A drama, based on a true story, about a hit man who was arrested for committing more than a hundred murders. Directed by Ariel Vromen; starring Michael Shannon, Winona Ryder, and Ray Liotta. Opening May 3. In this romantic drama, an English bachelor (Pierce Brosnan) and a Danish divorcée (Trine Dyrholm) meet in Italy en route to a wedding. Directed by Susanne Bier. Opening May 1. Starting with the very first scene - when he hectors his recalcitrant son Dean (Zac Efron) with nostrums of salesmanship and confronts the bereaved at a funeral in the hope of making a deal for land - the Iowa industrial-scale farmer Henry Whipple (Dennis Quaid) may as well be wearing devil's horns. Warmhearted performances - by Kim Dickens, as Henry's wife, Irene; Maika Monroe, as Dean's girlfriend, Cadence; Chelcie Ross, as Henry's former associate; and Red West, as Henry's overbearing father - are squandered in this sermon on the plain. - Richard Brody (In limited release.) With Christopher Meloni, as the Dodgers" manager, Leo Durocher, and the lively Nicole Beharie, as Robinson's wife, Rachel. - David Denby (Reviewed in our issue of 4/22/13.) François Ozon's latest film is one of his best. Some of his previous works have betrayed a taste for the hectic and the farcical, while others have crept toward a more insidious darkness; here, for once, the two impulses are fused. Fabrice Luchini - a born stooge of dramatic fate, never more so than when he tries to control it - stars as Germain, a literature teacher in a French lycée, who feels compelled by the essays of a precocious pupil named Claude (Ernst Umhauer). At first, he merely corrects them, and advises on style; soon, however, he is drawn into the experiences that they record - the life, and the love life, of a bourgeois family, and its vulnerability to Claude's mysterious intrusions. Or are they nothing worse than teen-age fantasies? The result is endlessly playful, although the rules of the game, in Ozon's hands, could hardly be graver, and what can be at stake, in the act of storytelling, has seldom been more elegantly sketched. With Kristin Scott Thomas as Germain's wife - calmer than her foolish husband, but no less beckoned by the lure of words. In French. - Anthony Lane (4/29/13) (In limited release.) Salman Rushdie himself adapted this sprawling version of his celebrated 1981 novel, a kind of panorama of Indian and Pakistani political and family life, beginning with a delicately funny courtship in 1917 and ending, after many tumultuous events and magical happenings, sixty years later. The title refers to those children born at the stroke of midnight when India became independent from Britain, in August, 1947, especially Saleem (Satya Bhaba), who is able to conjure up other such children, including his increasingly evil doppelgänger, Shiva (Siddharth). Rushdie's characteristic antic humor animates the family scenes, but the movie gets bogged down in endless plot convolutions and whimsy (the material would have worked better as a TV miniseries). Bhaba's starring performance is weak, but many of the women, including Shahana Goswami and Shriya Saran, are entrancingly beautiful and lively. Deepa Mehta, who lives in Canada, directed. - D.D. (In limited release.) By 2154, Earth is ruined and all but deserted. There are a few alien scavengers left over from a catastrophic war, but humanity is represented by only Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) and his partner, Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), who lead a sleek and frictionless existence, mostly in midair. All the other people, allegedly, have moved to Titan, one of Saturn's moons, and good luck to them. Jack is a service engineer, and much of his time is spent unaccompanied, buzzing through the skies or crossing the cratered landscape on a motorbike, with a determined jut of the jaw. Echoes of sci-fi, far and near, resound through Joseph Kosinski's new film, although its most immediate debt is to Duncan Jones's modestly budgeted "Moon" (2009), in which Sam Rockwell played a lunar loner; Cruise's solitude is scarcely less intense, but it sits uneasily in so grand and costly a project. The plot defies - and may not deserve - explication, and, when other characters enter the fray (and even when two of them are played by Morgan Freeman and Olga Kurylenko), they make surprisingly little impact. The exception is Riseborough, whose graceful spookiness is a challenge to Cruise's control; while the movie around her, though buoyantly shot by Claudio Miranda, feels ever more grounded and stuck, the figure she cuts, you feel, is not quite of this world. - A.L. (4/29/13) (In wide release.) The young director, Terence Nance, builds the film around his 2006 short, "How Would You Feel?," a love story in the conditional mode in which he co-stars with Namik Minter - both playing themselves - to depict the course of their tentative relationship. He interrupts that film to apostrophize, in cinematic chapters, footnotes, and asides, on his romantic history and on the confluence of forces that brought the pair to a crossroads. Nance, who has a fine-arts background, elaborates the story with whimsical and enticing animations, multimedia collages, and copious subtitles and intertitles, as well as with an intricate and archly funny non-stop monologue of psychological self-revelation. It's as if Nance were filming the couple in a mirror, as nested Russian dolls that pop out with cameras of their own. Michael Bay leaves action-figure bombast behind for this rowdy, raunchy, gleefully swaggering true-crime tale from the mid-nineties, about a swinging Miami bodybuilder, Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg), endowed with the gift of salesmanly gab and big dreams to match, who is stuck working as a trainer at a gym. One regular client, Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub), boasts of his fabulous wealth, and Lugo decides to lay hold of it by kidnapping him, enlisting a mild-mannered gym colleague, Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie), and a mighty, penitent ex-con, Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson), to help. Of course, the three stooges soon find themselves in over their heads, amplifying one another's mistakes