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For your Thanksgiving weekend viewing, you have a choice: A scientist in love, bumbling kidnappers or spy-savvy waterfowl.

And — surprise! — the waterfowl are the best option.

"Penguins of Madagascar" spins off the flightless birds-turned-super spies into their own adventure — battling an evil octopus (voiced by John Malkovich) bent on revenge on all penguins everywhere. (He has his reasons.) The movie is fast-paced and wickedly funny, smartly spoofing spy movies and action cliches.

"Horrible Bosses 2" follows up on the raunchy 2011 comedy, and it's a case of more being less. This time, Nick (Jason Bateman), Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) and Dale (Charlie Day) are their own bosses, and turn out to be horrible at it — getting snookered by a catalog retail executive (Christoph Waltz) and his spoiled son (Chris Pine). The guys decide to retaliate through kidnapping, which goes ridiculously wrong. The trio gets outplayed by the movie's villains, including scene-stealing moves by returning players Kevin Spacey and Jennifer Aniston.

"The Theory of Everything" is undiluted Oscar bait, a straightforward and well-mounted biography of physicist Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) that focuses on his romance and marriage to Jane (Felicity Jones). Redmayne's performance is the showy one, as he captures Hawking's gradual physical disintegration to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig's Disease). But Jones, playing the patient caregiver and soulmate, is more quietly impressive.