I often note how difficult it is to create a comedy that’s not only smart and funny but also charming and surprising. But first-time director Craig Zisk, a TV veteran, has done that with “The English Teacher,” which opens in limited release today (5/17/13) and is already available on VOD.

Like a witty update on Jane Austen, the script by Dan and Stacy Charlton details the life of a single woman, Linda Sinclair. As played by Julianne Moore with deliciously mousy energy, she’s a high school English teacher who, at 45, is a dedicated spinster (though we see her various abortive – and judgmental – attempts at dating).

Linda gets her satisfaction from the small pleasures in her life: opening young minds to the joys of literature, eating health-conscious meals for one while watching “A Room With a View” on DVD. But her life changes one night at an ATM when she pepper-sprays what she thinks is a mugger (despite the fact that she lives in cozy, tiny Kingston, Pa.).

The mugger turns out to be one of her former students, Jason (Michael Angarano), a promising writer who has come out of NYU with a finished play and no prospects for producing it. He’s ready to chuck writing altogether and go to law school. But Linda, for whom Jason’s talent is a shining moment in her teaching career, reads his play and decides she can’t let that happen.

So she shows his script to the high-school drama teacher, Carl (Nathan Lane), who falls for it as hard as she does. Or maybe it’s that he’s tired of directing “Our Town” and “The Importance of Being Earnest.” Jason’s play is dark and heavily symbolic, which disturbs the high school’s principal (Jessica Hecht) and her Number Two (Norbert Leo Butz). But Carl promises (falsely, just to keep things moving) that he will cut the play’s double-suicide ending.

Once production starts, things start to unravel. Linda finds herself embroiled in Jason’s relationship with his father (Greg Kinnear), who seems to be trying to control Jason’s life. She has a brief and unexpected assignation with Jason, then decides it’s inappropriate and calls a halt to it – only to find herself consumed with jealousy when he begins canoodling with an actress in the cast. Suddenly her world begins to unravel in ways she – and Jane Austen – never imagined.

Yet there’s nothing outrageous or unbelievable in the sequence of events that unfolds. The writers keep the focus on Linda and her circumscribed little existence. She has all the answers in the classroom and assumes the same thing about her life. But life isn’t that neat.

Dressed in neat but dowdy costumes, her face hidden behind a hideous pair of aviator glasses and some drastic bangs, Moore shows physical-comedy chops that are both admirable and quite funny. Most of all, she captures the sense of surprise and befuddlement this woman falls into as she goes deeper and deeper down this particular rabbit hole.

I’m a sucker for backstage stories that use the blend of ego and vulnerability of theater folk as fodder for humor. Lane couldn’t be more perfectly cast as the drama teacher; but this isn’t a full-on exhibition of theatrical flamboyance. Lane does capture the optimism and, perhaps, self-deception that keeps this man plugging away in the face of daunting obstacles.

The rest of the cast – including the underrated Angarano as the immature playwright and Kinnear as his (eventually) understandably snappish father, as well as Butz and Hecht in tasty roles – is terrific. They get their moments but also know how to support and provide points of conflict.

“The English Teacher” is a witty delight, a film about a woman who has been in denial about her own life for too long. It’s a small but very funny treat with a cast to die for.

Having broken through as a filmmaker with the intriguing and moving “The Freebie,” actress Katie Aselton suffers the sophomore slump with her second film as a director, “Black Rock.”

Written by her husband, Mark Duplass, “Black Rock” is meant to be a “Deliverance”-style thriller, a girls-vs.-boys tale set on a deserted island off the coast of Maine. The girls have boated out there for a weekend getaway, a chance to reconnect and sort old personal grievances.

They’re played by Aselton, Lake Bell and Kate Bosworth. Then they run into three men who are returned Iraq war veterans, also out for a little r’n’r. One of the women decides to hook up with one of the men – but when he gets too frisky, well, things go too far – and suddenly the men are hunting the women, who are just looking for a way off the island.

Oh, and did I mention that the men reveal themselves as having been dishonorably discharged for violence they perpetrated in Iraq?

That set-up seems perfunctory – and the action goes downhill from there. It feels amateurish, as though it was made up as they went along. Aselton has worked in the past from an outline rather than a script, and it’s hard to know just how scripted this film is. But it feels improvised in all the worst ways.

