This week’s movie releases

He’s foiled attacks on skyscrapers, airports, entire cities and the US computer network. Now the fates have conspired and the stars have aligned to once again place John McClane (Bruce Willis) in the wrong place at the wrong time in A Good Day to Die Hard. Expanding ever outwards from the office-block claustrophobia that made the original so compelling, the fourth Die Hard sequel finds the former cop neutralizing a terrorist threat on a global scale. Heading out to Russia to help wayward son Jai Courtney out of some bother with the local law, he soon discovers McClane Jr is a genuine chip off the old block, working as a CIA agent trying to stop the theft of nuclear weapons. Cue a father-son team-up to bring down the bad guys. Irish filmmaker John Moore (Max Payne) directs.

Two more tough cookies pair up for Broken City, the first solo feature from Allen Hughes, one half of directing duo the Hughes brothers (Menace II Society, The Book of Eli). Mark Wahlberg plays a disgraced NYPD cop-turned-private detective who’s hired by city mayor Russell Crowe to investigate the infidelity of his wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones). But when her suspected lover winds up dead, he realizes he is a pawn in a much larger and dirtier game than he could have imagined.

Staying in the Big Apple, 2 Days in New York is French actress-writer-director Julie Delpy’s equally amusing follow-up to her very funny 2 Days in Paris. Now split from the neurotic Jack of the French-set first movie, Gallic photographer Delpy is living in NYC with their son and new boyfriend, Mingus (Chris Rock), a radio disc jockey, and his daughter from a previous relationship. All very cozy, until her father (again Delpy’s real-life dad Albert Delpy), sister and sister’s sleazy boyfriend come to stay.

Monet matters

With a script written by the Coen brothers, Gambit is a remake of the 1966 Michael Caine and Shirley MacClaine art heist comedy starring Colin Firth as a curator trying to trick his former boss into buying a fake Monet and Cameron Diaz as the rodeo queen helping him. Alan Rickman, Tom Courtenay, Stanley Tucci and Cloris Leachman lend support.

A Euro-pudding kids animation made with Spanish, Italian and French input, Blackie & Kanuto is the story of a sheep obsessed with traveling to the moon and a sheepdog obsessed with the sheep. Together they embark on an incredible journey that brings them into contact with singing cows, fashionista wolves and rocket scientist dogs.