What lingers is the feeling that the filmmakers may pay lip service to Turing’s sexuality, but they prefer to keep his sex life strictly theoretical. Careful, there: No tracking dirt on the nice clean prestige picture.

Wahlberg brings an intense, often internalized performance to a wickedly written role, and while he’s no James Caan, he’s certainly able to infuse this mesmerizing character study with enough rancid brio to make this self-flagellating hustler believably doomstruck.

This is Burton’s most mainstream film to date, which isn’t to say it’s not an eccentrically entertaining ride. It is, but minus the kooky occult élan you expect from the man who made "Edward Scissorhands." It’s a Lifetime movie, as directed by, well, you know who.

Surprisingly well-crafted for something as aggressively dumb as this, the real surprise is the cast.

Whatever the case, Foxcatcher provides little insight. Art can shape the truth in ways that resonate beyond the obvious. Regrettably, the truth-shaping here grapples for significance, without any apparent aim. Catch as catch can.

Little girls will love it. I used to be a little girl once, too. I didn’t care much for the Top 40 glossy coat slathered over every song, but this heart will never harden to a spunky kid who’s certain the sun’ll come out tomorrow.

The performances have remained continuously excellent throughout The Hobbit trilogy, and they remain so here; likewise Howard Shore’s score, which is particularly righteous – bloodthirsty when it needs to be, keening when a particularly major character is cut down.

Exodus is an entertainment of the first order. I’m not so sure about the filmmaker’s decision to render the Metatron archangel as a 9-year-old boy, but what the hell? You get hit on the head with a boulder, who knows what you’ll see?

Wild lands some hard punches, but it can’t sustain the impact. Some of that lies in its inherited arc: Strayed found some peace – the whole point of the trek – but arriving-at-peace is less provocative than the struggle, at least in a movie.

To the filmmakers’ credit, the points of view in The Great Invisible are comprehensive and varied, though it’s clear who they view as the good guys and bad guys here.

Everywhere in America these days, people pay lip service to the idea of conducting open and honest conversations about race. Due to a fluke of timing and its entertaining quality, Top Five should help get the ball rolling.

The Pyramid is a mere matinee meat-grinder, neither terribly original nor all that tense. The real pyramids have been remembered for millennia. This one will be lucky if it lasts a week.

It’s Fukumoto’s wonderfully weathered countenance that makes Ochiai’s film such an elegiac delight. On it, you can see the entire history of samurai cinema, or at least that essential part of it that died often, and beautifully so.

The crisp imagery (by Radek Ładczuk) creates a true sense of menace amid the household banality. Tales about mothers who fear their offspring also strike at a very primal level of mythic storytelling. Vigilance is the only means of protection against creatures from the id.

Irving again delivers personal observations about curious creatures in a manner that’s part nature doc and part meditative exploration. The result is as mixed as the process.

The antithesis of a feel-good movie, Listen Up Philip is a challenging experience, largely because it refuses to compromise its protagonist’s dogged preoccupation with himself.

The Homesman gives us a West devoid of gunslingers and heroes and hearth vs. hunt dynamics, and instead shows us people trying to get through their days alive and sane.

A merry entertainment that never pretends to greatness, Penguins of Madagascar is all about antics, verbal and visual.

The humor ranges from situational gags to wordplay both clever and juvenile. Despite routine lapses into gay panic and the kind of dick-stroking shadowplay that was exhausted a decade ago by the Austin Powers franchise, there are strong laughs sprinkled throughout, culminating in an unexpectedly inspired climactic car chase.

Ultimately, I’ll Be Me is both an unconventional tribute to this American icon and a deep-down cri de coeur for more research on viable ways to retard the progression of Alzheimer’s and perhaps one day find a reliable cure. No one’s getting any younger, after all.

What takes The Theory of Everything into the cosmos is Redmayne’s extraordinary performance. The disciplined precision with which he progressively embodies Hawking’s failing body is nothing short of astonishing.

Even this sequel, released 20 years after the original, had to up the number of poop jokes from the first film’s doozies in order to keep up with public taste.

The relative restraint of Beyond the Lights is practically a godsend, presenting audiences with a fairy tale grounded in something resembling reality and fractured by external circumstance as much as internal doubts.

