“An Education” — Sixteen-year-old Jenny learns the ways of the world in this coming-of-age drama, but there’s a revelation in store for us, as well. We get the pleasure of meeting an exciting young actress who surely deserves to become a star. Carey Mulligan is radiant as a suburban teenager in 1961 London who’s curious and clever beyond her years but still rather innocent and impressionable. Although she’s a diligent student and dutiful daughter, she sits alone in her bedroom at night longing to be grown-up enough to live in Paris on her own, basking in the culture. Mulligan maintains a beautifully believable balance of these contrasting forces, even as Jenny gets drawn from the sedate and boring life she knows into a glamorous new one. Her guide is David (Peter Sarsgaard doing a solid British accent), a thirtysomething man with whom she experiences an immediate connection. He whisks her away in his flashy sports car to nights filled with concerts and late-night suppers and, eventually, weekend trips out of town. Even her protective parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour), who are initially skeptical of David’s intentions because of the age difference, fall for his urbane charms. Director Lone Scherfig and writer Nick Hornby find just the right touch here with some tricky material, based on the memoir by Lynn Barber. The challenge is: how to make David, and this ill-advised relationship, seem thrilling rather than creepy? Through Jenny’s eyes, we get caught up in the excitement, too, but as bystanders we know it can’t last — even before David’s dark side starts to surface — and that’s what gives “An Education” an inescapable tension. PG-13 for mature thematic material involving sexual content, and for smoking. 95 min. — Christy Lemire

“The Box” — Cameron Diaz and James Marsden have a moral dilemma: Press a button on a mysterious container and they’ll get $1 million, but someone they don’t know will die. What button, on whose box, did writer-director Richard Kelly push to get the money to make this awful, preposterous thriller? Diaz and Marsden play a couple offered the box, button and deal described above by a grotesquely disfigured stranger (Frank Langella). Adapting this mess from a Richard Matheson story that was the basis of a 1980s “Twilight Zone” episode, Kelly roams ponderously beyond that tale’s snappy ending, into an installment of “The X-Files” in its post-Mulder death throes, when the show turned to rot. Kelly piles on government conspiracies, abductions, mobs of automatons controlled by forces beyond human comprehension. The hammy dialogue and hammier performances eventually start to provoke laughs as the movie shambles toward its overdue demise. PG-13 for thematic elements, some violence and disturbing images. Running time: 115 minutes. — David Germain

“A Christmas Carol” — The time, not just the season, is ripe for a new version of “A Christmas Carol.” When Charles Dickens wrote his classic story, it was a cautionary tale to greedy capitalists of the 19th century (Scrooge recalls his deceased partner, Jacob Marley, as “a good man of business.”). Dickens’ story is about as sturdy a one as we’ve got — it would be nearly impossible to mar what might be the finest ghost story this side of “Hamlet.” Unfortunately, our 2009 version is defined only by its technology. Animated in 3-D, Disney’s “A Christmas Carol,” directed by Robert Zemeckis, suffocates from its design. Despite (or because of) Zemeckis’ approach to using performance-capture animation, the film comes off oddly inanimate. Jim Carrey, playing not just Scrooge but the three ghosts who visit him, clearly has the zest and range for the parts. But he — like the rest of the cast, including Gary Oldman, Colin Firth and Cary Elwes — struggles to break through the film’s excessive wizardry. PG for scary sequences and images. Running time: 95 min. — Jake Coyle

“The Fourth Kind” — This flat-lining, alien-abduction thriller offers a close encounter that buries an interesting idea under a barrage of gimmicky, carnival-like hokum. The movie’s unwieldy mix of degraded pseudo-documentary footage and “Unsolved Mystery”-style re-enactments is as unconvincing as it is distancing. In a sleep-inducing performance, Milla Jovovich plays an actress re-enacting an Alaska psychologist’s research into patients’ reports of strange phenomena. Writer-director Olatunde Osunsanmi presents these events in split-screen fashion with the “real,” raw videotaped footage of patients’ recollections playing side-by-side with the actors’ reconstructions. Osunsanmi invests so much time and energy trying to convince the audience of the events’ veracity that he forgets to create even a rudimentary sense of tension. His split-screen divide between “reality” and “re-enactment” is almost as distracting as composer Atli Orvarsson’s boom-boom score. PG-13 for violent/disturbing images, some terror, thematic elements and brief sexuality. 98 min. — Glenn Whipp

“The Men Who Stare at Goats” — A fun tone is undermined by disjointed storytelling in George Clooney and producing partner Grant Heslov’s romp based on Jon Ronson’s amusing nonfiction book about the U.S. military’s research into psychic warfare and espionage. First-time director Heslov crafts a hit-and-miss fictional narrative ornamented with some of the brighter anecdotes Ronson uncovered about efforts to create warrior monks who try to walk through walls or glare animals to death. Clooney plays a prodigy of this New Age militarism, with Jeff Bridges as his Dude-like mentor, Kevin Spacey as a psychic rival and Ewan McGregor as a reporter uncovering the story amid the war in Iraq. The movie opens with the promise of a Catch-22 or Strangelove-style satire, but while it maintains much of the book’s drolly incredulous spirit, the dots of absurdity just don’t connect that well. With “Star Wars” vet McGregor on hand, the repeated Jedi knight references are jarring. R for language, some drug content and brief nudity. 93 min. — David Germain