Movie Nation

Aura is 22, fresh out of college with a degree in film theory and no direction, no sense of how to “get started” on life, career, etc.

She’s just been dumped by her college beau, and she’s moved back to her New York city home with her over-achieving high school sister, Nadine, and her mom. Mom is an artist, a photographer who takes art shots of fancy feet in scenes with tiny furniture.

“Tiny Furniture” is writer-director-star Lena Dunham’s amusing meander through “post graduate delirium,” a relationship comedy about nothing so much as the permanent relationships of family and New Yorker’s relationship with space — and the lack of it.

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Ivan Reitman — whose directing career (“Ghostbusters”) is so long in the tooth that he actually has a son, Jason, directing Oscar-worthy comedies — has his best outing in decades with “No Strings Attached,” an amusing flip of the “friends with benefits” sex-leads-to-love romantic comedy formula.

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It doesn’t take four minutes for “Rio” to set itself apart from all the “Ice Age” movies the animators at Blue Sky  made before it.  A rain forest filled with parrots, macaws, cockatoos and toucans sing and dance the samba in a flying delirium of color.

And then the poachers show up.

Comical, colorful, wonderfully cast and beautifully animated, “Rio” is the first Blue Sky movie that could be compared to the best of Pixar. It weighs weighty subjects with a light touch, embraces the music of the culture it visits and delivers delights like few cartoons this side of the Golden Age of Disney.

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They’re bold, not hiding their faces, waving their guns. Um, waving their gun. But it’s a toy, a bit too small to be convincing. The fellow waving that toddler-sized AK-47 tries to hold it closer to the camcorder, too dense to explain the concept of forced perspective, making it look bigger on camera.

Do the others understand? Not bloody likely. They’re British buffoons, Middle Eastern expats with little interest in the Koran, no genuine gripe against the West that has given them shelter, just jihadist dreams of reconciling their tiny place in the world with the grandiose violent rhetoric of idiotic, testosteroned boys.

Which these “Four Lions” are most assuredly not.

“Four Lions” is a very funny British send-up of the dimwitted children of parents smart enough to escape their repressive Islamic homelands. Mostly in their late 20s, these “Lions” listen to bad pop music, make ineptly menacing videos and one-up each other in their boasts of how they will burn their names in history.

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“Voyage of the Dawn Treader” is either a spirited revival of the film franchise based on the C.S. Lewis children’s Narnia novels, or an entertaining and emotionally satisfying coda to “The Chronicles of Narnia.”

In the able care of veteran director Michael Apted, who has helmed films that won actors Oscars and been a steady hand on the tiller of many an action film, including a James Bond adventure, the series’ casting shortcomings and drifting storylines are less pronounced and we get an idea of how the whole  of Lewis’ Christian allegory fantasy might have played out in better hands. If Apted and his ilk had made the films, they might have been a worthy challenger to the far more popular Harry Potter pictures.

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“Voluptuous” doesn’t quite do the Gemma Arterton justice. It leaves out her voluminous hair, her perma-pout and those eyes so dark no cinematographer seems able to coax color from them.

And “overripe” seems a tad mean.

No sense mincing around objectifying her, because heaven knows filmmakers never do.  Her “come hither look” is the closest thing the big screen has to a heavy-duty dose of Viagra.

Arterton, one-time Bond girl, object of the lust of a “Prince of Persia,” is put on glorious display in the title role Stephen Frears’ “Tamara Drewe,” based on a Posy Simmonds graphic novel. Arterton’s Tamara is lust incarnate, something of a muse to some, an awful bother to others, playing a big city journalist who returns to her home village and stirs things up.

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Acting for the silver screen doesn’t get more raw, moving or accomplished than what you see in “The Fighter,” that rare film in which every performer in it leaves the viewer in awe.

The quartet at its heart — Christian Bale,  Amy Adams, Melissa Leo and Mark Wahlberg — wholly inhabit their characters and wash away most everything they’ve done in the past. And what’s even better is how perfectly they complement each other in this down-and-dirty “true story” boxing drama.

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