A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969) — PICK

Captain America: Civil War (2016) — PICK

Love & Friendship (2016) — PICK

Our God’s Brother (1997) — PICK

A good, pious saint film; a witty comedy of manners; an animated family classic; a rollicking action blockbuster: You can find something to suit your tastes among these new releases.

Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope St. John Paul II, originally wrote the stage play Our God’s Brother as a seminarian to honor a “debt of gratitude” to the subject, the Polish holy man St. Adam Chmielowski or Brother Albert, founder of the Albertine Brothers. Like Wojtyla, Chmielowski had many gifts, giving up a career as a celebrated painter to serve the poor — a move that helped to inspire Wojtyla’s own vocation. Chmielowski was beatified and canonized by John Paul II, so Our God’s Brother is a portrait of a saint by the saint who made him a saint!

Directed by Krzysztof Zanussi (Life for Life, about Maximilian Kolbe), the film version is newly available from Ignatius Press. Full disclosure: The companion booklet includes my own in-depth essay on the film and my interview with Zanussi.

With Love & Friendship, Whit Stillman, the “Jane Austen of indie film,” has at last made an Austen adaptation, unsurprisingly picking an early, unfinished, posthumously published novella. Starring an arch Kate Beckinsale as the charming but ruthless Lady Susan, it’s a perfect union of Stillman’s trademark hyper-articulate dialogue with Austen’s own witty language.

Debuting on Blu-ray, A Boy Named Charlie Brown is the first and best of the Peanuts feature films, a decent anthology of Charles Schulz’s bittersweet schtick.

Finally, in a year of mostly lackluster popcorn blockbusters, Captain America: Civil War delivers the goods, a movie that plays like an antidote to Batman v Superman and Avengers: Age of Ultron — and features the best big-screen interpretation of Peter Parker to date.