“Arrival,” with Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, and Forest Whitaker, is a movie about aliens who attempt to communicate with humans, with profound effects on earthlings in general and with the linguistic expert played by Adams in particular.

The aliens are giant squidlike creatures who grunt and moan but also produce inky circular glyphs. Dr. Louise Banks, played by Adams, struggles to understand the messages, but she knows that when you learn another language, you reset your brain according to that language’s way of thinking. The aliens have a different sense of time, and as Dr. Banks deciphers their language, she begins to see the future. Which is what the aliens really need her to do.

The film belongs to Amy Adams, who delivers her most commanding performance yet. Renner is not much more than a sidekick, and Whitaker is the tough but fair military man. The most elusive character, however, is the script, so if you see the film, pay close attention.

Dr. Banks ends up with hard choices to make. If you know how your life will turn out, and how your decisions will affect others, would you do things differently? That dilemma is really at the heart of the movie. It carries a profoundly pro-life message, not so much in the way that term is usually understood, but in the sense that even a life cut short is well worth living. Unfortunately that is a radical message today.

A washed-up but dedicated actor struggling for relevance in a rapidly changing world he doesn’t really understand is a quick summary of the new release “Birdman,” but it also applies largely to the star, Michael Keaton, which may explain some of the intensity he brings to the role. Keaton and the rest of the cast turn in excellent performances, but the film ultimately can’t escape the weight of its own cleverness.

Keaton plays Riggan Thomson, an actor best known for playing a comic-book action hero, just as Keaton had his greatest success two decades ago in “Batman” movies. Riggan – may I call you Riggan, Mr. Thomson? — is trying to resurrect his career and give himself some legitimacy by taking a shot at theater. He is the writer, director, and star of a Broadway production of a play based on a collection of short stories by the late Raymond Carver.

Or he will be if he can get the production together and overcome his own demons, which include an impressive capacity for alcohol and the voice and eventually the image of the Birdman character belittling his attempt at a new life. His daughter, well played by Emma Stone, tells him, as even loving children sometimes do, just how irrelevant he is – why, he doesn’t even have Twitter or Facebook accounts!

A more serious problem is the open hostility of the New York Times critic, Tabitha Dickinson (Lindsay Duncan), who promises to sink the play with a bad review just because it is not Art. In the end, she saves it with a backhanded compliment, attributing to Riggan “The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance.”

The film covers three nights as the cast and crew scramble to open the show, surviving mishaps such as a stage light falling on an actor’s head. He’s replaced by Mike Shiner (Edward Norton), who brings a well-established Broadway presence at the cost of supreme arrogance. Riggan stumbles into social media when he steps outside for a smoke only to have the locked stage door close behind him. He has to run through Times Square clad only in his socks and underpants to get back into the theater, a trip promptly captured and shared with the world by eager celebrity-watchers.

The film could work as a black comedy of the insular little world of theater, but this is a movie, so the Birdman trapped inside Riggan’s head plays an ever-bigger role, leading to obviously imaginary action-film sequences. Director Alejandro González Iñárritu ultimately can’t decide if the film is comical, fantasy, or some sort of magical realism. The ending undermines the rest of the picture.

“Unbroken,” directed by Angelina Jolie, is the story of the courage and endurance of a young American held prisoner, and brutally mistreated, by the Japanese in World War II. With a slow pace and a running time of 2 hours 17 minutes, it is also something of a test of the endurance of the audience. By taking a straightforward biographical approach, broken up only by some flashbacks to fill in the backstory, Jolie achieves accuracy and honesty while giving up narrative intensity and a decisive climax.

The film is based on the nonfiction book by the same title, by Laura Hillenbrand (known previously for “Seabiscuit”). It’s the story of Louis Zamperini, a young athlete who placed eighth in the 5,000 meters in the 1936 Olympics. He is played very effectively by Jack O’Connell, an Anglo-Irish actor in his first big role. After attending USC, Louie enlisted in the Army Air Corps shortly before the U.S. entered the war, was commissioned as a lieutenant, and served as bombardier on a B-24 Liberator in the Pacific Theater.

Zamperini’s plane crashed in the ocean while on a search-and-rescue mission. He, the pilot, and one other crewman survived the crash and climbed into a life raft for what became the ghastly ordeal of floating adrift for six weeks in the hot sun, catching fish and birds to eat and hoping for rain to bring fresh water. A Japanese plane strafed the raft. The third man died after 33 days at sea; Louie and the pilot drifted 2,000 miles before touching land that was, unfortunately, occupied by the Japanese. Thus began Louie’s second hellish ordeal, imprisonment in several camps that ended only when the war did.

Being a prisoner is always awful, but Louie was targeted for special abuse by a sadistic guard named Watanabe, who did everything he could to break the American’s spirit. The guard is played by Takamasa Ishihara, an actor better known in Japan as a somewhat androgynous singer-songwriter and rock band guitarist. He brings a creepily erotic note to his sadistic treatment of the Allied prisoners. Watanabe’s ultimately unsuccessful campaign of cruelty provides the only real rivalry in the film.

