The new Swedish film Force Majeure is an unexpected powerhouse, deftly blending moments of engaging introspection with surprising bits of dark humor to create a thrillingly original tale of marriage and mistrust. The film’s devilishly clever title, literally “superior force”, is a clause commonly found in contracts that refers to a freak, unavoidable accident that exonerates both parties from fulfilling an agreement. Indeed, the main characters are met with an chaotic and unforeseen incident but it’s the chilly aftermath of that event that is the true focus of the film’s narrative.

We are introduced to Tomas (Johannes Kuhnke) and Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) as they find themselves in the French Alps for a week-long skiing trip with their two children. While eating lunch on the hotel balcony one afternoon, a controlled avalanche creeps dangerously close to the restaurant and the patrons initial reaction of wonderment devolves quickly into mass hysteria. A panicked Tomas makes an instinctual dash of self-preservation, which leaves an incredulous Ebba to protect the children on her own. While the physical threat of the avalanche is later revealed to be a false alarm, a metaphorical avalanche of doubt and misconception begins to slowly threaten the relationship between Tomas and Ebba.

“Slowly” is the key word here, as director Ruben Östlund displays tremendous patience in generating scenarios during which the two characters can suss out what happened on the balcony that day. I was struck by how intently the camera focuses on the faces of the actors as they subtly confront one another about their reactions to the seemingly life-threatening event. Instead of just having Tomas and Ebba talk with just each other the entire film, he not only includes other pairs of couples during theses conversations but chooses to linger on their awkward and uncomfortable facial expressions to break the tension.

The two leads are fantastic here, as Kuhnke constructs a naturalistic portrait of crumbling masculinity and Kongsli conveys notes of mounting insecurity with considerable nuance. Kristofer Hivju, of Game of Thrones fame, also turns in a very funny performance as a sort of devil’s advocate who defends the virtue of Tomas’ intentions but does well to point out to Ebba that he would have personally reacted with more courage if he had been placed in the same situation. I should also say that child actors don’t very often get much credit but children in this film (real life brother and sister Clara and Vincent Wettergren) do a convincing job with some tricky material.

While the film builds nicely to a cathartic climax, it does stumble to find its footing afterwards. There are about 2 or 3 different moments that felt like sufficient stopping points but instead, the actual ending comes abruptly with a puzzling last exchange of dialogue. Nevertheless, Force Majeure is a thoughtful and bizarrely funny look at the failure of the male ego and the slow climb of redemption up the mountain of patriarchal expectations.

The Imitation Game is the second biopic this season that attempts to portray a well known genius but like The Theory of Everything, Game somehow loses its way and seems to have trouble conveying what was so remarkable about its subject. As the marketing cleverly suggests, Alan Turing was indeed an enigma but director Morten Tyldum does little to shed any new light on his personal or professional affairs. It’s a very straightforward, easily digestable film and while it has an worthwhile story to tell, I can’t help but feel disappointed that it didn’t probe deeper into Turing’s mind.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays the legendary mathmetician with the same brand of affable arrogance that he’s perfected in the BBC series Sherlock. The film follows Turing during important stretches of his life but focuses primarily on his time as an MI6-recruited cryptanalyst during the Second World War. He leads a crack team of coding experts, including Joan Clarke (Keira Knightly) and Hugh Alexander (Matthew Goode), to eventually break the daunting Nazi Enigma code and provide the Allied Forces with a tactical advantage that would eventually lead to their early victory in the War.

The wartime code breaking section of the movie is its most compelling, distilling the team’s years of struggle with the nigh indecipherable cryptograph into moments of crushing defeat and inspiring triumph. The film’s most poignant scene comes after the code is broken, in which the group’s knowledge of an impending Nazi attack must be kept confidential in order to keep the secrecy of their solution in tact. The scene delves further into the tragic irony of this realization, as one of the coders recognizes one of the Nazi’s targets as the boat on which his brother is serving. It’s a heartbreaking moment and a memorable emotional climax for the film.

Sadly, the portions of the story that involve Turing’s troubled times as a boarding school student and his personal post-War struggles that led to his eventual suicide are not nearly as affecting. The push-pull nature of the flashbacks and flash forwards is distracting and simply not worth it, given that there’s more than enough to dissect in the main mission storyline alone. Especially contrived is the repetition of a line about exceeding expectations that made me roll my eyes all three times that it was uttered. The movie is also awkwardly framed within an interrogation scene that never leads to anything that would justify its inclusion in the first place.

