Cartel Land is Traffic but for real. Documentarian Matthew Heineman’s prize-winning Sundance sensation is unlike anything else we’ll see this year, non-fiction filmmaking as visceral, edge-of-your-seat thriller utilizing the medium in ways seldom done before.

He finds corners and angles to Holmes other current portraits of the character haven’t discovered, and as impressive as Benedict Cumberbatch, Robert Downey Jr. and Johnny Lee Miller have been, McKellen surpasses them with ease. I felt each beat of the journey, took every step, and by the time final decisions are made I was so caught up inside of the great detective’s headspace it was almost as if we were making them together in some sort of symbiotic tandem.

But when the balance does work the results are sublime, the filmmaker hitting it out of the park with a crackerjack final 20 minutes that had me sitting on the edge of my seat in white-knuckled joy, my eyes popping out of my head in glee. More, as outlandish and over the top as things become the story itself fearlessly remains emotionally grounded, keeping the grieving parents front and center while never forgetting what the house needs and wants for a single solitary second.

The big problem? The film is boring. As technically proficient as it might be, as nicely staged as a few signature moments are, overall there’s a humdrum banality to the supernatural happenings that’s just not particularly noteworthy, everything building to a supercilious silly twist of a finale that’s nothing close to original.

The best thing about David Thorpe’s documentary of self-exploration Do I Sound Gay? is the deeply personal realization it comes to. At the end of the day, what this rather slight film ends up being about is acceptance. Yet, not on a broad scale, but on a deeply personal one, instead. What Thorpe comes to realize is that, in the end, he can’t expect others to fully accept him, more to the point to love him, if he in turn cannot learn to accept himself.

The Minions, much like the acorn-chasing Scrat from the Ice Age franchise, work best in short, controlled bursts of mayhem, so designing an entire feature around them probably wasn’t a terrific idea right from the start.

But there are cracks in the façade, and at a certain point no amount of directorial embellishment can mask them. David and Alex Pastor’s (The Last Days, Carriers) script gets sillier and sillier as it moves along, building to bursts of outright stupidity that are almost laughable in their outlandish lunacy.

That’s not hyperbole, either. Kidman nearly elevates this film to something essential almost entirely on her own. This is a magnetic, impossibly complex star turn that comes close to being one of the Oscar-winner’s best, and truly the only reason I’m talking about [Strangerland] at all is entirely thanks to her.

Anchored by a stupendous, marvelously intricate performance from its star, [Gemma Bovery] is a sprightly, introspectively fearless wonder that goes to some pretty dark places yet does so with a somewhat surprising amount of levity. It’s an odd amalgamation of comedy, drama and tragedy all melded into one gleefully anarchic whole, and as such it’s a joy to watch opening frame to last.