The movie lumbers on some more, reiterating the obvious and relying on overfamiliar imagery. Audiences have a long year to wait for Part 2. Would it not have been better to leave them breathless than heaving a sigh?

The best that can be said for this one is that we’ve seen plenty worse of its kind.

Saving Christmas will hold little interest for anyone not already a believer. It’s too single-minded in its instructional purpose, too averse to multidimensional characters, too youth-pastor-like in its dorky humor.

It’s perhaps surprising that there aren’t more Linklater documentaries out there, considering how substantial, influential, and plain f---ing brilliant his body of work is. In the meantime, 21 Years will have to do.

Low Down is a wonderful downer of a film that fits quite comfortably on the video-store shelf between "Barfly" and "Drugstore Cowboy." That said, depending on your proclivity for plunging into the cinematic depths of despair, your mileage may vary.

Rosewater, along with his nightly mockery of the news, shows that freedom of the press has no greater champion than Jon Stewart.

The film gets its biggest laughs – and there truly are some grandly bleak belly-shakers here – by upsetting the apple cart on traditional gender roles.

Why Don’t You Play in Hell? isn’t for everyone, but neither was Stravinsky’s "The Rite of Spring." Genius is genius, no matter how many audience members may riot.

Open Windows has plenty to say about both the death of privacy and the dominion of the always-connected digiverse we now inhabit, and editor Bernat Vilaplana does a remarkable job of keeping the film’s frenetic pace rushing headlong toward an ending that you’ll never see coming.

What’s missing here is the full adrenaline rush associated with this dangerous but exhilarating sport and pastime. The documentary’s start/stop narrative structure never allows anything to accelerate full throttle.

Despite its pleasant veneer, Laggies is a bit adrift itself. Winning performances keep us engaged – and a one-sequence appearance by Gretchen Mol as Annika’s mother who flew the coop is hauntingly complex.

Citizenfour is obviously in Snowden’s corner, but as an example of pure cinema vérité, this is the finest – and most disturbing – political documentary since Alex Gibney’s Oscar-winning "Taxi to the Dark Side."

Before I Go to Sleep still offers a near encyclopedic look at what not to do.

Another friggin’ superhero story that acknowledges comic-book tropes while rarely subverting them, Big Hero 6 is powered nonetheless by its witty charms, lively animation, and swift pace.

Interstellar is riddled with ridiculisms; the but how comes … never stop. And yet: Nolan, a notoriously chilly filmmaker who’s never shown much faculty with matters of the heart, is pinning that heart squarely on his sleeve.

This folk tale about a magical child has even been cited by some scholars as an early and elegant work of science fiction. However, it’s also possible to bypass all this baggage and just approach The Tale of Princess Kaguya as the gorgeous and expressive film that it is.

The leads’ prolonged, puffed-feathers sparring is entertaining while it lasts, but the sensation of something sizable is only fleeting.

The movie works best as a whodunit with a pointed twist.

This is basically a Whitman’s Sampler of poor taste, and a tastier one at that.

Releasing Nightcrawler on Halloween may seem counterintuitive, but then again, when better to release a thoroughly gripping portrait of an utterly modern sociopath?

Hasbro’s long-lasting occult board game gets its own starring role in a film that makes those other recent Hasbro plaything adaptations – namely "Transformers" and "G.I. Joe" – look like triumphs of subtly engineered cinematic magic.

The film is so soaring, sometimes literally, I hardly missed the feeling of hard ground underfoot.

23 Blast is a well-acted inspirational sports drama that never quite rises above the treacly mire of cliches that seem inherent to the genre.

At the center of it all stands Reeves, a convincing embodiment of both the calm before the storm and its subsequent capacity for ruin.

As much a portrait of a community as of its brilliant, de facto mayor, Harmontown is a stirring tribute to the restorative power of finding your people.

There is much pain, and any number of deeply philosophical questions posed, if not answered. This is very powerful stuff, but what you ultimately make of it will have a lot to do with the politics you bring to watching it.

The creature’s big reveal is masterfully handled and a final revelation is exceptionally memorable, but the characters, unsurprisingly, remain interchangeable with those of any number of other teens-in-peril pics.

