Movie Nation

Teenagers acquire super powers and, being teenagers, videotape themselves as they learn what they can do in “Chronicle,” an entertaining comic book movie without the comic book — or heroes wearing capes.

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“It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness” was a favorite Chinese proverb of the late “Peanuts” cartoonist Charles Schultz. Photographer James Balog must have taken that to heart as he noticed changes to the wild world he documents, and heard all the cursing during the discussion of global climate change.

So Balog took a candle — cameras, 25 of them — set up time-lapse gear and mounted them in front of a number of the world’s glaciers for over three years. And in starkly beautiful, simple and damning images, he showed the world climate change — glaciers disappearing so fast he had to re-aim his cameras just to capture their decline.

“Chasing Ice” is a beautiful documentary that follows Balog, who often works for the National Geographic, in his dogged quest to silence the blizzard of denial which the film shows is coming from one or two places — Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. In montages of TV footage, idealogues such as Sean Hannity and Limbaugh use “Al Gore” as a curse word to dismiss the overwhelming evidence and the unified scientific research that burning fossil fuels has warmed the planet and is melting the world’s ice, from pole to pole. Balog answers them with simple, blunt truth.

“Seeing is believing.”

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My woman, Señor Lopez, must love the land as much as I do!” Armando declares in “Casa de mi Padre.”

Since Armando is played by Will Ferrell, the over-the-top line is played as over-the-top as you would expect – brow furrowed, eyes looking dramatically at the horizon. And since “Casa de mi Padre” is a Spanish-language comedy, a broad spoof of Mexican melodramas and “telenovelas” (soap operas), Señor Ferrell performs the line, as he does all his lines, in Spanish.

We’re used to politicians talking out of both sides of their mouths. “The Campaign” is a political comedy that attempts that feat.

It’s a rude and crude farce that takes broad swipes at the political system and the people who manipulate it. It’s not subtle about attacking the election-buying billionaires, the Koch brothers (called the Motch brothers here). The campaigners themselves are basically puppets — one a crass, lazy Democrat given to giving in to his basest instincts, the other a startlingly ill-informed Republican whose idealism gives way to a cynical makeover to make him more presentable to the North Carolina voters he’s appealing to.

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“Bully” is a moving but somewhat myopic take on America’s newly anointed favorite childhood problem — schoolyard bullying. With emotional testimonials and candidly damning school and schoolbus video evidence, it’s a movie pitched as more than a mere movie — a cause, and a righteous one at that.

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Whatever you think of Tom Cruise, you know he’s not 6’5” and well over 200 pounds, which is the way author Lee Child describes his crime-solving/justice dispensing ex-military policeman, Jack Reacher.

But even if Cruise isn’t as physically imposing as the guy, he can still bring the intimidation, as he proves in “Jack Reacher.” Cruise carries off the part with a bruising panache, as at home in a brawl or car chase as he is in droll banter with the mere mortals who surround him.

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Director Michael Winterbottom finds fresh pathos in that classic melodrama of a beautiful poor woman “ruined” by a rich rake with “Trishna,” an updating of “Tess of the D’urbervilles.” Winterbottom moves the story to modern day India, and makes it relevant all over again in a country where caste and class can still ordain who gets to ill use whom, simply by custom.

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“Queen of Versailles” is a documentary that plays like a pilot for a reality TV series. You think the Karadashians are trashy, that “Jon & Kate Plus Eight” was a high-carbon-footprint divorce waiting to happen?

Wait’ll you see see the Siegels of Orlando!

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