Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s infamous ‘Hitler Speech’ of March 2003 caused an onslaught of violence against domestic opponents. So much so that an outraged George W. Bush froze all assets of Mugabe and many of his supporters. Mugabe’s words, quoted by reporter, Peta Thornycroft in the March 26, 2003, Telegraph.Co.UK, are in direct response to accusations by the British press that Mugabe’s political actions are comparable to those of Adolf Hitler:

“This Hitler has only one objective: justice for his people, sovereignty for his people, recognition of the independence of his people and their rights over their resources. If that is Hitler, then let me be a Hitler tenfold.”

This speech, reverberating in Mugabe’s own voice, forms a backdrop for the brilliantly disturbing new documentary “Mugabe and the White African” by newcomers Lucy Bailey and Andrew Thompson. It is no surprise that the film is shortlisted for an Oscar and should, no doubt, receive several.

Time has a way of forgiving the past. Just ask Hugh Hefner, who has somehow gone from illicit to iconic over the past 50 years, outshining – and in many cases outliving – most of his critics. Hefner was the first to put nudity on newsstands, the first to expose the one thing all of us loved and none of us acknowledged, the first to transform sex from a closeted ritual to the great American pastime. And he did it all during the feel-guilt Fifties – a time when most sex acts weren’t only considered immoral, they were downright illegal.

Thus is the early premise of Brigitte Berman’s “Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel.” Berman’s documentary is an engaging, if often one-sided, portrayal of Hefner as a progressive visionary who went from creating the Playboy philosophy to becoming the ultimate personification of it. Berman’s Hef is a counterculture hero, a misunderstood activist whose public image is constantly at odds with his private persona.

Imagine a world where no one pretended … Well, almost no one. So goes the premise of “Life During Wartime” — a film that focuses on an eclectic cast of characters, most of whom are either searching for the truth or trying their best to deny it. It’s familiar territory for (Director) Todd Solondz, who seems to have written “Wartime” as a companion piece to 1998’s “Happiness,” albeit a companion piece with a completely different cast and setting. Solondz is on top of his game here, presenting and resolving more conflicts in 97 minutes than most directors will in their entire careers.

Is it more cathartic to forgive or forget? Is it right to persecute those who have no control over their impulses? Who suffers more as a result of past actions — the guilt-ridden criminal or the hapless victim? “Wartime” explores all of these themes and more, and it manages to do so without taking sides.

Anyone who grew up during the Cold War can recall the fear and paranoia brought on by the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race. In a 1961 address to the U.N. General Assembly, President John F. Kennedy referred to the nuclear threat as a “sword of Damocles” that loomed over all of us, guaranteeing our destruction should we ever cut the cord that kept the sword at bay. Though the Cold War has since ended, and the U.S. and the nations of the former Soviet Union are now on friendly terms, Lucy Walker’s documentary “Countdown to Zero” makes its starkly clear that the world’s nuclear danger is no less imminent.

Using Kennedy’s cautionary speech as its impetus, “Countdown” analyzes just how easily a present-day nuclear scenario could be triggered. Since the end of the Cold War, the players in the world’s nuclear game have become more numerous, and security conditions increasingly volatile.

Tatiana Maslany gives what should be a career-defining, star-making performance as a teenage girl on the cusp of sexual maturity. In this bleak Canadian drama, she plays Ruby, who, along with her 11-year-old sister, Rose, is abandoned by their mother when she runs off to L.A. to chase dreams of being a movie star. Left in the hands of their alcoholic, emotionally stunted former hockey player father Ray, Ruby and Rose form a dysfunctional family of sorts. But with self-absorbed, adolescent Ray still figuring out who he is, Ruby finds herself rebelling until she’s spiraling out of control on her way to becoming the town floozy.

While it starts out as a regular enough family drama, “Grown Up Movie Star” quickly becomes much darker, tackling Ruby’s sexual experimentation, homosexuality and pedophilia. The writing, acting and direction are all spot-on, though, so the descent into grimmer, more harrowing territory is smooth and feels natural.

The setup to “Alamar” — literally, “To the Sea” — reads like something out of a Harlequin novel. Roberta, a metropolitan Italian woman, moves to Mexico for work and meets Jorge, a traditional Mayan man with long wavy hair who refuses to put on a shirt over his smooth, toasted skin. They fall in love but their relationship can’t last — they’re just too different. However, they do share a five-year-old son, Natan. “Sometimes, I think God made us meet so that Natan could be born,” Roberta says.

