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.

Hollywood will be hard pressed to top this lean Canadian indie picture that knows it’s just another dumb werewolf movie, but has fun with that knowledge.

As instantly forgettable as the pleasant but unremarkable tunes Miller, Sagal and assorted soundtrack artists sing during the film.

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.

Bloody, brutal and melodramatic.

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.

Rene Russo is spot-on as Nina, an aging TV news director who is the only person Bloom will sell his footage to.

There’s no reason the missionary-recruiter turned stalker idea couldn’t work. But this one doesn’t.

Slow-witted and slowly paced, with characters kept at arm’s length, our biggest concern is not whether Ricky will indeed be Hit by Lightning, but whether anybody will find a spark of life in this corpse of a comedy.

That miss-or-hit collection of horror shorts, “The ABCs of Death” becomes more hit or miss with its sequel, ABCs of Death 2.

Workman’s film feels exploitative, and the filmmaker cannot help but make Carbee look a little creepy and a bit pathetic. The only thing that eases your conscience watching Magical Universe is the difficulty in deciding, “Who was using whom here?”

I just wish there’d been more to this allegory, something more than Radcliffe’s Ig explaining his protrusions to one and all with “They’re horns. It’s a crazy story.”

Reeves animates the action and the filmmakers surround him with wonderful co-stars; the quietly menacing McShane, the chop shop operator (John Leguizamo), the dapper “cleaner” (David Patrick Kelly of “The Warriors”) and the spitting, hissing Nyqvist.

First-time writer/director Peter Sattler finds a few surprises to throw at us in this somewhat conventional “Stockholm Syndrome” story.

“Cheerful” and “triumphant” aren’t words that come to mind when you think of Alzheimer’s, the debilitating illness that destroys memory, mind and body. But darned if country star Glen Campbell doesn’t manage that in Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me.

Moretz is as real as ever, and Knightley manages Megan’s transition from annoyingly naive to adorably confused. But for that she has help, and for that she and we should thank Rockwell. In this case, the actor most accomplished at playing slackers is the one who gets everybody — and the movie — to grow up.

Whatever its intent, White Bird in a Blizzard misuses most everybody involved, especially the dazzling young star of “The Descendants,””The Fault in Our Stars” and “Divergent.”

Chilling, cruel and funny — in an icy, Swedish way.

Convincing shaky cam or not, in the end all we’re left with is what we started with, just another bigfoot movie.

The Best of Me plays like the worst of Nicholas Sparks.

Serious and silly, self-aware and ironic, it’s the movie that questions stardom, fame and celebrity, built around a role Michael Keaton had to become a has-been to play.

A Mexican-accented kids’ cartoon so colorful and unconventionally dazzling it almost reinvents the art form. As pretty as a just-punctured pinata, endlessly inventive, warm and traditional, it serves up Mexican culture in a riot of Mexican colors and mariachi-flavored music.

It’s good, not great, and it’s not Ayer’s fault that the rarer these B-movies become, the more we expect from them.