They are the members of the Child Protection Unit, charged with investigating everything from runaways to sexual abuse. Their daily work brings them in contact with some of society’s saddest cases because their clientele includes its youngest, most vulnerable victims.

Le Besco, who also appears in the film, was inspired by a documentary on the real CPU. She interviewed its members, then cowrote her script based on the experiences she’d been told about. Her film encompasses the day-to-day lives of the members of the CPU squad, whose cases seem to come and go with surprising speed and disheartening regularity.

We see the squad members interviewing victims and perpetrators, coaxing or browbeating confessions or statements. A little girl will casually mention that, while bathing her, her father “scratches” her bottom. A teen offhandedly mentions offering sex in exchange for a cell phone; a mother dragged in for shaking her baby viciously in public says that her older son (who looks to be about 3) is easier to get to bed at night when she gives him a handjob.

In between, we get a taste of the interaction between the members of the squad – between the group as a whole and between partners. It’s obviously intense work, creating similarly fraught bonds between colleagues. One pair – played by Marina Fois and Karin Viard – shares secrets about their personal lives, serve as each other’s confidantes and, ultimately, wind up with bitter recriminations against each other.

The humor of these officers, however, is defensive, combating the tragedy and absurdity of otherwise unsettling situations. It’s gallows humor, to be sure – and it usually accompanies those rare moments when the squad is able to prevent a tragedy, rather than clean up after one.

The tension sometimes derives from struggles within the precinct itself. It might be the departmental hierarchy (the narcotics squad is given preference over CPU) or the commander’s unwillingness to step in to make a difference when he might. Each member of the squad brings his or her demons to the job; it’s hard to tell what might set an officer off.

Le Besco also offers a glimpse of the home life of the officers, where spouses have no interest in hearing about life on the job. But these are cops who can’t help bring their work home with them. It could be anything from a raid on a gypsy encampment to take the children – who are being trained as pickpockets – into custodial care or watching a rape victim give birth to stillborn child, from which DNA will be taken to charge her attacker.

The director has a large and varied cast, all of whom bring different facets to the job. Fois is the tightly strung cop who urges Viard to leave her unfaithful husband, while hiding her own anorexia. Joeystarr is the mixed-race tough guy with a tender heart for abandoned children. Frederic Pierrot is their long-suffering squad leader, who must serve as buffer between hot-tempered cops and their chilly chief (Wladimir Yordanoff).

The film’s one flaw is Le Besco herself. She plays a photojournalist who is embedded with the CPU to shoot their daily doings. At first given the cold shoulder, she gradually is accepted, becoming involved with one of the squad members. But her presence distracts from, rather than illuminates or adds to, the reality of the film.

Without her, the film might be 10-15 minutes shorter and even more headlong than it is. Even so, “Polisse” is gripping and powerful, an unsentimental look at a thankless job where the victories are hard fought and all too rare.

Did I say offensive? Put it this way: If you don’t have a sense of humor about race, religion, ethnicity, sexuality and gender, here’s a movie that will easily induce anger or worse.

If, on the other hand, you can find the risky humor in a throwaway visual gag in which an anti-Semitic despot plays a Wii game based on Palestinian terrorists killing Israelis at the 1972 Munich Olympics (complete with a feature that offers the shooter “Jew-dar” to find his targets), well, this is the movie for you.

I will admit that I gasped and then giggled at the audacity of what is a tossed-off sight gag. And I was laughing regularly throughout this film, which was directed by Larry Charles and written by Baron Cohen and three others. Is it uneven? Of course – so are all of his films. But his hit-to-miss ratio is as high as that of the Zucker brothers in their “Airplane” heyday.

No one is safe from Baron Cohen’s sting, starting with the rulers of Arab countries, admittedly a demographic that can stand having fun poked at them. But he’s just as rough on the people who show up to protest dictators’ appearances at the U.N. And vegans and liberals and the CIA. And Brooklyn hipsters. And American tourists. And Arab expatriates. And the media. And celebrities… and … and …

Well, as I said, Baron Cohen casts a wide net. He seems to have something wildly nasty to say about everyone – but he always seems to say it with a charming smile. He’s an equal-opportunity offender.

