There’s almost something criminal about watching a mobster film without Al Pacino or Robert De Niro in it. The cinematic wise guy, with his cartoonish bravado and brazen thuggery, has enthralled moviegoers for ­generations. 

“I want to tell you about radium,” Marie Curie, the Sorbonne’s first female professor, informs her class in 1906 in Paris. “A most remarkable element that doesn’t behave as it should.”

The new film Radioactive depicts Curie (Rosamund Pike) in much the same way. Independent, almost anti-social, Curie excelled at science in an era when the laboratory was pretty much a boy’s club. She was the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize, and one of only four people ever to win twice.

In Stateless, the lives of four individuals converge at the Barton Immigration Detention Center, located on a barren parcel of terrain in South Australia. One is an immigrant seeking asylum, and the other three are white Australians. Such a formula seems ill-suited to a political statement on refugee welfare. So, while the new Netflix limited TV series (rated TV-MA for occasional strong language and isolated moments of sensuality) does pro­ject concern for displaced persons, the personal dramas command center stage.

A kidnapper binds your wrists with a zip tie. How do you get free? The Battlbox crew of Netflix’s new reality TV series Southern Survival has the answer: Fasten your right and left shoelaces together through the zip tie. Then use your legs to tug the laces back and forth across the zip tie in a sawing motion, and—snap!—you’re free. Good to know.

At their finest, dads provide, protect, play, and model pious behavior. And then there are those moments when even the best fathers prove they’re oh-so-fallen. 

The same goes for Dads, a new documentary directed by Bryce Dallas Howard, daughter of one of Hollywood’s favorite sons, director Ron Howard. Dads delights in the joys and challenges of fatherhood, and addresses a man’s responsibility to mother and child. It’s an unexpected—almost radical—statement from Hollywood.

Greenland seems a world away, but its people’s miseries reinforce Solomon’s lament that “there’s nothing new under the sun.” Anywhere. 

The new documentary The Fight for Greenland focuses on political and social struggles unsettling Earth’s largest island. Should Greenland break from the Kingdom of Denmark? Can Greenlanders halt alcoholism, sexual abuse, drug addiction, and suicide?

If Rush Limbaugh bashes the green-energy movement, it’s politics as usual. When Michael Moore does too, storms brew on the left.