Before I saw Alex Gibney’s documentary We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, I figured Gibney would be kicking the same government hornet’s nest already inflamed by his protagonist, Julian Assange — or some other nest, there being so many hornets and soul-sucking ghouls and dark subterranean forces in this and the last presidential administration that we’re practically living in Harry Potter World. But Gibney ended up following his story into other, even weirder areas. He comes to view the whistle-blowers, the cyberguerrillas in the war against all forms of secrecy, from a sort of psycho-anthropological perspective: Here, he says, is how the culture created them. And here’s how it destroys them. By the time this twisty, probing, altogether enthralling movie hits its final notes, the crimes against the Constitution and humanity have been upstaged by personal demons. Which is our woe as well.

Positing that there’s a secret battle in the forest between life and decay, the new animated film Epic proceeds to zoom into a world of tiny forest Samurai (called the Leaf-Men) who ride hummingbirds and fight against the forces of darkness and rot, epitomized by gray, scaly, gnarly creatures called the Boggens. Along comes ordinary-size human M.K. (voiced by Amanda Seyfried), newly arrived at the woodland home of her nutty scientist father (voiced by Jason Sudeikis) and who lands in this magic tiny forest people world just as the beautiful and ethereal Queen Tara (Beyoncé) is dying. Given a magic flower pod by the queen, M.K. joins a veteran Leaf warrior named Ronin (Colin Farrell) and a brash young rebel named Nod (Josh Hutcherson) as they seek to preserve the pod, which will help them crown their new queen if they allow it to bloom in the light of the moon during a Summer Solst … oh, forget it, it’s too elaborate to explain here. For a movie that’s so generic, Epic sure does throw a lot of contrived mythology at us.

The most fascinating thing about Before Midnight is that it exists — and that its form, in a sense, preceded content. Director and co-writer Richard Linklater and actors and co-writers Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy have reunited for the second time to chart the latest zigs and zags in the romance of Jesse and Celine — which began in 1995 in Before Sunrise and did not seem meant to go beyond, well, sunrise. Two attractive strangers on a train had a meeting of minds and then bodies and parted with an agreement to meet at a later date. When the three made Before Sunset nine years later, they dodged the biggest challenge. They hit the reset button: Jesse and Celine for convoluted reasons missed each other, and their lives went sadly on — until he wrote a novel and she came to a reading in Paris and …

The dialogue is slack, but apart from that the latest Fast & Furious installment, Fast & Furious 6, is more fun than any fifth sequel except Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country — which gets the edge because Nicholas Meyer made The Wrath of Khan, and I’m feeling nostalgic. Resident F&F director Justin Lin has a touch that’s surprisingly delicate for a series featuring muscle cars and hardbodies. It’s almost … feminine, at least if your definition of femininity is open enough to admit two women swivel-kicking each other to a pulp. Lin also loves cars enough to make them look as if they’re subject to the laws of gravity rather than the logarithms of computer programmers. The driving in the film is a thing of beauty.

The Hangover Part III opens on an elegant slow-motion shot of some guards running urgently, to the strains of classical music, through the corridors of a Thai prison. They make their way to a gate beyond which we see, still in slow motion, an elaborate, cataclysmic riot already in full progress. Amid the total chaos, they make their way to the cell of goofball Chinese gangster Leslie Chow (Ken Jeong) and discover that he has fled, Shawshank Redemption–style. Purely on the surface, it’s a beautifully put-together scene — aestheticized and shot with uncommon cinematic grace. And right there is pretty much everything that’s wrong with The Hangover Part III.