Despite these directorial flaws, The Imitation Game finds its most indespensible asset in Cumberbatch, who has a knack for unveiling layers of repressed emotion in his portrayals of brilliant men. Knightly also turns in a confident performance as a longtime partner of Turning’s, who wasn’t shy about going toe-to-toe with him on an intellectual and personal basis throughout his life. Unfortunately, the good work by the actors here is hindered by a lack of chronological cohesion and an overall shallow approach to a complicated historical figure.

The new Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything is a wonderfully frustrating film that sports a truly spellbinding lead performance by Eddie Redmayne but is lacking in just about every other category. Almost all of its scenes feel like they were designed to provide just enough conflict to advance the story but not enough to challenge the viewer in any way. Perhaps some will be taken with its pleasant and vapid retelling of Hawking’s first marriage but on the whole, I was somehow offended by the inoffensive tone of the entire movie.

We start at Cambridge University in 1963, where the young Hawking meets and subsequently courts a charming literature student named Jane Wilde, played by Felicity Jones. After an innocuous fall in the park, he is diagnosed with motor neuron disease and informed by his campus physician that he has 2 years to live. Despite this revelation, Jane vows to remain by his side as he pursues a burgeoning career in theoretical physics. While their marriage is constantly tested by his worsening condtion, they find solace in a third-party father figure named Jonathan Jones, who is played by Charlie Cox.

Redmayne’s portrayal of Stephen Hawking is nothing short of astonishing and frankly, it may be one of the only compelling reasons to see the film in the first place. He’s able to capture Hawking’s gradual deterioration with an incredible range of facial and physical expressiveness but most importantly, he’s able to convey the spirit of a fiery genius without uttering a single word. Even when he’s wheelchair bound and nearly unintelligible, there’s a devilish wit working tirelessly beneath the surface that Redmayne is able to communicate to the audience on a seemingly telepathic level.

Despite this tremendous performance and Hawking’s remarkable life achievements, the film decides to focus instead on Jane’s struggle as a wife and mother of three children. This perspective could have proven interesting had the execution not been so toothless but more often than not, we’re left with melodramatic scenes that don’t resonate or build to anything meaningful. While the direction by James Marsh is frequently aimless, it deserves to be said that Anthony McCarten’s screenplay is not as overly sentimental as it could have been and light touches of humor are applied gracefully throughout the movie.

Marsh previously crafted the gripping and inventive documentary Man On Wire and it’s a shame to see a talented director create something as stripped down and apprehensive as The Theory of Everything is. Only in its third act when Hawking’s ability to communicate is revitalized do we see glimmers of a more thoughtful movie. I wish to believe that Marsh had a much more clever vision in mind for this story that was suppressed by the film’s producers in order to streamline it for Oscar contention. Redmayne will no doubt get the attention he so rightly deserves but beyond that, the film is a black hole of biopic aspirations.

Those who like their movie franchises unnecessarily drawn out and bloated, fear not: the final chapter of The Hobbit series is upon us at last and I fear that not even the most staunch Tolkien devotees will find much to like in the joyless obligation that is The Battle of the Five Armies. The whimsy and wonder of the previous entries has been replaced with stilted dialogue and endless barrages of computer generated chaos. In fact, this film was previously subtitled There and Back Again but unfortunately, The Battle of the Five Armies turns out to be a more fitting title after all, as the majority of the run time is dedicated to the titular conflict.

We pick back up right where the previous movie left off, with Smaug on his way to terrorize the small town of Esgaroth as Bilbo, played by Martin Freeman, and the Dwarves look on from the Lonely Mountain. After the great dragon is vanquished by Bard, played by Luke Evans, the fate of the vast treasure at Erebor becomes uncertain. Led by the fearless Thorin, played by Richard Armitage, the Dwarves defend their treasure against the Middle Earth armies of men, Elves and Orcs (frankly, I couldn’t tell you after seeing the movie who the Fifth Army is).

