This is an unusual role for Mortensen, but after you’ve played a thinking woman’s hunk so long and so well, what else is there?

Knappenberger can’t paint his subject as an imperfect human being because Swartz simply means too much to too many people right now. He’s a focal point for social and political change, with communal grief as its engine.

The movie lands like a punch.

Gibney lays out the full picture, availing himself of terrific concert footage, archival materials, and interviews with Fela’s colleagues and family members (including eldest son and musical heir Femi Kuti). The portrait that emerges is of a larger-than-life personality who seems to have been closer to those who didn’t know him than those who did. (Again, much like Brown.)

This is a movie that’s 168 minutes only because Quentin Tarantino is an uncontainable Rabelasian. He believes that more is more. And sometimes it is. But a truly great craftsman knows where to locate the line.

A slow-burner — deadpan and mysterious, funny and sad — about a young Japanese woman obsessed with a pot of gold no one else knows is there. The fact that it doesn’t really exist has no bearing on the matter.

The animals are so magically entertaining to watch here (helped by some gently mischievous narrative assists), the educational treatment is a fun time in its own right.

It’s a warm, sympathetic, very sloppy, and often very funny little movie about a young woman who, among several other things, is not remotely ready to be a parent and knows it.

It’s a relief to find a rock-doc that eschews the usual grainy hand-held wobble for steady camerawork and crisp compositions. The movie looks gorgeous — an artful frame into which Cave can pour his demons.

It’s simultaneously silly and progressive, a familiar movie moment reserved for the girl you’d least expect.

Green and his cast deliver a wonderful surprise. Echo himself, a generically precious alien, is the least of it. The funny, moving, authentic bond among the kids in the movie is the unadvertised draw.

Churns out dread, suspense, and hellish splendor with its derelict cityscapes and breakneck action.

Frustratingly elusive and seductively louche, Lespert’s “Yves” probes a cryptic myth and a fragile soul, penetrating neither, but conjuring up a taste of Saint Laurent’s suffering, genius and style.

This feature adaptation of kid-lit author R.L. Stine’s best-selling horror-comedy series is out to thrill fans with a story that’s just as obsessively invested as they are, right down to Black’s meta casting as Stine himself.

A key point, though, is that all the scientists profiled have staked their careers on this one discovery.

If you were alive in 1991, the televised images may still stick in your mind and your craw.

Even with his glossy new look, Charlie Brown remains the Charlie Browniest.

Comparisons have been made to the films of Jim Jarmusch and early David Lynch, both warranted. Amirpour wears her influences like a badge of honor but she also has a nascent sensibility of her own, arguably more feminine and certainly more sensual.

Filmmaker Joe Berlinger isn’t so much inspired as disgusted by the notorious gangster in his newest documentary.

Watermark feels less focused than “Manufactured Landscapes.” While it presents us with awful and/or awe-inspiring images and ideas, the movie lacks the tightening grip that made the earlier work so unforgettable.

“So how are you going to get them to dance together?” Dancing never explains how. Instead, as in similar films such as “Hoop Dreams,” it focuses on the contest, reducing the participants to a handful of representative kids who end up learning something about themselves and others.

Like “An Inconvenient Truth” (2006), the Oscar-winning film about climate change, it is a call to action. As a screed, it builds a credible, engaging argument, presenting evidence, statistics, talking-head testimony, whimsical charts, poignant personal stories, and animated illustrations of digestive processes to make its case.

They’ve built up a vast ensemble of character types, all of them played by better-than-average actors, and that they can mix and match the drama, comedy, or action as they see fit.

A Monster Calls is a portrait of coping that’s both fascinating and heartbreaking.

Like other offbeat and original efforts such as Spike Jonze’s “Her,” Jonathan Glazer’s “Under the Skin,” and Richard Ayaode’s dour “The Double,” it juggles genres, reverses expectations, and resorts to fantasy in order to explore the enigmas of gender, identity, and love.

A narrative feature can do what the documentary couldn’t: re-create the tightrope act in full, glorious motion, rather than editing together surreptitiously snapped photos. These dizzying IMAX 3-D visuals truly are big-screen magic.

It has been said before but it’s worth saying again: Gore Vidal was born to the toga, even if he never actually wore one.

Where Wild disappoints is in the didactic, show-and-tell approach of Vallée’s direction and of the screenplay.