When Roberta decides to move back to Rome, Jorge takes Natan on a trip to his father’s fishing shack on Banco Chinchorro, an atoll reef off the southeast coast of Mexico. A hybrid documentary drama, “Alamar” features real people — Natan is, indeed, Jorge and Roberta’s son — in a scenario orchestrated by director Pedro González-Rubio to comment on not only fathers and sons but man’s relationship to nature.

At the beginning of the century, directors Christopher Nolan and M. Night Shyamalan seemed destined for greatness. Their careers started similarly. Both men created critically acclaimed perception-challenging films for their second projects — Shyamalan's Academy Award-nominated, talking-to-the-dead story “The Sixth Sense” (1999) and Nolan's reverse-engineered thriller “Memento” (2000). But as the decade wore on, their paths diverged greatly, both financially and critically. While Shyamalan spiraled downward with financial and artistic disappointments, Nolan's career achieved new heights with each new production. This summer, both men engineered big-budget, potentially massive blockbusters. Shyamalan's embarrassing “The Last Airbender” possibly ushered in his creative nadir. Among the hoopla and astronomic expectations following the mega-hit “The Dark Knight,” Nolan somehow managed to keep the story intricacies of his latest film a secret. Eagerly anticipated, primarily courtesy of spectacular trailers and an aggressive viral campaign, the at-times tedious “Inception” fulfills its visual promise with an intriguing portrayal of a tale of dreams, thieves and redemption.

What begins as a painfully bleak portrait of life in the slums of Dublin transforms into a lovely, if dark, love story between two adolescents. Despite growing up in an environment rife with uncouth language (at best) and abuse (at worst), Kylie and Dylan (newcomers Kelly O’Neill and Shane Curry) have managed to preserve some semblance of innocence in which running away to the city is a grand adventure they can survive if they just stick together.

Kylie, 10, looks for any excuse to get out of the house where she lives with her four siblings and overworked mother; next door, Dylan, 11, loses himself in video games while his father rages at the uncooperative toaster. Unknowns hired for their insubordinate personalities, O’Neill and Curry are delightful and endearing. O’Neill especially, delivering coarse dialogue from bowtie lips, recalls an “E.T.”-era Drew Barrymore, and Curry is sweet in his exasperation/infatuation with her.

Noomi Rapace once again demonstrates that she owns the role of Lisbeth Salander, an enigmatic computer hacker with a violent past. The part is physically and emotionally grueling, requiring control and contemplation punctuated by bursts of brutality, and Rapace unselfconsciously inhabits it, in this chapter exposing an unexpected vulnerability under a seemingly impenetrable exoskeleton.

“The Girl Who Played With Fire” hews closer to the book by Stieg Larsson than the first film in the series did while still collapsing 500 pages into just over two hours: After the events of “Tattoo,” Salander flees Stockholm, returning just as her partner-in-crime, magazine publisher and former disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), stumbles onto an exposé on Sweden’s sex trade. The two haven’t spoken in more than a year, yet their fates remain inextricably intertwined when the journalist writing the trafficking story for Blomkvist’s publication and his graduate-student girlfriend are murdered and Salander is named the primary suspect.

Charming 3-D film pits legendary super-criminal Gru (Steve Carrell) against next-generation villain Vector (Jason Segel) in a game of one-upmanship.

After the greatest heist in history — of the Great Pyramid of Giza — by parties unknown, despondent Gru plans to steal the moon as his return to greatness. Cleverly hiding his secret headquarters deep beneath a suburban home, Gru delights in tormenting his neighbors. He routinely uses his freeze ray gun on them, runs over their shrubs with his souped up trademark super-vehicle, and basically behaves boorishly. Aided by mad scientist Dr. Nefario (Russel Brand doing his best “Q” impersonation), an array of nefarious gadgets that include a shrink ray and robotic cookies, and an army of mischievous little minions, things progress as planned until Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (Dana Gaier) and Agnes (Elsie Fisher), three orphaned girls from Miss Hattie's Home for Girls, show up selling cookies, throwing his life and plans into utter chaos.