Not every new movie gets Deadpool-level marketing. Here are six under-the-radar movies that are new to theaters, rent, or home video right now, and that you may want to seek out.

1. Cemetery of Splendor

Strand Releasing

There are two close-ups in Cemetery of Splendor that feel so startlingly intimate, they hit you like a punch. One is of Jenjira (Jenjira Pongpas), a housewife who volunteers at a hospital filled with soldiers overcome by a mysterious sleeping sickness. The other is of Itt (Banlop Lomnoi), the patient she's been visiting and has befriended during his scattered waking hours. Until they're shown up close, you never realize that the film has held them at a medium distance, but that's how bewitching the atmosphere of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's latest film is. It conjures up a world in which the magical and the mundane are mixed, and in which the past lurks unignorably beneath the present. In one scene, a medium named Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram) takes Jenjira on a tour of the palace that's since been replaced by a hospital and that's about to be replaced again by something more modern; it's as though the ghost of the building is still standing tall. The languidly paced movie requires some surrendering to, but it's well worth it.

Where to watch it: Cemetery of Splendor is now playing in New York, with more cities to follow.

2. Frankenstein

Xavier Samuel, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Danny Huston in Frankenstein.

Alchemy

Candyman director Bernard Rose has witty ways of modernizing Mary Shelley's novel in Frankenstein. His version of the monster, Adam (Xavier Samuel), is born from a 3D bioprinter, the work of a pair of married scientists (Carrie-Anne Moss and Danny Huston). The two are pleased with their creation, whose superhuman strength and healing abilities have made him almost indestructible, until mutations turn him from physically perfect to grotesque and they try to euthanize him. Instead, Adam escapes and ends up in Los Angeles's homeless population, a malformed adult with the mind and impulsiveness of a toddler.

Rose's ambitions are sometimes outpaced by his materials in Frankenstein, a movie whose visuals and effects can't always keep up with its story. But in telling an iconic horror tale through the experiences of its monster, it builds dread — not through what's lurking in the dark, but with our fears about the harm Adam may cause without meaning it or because he simply doesn't understand. Rose doesn't force his monster into a metaphor for anything; he just brings the narrative into the present day and allows it to resonate as one about the people who are shunted to society's outskirts and treated as less than human — even when one of them isn't human at all.

Where to watch it: Frankenstein is available via digital rental/purchase as well as on Blu-ray and DVD.

View Entire List ›

Christian Bale in Knight of Cups and Bobby Cannavale in Vinyl.

Melinda Sue Gordon / Broad Green, HBO

In Knight of Cups, Christian Bale's character is a successful screenwriter who never seems to get around to writing anything. He does, however, spend time in picturesque contemplation in the desert or on a beach, takes rides in his convertible, and goes to parties.

There's an impromptu soiree he attends early on in the film, the sort of shindig that can only exist onscreen — because even the most meticulously doormanned real-life event will never look as good as it does through the scope of Emmanuel Lubezki's matchless cinematography. It's at a rooftop bar, and there's a pool and a dazed-looking model drooping in silver body paint and angel wings. The floor is covered in glitter. Rick (Bale) gets so trashed that he sprawls across a bench like a child being tumbled into bed by an invisible parent. Then the film leaps forward a few hours, when most of the attendees have left, and Rick is alone, staring out over the city, pensive — he hasn't left the party, but the party's left him.

Knight of Cups

Broad Green

Knight of Cups is a Terrence Malick movie and, like other Terrence Malick movies, it is lyrical, unbearably lovely, and not terribly concerned with straightforward storytelling. The characters speak in voiceover more than they do to one another; the film is one long, experiential montage set to classical music more than it is a series of chronological events. Knight of Cups is about how Rick visits and revisits a series of current and ex-lovers, friends, and family members played by the likes of Cate Blanchett, Freida Pinto, Wes Bentley, and Natalie Portman, among others, each of whom corresponds to a tarot card and each of whom tells Rick about himself and his quest for meaning in bursts of abstract prose. It's an ecstatic fantasy about feeling malaise in a Los Angeles in which all doors are open to you.

