This week’s movie releases

Bill Murray is excellently cast as a grouchy layabout employed to watch over the 12-year-old son of hardworking divorcée Melissa McCarthy in comedy St. Vincent. Much to her horror, Murray’s hard-drinking, gambling-addicted Vincent takes young Oliver (Jaeden Lieberher) round his favorite bars and betting haunts, imparting, and receiving, a few life lessons along the way. The debut from writer-director Theodore Melfi, it also stars Naomi Watts and Chris O’Dowd.

After stepping into the boots of baseball legend Jackie Robinson in 42, Chadwick Boseman dons the dancing shoes of funk master James Brown in Mick Jagger-produced biopic Get on Up. Skipping around in time, The Help director Tate Taylor’s movie spans the music star’s childhood in Georgia, rise to fame, heyday and later years, with Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and Dan Aykroyd lending weighty support.

Directed by Ingmar Bergman muse Liv Ullman, Miss Julie is the third big-screen adaptation of Swedish dramatist August Strindberg’s famous play – after a 1951 Swedish version and British director Mike Figgis’s 1999 movie. Jessica Chastain stars as the titular young aristo trying to seduce valet Colin Farrell.

From Up in the Air director Jason Reitman, ensemble comedy-drama Men, Women and Children brings together Rosemarie DeWitt, Jennifer Garner, Judy Greer, Dean Norris and Adam Sandler in a story that takes a long, hard look at how online communication is affecting the relationships between parents and their teenage children.

Taking a very different take on troubled teens, German director Dietrich Brüggemann’s rigorously constructed Stations of the Cross follows 14-year-old Maria (Lea van Acken) as she works to conform to the strict spiritual standards imposed on her by her ultra-Catholic parents. The drama is divided into 14 one-shot scenes, each named after one of the Stations of the Cross depicting Christ’s journey to Calvary.

Building back up

Spanish comedy Los fenómenos stars Lola Dueñas as a new mom who, after being abandoned by partner Luis Tosar in Almería, returns to her native Galicia and finds work in the male-dominated world of construction.

Directed by Argentinean auteur Lisandro Alonso, Jauja features Viggo Mortensen as a Danish military captain in remote 1880s Patagonia who sets out in search of his daughter after she runs off with a soldier.