“Hyde Park on Hudson” is one of the more bizarre releases to hit video in recent months. It sports an A-list cast led by Bill Murray and Laura Linney, and it centers on a key period in the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The movie also has a capable director in Roger Michell, the man who made the outstanding 2002 thriller “Changing Lanes” and the even better 1999 romantic comedy “Notting Hill.”

Despite the amusing family neuroses and the “struggle through adversity to find happiness” underlining, the film ultimately comes off as flatly agreeable, but hardly fantastic. It has its adorable moments of affection filtered through a shell of eccentric family stories and slapstick humor. Those scenes meant to convey deeper feelings never find real intensity even though the conflicts they hover around are both real and thought-provoking. 

The latest film to shed light on Hemingway's life is the HBO drama “Hemingway & Gellhorn,” a picture about his relationship with his third wife, Martha Gellhorn. Although Hemingway is the best-known half of the power couple, Gellhorn is noteworthy in her own right, having established a career as one of the finest war correspondents of the 20^th century. The film begins and ends with an aging Gellhorn (portrayed beautifully by Nicole Kidman) recalling her past. 

The subject is so vast that it demands a director up to the task.  No stranger to activist movements, Kitchell created Berkeley in the Sixties, one of the defining protest films of its era, and the winner of many awards, including the the Best Documentary by the National Society of Film Critics.  Undaunted by the amount of research required, the mountains of archival footage to unearth, the spokespersons and narrators—Ashley Judd, Meryl Streep and Isabelle Allende, among others—necessary to make a relevant case for the survival of planet Earth, Kitchell has succeeded brilliantly.

Day-Lewis won his third best actor Oscar for his portrayal of Lincoln, and he is deserving of the award. Despite his English roots, the actor disappears so thoroughly into the role that it’s hard to imagine anyone else – American or British – playing it. As depicted by Day-Lewis, Lincoln is a charismatic man who is quick with a story and a smile, but he’s also a fearless champion of his beliefs.    

Written and directed by Mr. Nguyen, a Vietnamese-Québécois filmmaker based in Montréal, the movie milieu is the genocidal Congo wars of the 1990s and early 2000s, in which disease and starvation killed more than 5 million non-combatants. The focus of Nguyen’s tale is a girl named Komona (Mwanza), kidnapped at age 12 by a band of heavily armed thugs loyal to a warlord called Great Tiger.

Director Kathryn Bigelow may have won both of her Oscars for the 2008 film “The Hurt Locker,” but “Zero Dark Thirty” is her best project to date. The high praise for Bigelow’s newest feature isn’t meant to disparage “Hurt Locker,” which is a great film in its own right, but to underscore how powerful and affecting “Zero Dark Thirty” is. The movie is not only great, it’s a reminder that Oscar voters don’t always get it right.

After the first 20 minutes or so, a common thread emerges between each country’s histories: at one point or another, the United States intervened. Time after time, the U.S. would enter into a conflict that was waging within a Latin American country, and “settle” its dispute. The United States would leave the country with a new, American-trained, leader in its stead, with the hopes of improving trade relations with Latin America. 

Ang Lee won his second best director Oscar last month for his exceptional work in bringing novelist Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi” to the screen. The fanciful yet poignant story centers on an Indian boy named Pi Patel (Suraj Sharma) whose family runs a zoo. When his father decides to move to Canada, he packs the family and all of their animals onto a freighter only to see it sink at sea. 

Credit Emperor for putting big questions front and center for the audience to ponder: What is the United States, in the role of victor, supposed to do as a nation-builder? Benevolence?  Revenge? Step away and let the power vacuum be filled by something unknown (in 1945 Japan, this is Stalin and communism). With the United States’ role in the change of leadership in Iraq and  Afghanistan, these questions still haunt the world’s foremost democracy. The movie succeeds in demonstrating there are no easy answers.