It’s nearly impossible to overstate how widely beloved Mandela is—that’s what you get for leading a battered country out of apartheid—and how complex his legacy remains, intertwined with the complicated history of South Africa. Director Justin Chadwick is clearly mindful of the gravity, and gamely shoehorns all he can into two-and-a-half hours, but one has the sense there’s room for a project of much greater thoroughness. by Marjorie Skinner