THE PROMISE
PG-13, 102 minutes

For 13 years Chen Kaige has been known as the director of “Farewell My Concubine” because, in all that time, he hasn’t made another good movie, and “The Promise” won’t change that. Although this film made a lot of money in China, it’s also deeply hated by Chinese critics and many audience members, and was the subject of a parody video called “The Bloody Case that Resulted from a Steamed Bun.” The “Steamed Bun” parody was downloaded millions of times, becoming more popular than “The Promise.” When Chen Kaige threatened to sue the parodist, the entire country, including his ex-wife, spoke up and told him to get stuffed. It’s a feeling you’ll be able to identify with by the time you’ve finish watching “The Promise.”

The flick starts with the titular promise: Cecilia Cheung is a starving ragamuffin looting the bodies of dead soldiers when a fairy appears and grants her one of those wish/curses that are so popular in fairy tales: Cecilia will get everything she wants but she will never find true love. Fast forward a bit and Hiroyuki Sanada, who is the Master of the Crimson Armor, is defeating 20,000 barbarians with a bunch of slaves, some silly Styrofoam weapons, and a whole lot of scheming. The fastest slave is Kunlun (Jang Dong-Kun), who becomes his personal butler. The two set out to save the King from an attack by the Duke, Nic Tse. On the way, Hiroyuki gets wounded and has to send Jang Dong-Kun ahead disguised in his armor. The poor guy screws everything up: He kills the king, saves the girl (Cecilia Cheung), and then jumps off a cliff. And the hijinx are only just beginning!

Chen Kaige has traded story for spectacle. The colors pop, the costumes crackle, and the sets – with their cherry blossom trees, giant gilded bird cages, and hanging prisons – feel like the old “Batman” television show remade on a big budget in China. But the movie is pasted together like something a couple of kids are making up as they go along.

When a 20-minute clip of “The Promise” was shown at Cannes last year, the Weinstein Brothers snapped it up for an enormous sum. When they saw the finished product they gave it back to the producers, losing a large pile of cash in the process. If the Weinsteins were willing to lose money not to show “The Promise,” it’s probably wise to avoid it altogether.

– Grady Hendrix

HOOT
PG, 90 minutes

If your children want to be taken to see “Hoot,” you need to sit them down, take their hand, and gently explain a few things.

“Honey, that cute owl you see on the poster for ‘Hoot’? That owl isn’t in the movie.”

The owls may be adorable, but they are burrowing owls that live in holes. The movie mostly shows these holes, letting us imagine the owls hiding at the bottom of them. Robert Wagner appears in a cameo as the town mayor, and he gets more screen time than the owls.

If your children still want to see “Hoot,” there are a few more things you should explain. Set in Florida, the movie is about three kids trying to stop a pancake house from being built on top of some owl burrows. And no matter how annoying and self-righteous these three children are, you would have to explain that they are still probably right. That it’s wrong to bulldoze a breeding ground for endangered animals in order to build a pancake house. You could also take a moment to point out Luke Wilson playing a sweetly serious police officer.

“See, sweetie, that man thinks he’s in another movie. He thinks he’s in a movie that’s actually funny.”

Based on an eco-fable by novelist Carl Hiaasen and with original music by Jimmy Buffett, you could finally explain to your child that yes, sometimes adults with no demonstrable talent do become famous and get to make movies. If, after all this, your children still wants to see “Hoot,” I’m sorry.

– G.H.

FOLLOWING SEAN
unrated, 87 minutes

In 1969, documentarian Ralph Arlyck interviewed the charming 4-year-old son of his Haight-Ashbury neighbors for a short film titled, simply, “Sean.” In “Following Sean,” his thoughtful, mellow follow-up now playing at Cinema Village, Mr. Arlyck checks in on the adult Sean as part of a rumination on life, work, character, and nostalgia both personal and political.

In the original short, Mr. Arlyck and Sean caused a bit of a stir when the toddler casually claimed to have smoked (and eaten) pot. Conservative critics crowed over this proof of the decade’s degeneracy. Then there was Francois Truffaut, who cabled his approval of this real-life Antoine Doinel delinquent.