The rest of the movie is — like that shot of Rick après-party on the roof — full of equal parts beauty and bullshit, reveling in a heavily romanticized version of Hollywood superficiality while indulging a character who just can't figure out what he wants, and who bears wounds from an estranged father and a brother who died, keeping him from making connections. This doesn't stop him from trying various women on for size as possible salvation. "You don't want love. You want a love experience," one girlfriend, played by Imogen Poots, murmurs to summarize the emptiness of their relationship. Knight of Cups might be described, similarly, as an angst experience, delivering a simulacrum of a man's search for meaning as he soaks up the delights of the plush purgatory Malick makes L.A. out to be: an endless corridor of cocktails, palm trees, and lithe ladies. It's not exactly the director's Entourage, but it might be his attempt at a BoJack Horseman.

Vinyl

Macall B. Polay / HBO

Or maybe it's his Vinyl. Malick's movie is dreamy and disconnected while Martin Scorsese's HBO series is amped up and motormouthed. But they're both auteur projects about a particular flavor of dissatisfaction that almost no one has the opportunity to sample: the unplaceable ache of having everything except fulfillment. Knight of Cups' Rick and Vinyl's record exec Richie Finestra (Bobby Cannavale) aren't the first fictional characters to feel sad in positions of showbiz power — and they won't be the last — but these explorations of their dissatisfaction are particularly nettling because there's so little about their grandeur that feels earned. Richie is disaster with a good ear, and Rick may or may not be a good writer, but whether they deserve their plum gigs is beside the point. They could share a self-pitying shuffle from their sweet perches, which are separated by a continent and a few decades but both surrounded by other people who seem to actually know what they want and what they haven't been able to get. What to give the guy who has it all? Apparently, an extravagant ode to how hollow they feel inside as they rattle around their airy condo or Greenwich house, gazing at the women who are failing to make them whole inside.

Those women in Knight of Cups — Poots' manic pixie dream girl, Teresa Palmer's stripper with a heart of gold, and Blanchett (a standout) as Rick's physician ex-wife, among others — serve as mirrors in which Rick observes his own restiveness. But in Vinyl, a series overstuffed with acting talent and grindingly short of worthy ideas, there are actual full-fledged other characters, and almost any one of them would be a more interesting center than Richie. These include Juno Temple as the punk Peggy Olson to Richie's Don Draper; or Ray Romano as Richie's aging head of promotions; or Ato Essandoh as the blues artist Richie picked up and then betrayed early in his career. Then there's Olivia Wilde as the former Warhol girl whom Richie married, a woman dealing with the fact that being a suburban homemaker can be just as thankless as being a muse.

Vinyl and Knight of Cups.

Macall B. Polay / HBO, Broad Green

In the pilot, they all get dragged into the maelstrom of Richie's midlife crisis when he decides against selling his label, an exchange that would have made him and his partners very rich while allowing them to offload a floundering company. He screws his partners over without asking after coming out of an eventful night with a renewed fervor for rock and roll that's only partially fueled by all the cocaine he's been hoovering. He's eager to excavate his old dreams, everyone else's desires be damned, indifferent to just how many people in his orbit haven't had a shot at their own.

While Richie sneers down at the prospect of terminally square German investors buying his company for gouts of money and frets over "selling out," Rick wanders the lobby of a sleek skyscraper listening to a man in a suit talk about how he's going to make Rick rich and then some. "Is there anyone you want to sit in a room with?" he asks. "Is there anyone you want to know?" Outside, another man in another suit compares his life to "playing Call of Duty on 'easy' — I just go around and fuck shit up," a declaration of privilege so on the nose it's almost wince-worthy, even in a movie in which wealth is just another thing these character need only say "yes" to. But the question's inescapable: If these men are living life like they have the cheat codes, why are theirs the stories that we're watching?