in an echo chamber of extravagant, violent, and increasingly bloody and brutal idiocy, which eventually attracts the attention of a principled private eye (Ed Harris). The hyperactive script, by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (based on articles by Pete Collins), gives the characters snappy foot-in-mouth arias, and Bay adorns the story with slow-motion shots and slam-cuts, kinetic thrills and cocked angles, which capture sensational delusions of grandeur as well as panicked energy whirling out of control. Everyone involved, from Bay to the tangy flotilla of side characters - including a motivational huckster (Ken Jeong) and a sex therapist (Rebel Wilson) - seems to be having a rollicking good time putting the tall tale over. - R.B. (In wide release.) In his lifelong pursuit of pleasure, Holliday (who died in 1998) paid an outsized price in pain but was outspokenly wise to the transaction - and knew that this very performance, with its leap in self-knowledge and risky self-exposure, involved both. - R.B. (In limited release.) Two captivating shots in the middle of Carlos Reygadas's new film - one of a motorcycle zipping along a rural highway, followed by one of the same vehicle as seen from within a car trailing it - are the hinge moments in a grandiose, theoretical drama that runs on hypotheticals. A bourgeois Mexican couple, Juan and Natalia, live in a rustic village with their young children, Eleazar and Rutilia, their prosperity staining them like the mark of Cain. Juan, who has an Internet-porn habit, also abuses a dog and insults his neighbor's cheap camera. Meanwhile, the villagers struggle to subsist, performing manual labor (including for the interloping swells) and despoiling, with chainsaws, the surrounding Edenic forests. Reygadas's great subject is competition and its result, inequality, which he considers a diabolical curse; scenes of the couple in a Francophone sex club (with rooms named for Hegel and Duchamp) and of a sumptuous family reunion are matched by depictions of the locals" travails as well as of hunting, rugby, and other forms of aggression. Flipping between alternate versions of reality, the director evokes catastrophic uncertainty as man's grim fate. The premise is realized with a sludgy, bombastic portentousness; the images, for all their strained rhapsody, show little, and merely recite a thesis. In Spanish, French, and English. - R.B. (Film Forum.) In this wondrously accomplished and furiously expressive drama - blending the moody rambles of a road movie with the tightly ratcheted criminal tension of a film noir - the director Amy Seimetz, in her first feature, captures the wildly flailing energy and exhausted torpor of grinding frustration, as well as the flickering grace of stifled dreams. Filming her actors with a subcutaneous intimacy and the landscape (her home turf) with a nuanced eye, Seimetz balances a meticulous attention to practical menace with the eruptive force of her characters" inner lives; surprising voice-overs and dreamlike, hyper-detailed images plunge the story into a vortex of expressionistic subjectivity. One of the most quietly revolutionary works in the history of cinema, Roberto Rossellini's third feature starring Ingrid Bergman (his wife at the time), from 1953, turns romantic melodrama into an intellectual adventure. An English couple - Alex Joyce (George Sanders), a cynical, supercilious businessman, and his sensitive, cultured wife, Katherine (Bergman) - arrive in Naples to deal with an inheritance. As they travel alone together for the first time in eight years of childless marriage, their festering estrangement, from each other and from their comfortable way of life, bursts into open conflict. Filming on location, Rossellini devotes as much attention to the Italian settings and their cultural treasures as to the characters wandering among them; at Pompeii, the entwined bodies of lovers blasted by Vesuvius put an existential spin on Katherine's misery. Rossellini realizes his political agenda - regarding the discontents of bourgeois sophisticates whose sensibility is stunted by comfort - with a vision of redemption through aesthetic passion and roiling populist experience. Like his characters, his Hollywood stars go out of the Bentley and into the streets. From Rossellini's example, the young French New Wave critics learned to fuse studio style with European philosophy, to make high-relief drama on a low budget. - R.B. (Film Forum; May 1-9.) In this adaptation of Henry James's brilliant 1897 novel, set in present-day New York, Maisie (Onata Aprile) is a six-year-old girl caught between two dreadful parents, Susanna (Julianne Moore), an aging rock star with a foul temper, and Beale (Steve Coogan), an international art dealer who turns everything into a joke. They divorce, passing the girl back and forth, each using her as a weapon to hurt the other. Fresh marriages ensue, to inappropriately young partners, and there is much anger, betrayal, and cruelty as the girl's watchful eyes take in everything and she learns, slowly, what she must do to survive. The movie is shrewd about the infinite varieties of selfishness, but it lacks the necessary erotic tension, as well as any equivalent to James's wickedly funny voice. With Alexander Skarsgård and Joanna Vanderham. Written by Nancy Doyne and Carroll Cartwright; directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel. - D.D. (In limited release.) MUD: In limited release. PARADISE: LOVE: In limited release. 30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn (718-636-4100) - In revival. May 1-9 at 1:30, 3:30, 5:30, 7:30, and 9:30: "Voyage to Italy" (+). Walter Reade Theatre, Lincoln Center (212-875-5610) - "Film Comment Double Feature." May 6 at 7: "Villa Amalia" (2009, Benoît Jacquot; in French) and "Deep in the Woods" (2010, Jacquot; in French). 323 Sixth Ave., at W. 3rd St. (212-924-7771) - "History of Mel Brooks: Part I." May 7 at 8: "The Happiness of the Katakuris" (2001, Takashi Miike; in Japanese), followed by a discussion with the choreographer Mark Morris. 35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria (718-784-0077) - In revival. May 4 at 5: "Help!" 200 Hudson St., at Canal St. (212-601-1000) - The films of Trent Harris.