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.