EIGHT MOUNTAINS openingnight

new movies this week

ASTEROID CITY

★★★ 1/2

PG-13, 104 minutes. Starts tonight at Mystic, Waterford, Lisbon, Madison, United Westerly.

Wes Anderson gets back to the heart of things in “Asteroid City,” a film about grief, performance, storytelling, the cosmos and, well, everything. Or, as one character, a playwright played by Edward Norton, says when asked what his work is about: “It’s about infinity and I don’t know what else.” Meticulously designed and choreographed, with a beautiful, starry cast reading his and Roman Coppola’s droll words, “Asteroid City” is very, very Wes Anderson. Aren’t they all? But “Asteroid City” also represents a return to form (or at least the form most people preferred) after his past two films, “Isle of Dogs” and “The French Dispatch,” divided even his disciples. They worried, among other things, if style and form had finally usurped his storytelling. Regardless of whether you thought they were fun or painful or some dreadful in between, there was a palpable detachment to both films. Authentic emotion, when there at all, was strained. In this way, “Asteroid City” seems like a response to all of that — an earnest and self-conscious case for making art, putting on the play, telling the story, acting the part even if you (and your audience) aren’t entirely sure what you’re saying. It is wrapped in a labored and stylized conceit — a play within a play that’s being broadcast on a television network. And because it’s a play, the American midcentury Desert West can look as set designed as Anderson wants. He didn’t need a justification. Nonetheless, it’s a sly deflection — as is the idea that no one is really sure what the point is, embodied by Jason Schwartzman playing an actor playing a recently widowed war photographer, Augie Steenbeck, who has traveled to the desert with his brainiac son, Woodrow (Jake Ryan) and 6-year-old triplets (truly standouts). They come to Asteroid City, population 87, for the Junior Stargazer Convention, a government organized science competition in which genius kids show off inventions, which the government then owns. In the distance, atomic bombs are being tested, too. This Stargazer convention allows for an assemblage of a quirky ensemble with government types (Fisher Stevens), the brainiac kids (Grace Edwards, Sophia Lillis, Ethan Josh Lee, Aristou Meehan), their parents (Scarlett Johansson, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Steve Park), and the head scientist (Tilda Swinton).

— Lindsey Bahr, Associated Press

★★★★

No rating, 147 minutes. Starts Friday at United Westerly.

At the beginning of “The Eight Mountains,” the stunningly beautiful and deeply affecting adaptation of the award-winning novel by Paolo Cognetti, our narrator, Pietro (Luca Marinelli) describes a unique kind of friendship, one that has offered him “a place to put down roots.” Roots and rootlessness are at the core of this simple, yet complex tale, one that drives at the very heart of existence, our connection to others and to the world around us. This French/Italian/Belgian co-production is written and directed by the Belgian husband and wife filmmaking team of Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch, who delicately balance the earthiness, effervescence and emotional highs and lows of this story. “The Eight Mountains” is the story of a childhood friendship of convenience that evolves into a lifelong relationship between a pair of platonic soul mates, grown in the rocky soil of the Italian Alps. Eleven-year-old Bruno (Cristiano Sassella) is “the last child in the village” of Grana, where young Pietro (Lupo Barbiero) is spending the summer with his parents, away from the noise and pollution of Turin. Where Bruno is physical, embodied, confident, Pietro is cerebral, a bookworm and an over-thinker. But they take to the land together, communicating in the way that boys do: running, jumping, wrestling, splashing. As they grow up, the differences in their circumstances sharpen.

— Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service

NO HARD FEELINGS

R, 103 minutes. Starts tonight at Waterford, Westbrook, Lisbon.

Jennifer Lawrence gets to show off her comedic chops in this R-rated sex comedy directed by Gene Stupnitsky, a writer on “The Office.” The Oscar winner plays a struggling Uber driver who gets paid to date the awkward son of a wealthy family.