This film loves its characters, but loves their ideals even more.

You may well emerge from The Search for General Tso with a hankering for the titular spicy dish.

Director Tom Harper (“War Book”) defaults too often to gotcha scares, which is disappointing.

A Most Violent Year is a small picture, but each brushstroke is laden with detail and craftsmanship.

Stephen Sondheim’s stage classic Into the Woods, a dark and subversive musical take on fairy tales, not only survives but triumphs in the composer’s most unlikely collaboration with Disney.

The cast is excellent, particularly Timur Magomedgadzhiev as a conscience-stricken co-worker, but it’s Cotillard who’s in nearly every scene. Desperate, downtrodden, but grasping at each shred of hope, Cotillard — who won an Oscar playing Edith Piaf in 2007’s “La Vie en Rose” — carries the whole film.

Brilliantly acted and directed, Ava DuVernay’s towering Selma is Hollywood’s definitive depiction of the 1960s American civil rights movement — as well as perhaps the most timely movie you’ll see this year.

Director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s film combines allegory, brutal melodrama, black humor and strikingly beautiful compositions, each frame dense with meaning. Leviathan stays absolutely gripping, right up to the O. Henry twist that slams the film shut.

The moral alertness of the film is of the level normally confined, in military pictures, to talky courtroom scenes, yet Eastwood skillfully works dilemmas into propulsive and suspenseful action.

Dialogue, we seem to have forgotten, matters, and the words — by the brutally funny screenwriter of “The Departed,” William Monahan — are electric eels, slithering and sinister and nasty. They sneak up and sting you, or sometimes tickle your toes. Lowlifes don’t actually talk this way? Yeah. But if only they did.

Who gets to say what art is? Does honest emotion count for more than cold abstraction? If Andy Warhol likes it, does that make it OK? Big Eyes toys with some amusing ideas, and that’s enough.

Unbroken, is a cinematic scrapbook, a collection of well-composed scenes practically cut and pasted from “Memphis Belle,” “Chariots of Fire,” “Life of Pi” and “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” Unlike those other films, though, Angelina Jolie’s second effort as a director is more a series of similar events than a story, and lacks an underlying message except that torture hurts.

Timothy Spall, a character actor best known as Wormtail in the “Harry Potter’’ series, delivers an Oscar-caliber tour de force as eccentric British landscape painter J.M.W. Turner in the exquisite Mr. Turner.

Beautiful to look at, with its burnished interiors and magnificent Turkish steppes, this long film builds to a powerful conclusion. Ceylan’s characters grind each other to a powder while hardly raising their voices.

The worst Hollywood musical so far this century, it’s another misstep for Sony Pictures, which also sponsored the abortive ‘‘The Interview.’’

For piquing kids’ interest in history and nature, you could do worse than this goofy Ben Stiller franchise. But its third installment is more meh than manic, too reliant on wide shots of the ragtag Museum of Natural History cohorts striding down corridors. You get the feeling returning director Shawn Levy is ready to hang it up.

It’s sprightly, funny and at times piercingly sad.

I was reminded, at times, of the painstakingly detailed beauty of “The Triplets of Belleville,” but Moore has a more ethereal, rounded aesthetic all his own. They don’t make movies like this anymore — except when, lucky us, they do.

Hate to say it, but this film ain’t half the satire it could have been.

It’s adequately visionary, it’s routinely spectacular, it breathes fire and yet somehow feels room-temperature.

An utterly clueless, relentlessly grim and rambling action epic guaranteed to displease devout Jews, Christians and Muslims alike, amuse atheists — and generally bore everyone.

There are a lot of parallels with “Breaking Bad” here: the Southwestern setting, the dorky husband turned criminal, the blond wife and the scene in the carwash. But if you can avoid dwelling on its derivative qualities, After the Fall has its own case to make about how far the middle class has fallen — and continues to slide.

Inherent Vice, meandering even by Anderson’s standards, is easily the worst of his movies, a soporific 2½-hour endurance test.

Seeing this great actress, age 84, draw real feeling and laughs from such mediocre material is worth the watch.

If this documentary is swift and witty, that’s in part because it relies heavily on clips of Orson Welles talking. And oh, how Welles could talk, that beautiful voice wrapping itself around tall tales and wine commercials with equal grace.

If Top Five doesn’t go deep, though, it is intermittently very funny.

It’s well-executed but familiar territory, with a dearth of jarring moments. Those of us who aren’t friends and family of the crew could use a little wake-up shove here and there.

Thin yet excruciating, the film is a quintessential vanity production. The script feels like a first draft that aspired merely to mediocrity and fell well short.