An intriguing sci-fi thriller, but in the end it doesn’t do enough with its ideas.

Director Uberto Pasolini (“Machan”) has a gem in Marsan, a virtuoso actor who plays the role delicately where another might have laid on the pathos too thick.

Patrick Stewart knocks it out of the park as a Juilliard School dance teacher forced to spill his biggest secrets in Match, which playwright Stephen Belber effectively directed and adapted from his own Broadway play.

How English is this movie? As English as a cold, rainy day at the beach. As English as the politeness that masks hostility, as English as a pie that contains meat, as English as secretly wishing you lived in some other country.

This Michael Mann-directed film is full of Michael Mann-isms, many of them familiar from, and done better in, “Heat.”

Melding a morality play with a glossy soap, Italy’s Human Capital is a fairly successful balance of entertainment and ideas.

The Wedding Ringer is not so much a rom-com as an anatomy lesson. And the lesson is this: Men have balls. They must have them, or grow them, otherwise they are not men. They are little girls.

Though the film, based on a Ron Rash novel, doesn’t quite deliver on all its grim portents, debut director David Burris creates a neo-Faulknerian atmosphere of indelible sin in a story that rises above cliché. As Wyle’s character puts it, “The South was never one thing.”

Weirder and more contemplative than many of its time-traveling brethren, Predestination is a stylish head trip. It also marks Australian actor Snook as one to watch, as she demonstrates some serious gender-bending range.

It’s an absorbing documentary that eloquently explores questions about forgiveness.

Teen house-arrest thriller Dark Summer gets out ahead of any ripping-off-“Disturbia” talk with an early Shia LaBeouf joke. But its sleepy, hallucinogenic aesthetic is an entirely different — and rather less engaging — style, anyway.

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.