Paul Dano in Love & MercyLOVE & MERCY

Receiving a wide national release on the same weekend as Inside Out's debut, director Bill Pohlad's Love & Mercy is also an exploration of the brain - specifically, the brain of Beach Boys wunderkind Brian Wilson, alternately portrayed by Paul Dano (during the film's Pet Sounds-era 1960s sequences) and John Cusack (during Wilson's heavily-, and incorrectly-, medicated period in the late 1980s). And rather astonishingly for a work of its type, it boasts numerous scenes in which it really, truly feels like we're allowed to roam around in a legendary musician's head, feeling what he feels and, even more importantly, hearing what he hears.

Jack O'Connell in UnbrokenUNBROKEN, THE IMITATION GAME, and BIG EYES

Among other titles, Christmas Day brought with it the area releases of Angelina Jolie's Unbroken, Morten Tyldum's The Imitation Game, and Tim Burton's Big Eyes. Each of them opens with a title-card variant on "This is a true story." Each of them ends with a series of title cards informing us what happened to characters after the films' narratives concluded. And each of them, for occasional better and more frequent worse, feels absolutely, 100-percent Hollywood.