‘Blindness’ a pretentious, ridiculous slog

“Blindness” — The blind literally lead the blind — to hell and back — in this pretentious, preposterous allegory.

An unnamed disease afflicts the unnamed citizens of an unnamed city, all of which is too precious. The victims are left sightless but they see white instead of black, a sensation one character compares to “swimming in milk.”

Once they’re rounded up by soldiers and quarantined in a grubby, abandoned mental asylum, their worst primal instincts emerge: urination and defecation in the hallways, theft, assaults and, ultimately, rape.

The physical and moral deterioration calls to mind the situation in the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina, but director Fernando Meirelles, in adapting a novel by Nobel Prize-winner Jose Saramago, is clearly trying to suggest that society similarly could collapse anywhere, anytime. Rather than being thought-provoking, though, the whole dreary exercise feels like an overlong beat-down — as if we’re being scolded just for showing up.

Even Julianne Moore can’t liven up this slog, despite a typically strong performance as the one person who can still see (which is never explained, probably because it’s an arbitrary plot device). She pretends she’s blind, though, to stay with her husband (Mark Ruffalo), who is an eye doctor.

Other victims include a little boy, a hooker with a heart of gold (Alice Braga) and an elderly man (Danny Glover), all of whom were the doctor’s patients, and a bartender (Gael Garcia Bernal) at the hotel where the prostitute worked.

R for violence including sexual assaults, language and sexuality/nudity. 121 min. One and a half stars out of four.

“Flash of Genius” — It’s the first day of school and Greg Kinnear, as a college engineering professor, writes the word “ethics” on the blackboard for his students to ponder.

Obviously, this will be important to this character and to his story. It’s also just one of many examples of director Marc Abraham spelling out for the audience exactly where he’s going with this David-and-Goliath tale of corporate greed that’s based on true events.

Kinnear stars as Dr. Robert Kearns, married father of six and inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper in 1960s Detroit. Someone had to figure it out — the guys at Ford had been tinkering with little success — but then when Kearns came along, the company liked his makeshift contraption so much, it stole the thing away from him without giving him credit (or a cent).

“Flash of Genius” is the long, arduous story of the legal battles and family sacrifices Kearns made in the name of truth, justice, and all that is right in this world.

There’s something quaint about how old-fashioned this little guy’s fight is — and Kinnear is often so aw-shucks in his Midwesternness, it sounds like he’s doing a Jimmy Stewart impression. But we know that he fought and won, and Abraham, a longtime producer directing for the first time from a script by Philip Railsback, does little to boost suspense.

Lauren Graham is likable as always but seems miscast as Kearns’ dutiful wife, Phyllis, who finds she can only tolerate his obsession for so long, and Alan Alda has a couple of standout scenes as his no-nonsense lawyer.

PG-13 for brief strong language. 118 min. Two stars out of four.

“Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist” — Someday, Michael Cera will show us what else he can do. He surely must have someone else inside him besides the poignantly verbal but sweetly awkward nerd we’ve come to know and love in such movies as “Superbad” and “Juno,” and the late, great TV series “Arrested Development.”

For now, though, Cera is that guy again, but he also shows some potential as a viable romantic lead — albeit an unconventional one. He and Kat Dennings have a lively, easy chemistry with each other as a couple of high school seniors prowling the streets of New York on an all-night quest to find their favorite underground band.

Cera’s Nick is an average middle-class New Jersey kid who is obsessed with Tris (Alexis Dziena), the unfaithful ex-girlfriend who dumped him, and the CD mixes he makes for her of his favorite indie rock tunes aren’t winning her back.

But they do win the heart of Dennings’ Norah, a classmate of Tris’ who thinks Nick must be the coolest guy in the world, based solely on his musical taste. One night, through a convoluted confluence of events, Nick and Norah find themselves thrown together.

The comedy from Peter Sollett (“Raising Victor Vargas”), based on the book by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan, is aimed squarely at 20-something hipsters, but it’s a worthy successor to those 1980s John Hughes movies that were sweetly romantic without trying hard to be.

PG-13 for mature thematic material including teen drinking, sexuality, language and crude behavior. 89 min. Three stars out of four.

“Religulous” — Bill Maher is preaching to the choir with this documentary that dissects organized religion, but he’s doing it in his laceratingly funny, typically sardonic way.

The comic has touched on this topic often in his standup act and on his HBO talk show “Real Time With Bill Maher,” but here he goes on a full, focused attack, and pretty much no one emerges unscathed (except those who practice Eastern religions, for some reason).

If you’re an atheist or an agnostic, you’ll be completely on board and happy to tag along with Maher as he travels the globe asking people about their faith — everywhere from Jerusalem and the Vatican to a truckers’ chapel in Raleigh, N.C., and a Holy Land theme park in Orlando, Fla. If you’re a true believer, though, you’ll probably be offended.

Then again, Maher is surely smart enough to realize that his movie will convert no one, but he seems to get off on the thrill of the challenge nonetheless. “Religulous” comes from director Larry Charles, who teamed up with Sacha Baron Cohen for “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” and it has a structure reminiscent of that 2006 comedy, as well as similarly uproarious laughs.

The ones on the receiving end of Maher’s Socratic-style questioning are often humorless — they don’t get that he’s toying with them — which makes the results even more absurdly amusing. Quick cutaways to movie clips that illustrate his points, from “Scarface” to “Superbad,” keep the energy and hilarity high, as do subtitles commenting on the conversations, similar to “The Word” segment on “The Colbert Report.”

But Maher undermines his arguments at the end when the tone turns sharply serious: He tries to make a connection between religion and all the wars and violence in the world, and he does it with the same kind of certitude he just got done condemning others for having.

R for some language and sexual material. 101 min. Three stars out of four.