HBO’s Behind the Candelabra provides an astonishing performance by Michael Douglas as fl amboyant pianist and nightclub performer Liberace from the 50s through the 70s. Matt Damon portrays his lover, Scott Thorson. These are two great actors conveying their tempestuous relationship under Steven Soderbergh’s intelligent direction. Years before Elton John, Madonna, or Lady Gaga, the pianist dazzled Las Vegas audiences but lived a double life. The movie goes behind the glitz to explore the real Wladziu Valentino Liberace, who publicly denied he was gay.

Dan Aykroyd is perfect as his harried agent, and Rob Lowe hilarious as his plastic surgeon. Debbie Reynolds is unrecognizable as his adoring mother, Francis. Both actors brilliantly shed their famous real-life personae and look born for their roles. You never see the acting; you see reality replicated and a bizarre, manipulative pampered star, at one time the highest-paid performer in the world, come back to life.

Black Rock features perennial starlet Kate Bosworth. A camping weekend on a deserted island off the coast of Maine with two girlhood friends, portrayed by Lake Bell and Katie Aselton (who directed), turns to terror. Events quickly devolve with the arrival of three hunters who use the women as prey, stalking them around the island. There’s no wit, no clever trick, no plot gimmick; nearly everything is familiar and predictable, attributes that doom a thriller.

The Patience Stone thrusts the viewer into the mayhem and devastation of the endless war in Afghanistan. A young mother sits in an otherwise empty, stark room. Beside her lies her comatose husband, severely wounded and presumably braindead. Loyally if not altogether lovingly (the marriage looks to have been arranged), she sits all day beside him talking and trying to revive him, never losing faith. She tends to her children amid the continuing mortar fire and street battles near her apartment, not daring to think of their immediate future. The only temporary respite comes from visiting a relative who runs a nearby brothel. When she befriends a young Taliban, she may have found a reason for remaining there in this deeply absorbing look at a prolonged war brought into her life and, by extension, ours.

Golshifteh Farahani plays the courageous woman whose world is turned upside down by a series of horrific events, the sort every Afghani no doubt endures in her daily life. This is an astonishing movie.

Blackfish isn’t about a fish but rather magnifi cent black predators that belong in the ocean, not in amusement parks performing demeaning tricks for mesmerized tourists. This is a shocking documentary about so-called killer whales, also known as orcas, majestic mammals with individual communities and pods that speak different languages! Former trainers explain how they came to realize that the very idea of Sea World is inhumane. We see calves stolen from their mothers mid-ocean, doomed to a life swimming in a confi ned concrete enclosure, forced to perform inane tricks and splash easily entertained crowds.

One orca named Tilikum killed three trainers after years of confi nement in a restricted concrete compound after missed warnings. In one harrowing sequence, another trainer’s leg is clamped in Tilikum’s mouth as he’s repeatedly pulled underwater. His scuba training helped avoid panic. Instead he continually stroked the whale, and his life was spared.

Sea World refused to participate, so there’s a clever animated recreation of a government hearing where the park’s attorney defends its shameful practices.

We also see former trainers, now sadder and wiser, recalling how they spouted company lies about the lifespan of captive orcas. Especially poignant was an old diver recalling how years ago he’d pried a calf from its mother in the ocean, then helped drag it away for a life spent entertaining humans.

Between Us deals with two couples who meet periodically to discuss their innermost fears and experiences. Julia Stiles, recently in a similar movie called It’s A Disaster, is paired with Taye Diggs. Australian Melissa George, whose husband is portrayed by veteran David Harbour, costars. The dialogue is uninvolving and Ms. Stiles, who lends class to any project, should avoid scripts with characters revealing problems that aren’t very interesting.

Augustine is a remarkable French movie starring Vincent Lindon as Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot, credited as the father of modern neurology. With his colleagues, he treated women with a variety of neurological, psychosexual, and motor disorders. French singer Soko costars in the title role, a serving maid who’d suffered a horrifying seizure during a dinner and who’s been sent to a gloomy medical facility where women were often left unaided and forgotten. But Dr. Charcot treated and used her to ensure funding from the academy to continue his research. It’s a shocking fi lm about a little-known hero of medicine. [HS]