In the film, he plays Admiral General Aladeen, supreme ruler of the Middle Eastern kingdom of Wadiya. He’s ready to execute anyone who questions his authority or his knowledge of current events or even anyone who simply makes him a little uncomfortable. Sure, his people hate his brutally dictatorial ways; that’s why he has a double to take his place in public, the better to be assassinated in his stead (since attempted assassinations seem to be a part of his daily life).

And most of them, apparently, are being orchestrated by his uncle, Tamir (Ben Kingsley), who should have taken the throne when Aladeen’s father died. When Aladeen is summoned to speak to the United Nations about whether or not he has nuclear weapons, Tamir plots to secretly kill him and replace him with a dim-witted goatherd, who will be manipulated into doing Tamir’s bidding (including opening Wadiya’s rich oil reserves to international development).

But Aladeen escapes from his kidnapper and winds up homeless (and beardless), the object of compassion of a politically progressive young woman named Zoey (Anna Faris). She takes him in, giving him work in her extra-crunchy natural foods co-op in Brooklyn.

Old habits die hard, however, and Aladeen’s attitudes are deeply entrenched. Yet exposure to Zoey (and eventual attraction to her) ultimately changes Aladeen, even as he plots to infiltrate the Wadiyan stronghold in Manhattan and replace his replacement in time to foil Tamir’s plot to declare democracy in Wadiya.

The plotting here is more structured than the free-form approach in “Borat” and “Bruno,” both of which felt like they were scripted in the editing room. The story is simple, to be sure, a clothesline on which to hang a variety of comedy sketches. In one, for example, Baron Cohen and Jason Mantzoukas, as Aladeen’s only ally in America, take a helicopter ride over Manhattan to do surveillance on the hotel where the Aladeen imposter is being kept. Trying to seem like typical tourists, they instead scare the crap out of their fellow passengers, who think they’re planning the next 9/11.

Baron Cohen’s jokes about the co-op’s customers and employees are scabrous and deliciously observed, blending rudeness, visual gags, unexpected violence and other elements to create laughs. Similarly, his exchanges with Zoey are consistently funny because of Faris’ wide-eyed affect and Baron Cohen’s ability to say outrageous things without seeming to be making a joke.

In that respect, “The Dictator” is a deft satire – right up to its climax, in which Aladeen gives a speech about why he hates democracy and casually skewers American attitudes and actions of the past dozen years.

Baron Cohen admittedly is not for all tastes – but if you can swing with him, “The Dictator” is a vastly entertaining comedy.

The 1984 book, by Heidi Murkoff, is a perennial best-seller for its witty but honest assessment of the changes that women go through when they’re pregnant, the effect that has on her partner – and the subsequent transition of their relationship and their lives once the baby arrives.

But what writers Shauna Cross (who wrote the limp “Whip It”) and Heather Hach have come up with is like a melange of weak TV-movie pregnancy plots. The writers split the focus between three couples expecting babies, one couple that’s adopting and one single woman who confronts an unexpected pregnancy after a one-night hook-up. In that way, the writers and director Kirk Jones are able to focus almost completely on the clichés, without having to actually get very deep with any of the stories.

Let’s see: There’s Cameron Diaz as a personal trainer who’s the star of a “Biggest Loser”-type TV show. She winds up pregnant with her boyfriend (Matthew Morrison), one of the professional dancers on a “Dancing with the Stars”-type show.

There’s Elizabeth Banks, married to Ben Falcone (the air marshal from “Bridesmaids”); she runs a boutique that specializes in supplies for the breast-feeding mother (just so her assistant can say, “We’re going to need more nipple cream”). Her husband, a dentist, is the son of a famous NASCAR driver (Dennis Quaid), whose latest wife, Brooklyn Decker, is also pregnant. Just to be really trite, the son has daddy issues, because Dad never let him win at anything.

(Let’s not even get into the likelihood that a woman who looks like Banks would be married to someone who looks like Falcone, a funny guy to be sure but, really? When we later learn that, in fact, he was a one-time contestant on Diaz’s weight-loss show when he weighed 100 pounds more – no way.)

Then there’s a photographer (Jennifer Lopez) and her advertising-man hubby (Rodrigo Santoro), who are infertile and adopting a baby from Ethiopia. Finally, there’s a pair of food-truck entrepreneurs (Anna Kendrick and Chace Crawford), rivals and former high school pals who connect one night, with not-unexpected results.