There’s not a lot of acting because it’s mostly about the action. Action is supposed to define character but, in this case, the characters are not fleshed out enough for us to care about any of them.

The women have their personal issues with each other, but that only feels like filler once the actual plot kicks in. The men are brutish and then mad and dangerous. The violence – because that’s what most of the action consists of – feels phony.

As does the entire film of “Black Rock,” which is both formulaic and as inert as the titular geological formation.

Anyway, Kim Ki-Duk’s “Pieta,” opening in limited release tomorrow (5/17/13), is as twisted and unexpected as much of the Korean cinema that has reached this shore. With its dazzlingly cynical story and intensely squalid setting, it’s a trip to the dark side – indeed, the darkest side.

Lee Jeong-jin plays Gang-Do, a loan shark’s debt collector who seems to prey on the most unfortunate of fringe workers in an industrial area of Seoul. He works as enforcer for a money man, who makes the loans under one condition: The borrower sign a disability-insurance policy, with the loan shark as beneficiary. Then, if the debtor fails to make a payment, Gang-Do comes and cripples them, collecting the insurance to settle the loan.

It’s a cruel and ruthless business but Gang-Do, an orphan who obviously has lived a brutal life, seemingly has no conscience. Or any sort of feelings at all – at least until a woman, Mi-Son (Jo Min-soo) shows up on his doorstep claiming to be his mother. She’s a sorrowful sort, chagrined at the embarrassment of an unwanted pregnancy, contrite about giving up the baby, eager to reestablish a relationship with Gang-Do.

Gang-Do, however, is unconvinced. Given his profession, he has an innate suspicion and seems positive that this is a scam of some sort. He puts her to the test – to an extreme test, to be sure – to get her to break character. When she doesn’t, he begins to soften, to believe that, in fact, he has found the mother he never knew.

In fact, it is a scam – but not one you would figure out. Instead, Kim casually reveals Mi-Son’s true intent only at the film’s devastating conclusion.

The film itself is bleakly insinuating, taking the viewer on a tour of urban decay that is startlingly stark. The blasted landscape of this film looks like some post-apocalyptic future, when Kim is merely shooting some of Seoul’s bleaker industrial neighborhoods.

Lee is an actor playing a remote character but there’s nothing remote about how he experiences this. Jo, by contrast, is a heart-on-sleeve actress playing a sorrowfully contrite mother, with a hidden agenda. She is alternately transparent and opaque in fascinating ways.

“Pieta” is disturbing stuff, a revenge drama that rarely pulls its punches, graphic without going to the violent extremes of some Korean films. It will haunt you.

That began to change when the “Star Trek: The Next Generation” movies kicked in; most of them were pretty good. But now, with J.J. Abrams at the helm of the rebooted prequels, all bets are off.

His “Star Trek,” which was a kind of origin story for the U.S.S. Enterprise and its crew, was a whee of a film when it was released in 2009: smart, funny, exciting – and just plain fun. The latter term – fun – too often is overlooked by critics as they dive seriously into the movies they write about. Indeed, I find a certain level of distrust among the more sober-sided of my brethren for anything that provides too much giddy pleasure, as if to say: How serious can it be if it’s fun?

But Abrams’ second outing with the franchise, “Star Trek Into Darkness,” is, if anything, even more entertaining than the first one. Even as it calls back to “Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan” (also the second film in the series), it charts new territory, utilizing old memes and new technology in a story that keeps unwrapping itself like a set of nesting dolls.

After a contrived opening sequence involving a nearly botched mission, Kirk and Spock find themselves called on the carpet, with Kirk (Chris Pine) demoted to executive officer to his mentor, Admiral Pike (Bruce Greenwood). But an act of terrorism in London – and then an attack on Star Fleet headquarters in San Francisco – leaves Kirk back in control of the Enterprise, with Spock (Zachary Quinto) as his second in command.

Their mission, assigned by Star Fleet commander Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller), is to track the terrorist, a man named John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch), a Star Fleet insider apparently gone rogue. He’s escaped to the planet of the Klingons – and that planet (that whole part of the galaxy, in fact) is off-limits, in order to stave off what is seen as a coming war with the Klingons.