From the Helm’s Deep battle in The Two Towers to the battle at Pelennor Fields in The Return of the King, large scale showdowns were an integral part of the success of the Lord of the Rings franchise and they used to be one of director Peter Jackson’s fortes. Some of the sequences in this film feel like a parody of Peter Jackson’s directing style, whether its characters taking long pauses to speak amongst hundreds of characters fighting around them or the hilarious over abundance of Orc beheadings that used to be treated as a novelty in the LotR series but is literally done to death in Five Armies.

When the screen isn’t filled wall to wall with incoherent and increasingly implausible action, we’re treated to meaningless subplots that crop up sporadically throughout. The most noxious are those involving an Elf-Dwarf romance that inspires some amazingly mawkish lines of dialogue like “he is my king but he does not command my heart.” This could possibly be forgiven if the acting was worthwhile but it consistently appears as though the majority of the actors are bored to reprise these roles. Least compelling among these actors is Lee Pace, who has proven again to be a colossal bore in his antagonistic film roles after his charming lead part on ABC’s Pushing Daisies.

While plodding through its comparatively gracious runtime of 144 minutes, there’s an unshakable sense of looming déjà vu as one watches this entry in the Hobbit series. It’s the feeling that everything we’re seeing has been done better before and even by the same production team, which is unfortunately the case here more often than not. I personally can’t wait for the day when all the Hobbit films are available on Blu-Ray and someone clever on the internet condenses the three into one cohesive piece of filmmaking. Until then, I can’t suggest that even diehard fans go out to see this thud of a conclusion.

Documentaries can serve many roles: they can inform, they can influence and yes, they can bore. But some, like genre greats Hoop Dreams and Capturing the Friedmans, take a seed of an idea and pursue it with the dramatic precision of a fictional feature film. The result is an exquisite experience: watching a true story that feels like it’s being created before our eyes. That’s how I felt while watching The Overnighters, which I found to be one of the most compelling and transfixing documentaries that I’ve seen all year

The movie’s title refers to a program started by Pastor Jay Reinke at his church in Williston, North Dakota, which allows men who are effectively homeless to find shelter as they hope to take advantage of the rampant growth in the area’s fracking jobs. While this is clearly an overwhelming act of charity, Reinke’s plan soon comes under fire from a community whose recent population spike has also seen an increase in the number of felons and criminals residing in the small North Dakota town. When details of an Overnighter’s criminal past come to light, Reinke finds himself in a very public act of moral tug-of-war that threatens to erode his career and his family’s trust.

Even if you take the weighty and worthwhile topics of economic inequality and the nature of charity away from The Overnighters, you would still be left with a fascinating and deeply personal character study. Reinke is compelling for the same reason the main character in a fictional drama would be: we root for him and yet we can’t be entirely sure of his motivations. He consistently refers to himself as a deeply flawed man when confiding in the men that he shelters, although he generally comes off as a thoughtful, charismatic and generally kind person. “It’s easy to become a facade,” he states at the film’s opening, and we don’t fully learn the weight of what he means until the concluding moments of the story.

The entire structure of The Overnighters is similarly purposeful, which can be attributed to the keen eyes and ears of director Jesse Moss. In interviews, Moss has revealed that he originally went to Williston to capture the fracking story and how it affected the community but he shifted his story’s focus when learning of Pastor Reinke and his mission. This spontaneous shift in storytelling makes Moss’ film even more admirable, especially considering that Reinke’s culminating moment in the movie was almost entirely unplanned by the filmmaker.

I also admired Moss’ level headed approach to this material. This is a documentary potentially ripe for loads of political posturing but he gives each character room to express their thoughts and feelings freely instead of editing together a series of talking head interviews to hammer home a point. The Overnighters often plays like a parable for the cynical notion that “no good deed goes unpunished” but in Reinke’s case, the unravelling of that good deed reveals universal truths about the resiliency of the human spirit.

Most modern horror films don’t have as much patience or trust in their audience’s intelligence as The Babadook does. While most work on a surface level that mainly involve knee-jerk reactions and amped up music cues, there is a select class of films like this one that work on an intimate psychological level of dread and discomfort. For those reasons, among others, it stands out as one of the best horror movies of the past few years and certainly the most unique that I’ve seen this year.