Wait, you’re saying – where does Chris Rock fit in to this (because he’s so prominently featured in the commercials)? He’s part of the “dudes group,” a bunch of dads who get together regularly to take their kids to the park and let off steam: What happens in dudes’ group stays in dudes’ group. How hilarious is that? They’re drafted to help Santoro understand what he’s in for when his baby arrives. Even the presence of Rock and Thomas Lennon can’t elevate the weak writing.

What you’ve got is a series of sketches, variations on a theme, none of them too long, none of them in any way original – and very little of it amusing. Jones doesn’t need to think, just to mix and match, hopping from couple to couple without pausing for character development or story (since the plotline is already baked in).

The only one who actually finds the funny is Banks. Rock gets off a couple of decent lines and so does Megan Mullally, who shows up playing herself on the same “Dancing with the Stars” spoof. Several other people show up as themselves as well – Whitney Port, Dwyane Wade – and their presence alone is supposed to trigger laughs. It doesn’t.

“What to Expect When You’re Expecting” is like a Whitman’s sampler, in which every piece turns out to be a stale chocolate-covered cherry – the ones you bite and then sneak back into the box when no one’s looking.

The two central characters are Alan (Jake Sandvig) and Ben (Jason Ritter), first glimpsed parking cars as valets at a funeral. Or are they? After a few minutes of banter, they give a claim check to the owner of a BMW, then casually get in and drive it away, stealing and selling it.

This scam apparently keeps them in spending money, enough that they own their own house. Indeed, they live in the guest house at the rear of the property, renting the main house to a newcomer, a woman named Lynette (Carrie Preston) and her 12-year-old son, Kelsey (Chandler Canterbury). Alan and Ben are benevolent types; when Lynette explains that she’s still awaiting FEMA funds after losing her house in Hurricane Katrina (a dated reference, perhaps), they cut her a break on her rent.

But Lynette’s life is on a downward spiral. She’s divorced from a man who wants nothing to do with Kelsey and she can’t find a job. When Alan’s sister, Mel (Rebecca Hall), notices that Lynette barely has any food in her house, Mel reports her to child protective services. The pressures build until Lynette can no longer cope with the demands of motherhood.

Suddenly, Alan and Ben find themselves the only thing standing between Kelsey and a foster home. So Alan decides that it’s time to grow up and take some responsibility – starting with providing a home for Kelsey.

But can they do it? And even if they’re emotionally equipped for parenthood, will they be allowed to do it?

That’s the long and short of the story, but Crano turns it into something deeper and more heartfelt than a regurgitation of “Three Men and a Baby” or “Mr. Mom.” This isn’t a wacky comedy about two doofuses figuring out how to be dads. It’s about developing enough empathy to reach out to someone else, about getting past one’s own hang-ups to help another person.

Abandonment is obviously an issue here, as is responsibility. It’s not just the transformation from boys to men – it’s about the meaning of manhood and how to teach it to someone else.

Ritter and Sandvig have an easy chemistry, the joshing familiarity of old friends who can finish each other’s sentences. Ritter in particular shines, shifting fluidly from glib to glum and back again, at times achieving an emotional nakedness that is truly touching.

“A Bag of Hammers” isn’t out to change the world. But it does capture the sense of what happens when our world does change, in ways that bigger, more expensive films too seldom achieve.

Apparently no one had the stones to say that to Burton or Depp, whose inflated reputations rest on their box-office clout, much more than their artistic vision. And so we have “Dark Shadows,” as dreary a big-budget extravaganza as you’re likely to see this year (unless Michael Bay springs a movie on us unexpectedly).

“Dark Shadows” is all the argument you need for staging some sort of couples’ intervention on Depp and Tim Burton. Yes, I know – they made “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Ed Wood” and “Sweeney Todd,” all worthy films. On the other hand, they made the middling “Sleepy Hollow,” the execrable “Alice in Wonderland” and now this piece of mirthless kitsch. So it’s really a wash, wouldn’t you say? Time to move on and stop enabling this kind of pop-culture junk.