The greater shock, perhaps, is that now the kid is all right: Sean is sharp, self-possessed but unprepossessing, with a sly sense of humor and steady work as an electrician. Mr. Arlyck meanwhile falls in with the 1960s skeptics. He contributes his own stories of fleeing to Berkeley as a young man only to find a paradise muddled.

Where were the parents? Sean’s father is now broke but clings to the old ideals. One of the film’s shattering moments comes when Mr. Arlyck, unable to stop himself, asks the shambling figure, “What’s this fascination with freedom?” It’s hard to know what’s more poignant, the awkward response or the director’s own revealing question.

If one of cinema’s oldest thrills is the ability to watch someone age over time, the film also shows how ideas age. Sean’s grandmother, a major leftist activist, turns up as a sobering predecessor to the muchpublicized pranksterish side of the Left in the ’60s. Mr. Arlyck’s misgivings about the fallen ideals come through in his definition of adulthood as spending most of your time doing things you don’t want to do. Of course, if your life results in producing subtly engaging films such as this, it can’t be too bad.

– Nicolas Rapold

CRAZY LIKE A FOX
PG-13, 99 minutes

“Crazy Like a Fox” should be a movie well suited to right-minded folk like me, who see a church being converted into condos and mutter (justifiably!) about the decline of Western civilization. But Richard Squires’s underdog tale of a “Virginny” landowner fending off a rapacious D.C. power couple is too hokey and predictable to raise even this purist’s interest.

Scraggly, wiry Nat Banks (Roger Rees) lives with his family on a picturesque estate given to his ancestors before the Revolutionary War. When piling tax bills force him to sell, he has second thoughts and camps out by a nearby creek like a cut-rate General Lee. The long-suffering Mrs. Banks (Mary McDonnell) leaves with the kids to wait out his rebellious phase.

The new owners are scoundrels, all right: Will (Paul Fitzgerald) and Ellie (Christina Rouner) hand Nat a vacate order immediately after the sale, reneging on their promise to keep Nat on as manager of the estate. “I call it a negotiating strategy myself,” says the nefarious whippersnapper.

Scenes and dialogue like that never leave a question about plot, character, or the stakes involved between farming as a way of life and the estate as a mere investment. Or, put another way, between patri ots and, so it seems, major tightasses. Mr. Fitzgerald sometimes evokes Steve Carell in evil mode.

With Nat just hanging around, “Crazy” is basically waiting out the clock until it’s deus ex machina time. Mr. Rees makes a passable eccentric but doesn’t do much with the juicy role (and can’t seem to get his British tongue around the accent).

But the fields, streams, and dilapidated grandeur of the house look nice enough. And it’s at least a little Southern comfort for the shortcomings of the laudable but mechanical story constructed around it.

– N.R.

AN AMERICAN HAUNTING
PG-13, 84 minutes

“An American Haunting” is a movie made with all the intelligence, craft, and insight you’d expect from a film directed by the auteur behind 2000’s “Dungeons and Dragons.” But while both movies sport all-star casts (Thora Birch and Jeremy Irons in “D&D,” Sissy Spacek and Donald Sutherland in “An American Haunting”) and miserable special effects that look like stickers applied directly to the print, “Dungeons and Dragons” is downright awful, while “An American Haunting” is merely mediocre. In a weird way, that’s somewhat encouraging.

Based on the legend of the Bell Witch, this flick is set around 1818 in Red River, Tenn., where the upright Bell family are set upon by a violent, invisible ghost that beats up their nubile young daughter, Betsy, before getting bored and beating up the rest of the family, too. John Bell (Mr. Sutherland) is a recently fallen but prominent figure in the community, and his family disintegrates as the disturbances grow increasingly baroque, encompassing carriage wrecks, packs of wolves, and a little ghostly Laura Ingalls Wilder. Ultimately, there’s a last-second switcheroo that attributes the haunting to sexual abuse, which would have had a lot more impact if the title card that appears right after this revelation didn’t have grammar mistakes on it.

Mr. Sutherland gives an enjoyably laidback performance, but Ms. Spacek’s role makes almost no impression. Though the editor, Richard Comeau, does manage to wring some suspense out of a handful of sequences, the special effects of “An American Haunting” look fake, it’s shot in Romania (standing in for Tennessee), and even the true story on which it’s based is actually a novel disguised as a non-fiction account of a haunting.

– G.H.