Canonicals: use when page has same listings, but displayed very differently?

[LahomaManagement]

Say you have a listing of movies. In that listing, there are 5 different view types. One has the scenes broken out. Another has only the box covers. Two of the views have movie descriptions, but others don't. Still, the listings themselves are the same, and you only want the default view to be indexed. Is it appropriate to use canonicals in this case?

The alternative is to noindex the other views, but the site already has rankings and deep links.

If Google does see the pages as unique and we apply a canonical, could we be penalized or would they merely ignore it?

[GPainter]

Firstly you would never be penalized for using rel=canonical. If its the same content yes I recommend using the tag pointing towards the one you want indexed.  It seems like a messy layout though have you looked into making it neat and maybe a bit more friendly for users, could you not have a lot of that information on one page ?

In short - Yes use canonical to avoid duplicate issues.