But Marcus wants Kirk and the Enterprise to sneak into Klingon airspace, then find and terminate Harrison. Kirk accepts the mission, though he decides he will capture Harrison instead, and bring him back.

There are motives within motives, plots within plots in the script by Damon Lindelof (“Lost”) and the team of Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, writers of the first two gratingly bad “Transformer” films, who seem to save their best material for these outings. The dialogue has a witty crackle to it, as it manages to tell the story while both nodding to and poking fun at the original series.

Pine and Quinto have a wonderfully prickly chemistry as the passionate Kirk and the dispassionate Spock. There’s an underlying theme here – of the sacrifices we make for our friends and the meaning of friendship, as Kirk tries to school Spock in human traits, while Spock tries to impart a less headstrong approach to command. The rest of the crew – Karl Urban as the fiery Dr. McCoy (“Dammit, I’m a doctor, not a warp-drive engineer!”), John Cho as Sulu, Zoe Saldana as Uhura and Simon Pegg as Scotty – get the chance to contribute to the story, while also developing their characters.

There’s a mixture of pleasures to be had with these new “Star Trek” adventures. These are, by now, characters who have become ingrained in our popular culture but who, in the wrong hands, could simply be used to sell merchandise with low-level adventures. (Hello – “G.I. Joe”?) Instead, Abrams has injected this franchise with new life, using the existing lore to deepen and expand upon this fictional future. He honors the past but doesn’t pander to it, showing that it is possible to find new ways to tell old stories.

“Star Trek Into Darkness” is the first real blockbuster hit of the summer. With all the sequels, remakes and other demonstrations that imagination long ago died in Hollywood, this is an actual sign of hope for the future.

I’ve mostly been a fan of the films of Noah Baumbach but, with “Frances Ha,” he loses me.

Never a filmmaker for whom story seemed particularly important, Baumbach collaborated here with his star, Greta Gerwig, for what feels like an amorphous and fragmentary story of a delusional young woman who doesn’t seem to want to grow up. The visual and musical references are to the French New Wave, but while imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, it’s still just cribbing from someone else’s test paper, isn’t it?

Frances wants to be a modern dancer but can’t quite catch on with the company where she apprentices. She is a flop with guys, never seeming to meet the kind of men who get her. Her best friend, Sophie (Mickey Sumner), also drifts away from her, having decided to actually marry the vague boyfriend she apparently has kept at arm’s length for years.

Which leaves Frances …where? Adrift in Manhattan, much as Gerwig was in the dreadful “Lola Versus.” Or the dreadful “Arthur,” in which she tried (and failed) to channel Liza Minnelli. (Doesn’t she know that’s what female impersonators are for?) Or ..

Well, OK, so I thought Gerwig was palatable in Baumbach’s sourly compelling “Greenberg.” Beyond that, however, I’m not one of these critics who, in order to sublimate a crush on Gerwig, has proclaimed her an actual actress. Because she’s not much of one.

Nor, from the evidence here, is she much of a writer. Baumbach is, but his brisk, acerbic wit seems to have been diluted by the watery Gerwig, who seems to have no flavor whatsoever. Her performances are weak tea, in the strongest sense of the term.

So is “Frances Ha.” Give it a miss and check into Baumbach’s earlier films, which have an astringently pointed wit that this film lacks. Watching “Frances Ha” is like viewing the outtakes from a movie you don’t want to see.

Roth produced, co-wrote and stars in this film by Chilean filmmaker Nicolas Lopez, playing the appropriately named Gringo. He’s an American on vacation in Santiago with a friend he met as a foreign-exchange student, Ariel (Ariel Levy). They’re both under the influence of Ariel’s childhood friend, Pollo (Nicolas Martinez), an unshaven, balding, pudgy party animal with a rich daddy.

For some reason, Pollo is the group’s chick magnet, attracting women with his promises of outrageous VIP partying opportunities. The trio eventually connect with three women and head for Valparaiso, apparently even a better party town. Once there, they wind up in an underground nightclub – when a massive earthquake hits.

