19 at 9:45: "Vivre Sa Vie" (1962). • Oct. 20 at 4: "Hélas pour Moi" (1993). Oct. 22 at 12:30, 4, and 7:30: "Vagabond" (1985, Agnès Varda). Roy and Niuta Titus Theatres, 11 W. 53rd St. (212-708-9480) - "To Save and Project." Oct. 16-20 (call for showtimes): "Eight Deadly Shots" (1972, Mikko Niskanen; in Finnish). • Oct. 19 at 1:45 and Oct. 22 at 4: "The Story of Mikko Niskanen" (2010, Peter Von Bagh; in Finnish). • Oct. 19 at 4:30: "Girl Spies and Irish Colleens," short silent films introduced by the writers Jane Gaines and B. Ruby Rich. 35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria (718-784-0077) - The films of Claire Denis. Oct. 18 at 7 and Oct. 19 at 4:30: "Chocolat" (1988). • Oct. 19 at 7: "Trouble Every Day" (2001). • Oct. 20 at 7: "The Intruder" (2004). • The films of Howard Hawks. Oct. 19 at 2: "The Dawn Patrol." • Oct. 19 at 4:30: "Air Force" (1943). • Oct. 20 at 1:30: "Land of the Pharaohs" (1955). • Oct. 20 at 4: "Hatari!"