Reel-View Ratings: The Bigger The Beard, The Better The Movie

FANDRY

Youthful Jabya is in love with the beautiful Shalu — a simple teenage love story, if it weren’t for the fact that Jabya is an untouchable Kaikadi, the lowest of the low in his Indian village, and Shalu is from a respectable, high-ranking family. He can’t get the girl, or a decent job, or anything he wants, really. Sharply edited, with acting-that-doesn’t-feel-like-acting performances, the film dutifully follows the languid-yet-frenetic pace of village life, buoyed by the ups and downs of Jabya’s attempts to escape it. That means the film moves in spurts and starts, but the ending packs a painful punch.

Plays 12:30 p.m. Jan. 7 and 20, 4 p.m. Jan. 10 and 7 p.m. Jan. 14 at Doris Duke Theatre

PREDESTINATION

Time travel, as we have learned in so, so many movies, never leads to anything good — or simple. Ethan Hawke plays a bartender-time traveler-secret agent who coincidentally (spoiler: it’s not a coincidence) meets Sarah Snook’s intersex-time traveler-astronaut-comfort woman in a convoluted narrative that jumps time, place and identity several times over. It’s a visually lush, thematically engaging story that immediately will remind viewers of Cloud Atlas, but it will nevertheless lose at least half its audience along the way, with an overly long expository dump in the beginning and too little time to untangle the threads at the end.

Opens Jan. 9 in wide release

SELMA

Selma is not a Martin Luther King Jr. biopic, nor an uplifting parable about the civil rights movement. It is an examination of a moment in history: the Selma marches of 1965. Director Ava DuVernay draws from an ensemble of players to tell the story from every angle, from President Lyndon B. Johnson, to Malcolm X, to individual, but never faceless, protestors. Selma does not hesitate to get gut-wrenchingly bloody and real, as protestors get assaulted in the streets, but its ending still can’t resist falling back on Hollywood optimism. David Oyelowo embodies King as a man, not an ideal — and he carries the film.

Opens Jan. 9 at Kahala Theatre