Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
**
Installment 3 in Gore Verbinski’s swashbuckling, box-office-pillaging franchise doesn’t run aground so much as toss you about on a sea of action gestures followed by the dead calm of flat dialogue. The movie picks up where “Dead Man’s Chest” unsatisfyingly ended: Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) is going batty in the pirate purgatory of Davy Jones’ Locker. Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) set out to save him. Those who love being buffeted by impressive special effects, their narrative compass spinning wildly, will get their fill with “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.” For the rest, the overloaded sequel exhausts without ever satisfying. Cluttered and clattering, busy with jokes that never bob to the surface of funny, it puts the “oy!” in ships ahoy. PG-13; 2 hours, 48 minutes.
Superbad
***
OK, a few folks peeled out of a preview screening of “Superbad,” director Greg Mottola and producer Judd Apatow’s juvenile celebration of teen-guy friendship and humming hormones. Maybe they split because the protagonists have more words for sex acts and bodily fluids than the Inuit have for snow. But if you can accept that any comedy branded with the “From the creators of ‘The 40-Year-Old Virgin’ and ‘Knocked Up’ ” will shove the envelope, then there’s bawdy fun to be had in the story of high school best friends Evan (Michael Cera) and Seth (Jonah Hill). R; 1 hour, 30 minutes.
Arctic Tale
***
This is not a documentary. Instead the filmmakers have dubbed their endeavor “nature-fiction,” in which they utilize storytelling arcs, facts and real (not real-time) images from the wild. The Arctic’s warming climes force Sela’s herd and Nanu’s family to make different survival choices than their kind had in years and decades past. Their responses will bring two species not known to cross paths into each other’s sphere. Sela’s and Nanu’s tales are a fusion. So, too, is the movie, which mixes different views of our relationship to animals, nature, and, of course, one another. When a familiar voice in “Arctic Tale” takes care not to give a bear cub a name, we know something untoward is going to happen on that vulnerable expanse of northern ice. So trust your inner “uh-oh” and prepare your wee ones for some upset. G; 1 hour, 24 minutes.
Lisa Kennedy.