Big, loud, lavish and flat, “Dark Shadows” was written by Seth Grahame-Smith, who came up with the one-joke idea of mash-ups blending classic literature and history tales blended with horror-movie tropes, like “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.” The witless script here doesn’t bode well for Grahame-Smith’s screen adaptation of his own “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Killer.”

That’s because virtually all of the jokes in “Dark Shadows” are DOA. They’re either trite (an 18th-century vampire wakes up in 1972 and is mystified by cars and TV – how clever) or simply flat (let’s have that vampire say “Kiss my ass” in formal 18th-century language). And the horror? Forget it – too jokey. And the jokes? Not nearly jokey enough.

Tricked out like a gothic romance, “Dark Shadows” chronicles the early plight of Barnabas Collins (Depp), scion to a rich fish-cannery family in pre-Revolutionary War Maine. The family is so dominant that the town is called Collinsport; their lavish mansion is called Collinwood. But Barnabas runs afoul of a witch named Angelique (Eva Green), whose love he doesn’t return. So she kills his parents, casts a spell on the woman he loves (Bella Heathcote) that causes her to throw herself off a cliff – and then turns Barnabas into a vampire and rats him out to the townsfolk, who entomb him alive.

(The vampire lore is incredibly half-assed here. Aside from the fact that Barnabas becomes a vampire through a witch’s spell – as opposed to being bitten and turned by another vampire – there’s the whole on-again, off-again nature of his relationship with daylight. Not that that’s this movie’s biggest problem, but just saying.)

When Barnabas is accidentally released, it’s 1972 (oh Tim, how daring – making fun of lava lamps and the fashions of that earlier era!) and the Collins family is on the skids. What’s left of his family, dominated by matriarch Elizabeth (Michelle Pfeiffer) and her ne’er-do-well brother Roger (Jonny Lee Miller), inhabits Collinwood in virtual poverty, or as much poverty as it takes to run a mansion with a pair of obviously cut-rate servants. The Collins’ fish cannery is in ruins and the town is dominated by the cannery run by the still lively Angelique. So Barnabas – now a stunning shade of fish-belly white – moves back in to Collinwood to help the family revive the business to get revenge once and for all on Angelique.

Stale? The plot is positively moribund and the writing is no better. There are any number of barely sketched characters, from the clichéd drunk of a houseman (Jackie Earle Haley) to Elizabeth’s sullen teen daughter (Chloe Grace Moretz) to a live-in shrink (Helena Bonham Carter). There were probably other actors with three names clamoring for roles but, mercifully for their careers, they aren’t in this film.

“Dark Shadows” isn’t the worst movie ever made. It probably won’t even be the worst movie of the year. And that’s the best I can say about it. Watching it is like being told a weak joke that you already know.

An antidote to the current state of popular culture and media, “God Bless America” takes square aim at everything that is crass, craven and crappy on television, radio and everywhere else. From politics to talk radio to TV talkers to reality TV and beyond, Goldthwait’s film employs a slash-and-burn approach – and creates wildly funny moments in the process.

His hero is Frank (Joel Murray), an average guy who works in an office in Syracuse. He’s divorced and has a daughter who is a blossoming young brat. Frank, a mild-mannered fellow, is appalled by much of what he sees and hears in the media: “Why have a civilization if we’re no longer interested in being civil?” he muses.

Frank seems to be the office shmo, just because he doesn’t yuk it up over the latest outrage on a local morning radio show. When his office mate expresses surprise that Frank isn’t amused, Frank tells him, “I’m not afraid of foreign people or people with vaginas,” two prime targets.

Frank has feelings for a secretary at his office – but when he tries to express his innocent interest in seeing her by sending flowers, he’s fired for creating a hostile work environment. Then he gets a terminal diagnosis from his doctor. Things couldn’t get much worse.

Sitting home drinking, he happens to switch channels to a reality show about a spoiled rich girl named Chloe – and sees his own daughter’s future. Something snaps, and Frank decides that, as his final act, he’s going to rid the world of this teen harridan. So he drives 400 miles in a stolen car – and shoots her in the face.

There’s a witness to the crime: a classmate of Chloe’s named Roxy (Tara Lynne Barr), who hates all the same things about contemporary society that Frank does. She talks Frank out of killing himself after he offs Chloe – and convinces him that they can strike a blow for sanity by going on a killing spree, eliminating everything they think is wrong with the culture.

