Movie Reviews: Cheri, My Sister's Keeper, The Stoning of Soraya M.

THE STONING OF SORAYA M. For those ambivalent about whether stoning women to death is a cruel punishment, here’s The Stoning of Soraya M., a dutifully plodding if watchable dramatization of a real, particularly appalling application of sharia law in small-town Iran. Soraya (Mozhan Marnò) refuses to divorce abusive husband Ali (Navid Negahban), because he won’t leave her enough money to feed her children, so he teams up with their village’s mullah to start a rumor that she’s committing adultery, punishable by death. Events take their inevitable course, with Soraya’s BFF (played by Shohreh Aghdashloo) narrating, and Soraya gets to live out the title in a bloody and prolonged sequence reminiscent of The Passion of the Christ — which is appropriate, since Jim Caviezel pops up here, speaking creditable Farsi as the journalist who blows the whole thing up. Director Cyrus Nowrasteh gives the proceedings more flair than is usual for the explicitly didactic: If his ideas (the camera rocketing on the stones thrown at Soroya, as if they were Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves’ arrows all over again) are bad, at least he’s trying. But this is basically self-congratulatory fare for people who feel more “politically conscious” when reminded that women in the Islamic world can have it rough. Right now, you’re better off just watching the news. (Music Hall; Monica 4-Plex; Playhouse 7; Town Center 5) (Vadim Rizov)

UNDER OUR SKIN Like most activist documentaries, Under Our Skin isn’t content to merely make its case and get out of the room. It has to convince us we’re looking at The Greatest Threat to Civilization of Our Time. Lyme disease, we’re told, is the next AIDS, while ominous shadows darken maps of the globe. All that aside, Andy Abrahams Wilson builds a decent, if stylistically dull, case that Lyme disease is far deadlier and more neurologically debilitating than most doctors want to admit, and that the medical boards that should be researching cures and saving people are colluding with insurance companies to deny treatment. (Doctors who treat Lyme disease can be called in front of their state medical boards; complaints are filed not by patients but HMOs angry about paying up.) Wilson’s cross section of victims are willing to look wretched and exposed on camera to hammer their point home. In synopsizing what it’s like to have the disease, Wilson builds a portrait of something reminiscent of Safe, only scarier: symptoms that may or may not exist, denied by those supposed to treat them, and used by insurance companies to batter doctors. Bring on the public health care. (Music Hall) (Vadim Rizov)

YEAR ONE Unbearably painful from shrugging start to outtakes-laden finish, Harold Ramis’ half-assed, harebrained return to writing and directing makes Mel Brooks’ equally muddled, soporific History of the World, Part 1 look downright majestic by comparison — and comparisons are inevitable. Sixteen long years after Groundhog Day, perhaps the greatest American comedy of the 1990s, this is instead the Harold Ramis responsible for Club Paradise — the unfocused and unhinged sketch comedian for whom no laugh’s too cheap, as evidenced by scenes involving the eating of shit, the tossing of testicles and the streaming of urine all over Michael Cera’s face. Released under the Judd Apatow banner, Year One is a hollow, cynical exercise in juvenilia, and the cast of thousands looks like it’d rather be anywhere other than the desert, pretending to be biblical outcasts. Jack Black, as hunter Zed, has never worked so hard for so little. Cera, as gatherer Oh, can’t even obscure his embarrassment behind the strands of a cheap and ill-fitting wig. Not one of the comedy all-stars that Ramis enlisted — among them Paul Rudd, whose cameo as Abel lasts all of 30 seconds and still runs too long; David Cross as bro-killin’ Cain; and Hank Azaria as son-sacrificing Abraham — can wring a single laugh from a screenplay that pauses for a moment to contemplate the existence of God between squeezing out sharts. Year One serves as irrefutable proof that He does not exist. (Citywide) (Robert Wilonsky)