Knight of Cups

Broad Green

In the end, it's not oblivious navel-gazing that makes Vinyl and Knight of Cups' stories tiresome. It's the way that they reinforce the importance their main characters have already assumed for themselves. Knight of Cups starts with the Hymn of the Pearl, a parable from the Acts of Thomas (from the gnostic Bible) about a prince who's sent on a quest to retrieve a pearl but instead forgets who he is and why he's on a journey in the first place. In the film, Rick would be that prince, awakened from his complacent haze by an earthquake — the earth literally shaking him into awareness. In the TV show, Richie gets his own local disaster as personal epiphany when he survives a building collapse during a particularly dizzying New York Dolls show. He emerges from the rubble in a shot that feels like a nod to the end of Scorsese's own After Hours, eventually making his way back into his office bloody and dusty and claiming to have been mugged by God — though, in Richie's words, "I took his wallet instead."

These characters are not actually touched by the divine, but they accept these larger moments as signs meant for them in the same way they take for granted their access, power, and wealth. There's a chilly realism in that, even with the hallucinatory touches both Scorsese and Malick drop in to depict their protagonists' unmoored inner selves (like the vision of Janis Joplin belting a song alongside Richie's frustrated howl when his office catches on fire, or when an actress in full Marie Antoinette garb walks near Rick through a "city street" of a studio backlot). Why would Rick or Richie have any reason to doubt their places at the center of their respective universes? They're not the most compelling people onscreen, and yet they're the characters these self-serious stories are focused on. Everyone else is left on the sideline, hoping that someday they'll get a chance at the spotlight.

John Goodman and Mary Elizabeth Winstead in 10 Cloverfield Lane.

Michele K. Short / Paramount Pictures

Cloverfield was a found footage film about a gargantuan, spindly limbed monster ravaging New York. The 2008 film was also, sidelong, a movie about 9/11 — not the causes or the consequences, but the visceral awfulness of being in the middle of an assault on the city, frantically trying to discern what's happening, where to run, and whether your loved ones are safe. Its shaky-cam style evoked the videos shot on the fly by eyewitnesses that have become our usual first look at disasters in the years since 2001. Its characters were just ordinary people who didn't defeat the creature, or figure out its origins, or make smart decisions in their attempts to stay alive. Cloverfield dealt in a recent American trauma the way its kaiju classic predecessor Godzilla evoked Japan's fears about nuclear weapons in the wake of World War II.

John Gallagher Jr. and Winstead in 10 Cloverfield Lane.

Michele K. Short / Paramount Pictures

The monster in 10 Cloverfield Lane — a clever, modest thriller being positioned (a little cynically) as a sort of follow-up to that first film — offers a different kind of real-world resonance. The monster's name is Howard, and he's played with ominous conviction by John Goodman.

Howard is the man responsible for building the well-stocked bunker — a sterile, florescent-lit space filled with humbly homey trappings — in which most of the movie takes place. He's a former Navy guy and a current doomsday prepper who claims there's been some kind of major attack, and that everyone outside is dead. He insists that he's saved the lives of the two people he's taken in, and that it'll be at least a year or two until the fallout settles and it's safe to leave.

The big questions in 10 Cloverfield Lane are whether Howard is delusional or lying (not the same thing) in order to Kimmy Schmidt his two younger guests, and whether there really is trouble outside. Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has plenty of reasons to doubt his trustworthiness. She's in the process of fleeing an unhappy relationship when she's sideswiped by a car on a quiet Louisiana road; when she wakes up, she finds herself chained to a wall in an unfurnished room in his shelter, informed by her apparent abductor Howard that the world has ended and that she's only alive thanks to him. Howard, who's held on to artifacts of his departed daughter like he's eager for a replacement, frees Michelle from her chains but not the bunker. She's down the hall from Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.), the only other resident, who's curiously unbothered by his living situation — because, as we soon learn, he not only chose but fought to come inside, for reasons that suggest Howard was right about at least a few things.

Goodman in 10 Cloverfield Lane.

Michele K. Short / Paramount Pictures

10 Cloverfield Lane — which was helmed by Dan Trachtenberg and (like Cloverfield) produced by J.J. Abrams — is a nimbly directed three-person show that often comes across like a very dysfunctional family drama, the characters falling or forcefully placed into the roles of father, daughter, and boy next door. However, it's the relationship between Michelle and Howard in which the armrest-clutching tension builds, falls, and builds again. Winstead is a remarkably present actor, and Michelle is established as a gratifyingly level-headed and aware character from the start: For example, in a pre-bunker moment, she cautiously eyes an approaching car while fueling up at a gas station — just like, you know, a real woman traveling alone at night would. The result is the rare thriller protagonist whose every decision feels reasonable even though the situation she's navigating is a mire of questionable truths and conflicting evidence (what are those rumblings overhead?) which leaves her constantly uncertain about what to believe.