Essie Davis stars as Amelia, a struggling widow and mother of a troubled seven-year-old named Samuel, played by Noah Wiseman. Through an early flashback, we find that Amelia’s husband Oskar, played by Benjamin Winspear, passed away the night of Samuel’s birth as he was rushing to drive Amelia to the emergency room. It’s made clear that the seven years of single parenthood haven’t been easy on either Amelia or Samuel and when a macabre pop-up book titled “Mister Babadook” begins appearing around the house, it unleashes the titular supernatural force that cruelly threatens to rob them of their sanity and their lives.

While the creature is only seen briefly during its moments in the film, its ominous silhouette alone creates a lasting impression and when seen in full, the Babadook reminded me most of a twisted combination of Nosferatu and Jack the Ripper. This archaic aesthetic is fitting, as the lighting and staging in the most climatic scenes feels like a throwback to silent era films. Even the majority of the effects are practical as opposed to computer generated, which lends a more realistic and grounded approach to scenes that may have otherwise come off as cheap or lazy.

Grounded is also a good word to use when describing the storytelling as well, which does involve supernatural elements like ghosts and monsters but is rich with subtext on human issues like the persistence of grief and the hardships of single parenthood. Amelia’s feelings of resentment and exhaustion towards Samuel exist long before the Babadook arrives in their home and director Jennifer Kent does a great job at materializing these impulses in a way that feels psychologically convincing and dramatically satisfying. While some scenes may be a bit too on-the-nose when tying the allegorical elements together, it’s hard to fault a debut film that’s striving to push an entire genre into more narratively complex territory.

It’s difficult, too, to understate the importance of Essie Davis’ performance to the film’s success. She’s a marvel to watch, conveying depths of anguish and rage underneath the guise of a mother trying to put on her best face for her child. When moments of brutal honesty do arrive, Davis delivers them with a frightening amount of conviction. She, along with director Jennifer Kent, have created a very special scare-fest that I hope will haunt audiences for years to come.

The final entry in the Hunger Games series has arrived and in the tradition of the hugely successful Harry Potter and Twilight films, it has been split into two parts with the final film being released a year from now. While I haven’t read the books and can’t tell you if Part 1 creates a viable stopping point for the final film, I can say that this standalone portion of Mockingjay feels quite stretched at feature length and I have a hard time believing that this material couldn’t be skillfully condensed into one movie. Clearly this was a financial decision on the part of Lionsgate to milk their $1.5 billion (and counting) franchise as long as they can.

Mockingjay picks up right where we left off from Catching Fire, with our heroine Katniss Everdeen, played by Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence, living in the bombed-out District 13 and still reeling from the outcome of the Quarter Quell. Her actions in those Games have sparked uprisings and civil unrest throughout the Districts and the President of 13 Alma Coin, played with conviction by Julianne Moore, hopes to mold Katniss into a symbol of united revolution against the Capitol. She agrees under the condition that her lost love Peeta, played by Josh Hutcherson, be retrieved from the clutches of the Capitol and its corrupt President Snow, reprised with grinning menace by Donald Sutherland.

The film has taken away what I always thought was one of the least interesting things about the previous entries, the Games themselves, but it hasn’t replaced them with much exciting material either. Fans of the series will likely be put off by the Katniss-less action in Part 1, in which the main character fires exactly one arrow in combat, although it does produce one of the movie’s most satisfying, trailer-ready shots. The majority of the material here is comprised of characters brooding or explaining or plotting, which may prove worthwhile for Part 2 but doesn’t leave us with much for now.

All of the characters, Katniss included, feel sidelined and underutilized, often waiting for things to happen as opposed to moving the story along themselves. If that was a conscious decision on the part of director Francis Lawrence, it comes off more as spinning its wheels rather than organically building tension. The acting here is similarly dubious; I never imagined that Josh Hutcherson would give a more convincing performance than Jennifer Lawrence in this film (or any film, really) but it’s sadly the case here.

Despite this, Mockingjay is not without its share of inspired moments. There are thankfully some beats of levity in a scene that finds Katniss botching her lines for an overproduced propaganda film that has cheeky notes of political satire embedded. I was most taken with a quietly poetic scene in which soldiers infiltrate the Capitol to retrieve previous Tributes, which frequently reminded me of the Abbottabad raid sequence in Zero Dark Thirty. Here’s hoping that the finale has more gripping scenes like this one but for now, it feels like we’re stuck with the world’s most expensive bookmark.