And therein lies the problem. We know that Louie will somehow survive and triumph, because otherwise there wouldn’t be a movie made about him. Watching him get beaten time and again is a lot to pay for a brief scene in which Watanabe sinks to his knees, defeated by Louie’s unbeatable spirit.

In other war movies – “Bridge on the River Kwai” comes to mind – at least we have the satisfaction of seeing the bad guys killed (along with some good guys, of course) and the bridge getting blown up. It isn’t widely known, but in the “Kwai” book, the ending is very different. David Lean knew that a successful movie has to have a spectacular ending, so he took the liberty of providing it. Jolie remains faithful to her source and provides a story that is satisfying in its own way, but not one you would gladly see again.

“Foxcatcher,” with Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, and Mark Ruffalo, is billed as a “crime drama,” but the term doesn’t quite fit. In a crime drama, the fascination is in seeing how the motivation for the crime unfolds, how the crime itself is conducted, and how its aftermath works out. In “Foxcatcher,” the crime is almost senseless; the criminal is clearly somewhat deranged, is something of an alcoholic and a drug abuser, and plays with guns to boot. You can see the horror coming; the question is who, exactly, will be the victim.

The great strength of the movie is in the acting. Every character is utterly believable. Steve Carell is nothing like his usual hapless characters. As John E. du Pont, heir to a piece of one of the country’s great hereditary fortunes, he is full of icy determination but oddly detached even while he yearns for some human relationship. He wears a very convincing prosthetic nose and cocks his head back to look down on mere mortals, but connects with none of them.

Tatum and Ruffalo play Mark and David Schultz, who both won Olympic gold medals in wrestling in 1984. Tatum is a gifted athlete who is not so good as a coach at the training center du Pont establishes on the family estate. His brother Dave comes in to take over the coaching, alienating his brother and setting up a conflict with du Pont. The brothers attempt to help du Pont carry out his dreams of athletic glory, but are foiled by the multimillionaire’s long slide into madness.

Ruffalo actually wrestled in high school, and he and Tatum got enough training to make their performances look very realistic (although the finer points of wrestling are far beyond me). The episode in which Mark has to lose 12 pounds in 90 minutes before a weigh-in is actually true. (Solution: sweat.)

The story is based on real events at the du Pont estate in Pennsylvania in the 1980s and 1990s, but the filmmakers take certain liberties to make the movie work better. In the film, du Pont is driven by his hatred for his mother, who disdained wrestling as a “low” sport, far beneath her own love of horses. The story is meant to be a psychological thriller as du Pont rebels against the limitations of his privileged life. In reality, it appears that du Pont simply went nuts one winter’s day and shot someone close to him.

The film is well done and has generated Oscar buzz for the lead actors. But the characters played by Carell and Tatum are so unsympathetic that it is hard to imagine audiences identifying very strongly with the movie. It is a breakthrough of sorts for Carell, but who wants to be known for playing a deranged rich guy? In the old days, the filmmakers would have changed the story so the victim lives and rehabilitates the shooter, but in the new age of verisimilitude, we are left with a rather depressing movie.

“Philomena” is the story of an Irish woman who searches for the son she was forced to give up for adoption many years before. After years of fruitless inquiring, she teams up with a British journalist and learns the truth about her son and about the system that took him away.

Philomena Lee was a “Magadelene,” an unmarried girl who got pregnant and was packed off to a convent to have the baby. Then she had to work in a laundry for three and a half years to pay back the nuns who ran the place. She was forced to acknowledge that the baby would be given up for adoption. Little Anthony was given to an American couple who already had three boys and were looking for a girl, but decided to take him as well because he came right up and embraced the mother. The price: a donation of a thousand Irish pounds each.

The film belongs to Judi Dench, who plays the title character as a ordinary, working-class person, a lover of snacks, brandy, and mass-market novels, but one with a steely determination to find out what happened to her son.

The journalist is Martin Sixsmith, played with understated wit by Steve Coogan, a British comedian not well known in this country. Sixsmith has just been sacked from his job as a government spokesperson and sees Philomena’s story as a way back into journalism.

The search for Anthony takes unexpected turns that Philomena accepts with more grace and sense than expected by the somewhat supercilious Sixsmith. Together they solve the mystery and arrive at closure for Philomena, not to mention a career reboot for Sixsmith.

The film is based on Philomena’s true story, as told by Sixsmith in a book. The real-life Philomena said the film is reasonably true to life, and she is thrilled to be played by Judi Dench.

The book was published during an uproar in Ireland over revelations of abuses in the long-established “Magdalene” system. Coupled with disclosures of sexual abuse by priests, the scandal rocked the Catholic Church in Ireland. The film suggests that the church today is not as rigid and authoritarian as it was fifty years ago (which hardly needs to be said). Nevertheless, the emotional climax is a confrontation, initiated by Sixsmith, between Philomena and an aging nun, Sister Hildegarde, who is just as mean and judgmental as she was in the old days — eager to cast the first stone. Naturally, Philomena’s response is far more Christian than Sister Hildegarde’s.

The film is a civilized little British production in which sex is discussed but not shown, there are no car chases, and nothing gets blown up, so it seems unlikely to get much beyond the arthouse circuit. But Dench and Coogan are worth watching, and the search for Anthony provides enough narrative momentum to keep the film going.