“With so many people out there who should be taking the big dirt nap, why stop now?” she reasons.

And so they take off on a cross-country trip, alternately offering lists of things they hate and doing something about it: shooting a group of teens who talk and text in a movie (hooray!); a cable commentator who’s a blend of Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity; the “God Hates Fags” crowd – ultimately leading to the finale of an “American Idol”-type show.

Goldthwait, working with a limited budget, isn’t trying anything startling visually, though he does offer amusing and imaginative segues and montages. Rather, this is a movie about the message: that we’ve dumbed ourselves down to a state of stupefaction and sheer stupidity, in which cruelty passes for entertainment and celebrity is exalted as a state of grace unto itself, one that glorifies greedy, rude behavior.

He manages to take swipes at everything from NASCAR to energy drinks, from TMZ to the sexualization of children. Frank gets off a telling sermon about the latter when Roxy asks whether he finds her attractive – and he tells her it would be inappropriate to answer.

“So we’re platonic spree killers?” she says, with a certain amount of disappointment.

Goldthwait has cast his film cannily, starting with Murray, so good as Fred Rumsen on “Mad Men” and the outraged Eddie Jackson on “Shameless.” Murray invests Frank with inwardly simmering outrage, capturing the sense of satisfaction that comes with ridding the world of truly horrible people. Barr is a nice discovery: fresh-faced, wide-eyed and eager to commit mayhem.

Let me be clear: “God Bless America” is not for everyone. It is viciously, violently funny, taking no prisoners as it spray-paints Goldthwait’s disdain across a brutal depiction of a pop-culture landscape that deserves this kind of sharp-edged satire.

It offers a couple of the biggest laughs in recent memory, including a slapstick gag worthy of Chuck Jones in his “Looney Tunes” heyday.

Thankfully, there are other nice things to say about “The Avengers,” a Marvel mash-up featuring a group of super-heroes who (almost) all have had their own movies. Don’t think of this as a sequel to the others; it’s its own thing unto itself.

And, thanks to writer-director Joss Whedon, that thing is veined with wit, even as it offers exactly the kind of action that fanboys and normal movie-goers alike want out of something like this. The wisecracks and bulls-eye one-liners aside, “The Avengers” offers big mouthfuls of action, at a scale that tickles the imagination.

Yet Whedon also realizes what the real attraction is here: It’s not the moment when these various troubled super-heroes put their own issues aside and band together to fight off a horde of invading aliens (although that’s a moment that’s worth the wait). Rather, it’s about the sturm und drang – the personal demons that goad these differently abled creatures into battling each other.

Those, after all, are the comic books that were always the best – the ones that pitted super-hero against super-hero. You always know that the super-hero will defeat the villain. But when it’s hero vs. hero, well, anything goes.

Or so it seems in this movie. You’ve got Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) vs. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor vs. Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Hulk against Black Widow (Scarlett Johannssn), Black Widow taking on Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner). And that’s not to mention the trash talk, the best of which is offered by Downey as the ever-flippant Tony Stark.

The plot is as comic-booky as it comes, drawing on clues and hints that popped up at the end of “Thor,” “Captain America” and the “Iron Man” movies. It all has to do with something called the Tesseract, a glowing cube of energy that figured in at least a couple of the previous films. SHIELD, the secretive agency headed by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), has been guarding this thing inside a mountain-top fortress – but Fury and his cohort discover just how little they understand the thing when it activates itself.

It opens a portal to, well, apparently Asgard – though it could be any evil corner of the universe where Loki (Tom Hiddleston) has been cooling his heels since he had his ass kicked last year in “Thor.” Loki, now in cahoots with a race of space aliens that look like Skeletor, pops up in this cave fortress, then casually takes over the minds of both Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and Dr. Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgard), though, if I recall, he brain-blipped Selvig at the end of “Thor.”

Then Loki takes off with the Tesseract. His goal is to open the portal and let all the aliens through; together, they’ll conquer Earth and install Loki as ruler. So Nick Fury calls together all the super-heroes at his command for a pow-wow on how to lock down Loki.

But, what with egos and cross-purposes, none of these heroes plays particularly well with others. So it takes them a while to stop squabbling among themselves and team up to battle the real bad guys.

