If you think you know where The Gift (2015) is headed from there you’d be dead wrong, Edgerton taking things into far more disturbing and devastatingly insidious psychological terrain than anything I could have anticipated beforehand.

In the end, though, it’s Streep who elevates things to the heights they ultimately ascend to. Demme cannily keeps her in the center of the stage, so even when others are shining it is Ricki we’re thinking about. It’s as terrific a performance as any the veteran four-time Academy Award-winning actress has given over the last handful of years, Ricki and the Flash topping the charts in large part solely because of her.

Shaun the Sheep Movie is a delightful, family-friendly, stop-motion sensation that gets better and better as it goes along. A priceless gem about friendship, family and sacrifice, it’s a consistently witty marvel filled to the brim with ingenious sight gags, endearingly original comedy and sublime characterizations – all of which are accomplished without any dialogue whatsoever – I absolutely adored. In short, it’s sheer perfection, and I’m not at all sheepish trotting out such an obvious pun as that in order to say so.

The fifth entry in the popular spy vs. spy series of action spectaculars, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation is a relentless thriller that ends up being marvelously entertaining even if many of its signature moments and beats feel in some way repeats of events from the preceding motion pictures.

But this [Vacation (2015)] fails on an even more calamitous level, forgetting the elements that made the Ramis/Hughes effort so memorable and long-lasting. It trades in platitudes instead of sincerity, elevating the gross-out antics to an even higher plateau yet leaving out the heart, soul and honesty that made all that icky silliness matter in a way it never could have otherwise.

The Look of Silence is director Joshua Oppenheimer’s powerful companion piece to his Academy Award-nominated stunner The Act of Killing. If that latter film was a detached, clinical analysis of unimaginable evil put under the most devastatingly perceptive of microscopes, this latest endeavor is the cry to hold those killers responsible.

Sadly, this big budget special effects driven comedy exists more than it does anything else, achieving a form of bland, barely interesting mediocrity that’s not terrible enough to be risible yet nowhere near imaginative enough to make up for its readily apparent shortcomings.

Featuring a number of exemplary performances, not the least of which is Gyllenhaal’s haggard ferocity in the lead role, filled with a number of stripped-down, nakedly raw emotional beats that take the breath away, the film is nonetheless an over-stuffed muddle that embraces every cliché the genre has ever known. [Southpaw (2015)] throws in so much stuff that one can’t help but want to throw in the towel and end things halfway through, the body of the viewer nearly as battered, bruised and bloodied as Billy Hope’s is by the time the climactic fight has reached its conclusion.

Shot on the fly using an iPhone 5S, featuring a pair of loose, energetically bouncy performances from newcomers Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor, [Tangerine (2015)] is an exuberantly original shot of comedic adrenaline, building to a cathartically touching coda that’s as distinctive as it is genuine.