In theaters

BEYOND BORDERS, directed by Martin Campbell; written by Caspian Tredwell-Owen, 127 minutes, rated R.

Politically charged and awash in melodrama, the heroically well-intentioned yet misguided new Angelina Jolie movie, “Beyond Borders,” is a manipulative travelogue of heartbreak and despair.

It moves glumly yet grandly about the globe, touching down just long enough in such hot spots as Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Chechnya to shame audiences into feeling guilt about their comparatively comfortable lives.

While it’s hard at work doing that – images of starvation, amputation, mass genocide and war linger interminably on the screen – the film also, rather perversely, tosses in a little sex, a little skin, a little infidelity to allegedly make all of this go down easier.

It doesn’t. Quite the contrary.

As directed by Martin Campbell from a script by Caspian Tredwell-Owen, this shallow, uneven message movie uses a very real backdrop of human devastation to bolster its intercontinental romance. It wants you to realize how lucky you are, but it also wants to make you breathe hard while doing so. As a result, conflict is achieved, but so is gross exploitation.

In the movie, Jolie, in full pucker, is Sarah Jordan, a wealthy American socialite living in London who stumbles upon her social conscience at a party in 1984.

There, at the black-tie fund-raiser thrown by her husband’s father, her life is forever changed when the raw, unpredictable, renegade Dr. Nick Callahan (Clive Owen) crashes the event with the press and an emaciated Ethiopian boy named Jojo in tow.

Speeches are made, social injustices are highlighted, Jojo is handed a banana and asked to behave like a monkey (no kidding), and Sarah is hooked.

Nick reeks of the sort of smoldering masculinity her soft husband, Henry (Linus Roache), sorely lacks.

Whether it’s because she likes Nick’s pecs or because she means well, Sarah is soon off to Africa, where Nick is stationed at one of the aid camps. When she arrives, she’s in a shimmering white linen pantsuit that never seems to wrinkle or show the dirt, not even when she rushes through the dunes to save her first child, a digitally starving infant about to be eaten by a vulture.

Nick ridicules her inappropriate attire and her fresh look (“You’re wearing perfume? Come on!”) but Sarah, a trouper, presses on. She has fooled herself into believing that she’s only there for the sick and the dying, when it is clear to the rest of us that she’s really there to get a piece of Nick.

Over the ensuing years, Sarah recklessly drops everything – her marriage, her children – to reconnect with Nick, first in Cambodia, where they have a tryst, and then in Chechnya, where she looks smashing in black mink. A wealth of plot inconsistencies ensue, but they are nothing when stacked next to the film’s true flaw: Who cares whether these two difficult people get together when all around them is such suffering?

Unable to make us care, “Beyond Borders” splits.

Grade: D

On video and DVD

FINDING NEMO, directed by Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich, written by Stanton, Bob Peterson and David Reynolds, 104 minutes, rated G.

If you’re going to spend $80 million serving fish to audiences, the last thing you want to offer them is a turkey of the sea.

And so, in “Finding Nemo,” Disney and Pixar Animation Studios prove once again that they know how to set a table and keep the crowds fed. The movie isn’t just the biggest box-office hit of the year, but it’s Disney and Pixar’s best-looking film to date.

Set in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the film tells the story of Nemo (voice of Alexander Gould), a young, motherless clown fish who wants to prove to his overprotective father, Marlin (Albert Brooks), that in spite of being born with a miniature right fin, he’s fully capable of taking care of himself.

It’s just that streak of independence that’s tested early in the film when Nemo is scooped up by a deep-sea diver and stolen away to Sydney. There, in a dentist’s aquarium, he joins a ragtag team of other fish being held captive while his father, joined by a dorky blue tang named Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), enlists the help of the sea in an effort to find Nemo and bring him home safe.

Blending elements of “Bambi” and “The Little Mermaid,” “Finding Nemo” isn’t as thematically rich or as emotionally satisfying as the studios’ previous forays into the super-charged world of computer-generated movies. Still, for its intended audience of tots, it’s nevertheless a winner.

Especially good is how directors Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich don’t sugarcoat the sea. It’s a dangerous world out there, filled with predators eager to prey on unsuspecting souls like Nemo. That message will likely resonate most with parents, while the film’s many well-done DVD extras will go a long way toward appealing to children.

Grade: B+

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays and Fridays in Style, Thursdays at 5:30 p.m. on WLBZ 2 and WCSH 6, and are archived on RottenTomatoes.com. He can be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com.