The friction between them, however, creates all the sparks that ignite the moments of pleasure in this film. The slugfest between Thor and Iron Man is imaginative and full-bodied, with the two guys nearly flattening a forest as they punish each other. And the Hulk-Thor throwdown is similarly impressive, pitting two indestructible forces against each other within an enclosed space.

The final showdown with the invading aliens – set around Grand Central Terminal in midtown Manhattan – starts slowly, but quickly gets over what is apparently the irresistible urge by directors to blow up cars and buildings to focus on the heroes and their struggles. Whedon quickly finds his groove, blending close-up hand-to-hand shots with sweepingly dynamic scenes of dogfights within New York’s concrete canyons.

He also comes up with perhaps the coolest effect in recent memory: a massive alien fighter-craft that looks and moves like a giant metal snake – or perhaps a cross between a snake and a whale. It flies, it undulates, it wreaks havoc with New York buildings – and, when it crashes, well, that’s cool, too.

Ultimately that’s what “The Avengers” is all about. With the spate of Marvel movies we’ve endured in the past three or four years, the level of computer-generated and green-screened action has risen considerably. It takes more skill – more intelligence and wit, as well as visual imagination – to create a “wow” factor. “The Avengers” definitely has it.

Yes, at 145 minutes, “The Avengers” is too long. On the other hand, it has more than a half-dozen major characters, each of which is used to having a whole movie to himself. Whedon finds ways to give each of them enough screen time to satisfy fans without losing the focus on the team. Indeed, the Iron Man material is head and shoulders above the stuff that filled out the bloated, slow-moving “Iron Man 2.”

If you’re not a comic-book fan, well, this probably won’t make you one. But if you’re looking for the kind of big-screen action that summer movies invariably entail, “The Avengers” is one of the rare ones that actually delivers on that promise.
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They make it look like an irreverent, iconoclastic satire, one that attacks hypocrisy among the pious – like something from the Farrelly brothers or, perhaps, John Waters. Oh wait – Waters already made that movie with Turner and called it “Serial Mom.” And it was a lot more interesting than this alleged comedy.

In fact, “The Perfect Family” is dramatic – when it isn’t dull and obvious. While there’s fodder here for a lampoon, Renton, working from a script by Paula Goldberg and Claire Riley, prefers the Lifetime-movie model.

Kathleen Turner plays Eileen Cleary, who discovers at the beginning of the film that her local monsignor (Richard Chamberlain – wow) has nominated her for a prestigious award: Catholic Woman of the Year. Her only competition is her arch-rival, Agnes Dunn (Sharon Lawrence).

Agnes is holier-than-thou and hoity-toity, setting up a potential cat-fight (or perhaps Cath-fight) that never materializes. Indeed, there are so many possibilities for barbs and jabs that never come to fruition that you start writing your own script in your head as you watch.

Because, you see, all is not well in the Cleary household. Even as Eileen is basking in the glow of her nomination, bombshells are about to go off at the Cleary dinner table.

Eileen’s daughter Shannon (Emily Deschanel) announces that not only is she five months pregnant through artificial insemination – but she’s going to marry her significant other, a woman named Angela. And Eileen’s son, Frank Jr. (Jason Ritter), has decided that he’s unhappy in his marriage and is leaving his wife and two kids for the woman he really loves, a local beautician.

You can see where this is headed: It’s the perfect trappings for farcical obfuscation and more. Think “La Cage aux Folles” and the like. Except it’s not: “The Perfect Family” instead turns into a didactic lesson on accepting the people you love for who they are.

Turner is a solid actor and she and the rest of the cast give honest, real performances. But once it becomes clear where this is headed – Eileen’s crisis of conscience at rejecting her children in pursuit of an award from a church that also denies the legitimacy of their choices – there’s no salvaging this earnest film.

Not that the message of the film isn’t a righteous one in the face of massive self-righteousness from a deeply flawed institution. And it’s probably not Renton’s fault that the film is being marketed as a yuk-fest. But “The Perfect Family” is a sober little drama that’s not a comedy by any stretch of the imagination – or not a very funny one.

Based on the novel “These Foolish Things” by Deborah Moggach, “Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” (opening in limited release 5/4/12) brings together Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, Maggie Smith and a few others for a seductive fish-out-of-water tale. And I’m using “fish” in the plural.