The cast is game and Siemen’s trenchant observations are the mark of a filmmaker with something to say – an increasing rarity in this day and age.

The Blue Room is mesmerizing, psychologically complex, and, at the very end, viscerally devastating. They don’t make them like this much anymore, but they should.

A third-act revelation will knock viewers silly and cause them to reevaluate everything that’s come before, but even without that jaw-dropping information, Moss’ film is a righteous piece of empathetic, of-the-moment documentary filmmaking.

If you scratch the surface too deeply, a few things might not ring true, but there’s no greater pleasure to be had than the film’s opening and closing sequences during which Murray, alone on the screen, dances, then sings along to the music coming through his headphones.

Not just narratively crude but aesthetically ugly, Men, Women & Children’s framing occasionally cuts characters off at the forehead, in effect lobotomizing them. I couldn’t think of a better metaphor for this brainless splotch of self-important scaremongering.

Housebound nimbly jumps through the hoops of horror tropes, inventively subverting them along the way. The fact that it sticks the landing is a testament to Johnstone’s solid script and direction.

Fuller’s film is inarguably a stone-cold classic of the genre, but Fury, for all its cacophonous chaos and half-crazed characters, never quite reaches the shellshocked heights required to make it a bona fide pillar of cinematic combat.

The Indonesian-born brother/sister filmmaking duo of Ken and Livi Zheng scores high points for creating a new take on the undocumented-immigrant badass story (hola, Machete), and for their obvious martial arts skills, but this first feature from the pair is ultimately hobbled by a paucity of credible acting.

Visually arresting but dramatically rote, The Book of Life at least introduces American kids to the Mexican holiday of Día de los Muertos and should score points with families looking for kid-friendly movies that reflect aspects of their Mexican cultural heritage.

Much like the experts drawn to Landis’ paintings, Art and Craft effectively invites viewers to question the honesty of what’s been placed inside the frame.

Already hobbled by an overwrought story that turns positively Hallmark-Movie-preposterous in its third act, journeyman director Michael Hoffman (Soapdish, The Last Station) can’t conceive of a single memorable set-piece or rouse his actors into action. By the time Marsden’s character has very polite sex with the love of his life with his pants still on, I was done.

If Pride manages to be somewhat reductive in its depiction of equal rights activism, at least it’s reductive in the right direction.

It’s a worthy effort, and Webb’s story is important. Nevertheless, Kill the Messenger feels extremely dated: In these cynical times, it’s too little, too late, which is too bad.

The Judge gives the sense of resting on its casting laurels.

Another addition to Universal’s Pictures Classic Monsters arsenal of crap (remember Van Helsing?), director Shore, in his feature debut, displays a fine sense of pacing but little else.

As the parents of four, Steve Carell and Jennifer Garner are a good match, her energetic intensity mixing nicely with his laid-back demeanor, and both underplaying their inherent adorableness.

Religious dramas have a track record of prioritizing wholesome values at the cost of production values, and while Left Behind is mostly too preoccupied with being a hoary thriller to preach to the converted, it’s a thoroughly laughable attempt to marry bombast with sermonizing.

While it’s possible that Annabelle might give a few audience members goosebumps, anyone who’s ever seen "Rosemary’s Baby" –or pretty much any film James Wan’s had a hand in since helming 2007’s "Dead Silence", the "Saw" franchise excepted – will figure out what’s going on within the first 30 minutes.

What’s great about this “documentary” – Cave gets a script credit alongside the directors, which kind of invalidates the whole notion of hands-off documentary filmmaking – is that it delves deeply into Cave’s notoriously fussy creative process without ever becoming stodgy or dull.

To my mind, movies about watching nomads walk rank alongside movies about writers writing: The action is dull and endlessly repetitive, and most of the interesting stuff occurs in the mind’s interior.

In every way, this is an enthralling but heartbreaking story, beautifully done.

An evocative, probing, enlightening, and impressionistic look at the lesser-known period of Hendrix’s life: the pivotal time from 1966-67 during which the musician discovered his style and voice.

Not even this sprightly cast can buck the privileged sense of entitlement that bedevils this movie. Don’t count on the impish humor that Simon Pegg has unleashed so successfully in other movies to save the day.

