At the movies: Now showing

‘Beverly Hills Chihuahua’

Showtimes: 2, 4:30, 6:45 and 9 p.m. Friday through Thursday at Skyline Cinema in Dillon.

A pampered Beverly Hills Chihuahua named Chloe finds herself accidentally lost in the mean streets of Mexico without a day spa or Rodeo Drive boutique anywhere in sight. Now alone for the first time in her spoiled life, she must rely on some unexpected new friends — including a street-hardened German Shepherd named Delgado and an amorous pup named Papi — to lend her a paw and help her to find her inner strength on their incredible journey back home. Starring Drew Barrymore, George Lopez, Andy Garcia, Piper Perabo and Manolo Cardona. PG for some mild thematic elements. 85 min.

‘Appaloosa’

Showtimes: 2:15, 4:45, 7:15 and 9:45 p.m. Friday through Thursday at Skyline Cinema in Dillon.

When two gunmen, Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch, arrive in Appaloosa, they find a small, dusty and lawless town suffering at the hands of renegade rancher Randall Bragg. Bragg has not only taken supplies, horses, and women for his own, but also has left the city marshal and a deputy for dead. In Bragg they find an unusually wily adversary who raises the stakes by playing with emotions. It is now up to Cole and Hitch to stand against the actions of the renegade rancher, which have already taken their toll on the town. Starring Ed Harris, Robert Knott, Viggo Mortensen, Renee Zellweger and Timothy V. Murphy. R for some violence and language. 108 min.

‘Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist’

Showtimes: 2:30, 5, 7 and 9:15 p.m. Friday through Thursday at Skyline Cinema in Dillon.

Nick frequents New York’s indie rock scene nursing a broken heart and playing the bass with his queercore band, The Jerk Offs. Norah is questioning pretty much all of her assumptions about the world. Though they have nothing in common except for their taste in music, their chance encounter leads to an all-night quest to find a legendary band’s secret show and ends up becoming a first date that could change both their lives. Starring Michael Cera, Kat Dennings, Ari Graynor, Rafi Gavron and Alexis Dziena. PG-13 for mature thematic material including teen drinking, sexuality, language and crude behavior. 90 min.

‘How to Lose Friends and Alienate People’

Showtimes: 2:15, 4:35, 7:10 and 9:30 p.m. Friday through Thursday at Skyline Cinema in Dillon.

Sidney Young, a smalltime, bumbling, British celebrity journalist, is hired by an upscale magazine in New York City. In spectacular fashion Sidney enters high society and burns bridges with bosses, peers and superstars. After disrupting one black-tie event by allowing a wild pig to run rampant, Sidney catches the attention of Clayton Harding, editor of Sharp, and accepts a job with the magazine in New York City. Clayton warns Sidney that he’d better impress and charm everyone he can, if he wants to succeed. Instead, Sidney instantly insults and annoys fellow writer Alison Olsen. He dares to target the star clients of power publicist Eleanor Johnson. He upsets his direct boss Lawrence Maddox and tries to make amends by hiring a stripper to dance for Lawrence during a staff meeting. His saving graces: a rising, sexy starlet develops an odd affection for him. Alison ‘s friendship with him might be the only thing saving Sidney from torpedoing his career. Starring Kirsten Dunst, Simon Pegg, Jeff Bridges, Danny Huston and Gillian Anderson. R for language, some graphic nudity and brief drug material. 109 min.

‘Igor’

Showtimes: 2, 4 and 6 p.m. Friday through Thursday at Skyline Cinema in Dillon.

A hunchbacked lab assistant has big dreams of becoming a mad scientist and winning the first place prize at the annual Evil Science Fair. Starring John Cusack, Steve Buscemi, John Cleese, Jay Leno and Jennifer Coolidge. PG for some thematic elements, scary images, action and mild language. 86 min.

‘Blindness’

Showtimes: 2:20, 4:50, 7:20 and 9:45 p.m. Friday through Thursday at Skyline Cinema in Dillon.

