Beautiful Boy is difficult to watch. It hurts on many levels. Based on the dual memoirs of David Sheff and his son, Nic, the film despairs that a drug addict can ever kick his habit. Nic gets clean for a while, but again and again chooses to shoot up with crystal meth. As surely as highs crash, so too recoveries collapse, the film seems to say.

Picture a war-movie hero, and who comes to mind? Rambo with an M16, or a reverend with an M. Div.? In Indivisible, a military chaplain gets to be the hero.

The new film from Pure Flix Entertainment is based on a true story, but it isn’t a typical war movie. The battles that Army chaplain Darren Turner (Justin Bruening) and his wife Heather (Sarah Drew) fight are to save marriages and souls. And throughout the entire film no soldier ever swears like a sailor. (There’s no sexual content, either.)

Just who was Freddie Mercury? Ask someone old enough to remember the superstar lead singer of the 1970s and 1980s rock band Queen, and you’ll probably get one of two different answers: dynamic singer and songwriter, or flamboyant libertine who died of AIDS.

Watching First Man might give viewers some sympathy for conspiracy theorists who allege the moon landings were faked: Roll back technology a half century, and such an achievement seems positively outlandish. In launch and flight scenes, the new film squeezes you into the rattling capsule clogged with myriad switches and wires. It makes you wonder, as the metal can’s occupants must have wondered, how the thing could get off the ground, let alone navigate through space’s vacuum to a distant, lifeless rock marked by no more than a borrowed drop of sunlight.

Critics are heaping praise on the fictional drama The Hate U Give for its message condemning racism and police brutality. But it’s one thing to spotlight problems, and another to offer substantive solutions.

Precisely half the audience at the opening night showing of God Bless the Broken Road that I attended seemed to enjoy the new faith film. The other patron laughed and gasped throughout, while I groaned in silence.

The good news is that “no animals were harmed” in the making of Mile 22. The bad news is that depictions of violence against human beings splatter the screen from start to finish. The new film (rated R for strong violence and foul language throughout) frolics in spinning kicks, grenade blasts, gunshots to the head, and even an admittedly ironic beating death using pieces of a hospital bed. Adding insult to injuries, Mile 22 sidesteps the moral tightropes and political intrigues that protagonists navigate in some worthwhile action thrillers.