The aforementioned stars all play British pensioners who, for their own reasons, are disappointed with what retirement has meant for them in England. They’re feeling outmoded in a fast-moving country, or undone by an economy that means their money isn’t stretching as far as it should. Or they’re simply lonely, residing minus a spouse in a community where they don’t know anyone else.

So they all fall for an Internet pitch, advertising a new retirement home for Brits in lovely Jaipur, India. The hotel promises old-school British manners – circa the age of the Raj – at a fraction of the price of living in England. And the weather is better.

They’re a mixed lot: Evelyn (Dench) is a widow whose husband left her with a pile of debt; Graham (Wilkinson) is a judge who suddenly sees the light at a friend’s retirement party and calls it quits himself; Doug and Jean (Nighy and Penelope Wilton) are a couple who invested everything in their daughter’s failed Internet start-up. Muriel (Smith) is a retired housekeeper who needs a hip replacement, which would take months to get in England but only a couple of weeks in India; Madge (Celia Imrie) is a better-off widow in search of a new man. And Norman (Ronald Pickup) is an aging roué, on the prowl for women.

They arrive to find that the hotel, an ancient, dusty place, isn’t quite finished with its renovation. But the proprietor, Sonny (Dev Patel), promises grand things – though the rest of his family would rather sell the aging property for the land value.

What follows is sort of the opposite of a coming-of-age story: It’s a new-beginnings tale, with most of these people finding something they thought they’d never have again, whether it’s love, companionship or a new way to employ long-dormant talents. It’s also, of course, a culture-clash tale, with these aging Brits plunged into the heart of a world as different from the English suburbs as you could find.

The script, by Ol Parker, distills and elaborates upon Moggach’s novel, jettisoning and condensing plotlines, adding stories and characters in ways that pull the viewer more deeply into the story.

But the characters are woven together skillfully, creating what ultimately feels like a familial unit, banded together in a strange new place, creating themselves anew at a point when they no longer thought it possible. There are a lot of characters – but each gets a full arc of development and winds up someplace they don’t expect.

The cast brings emotional depth to this tale, from Dench, as a woman both sad and fearful who discovers new purpose to her life, to Wilkinson, as a man who left a lover in India long ago and has come back to reconnect. Imrie and Pickup provide the randy humor, while Patel (and Tena Desae, as his would-be fiancé) bring fresh faces and young love. Then add in Maggie Smith as a cranky oldster with a few surprises up her sleeve; she’s a pure treat, managing to be broadly comic and touchingly bittersweet at the same time.

Though some may dismiss “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” as a simple cinematic confection, it offers more: emotional depth, terrific acting and the kind of enjoyment that too few movies even aspire to these days.

The plot, in a script Yakin wrote, pulls in strands of everything from cage fighting to the Russian mob. And then it sets Jason Statham loose in a world where he is the bowling ball and almost everyone else is a pin.

Let’s see if we can summarize: Statham plays Luke, first seen as a mixed-martial arts combatant who wins a match he’s supposed to throw. That pisses off the Russian mob, which had fixed the fight and had a lot of money riding on it. So they murder his wife and, instead of killing him, vow that they will kill anyone with whom Luke makes any sort of emotional connection.

Meanwhile, we also are tracking Mei (Catherine Chan), a sort of prepubescent human computer. She’s made the ward of a Chinese crime boss (James Hong), taken to the U.S. and employed as the records-keeper for his crime operation in New York’s Chinatown.

But she escapes and Luke (who is on the verge of suicide) rescues her. So it’s up to Luke to take on the Russian mob, the Chinese mob and, for good measure, a squad of corrupt New York cops. Oh yeah – and Luke is an ex-cop. Just in case this wasn’t silly enough already.

Logic? We don’t need no stinkin’ logic – not when Statham is around to bust out the mayhem at the blink of an eye. And honestly – there’s no one more dynamic or compelling when he gets physical than Statham. I’ve compared him to Steve McQueen in the past: cool, quiet, explosive. The comparison still stands.

And, to be sure, the action scenes – including close-quarters hand-to-hand on a New York subway – are pretty spectacular. Because, honestly, you don’t go to a movie like this for edification; you go for the thrills.

There are plenty of those in “Safe.” Leave your brain at the door and you’ll have a good time.