Smart People is about what can happen when the mind is divorced from the heart and spirit. It is also a droll peek into the dreary environs of academia, where the pursuit of knowledge has stumbled onto the treadmill of careerism. It stars Dennis Quaid as Lawrence Wetherhold, an English professor trudging grimly across Carnegie Mellon, face twisted and frozen into an expression of contempt for his colleagues and students. His colleagues, exactly the sort of twits infesting many universities, are probably even poorer souls than Lawrence.

Mainland China has been in denial over Tibet ever since Mao’s army invaded the mountainous theocracy. Communist China consistently denied that Tibet was a nation with a distinct history. China denied the aspirations of Tibetans after forcing them to endure mass murder, cultural genocide and the colonization of their country by Chinese immigrants. China denies all these things, but reality keeps poking the Beijing regime in the eye. The recent rioting and worldwide protests are not the prelude Mainland China had scripted for the Beijing Olympic Games. With the Chinese . . .

As the unhappy husband in Married Life, Harry (Chris Cooper) is banality curdled at the edges. He’s a successful executive in 1940s New York whose life begins to unbutton when he falls out of love with his wife of many years, Pat (Patricia Clarkson), and into a fine, furtive romance with a younger woman, Kay (Rachel McAdams). His best friend, the roguish British expatriate Richard (Pierce Brosnan), serves as the movie’s narrator and not disinterested observer. A well-groomed swinger, Richard begins to feel that a beautiful woman like Kay is wasting herself in the arms of the dowdy Harry.

Ben is a working-class Boston kid bicycling to school in an ivy-covered world of privilege. He gained entrance to MIT for pre-med and wants nothing less than Harvard Medical School. Harvard was his dream from childhood. He has the grades and the recommendations but not, as the admissions counselor puts it, “the dazzle” for a full scholarship. With his $8an-hour assistant manager’s job at a posh men’s clothing shop, he might be able to save enough for tuition by the middle of his next life on Earth.

After opening scenes around the kitchen tables of their homes, the two very different teenage girls at the heart of Tracks finally meet in the girls-room mirror at school. They don’t like what they see at first, but find each other again through the Internet and become fast friends. Catherine (Amanda J. Hull) comes from a solid though not entirely perfect upper-middle-class family where mom takes an interest and sets expectations. Claire (Rebecca Rose Phillips) is lowermiddle-class; her mom snarls at her from across the room. When Claire is called . . .

Night has fallen on a remote, deserted highway. A young married couple drives sleepily through the darkness toward their honeymoon cabin near Japan’s Mount Fuji when a gaunt, staring woman wanders into the road and is struck by their speeding car. When the couple regains consciousness after doing a figure-eight down a ravine, they can’t find the woman’s body. But the Body will find them, turning up especially in photographs . . .

With his grim visage, tight lips and square jaw, Salomon (“Sally”) Sorowitsch resembles at times a cartoon crook from Dick Tracy. Sally lives up to his appearance. No petty criminal, but rather an artist, he was Berlin’s “King of Counterfeiters,” replicating paper currency, identification cards, passports and “Aryan documentation” for Jews—all for a fee. According to The Counterfeiters, which is based on a true story of a Nazi plan to bring down the economies of their wartime enemies, Sally continued his operation for three years into the Third Reich. Finally arrested by Herzog, a jocular detective with the Berlin fraud squad, Sally’s Jewish identity could no longer be concealed in the dark corners of the underworld.

Naomi Watts is radiant as Ann Farber and Tim Roth is soft-spoken to the verge of inaudibility as her husband, George. They are an affluent couple on the way to their weekend home in the Hamptons, a gated getaway lodge that Martha Stewart would love. They’re listening to opera on their car CD player. Abruptly, the soundtrack switches to an outburst of shrieking death metal by John Zorn. It’s a tip-off: Something wicked coming their way will disrupt their cultivated holiday. And so it goes with Funny Games, Austrian director Michael Haneke’s Americanized remake of his own 1997 film.

Frances McDormand strays far from the sardonic country of the Coen Brothers, her regular employers, for a jolly romp in 1930s London, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. McDormand stretches her acting range as Guinevere Pettigrew, a dowdy failure as a domestic servant. Her previous mistress calls her “the governess of last resort” while sacking her, sending her into a future where uncertainty shades into bleak prospects.

The world in those days was almost empty of humanity; a place of wideopen spaces tenanted by small bands of hunters and gatherers and settled villages where agriculture had been discovered. The woolly mammoth roamed the plains and other large creatures now extinct may have persisted into the dawn of Homo sapiens. This is the world of 10,000 B.C., a muddled extravaganza from Roland Emmerich, director of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow. At first the story concerns a tribe whose existence is threatened by climate change. Will the mammoths that sustained their way of life for longer than anyone’s memory ever return? The suspense evaporates when the beasts arrive within a few scenes. The plot then takes an abrupt turn when slave-raiding horsemen attack and carry off half the tribe. A small band of warriors pursues the raiders and their captives to what seems to be the end of the Earth.