The blind literally lead the blind — to hell and back — in this pretentious, preposterous allegory. An unnamed disease afflicts the unnamed citizens of an unnamed city, all of which is too precious. The victims are left sightless but they see white instead of black, a sensation one character compares to “swimming in milk.” Once they’re rounded up by soldiers and quarantined in a grubby, abandoned mental asylum, their worst primal instincts emerge: urination and defecation in the hallways, theft, assaults and, ultimately, rape. The physical and moral deterioration calls to mind the situation in the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina, but director Fernando Meirelles, in adapting a novel by Nobel Prize-winner Jose Saramago, is clearly trying to suggest that society similarly could collapse anywhere, anytime. Rather than being thought-provoking, though, the whole dreary exercise feels like an overlong beat-down — as if we’re being scolded just for showing up. Even Julianne Moore can’t liven up this slog, despite a typically strong performance as the one person who can still see (which is never explained, probably because it’s an arbitrary plot device). She pretends she’s blind, though, to stay with her husband (Mark Ruffalo), who is an eye doctor. Other victims include a little boy, a hooker with a heart of gold (Alice Braga) and an elderly man (Danny Glover), all of whom were the doctor’s patients, and a bartender (Gael Garcia Bernal) at the hotel where the prostitute worked. R for violence including sexual assaults, language and sexuality/nudity. 121 min.

‘Nights in Rodanthe’

Showtimes: 2:10, 4:50, 7:10 and 9:15 p.m. Friday through Thursday at Skyline Cinema in Dillon.

The last time we saw Richard Gere and Diane Lane, in the 2002 guilty pleasure “Unfaithful,” they were running off together after covering up Gere’s murder of Lane’s hot, young, Parisian lover. Ah, those were the good old days. Their latest pairing, “Nights in Rodanthe,” finds them falling for each other under circumstances that are even more contrived. Gere plays a stoic surgeon on a mission to right a wrong; Lane plays an earthy mother of two who has separated from her cheating husband. Gere is the only guest at a remote coastal North Carolina inn; Lane just happens to be overseeing the place — as a favor to a friend — the weekend Gere is staying there. And wouldn’t you know it? There’s a hurricane on the way. Surely you see where this is going, and because “Nights in Rodanthe” is based on the novel of the same name by Nicholas Sparks (“The Notebook,” “A Walk to Remember”), you know it can’t end happily. We wouldn’t dream of giving anything away, but bring tissues if you’re the sentimental type. You’d pretty much have to be sentimental to tolerate such schlock, or at least be willing to check your cynicism at the multiplex door. Gere and Lane make the first half of director George C. Wolfe’s movie surprisingly tolerable, simply because they have such an obvious comfort with each other (they also co-starred in “The Cotton Club” back in 1984). Both have been around long enough to find some nuance within the potentially treacly script from Ann Peacock and John Romano. But then the storm comes — and it washes away all that good will. PG-13 for some sensuality. 96 min. Two stars out of four.

‘Burn After Reading’

Showtimes: 8 and 10 p.m. Friday through Thursday at Skyline Cinema in Dillon.

It’s a total goof, of course. A lark, a one-off. The latest offering in the eclectic filmography of Joel and Ethan Coen is not to be taken seriously — one look at Brad Pitt’s blond-streaked pouf of hair tells you that — and it’s certainly not to be compared to their starkly violent Academy Award-winner from last year, “No Country for Old Men.” This time, they take their eye for regional detail to Washington for what looks like an espionage thriller, except that the spying uncovers no significant information, everyone is clueless and no one’s ever truly in danger. R for pervasive language, some sexual content and violence. 96 min.

‘Eagle Eye’

Showtimes: 2, 4:30, 7 and 9:30 p.m. Friday through Thursday at Skyline Cinema in Dillon.

HAL goes mobile in this shrill, frantic thriller about technology taking over — and not in good ways, like making coffee for you before you even realize you want it. No, this supercomputer has a political agenda, which theoretically would seem timely with the presidential election approaching. Instead, this half-baked indictment of the Patriot Act and the war on terror feels a few years too late — maybe because that’s when executive producer Steven Spielberg originally came up with the nugget of an idea that “Eagle Eye” would become. Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan co-star as strangers who are forced to work together when their lives are commandeered by an oddly calm but insistent female voice. She’s everywhere — on their cell phones, on other people’s cell phones. She can manipulate stop lights and air traffic, monitor every surveillance camera on the planet and send messages through electronic billboards. She makes the duo steal cars, rob an armored truck, even stow away aboard a military plane. But why is she doing this? What does she want? That’s the overly simplistic mystery to be uncovered in the film from D.J. Caruso, reuniting with LaBeouf, whom he directed in the 2007 surprise hit “Disturbia.” He’s put together a couple of heart-pounding sequences here, but most of the action is edited in headache-inducing fashion. LaBeouf and Monaghan, ordinarily likable and versatile, can’t elevate this B-material; members of the strong supporting cast, including Billy Bob Thornton and Michael Chiklis, are equally slumming it. PG-13 for intense sequences of action and violence and for language. 119 min.