Opens today at the Broadway Centre Cinemas ; not rated, but probably R for strong sexuality, nudity and some violence; 97 minutes.

Director Tom Kalin ("Swoon") takes a lurid and meandering look inside the twisted psychology of the real-life Baekeland family: distant Brooks (Stephen Dillane), heir to the Bakelite plastics fortune; his vivacious but needy wife, Barbara (Julianne Moore); and their brooding son, Antone (Eddie Redmayne). Spanning two decades, Kalin and writer Howard A. Rodman explore Barbara's infatuation with social-climbing, her desperation at Brooks' infidelity and her creepily close relationship with Antone. Moore sinks her teeth into the larger-than-life role, finding pockets of cruelty and sympathy beneath the polished surface. Ultimately, I felt more sorry for Moore - giving her all to a skeezy, tabloid psychodrama - than for her self-absorbed character.

Space Chimps

Opens today at theaters everywhere; rated G; 84 minutes.

After a summer of good animation ("Wall-E" and "Kung Fu Panda"), "Space Chimps" is a callous clunker. When America's space agency loses an unmanned probe through a wormhole, the agency sends a crew of well-trained chimpanzees - Commander Titan (voice of Patrick Warburton) and Lt. Luna (voice of Cheryl Hines) - to retrieve the probe, along with a showboating circus chimp (voiced by "Saturday Night Live's" Andy Samberg) whose grandfather was among the original Mercury-program chimps. The movie (made by Vanguard Animation, whose dismal track record includes "Valiant" and "Happily N'Ever After"), already sputtering with lame pop-culture references, runs aground when the chimps arrive at an alien planet with a yucky-looking villain (voiced by Jeff Daniels) and a nausea-inducing color palette. Chimps could have made a better movie.

Operation Filmmaker

Opens today at the Tower Theatre; not rated, but probably PG-13 for strong language and fake gore; 95 minutes.

It would be simplistic to call this biting documentary a microcosm of the war in Iraq - well-meaning Americans act without a plan and get impatient when things don't go well - but being simplistic is the film's one weakness. It starts when Iraqi film student Mathuna Mohmed is profiled in an MTV News story, which is seen by U.S. actor Liev Schreiber, who decides to bring Mohmed to Prague to work on the set of Schreiber's directorial debut, "Everything Is Illuminated." Documentarian Nina Davenport, who was hired to follow Mohmed's story, finds an engaging and grateful young man. But complications, many of Mohmed's own making, have Davenport questioning her own and everyone else's good intentions. Davenport focuses deep on the Hollywood do-gooder mentality (Dwayne Johnson, on the set of "Doom," comes off as a nice-but-naive guy) and her own complicity in treating Mohmed as a symbol of the war and not as a flawed person.

Up the Yangtze

Opens today at the Broadway Centre Cinemas; not rated, but probably PG-13 for strong language; in English, and Mandarin and Sichuan with subtitles; 93 minutes.

Movingly told and gorgeously shot, this documentary by Yung Chang (a Canadian of Chinese descent) follows the plight of two teens whose lives are changed by China's massive Three Gorges Dam project. Yu Shui, a 16-year-old girl whose family's farmland will soon be flooded by the rising water, takes a dishwasher job on a river-cruise ship for Western tourists. Also working on the ship is Chen Bo Yu, an ambitious teen who embodies an unforeseen effect of China's one-child-per-family policy: "little emperors," kids spoiled rotten. Chang's fluid camera captures the river's vanishing beauty, as well as the dichotomy between Yu Shui's rural poverty and Chen Bo Yu's urban lifestyle.

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