Their first impulse is to escape from the club itself, then to figure out what to do. But that’s complicated by the sudden imperatives of the disaster itself: One member of the party has lost a hand and is bleeding to death. And everyone around them is panicking. Suddenly, the principal characters become potential prey to accidents, falling chunks of debris and the increasingly lawless version of society that emerges in this crisis.

There’s a low level of tension as you wait for the inciting incident; it takes more than a half-hour for the earthquake to hit. Then Lopez and Roth cram all the bloodiest action into the last 60 minutes – and they do, vigorously.

Once the earth shakes (with subsequent aftershocks that rattle the buildings and sends more giant cement boulders tumbling), Roth and Lopez line up hazards like dominoes, tipping them one at a time toward the shrinking group of survivors. Meanwhile, there’s also the threat of an impending tsunami.

The violence is garish and explicit, running with blood like a horror movie, minus the elements of sadism that have informed Roth’s previous films. It’s graphic but rarely egregious, except in the sense that the filmmakers seem to derive a certain thrill from squishing likable people.

Compelling? I guess. Exciting? Less and less as the film goes on. You can only listen to so much screaming and crying before it stops having the desired effect (ratcheting up the viewer’s stress level) and simply becomes grating.

“Aftershock” is competently made and effective at making you squirm. That’s as much praise as I’m willing to dish out.

While critics often score indulgent filmmakers by referring to their efforts as “home movies,” Polley has turned that insult on its head. She takes her actual home movies and repurposes them as a documentary about the nature of how we tell the stories of our lives.

In doing so, she touches upon a common meme: that life is a movie and, while we think we’re each starring in our own production, we are also supporting or bit players in scores of other people’s personal tales as well. Then the question becomes: To whom do these stories belong?

In Polley’s case, it’s the story of her mother, the former Diane Buchan, who died when Polley was 11. Polley interviews her father, Michael, and her four siblings about her mother, apparently a woman for whom the word “vivacious” was invented.

A part-time casting director in Toronto and a would-be actress, Diane was a force of nature – funny, disorganized, energetic. Her death from cancer left a void in the lives of all who were close to her. But her absence – and Sarah’s growing-up – began to raise posthumous questions that eventually prodded Polley into re-examining her family roots.

“Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” Tolstoy wrote. Yet the Polley family’s story is filled with both laughter and tears. Polley understands this, as well as the invasive nature of training a camera on her siblings. They are all incredibly good sports – as well as acerbic and witty storytellers.

None are more so than her father, Michael, whose narration serves as the film’s throughline. Sitting behind a microphone in a recording studio, the British transplant to Canada tells his own story, as well as his family’s, with understatement and insight, even as his daughter stops him to ask for a different reading of specific lines – art invading life.

There is a mystery story at the heart of this film, one that I won’t spoil here but which, at the midpoint in the film, suddenly changes what the story is about. The mystery is solved quickly, but its ripples continue through the film. It also brings the film back to its premise about family stories and the fact that we don’t know they’re stories while we’re living them. Nor do we immediately realize or recognize the part we play in those stories.

Polley and cinematographer Iris Ng mix and match contemporary interviews with home movies of Polley’s family. They also layer in reenactments, using actors to play her parents and siblings in their younger days. Those scenes are shot with the same grainy Super-8 aesthetic as the home movies, so they are sometimes hard to tell apart from the actual home movies. Which is the real Diane and which is the actress?

Ahhh – that’s the question the whole movie is trying to answer. See this compelling film and you’ll be thinking about it long afterward.

If you ever imagine gruesome deaths befalling people who annoy you in the course of your day – people you may not even know but who instantly rub you the wrong way – well, this is the movie for you.

The patience comes in as you wait for director Ben Wheatley and the film’s writers, Steve Oram and Alice Lowe (who are also its stars), to establish their premise and then yank it in an unexpected direction. Once they do, the laughs fall quickly into line.

Initially, this seems like a dry, quiet comedy about a doofus named Chris (Oram), who is taking his relationship with a woman named Tina (Lowe) to the next level. Despite her mother’s misgivings – and her mother (Eileen Davis) has plenty of those – Tina sets off on a vacation trip with Chris in his prized caravan (a camper, to us Yanks).

