Even with all this sparkle, the film staggers through its third act. By then, the script has rubbed the rough edges off the villains and made whatever point it was going to make several times over.

It’s the best film of this trilogy, but truthfully, none of the “Hobbit” thirds have been any better than middling “Hunger Games” or “Harry Potter” installments. Considering the vaunted reputation J.R.R.Tolkien enjoys, this overdone “There and Back Again” never quite got us there.

A handsome production, its few settings (indoors and outdoors) painterly and period-perfect. It’s entirely too long for a filmed chamber drama of such limited stakes. But Ullmann’s adaptation reminds us that the gap between “those people,” now called “the one percent,” and the rest of the world will always be ripe for conflict, drama and tension, no matter how much we evolve.

Get Santa is an at-times adorably daft holiday farce.

For all its stunning and stark wilderness settings (Spain and the Canary Islands), its stunning effects, technical proficiency and scriptural cleverness, Exodus is a chilly affair... It’s still an exciting, entertaining epic.

Rock is more a genial presence here than an actor playing an addict tested by a bad day. He never lets us see the strain that could make him fall off the wagon. He scores laughs, but generously leaves the outrageous stuff to his legion of supporting players.

Anderson loses his way, failing to thin out the novel and its overload of characters, piling scene upon scene that neither amusingly complicates the plot, nor advances it. Phoenix, however, is never less than fun.

Moore makes us root for Alice, not for a cure, which still seems a reach, but for a completion of her life’s goals, a chance to control her fate as long as she has the wherewithal to do it.

And as long as it is, it would be a pity to cut one moment of Spall’s immersive, utterly convincing portrait of this common man with an uncommon gift.

The setting and old fashioned structure of the story won’t be to every taste. But The Physician is quite good at recreating its era and reminding us that once, long ago, it was the West that was backward and always looking East for enlightenment, education and a way out of the Dark Ages.

As he did with “The Dallas Buyers’ Club,” director Jean-Marc Vallée covers this inner and outer journey with a minimum of fuss. The flashbacks and their revelations, filling in the puzzle, are sparingly doled out. The stunning scenery Cheryl hikes through is barely noticed.

It does a poor job of showing the tragedy of Turing’s hidden life but a better job at making a bigger case — unconventional people make unconventional thinkers.

The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness is a great name for a documentary about Hayao Miyazaki and his animation house, Japan’s Studio Ghibli.

As “cute and cuddly” as ever, and often downright hilarious.

Manages to pop the hairs on the back of your neck more than most repetitive, predictable and gory Hollywood horror films these days.

Ptacek, as she was in the short, makes a great foil. And the addition of Rossum and Perlman to the cast adds pathos and paranoia, guilt and menace.

In a cinema recently overrun with combat documentaries, Marshall Curry’s Point and Shoot manages a first. Here’s a film that captures the romance of war amongst today’s young and testosterone-fueled. Want to know why young men from all over the world have flocked to fight for ISIS? Point and Shoot explains it.

A bloody, violent and yet grimly comic tale.

Beyond the Lights is another pain-behind-the-music romance. But it’s so well written, cast and played that we lose ourselves in the comfort food familiarity of it all.

Carell, though, is the real shock to the system here. He is quirky, queer in the old fashioned sense, and pathetically funny.

Rosewater was the name Bahari gave his persecutor (Kim Bodnia), a cunning, perfumed older man charged with getting a confession from this Westernized Iranian, a confession that discredits his reporting and the bad light Iran is in since the election, with its ensuing violent government crackdown on protesters.

Writer-director Karen Leigh Hopkins has lots of fun with this surreal set up, and only really loses the thread when reality intrudes.

Jones tells this story with care and a lack of hurry, a pace to fit an age when people traveled no faster than two mules pulling a wagon could carry them. It’s “True Grit” and “The African Queen” with a moment of “Lawrence of Arabia,” period-perfect and a total immersion in this world.

This delightful and inspiring drama succeeds the way Hawking has, even as he fails to deliver that “one theory” that explains “everything.” It’s reaching beyond your grasp, in life, in science and in film biographies, that achieves greatness.

It’s manipulative and overlong, too loud and “Incredibles” action-packed for the very young. But the manipulation errs on the side of mercy, compassion, sacrifice and humanity.

Whatever its length and melodramatic third-act touches, Interstellar is a space opera truly deserving of that label, overreaching and thought-provoking, heart-tugging and pulse-pounding. It’s the sort of film that should send every other sci-fi filmmaker back to the drawing board, the way Stanley Kubrick did, a long time ago in a millennium far away.

An old fashioned Japanese folk tale beautifully rendered in old-fashioned hand-drawn animation.

Whatever twists this puzzle tosses at us, the film reminds us that a great actor, in close-up, telling a story with just her or his eyes, is still the greatest special effect the movies have to offer. This cast telling this story ensures us that nobody will be dozing off Before I Go to Sleep.