New movies to be released tomorrow on DVD

A Christmas Tale (2008) ***** Late in A Christmas Tale Abel Vuillard (Jean-Paul Roussillon), the mirthful, patient patriarch in Arnaud Desplechin’s noisy, cloying and altogether marvelous film, reads aloud from the opening pages of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. His audience is his oldest child, Élizabeth (Anne Consigny), who has been complaining about the inexplicable sadness that perpetually afflicts her. (Early in the movie she offered the same complaint to her therapist.) As comfort and chastisement, Abel recites a long passage about the futility of our desire for self-knowledge and our alienation from our own experience. "We rub our ears after the fact," Nietzsche wrote, "and ask in complete surprise and embarrassment, ‘What just happened?,’ or even, ‘Who are we really?’" A Christmas Tale, which follows the extended Vuillard family through a few days and several lifetimes’ worth of hectic emotional confusion, induces a similar state of astonishment. A movie that is almost indecently satisfying and at the same time elusive, at once intellectually lofty — marked by allusions to Emerson, Shakespeare and Seamus Heaney as well as Nietzsche — and as earthy as the passionate provincial family that is its heart and cosmos and reason for being. Grade: A+

Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009) **½ The paradox of Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian is that a movie so bursting with novelty can feel so utterly familiar. This is partly because it’s a sequel, of course, but even the first Night at the Museum, directed, as this one is, by Shawn Levy, was a mixture of old hat and cool new stuff. That may just be the formula for pleasant, innocuous and intermittently thrilling family entertainment. Keep the emotions safe, simple and knowable, and focus the younger audience’s attention on a magic show of cute, funny, zany creatures and characters while throwing some half-clever verbal humor at the older kids and the accompanying parents. Apply a touch of prestige, on loan from widely admired educational and cultural institutions and voilà. You can’t lose. Where Ben Stiller fits in all of this remains a bit of a puzzle, but here he is again, a virtuoso of hostility playing the lead in a warm and fuzzy family comedy. A shallow and harmlessly diverting picture. Grade: C

Paper Heart (2009) **½ At the outset of Nick Jasenovec’s Paper Heart, the actress and comedian Charlyne Yi (playing a purportedly fictional version of herself) claims neither to need nor believe in romantic love. Over the course of the movie, however, she will be nudged toward conformity by two parallel forces: the actual testimonies of firm believers and the fictional unfolding of a fumbling affair. And since this is an American story, Ms. Yi’s conversion will come about in the quintessentially American way: as the result of a road trip. An unconvincing mash-up of the real and the fake, Paper Heart wavers between identities to no clear purpose and to its considerable creative detriment. Your enjoyment of Paper Heart will hinge almost entirely on your receptiveness to Ms. Yi and the extreme iteration of social awkwardness she represents. Grade: C

Terminator Salvation (2009) ***½ Terminator Salvation? Really, that’s a bit grandiose. Given the quantities of distressed metal on display in this sturdy and serviceable sequel — only the fourth Terminator movie in a quarter-century — Terminator Salvage might be a more apt title. Still, some things are saved, even redeemed, in the course of the movie, including, perhaps, the audience’s interest in killer cyborgs from the future and the fate of the Connor family. The movie, directed by McG (yes, him, the one-named auteur at the helm of the Charlie’s Angels pictures) from a script by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, has a brute integrity lacking in some of the other seasonal franchise movies. It parades neither the egghead aspirations of Star Trek nor the thick-skulled pretensions of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but instead feels both comfortable with its limitations and justly proud of its accomplishments. Grade: B