Not just any vacation trip, however: Chris, who claims he’s collecting material for the novel he plans to write, has mapped out a minute-by-minute itinerary that takes them to some of the cheesiest tourist attractions in the British Isles, including a tramway museum and a pencil factory. Meanwhile, the sheer romance of the excursion, he hopes, will propel him and Tina to a previously unattained state of bliss.

One problem: Chris is a bit of a stick. He’s also got a temper which, once ignited, is hard to quell. But he’s not quite sure what to do about it when, at one of the attractions, he has a run-in with a litterbug, who ignores Chris’ rebuke when the guy drops a wrapper on the ground. Then Chris accidentally backs his camper over the offender – and when he and Tina drive away unscathed, it all becomes clear to him.

He realizes that there is, in fact, a way to deal with the horrible people in the world: You can kill them, if you pick your spots and you’re quick about it. Intriguingly, Tina encourages the behavior, enjoying the macho aspects of her man standing up for what’s right.

Quickly, however, they fall out over just what counts as an offense that qualifies for execution. Does it have to be someone who offends public welfare – like the litterbug? Or just people who annoy you personally? And gee – Tina finds that, after a bit, Chris is beginning to bug her, at least a little.

The film moves at its own measured pace, with low-key exchanges and deadpan encounters instead of the kind of hysterical antics a Hollywood version of this film would entail. It’s the low-energy version, with that reluctance and restraint of the Brits contrasted with the sudden explosions of anger and violence.

Oram is wonderfully unprepossessing, while Lowe has an affect that seems to waver between cheeriness and petulance. She’s the wallflower with big dreams and low expectations, who suddenly finds that she can change her life in surprising ways.

“Sightseers” is like the slow-cooking version of a comedy, yielding tasty results thanks to the craft and patience of the filmmakers.

But don’t believe the hate. “The Great Gatsby” is not a terrible film; indeed, it’s a surprisingly affecting one.

I’m no Luhrmann apologist. I’m one of those who thought “Moulin Rouge” was silly and overrated. As for his indigestible “Australia” from 2008, well, at least the continent itself survived.

Yet I found myself pulled into the emotional world of Luhrmann’s “Gatsby,” despite only a couple of really outstanding performances and an in-your-face phoniness to the imagery which the film wears as a badge of honor. In translating F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel about the 1920s, Luhrmann turns it into an indictment of conspicuous consumption and the erosion of the human spirit that inevitably results.

In spite of the trappings of 3D and a Jay-Z-infused soundtrack, Luhrmann does find the beating heart at the center of this overstuffed enterprise. It rests firmly in the person of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jay Gatsby, who single-handedly breathes life into a film that is nearly sunk by the glum Carey Mulligan and the lightweight Tobey Maguire.

The story – in case you never took high-school English – is about the attempt to reclaim lost love (and the past in which it existed). It is told by Nick Carraway (Maguire), recently returned from World War I and attempting to make a go of it in the financial world. He rents a small cottage on Long Island and finds that he lives next door to a fabulous mansion, home to extravagant parties.

But he’s not invited to any of those parties until Gatsby discovers that Nick is a cousin of Daisy Buchanan (Mulligan), who is married to the boorishly wealthy Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton) and lives across the bay from Nick (and Gatsby). Daisy, it turns out, is Gatsby’s great lost love, left behind to marry Tom when the penniless Gatsby went away to war. Now he’s back – and is convinced that, given enough time with Daisy, he can remind her of what they once had and lure her into leaving Tom.

In Luhrmann’s version, this is a story about the strange symbiosis between users and those who are used. Nick, for example, uses Gatsby to enter a world otherwise denied to him. He doesn’t care that the smooth, elegantly confident Gatsby wouldn’t give him a second look if he didn’t have something that Gatsby desperately wanted.

It’s also about living the high life as though it were the only one that existed. Gatsby is rich (though the source of his wealth is shadowy) – and that’s all that matters. Wealth seems to exempt both Gatsby and Buchanan from the rules of society, with society bowing and scraping to make sure they can. The rich are different from you and me.

They are the masters of this particular universe, and from the distance of time, we know where they are headed, even if Fitzgerald wrote this prior to the 1929 crash. The echoes of the run-up to the financial debacle of 2008 are obvious, with extravagance being the only form of taste seemingly allowed in this world.