The film is vast and epic, featuring sprawling rivers, awe-inspiring landscapes, serious military campaigns, and the rich political and ideological history of the period. Still, without sufficient context, the films swirls grandly but without making much meaning.

Canadian director Philippe Falardeau (Oscar nominee for Monsieur Lazhar) films these early, subtitled scenes mostly with a documentarian’s observational remove and slightly shaky camera – an effective way to dramatize the horror of war without exploiting it, tarting it up with Hollywood techniques.

Fantasies and phantasms aside, Fincher proves himself yet again to be a better cinematic psychologist of (in-)human nature than almost any other director alive. It’s another squirmily excellent date movie from hell, courtesy of contemporary cinema’s most overt nihilist.

With The Guest, Wingard and Barrett have once more upped the ante for the indie horror flick pack.

Though Take Me to the River also offers up some civil rights history lessons between recordings, it feels like a mishmash effort overall, more a home movie than a theatrical release. That’s fine. If you approach it on those terms, you can’t help but feel the love, too.

The thing is, the music that Jed, Shelby, and their respective bands make is actually pretty good. The performance footage is polished enough that it looks like it could be plucked from a TV show like "Nashville."

It’s worth a watch to see these two reliably comic actors do some heavy dramatic lifting and tenderly spot for each other.

Washington is always superb when playing characters with a surface calm, but a boiling-over interior. Here, as the protagonist, he steers a vivid course through a seamy world.

The Boxtrolls feels rough-and-tumble and not as much fun by half.

What is most egregious, and seems completely lost on the filmmakers, is that the film is the very thing it attempts to expose: a pandering cash-in on faith-based films disguising itself as an honest examination of belief. And that, true believers, is unforgivable.

Once a crucial piece of backstory is revealed, the picture becomes more rewarding for it, emotionally and aesthetically, but that doesn’t temper the feeling that half the film was wasted on arty misdirection.

With A Walk Among the Tombstones, the names have been changed but the story’s all too familiar. Speaking of which, "Taken 3" is on its way.

This feature-length joke isn’t for us so much as it’s on us for holding out hope that sheer weirdness might be enough to sustain this lark through to its violent finish.

Subtle it ain’t, but there’s an undercurrent of palpable rage that pokes through the (very funny) banter-banter gloss of the thing, and the actors rip into it with relish.

It’s a pity party to which you’d like to RSVP an unequivocal “no.”

Even if it doesn’t manage to be quite the "Hunger Games"-level hit its producers would clearly desire, it’s the best of the wannabes we’ve seen so far.

Unfortunately, Who Is John Galt? substitutes the most knee-jerk Tea Party beliefs for Rand's far more ambitious and complex philosophy.

No Good Deed slouches toward its inevitable conclusion much like that rough beast to Bethlehem, falling apart and lacking all conviction.

All are filmmakers who find lyricism in natural elements, and this ability reaches an apogee with Land Ho! Yet the film runs the risk of being mistaken for a picture postcard.

There are many questions raised and answered in this film, but one that isn’t is why on Earth it’s garnered an R rating. Love Is Strange is anything but. It’s a seriocomic romance of the most genteel sort, full of heartfelt “I love yous,” brief (and definitely unerotic) snuggling, and a wealth of tremendously fine acting from all involved.

God Help the Girl is not so perfectly crafted, but the promise – oh, the promise is irresistible.

It’s all so quaint to the point of being anachronistic, and considering the dearth of truly family-friendly fare in the marketplace, it arrives just in time to hold wee ones and their parents over until "The Boxtrolls" arrives at month’s end.

James Gandolfini’s wintery silences and bitter outbursts are enough on their own to merit seeing this otherwise frustratingly vague slice of low-end Crooklyn crime life, but just barely.

The film provides invaluable context in its detailing of institutional racism in the Sixties and Seventies and in its emphasis on Ellis as an advocate for equality and as a righteous shit-stirrer.

Casting Seigner in the coveted role of Vanda in this adaptation of David Ives’ Tony-winning play may strike some as nepotistic (she’s married to director Polanski), but her performance stands on its own. It’s deliciously self-conscious.