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Young chimp Caesar bonds with the ailing Charles (John Lithgow) in Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

With a keen understanding of the old “eyes are the window to the soul” truism, Steven Spielberg equipped E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial with a look similar to Albert Einstein’s deep-set visage. In a pair of remarkable new movies in theaters now, charismatic simians — the aliens among us — bridge the species gap with their soulful gazes.

Both Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Project Nim remind us there’s plenty of nonhuman intelligent life in the universe. Just check the cages at a university research lab. Both films raise intriguing questions about the scientific imperative: Does medical progress require inhumane treatment of sentient beings with DNA quite similar to ours? If primates could talk, what would they say? At what point does a chimp’s charm wear thin and turn savage?

Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which opens Friday, follows San Francisco scientist Will (played by James Franco) as he seeks a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, which is slowly killing his father (John Lithgow). Lab experiments unexpectedly produce a super-bright baby chimp named Caesar, who moves in with Will and his family.

Caesar rules Rise. Andy Serkis and Weta Digital’s motion-capture team join forces under the direction of Rupert Wyatt to produce the summer’s most extraordinary cinematic achievement.

Unlike Roddy McDowall’s Cornelius in the original 1968 Planet of the Apes, or Tim Roth’s General Thade in Tim Burton’s 2001 remake, Serkis did not need to project his character through thick layers of rubber latex. Instead, the British actor, who learned to emote into head-mounted cameras by playing Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films, delivers a deeply expressive portrayal through eye movements, posture, sighs, nods, shrugs, grimaces and gestures.

Working with computer models that detailed dilation, light refraction and eye moisture, 450 Weta artists used new pupil-tracking technologies to overcome the “dead-eye” look that dogged some previous motion-capture efforts. After recording Serkis’ facial muscle movements, they painted the movement with photorealistic primate skin during postproduction.

The artists molded their computer-scanned images around a world-class performance. To get inside Caesar’s skin, Serkis studied documentary footage from the 1990s of a chimp named Oliver who walked upright, then worked from the inside out to trace Caesar’s evolution from adorable tot to bitter leader of a captive primate rebellion.

All that research and technology paid off: You’ll undoubtedly feel more for Caesar and his bright-eyed simian brothers than you do for Rise of the Planet of the Apes’ human actors.

In Project Nim, Oscar-winning documentary maker James Marsh creates his primate portrait by stitching together home movies shot by a succession of caretakers who fed, clothed and befriended a chimpanzee named Nim.

Separated from his mother as an infant, Nim is brought to New York in 1973 by Columbia University behavioral psychologist Herbert Terrace, who wants to disprove linguist Noam Chomsky’s theory that language skills are uniquely hardwired in humans. He recruits former student Stephanie LaFarge, now presiding loosely over a family of seven children, to raise Nim as one of her own. The hypothesis: If Nim is nurtured as if he were a human child, the chimp might acquire humanlike language skills.

Nim wears diapers. He rolls around on the floor with the toddlers. He hugs the kids and plays tag. Later, when Nim gets the run of a 25-acre estate in upstart New York, he smokes weed with his handlers.

The temptation to view Nim as a kind of alterna-human companion becomes especially compelling when the chimp appears to banter with his keeper using sign language. According to the film’s subtitles, Nim says, “The banana taste good, give me more,” and “I’m sorry,” among other expressions.

But here again, the eyes have it. Marsh uses close-ups in the archival video that seem to capture Nim’s inner workings with uncanny accuracy, simply by zoning in on the chimp’s eyes. Especially during the movie’s somber third act, Nim runs the gamut of emotions, from surprise to delight, disgust and disappointment, all evidenced through the way he looks at his captors.

In a director’s note for Project Nim, filmmaker Marsh speculates that characters like Nim function as a kind of primordially charged mirror into the human soul.

“How many of the characteristics that we recognize in Nim reflect part of our own genetic endowment, our murderous aggression, or social hierarchies, our need for hedonistic diversion and sensation?” he asks.

While very different movies, Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Project Nim both put us eyeball to eyeball with extraordinary chimps in a bid to teach us something about ourselves. But when American artist Rachel Mayeri presents her documentary Primate Cinema: Apes as Family in England next month, she’ll take monkey movies to a whole new level.

Billed as the first movie made expressly for chimp moviegoers, Primate Cinema shows chimpanzees — watching television.

Images courtesy 20th Century Fox except where noted.