But as firmly as Gatsby has constructed his persona as a wealthy man of influence, he still harbors insecurity about his personal truth. He is, in fact, a swindler with grandiose dreams, a poor boy who has reinvented himself by coloring outside the lines and bending rules that always seem more flexible for the rich. But he lives in fear of discovery and so that preternatural calm is easily cracked and, eventually, shattered.

DiCaprio plays Gatsby without swagger but with a strength and determination that is that much more poignant when it begins to erode. He captures the sense of a man desperately in love with an image from the past, trying to make this bit of his history into something more substantial than the wispy smoke of memory. When his plan begins to collapse, DiCaprio lets the desperation ooze out, like a sheen of flop sweat that seems to sour everything around it.

DiCaprio’s strength and command carry the movie even when he’s not onscreen, which is fortunate. It becomes clearer with each of his outings that Tobey Maguire is a likable but lightweight actor, unsuited for a role like this. He seems like a high-school kid whose feelings are all on the surface and just that superficial.

By contrast, Mulligan’s Daisy is as wilted a version of this role as you can imagine. She seems as empty as a Kardashian, so much so that it’s hard to imagine what Gatsby sees – or saw – in her. It’s a credit to DiCaprio that we buy this attraction, because Mulligan spends most of the movie in a daze – or perhaps a haze. It’s hard to tell.

Only Edgerton provides ballast to balance out DiCaprio. He’s brusque and canny as Buchanan, a charlatan who revels in his own lack of intellectual rigor. He’s got money on his side; what else does he need?

Luhrmann surrounds them with party scenes that would make Paris Hilton blush, so over-the-top and craven do they feel. The rap-heavy soundtrack seems absolutely right, the contemporary equivalent of the hot jazz of the Roaring 20s in which the film is set. It’s an anachronism and yet a smart one, creating resonance between past and present and amplifying the myopia that glossed over the warning signs and focused on the glitz and glamour.

Luhrmann’s visuals do hold the eye, blending real and computer-generated images in ways that seem deliberately collage-like. It’s not seamless, nor is it meant to be. (The 3D, meanwhile, may make it all feel more immersive but, as always, is wholly unnecessary.)

“The Great Gatsby” isn’t a great film but it is an affecting one, thanks to the depth and breadth of Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance. His Gatsby is still an untrustworthy weasel with delusions of grandeur and a willingness to do almost anything to get what he wants – but his collapse, when that ruthlessness proves his undoing, is that much more moving because of the heft DiCaprio brings to the role. See it for DiCaprio and you won’t be sorry.

Since then, I’ve decided that fashion is both silly and pointless. Fashion Week? I wouldn’t get within a mile of it – and the photos I see make me think that Hans Christian Andersen would be pocketing crazy cash from the annual parade of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” at those self-important tents in Bryant Park or behind Lincoln Center.

So I’m obviously not the target demographic for Matthew Miele’s documentary, “Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s.” Still, I’ve watched documentaries about topics in which I had no interest – including one about the guy who won the first season of “Project Runway” – and if the movie is well-enough made, I’ll hang in there.

But “Bergdorf’s” isn’t that movie. Instead, it’s like a vanity project for – well, who, exactly? All of the people who shopped at Bergdorf-Goodman in the store’s heyday, before it was sold to Neiman-Marcus? That’s hard to say – but it certainly challenged me to keep my eyes open, even for its short running time.

Aside from proclaiming its preeminence as “the” place to have your clothes shown if you’re a designer, and its famously chummy treatment of its customers, well, what do we learn from this film? That everyone who shopped there thought it was just fabulous? I’ll have to take their word for it, I guess, because I’ve never actually set foot in the place.

Nor am I likely to. I could barely sit through the whole film; I can’t imagine wandering the aisles of this puffed-up emporium.

I’d rather watch a movie about Target. At least the talking heads might not seem so self-satisfied and convinced of their own importance, simply because of their relationship to this particular store.

Even if you’re a longtime customer, I have to assume this thin hagiography would leave you dissatisfied. “Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s”? As the saying goes, I wouldn’t walk across the street to do so.