And what to believe about Howard? As good a heroine as Winstead's Michelle is, it's really Goodman's character who sears through the movie, a combination conspiracy theorist and ironhanded host. 10 Cloverfield Lane positions Howard as an extremist who's quietly thrilled that the moment he's been preparing for has arrived, and that he has a captive audience to tell "I told you so." He's introduced through a rumbling down the hallway like a giant — fee-fi-fo-fum — while the camera focuses on his stomping feet first, then the gun on his hip, and then ultimately settles on his glowering face as Goodman plays up the slouching ballast of his body. He's the man who's been muttering about invasions all of his life, finally sure that he's been proven right, a petty tyrant tending his windowless domain with a self-satisfied air, ordering Emmett and Michelle down to dinner and dictating appropriate conversation for the table.

Goodman, Winstead, Gallagher in 10 Cloverfield Lane.

Michele K. Short / Paramount Pictures

Like the resentful outcast Kylo Ren in The Force Awakens, or super-powered men's rights activist Kilgrave from Jessica Jones, Howard comes across as a warped, mutated version of someone who crawled off a Twitter block list. He's a paranoid, don't-tread-on-me nightmare, the concentrated embodiment of the sentiment that "they" are coming for us (and in Howard's case "they" could be anything from the Russians to the Martians) and that everyone who hasn't been stockpiling goods and weapons deserves what they get. "You people," he sneers at Michelle when he senses that she thinks he's crazy. "Crazy is when you build your ark after the floods have already come." Howard hasn't just been preparing for Armageddon but longing for it to come along and prove him both right and necessary, the unquestioned king of the underground lair he's built for himself. He reminds Emmett and Michelle repeatedly that they owe him gratitude, and when Michelle does thank him, he can't help but break into a self-satisfied smile — one of Goodman's more chilling choices.

Long before 10 Cloverfield Lane gets to the issue of whether or not there are monsters above ground, it's evident that Howard is monster enough below it: a figure of frustrated, resentful masculinity (he alleges, offhand, that his ex-wife turned his daughter against him) finally crowned with the authority he feels has long been denied him. While the original Cloverfield deliberately positioned its cast of twentysomethings to be dwarfed by a largescale disaster, 10 Cloverfield Lane is rewardingly claustrophobic, keeping its focus tight on the characters and their cramped space while whatever disasters there are loom outside the bunker. Inside of it is someone who is sure he's just been handed the ultimate proof that he knows what's best for everyone — and he has a gun. Given that reality, who wouldn't start to think about making a run for it, even if there may be nowhere safe left to go?

Mark Strong and Sacha Baron Cohen in The Brothers Grimsby.

Columbia Pictures

Anthony Horowitz, the latest author to be tasked with generating new James Bond novels, caused a furor by saying he thought Idris Elba was too "street" to play the famous fictional spy. But he was quick to say he'd prefer Adrian Lester, another black British actor, because "it’s not a color issue," he insisted.

Maybe not, but it is an issue of class, which Horowitz spoke around using terms like "rough" and "suave." Bond might be imperfectly aristocratic — when Vesper Lynd reads him in Casino Royale, she guesses that he didn't come from money — but he's learned to fake it, with the suits and the sangfroid, in a way Horowitz seemed to feel Elba, despite being suave as hell, could not.

Columbia Pictures

Which is what makes the joke at the heart of Sacha Baron Cohen's new comedy The Brothers Grimsby such an enjoyable one, even when the film as a whole weaves between being just hilariously foul and incoherently sloppy. It takes fellow Bond deconstruction Kingsman: The Secret Service's class consciousness to more outrageous extremes. The movie features a sleek, Bond-ish agent named Sebastian Butcher (Mark Strong), who to his horror is plunged back into contact with his gritty past and the brother, Nobby (Baron Cohen), he hasn't seen in years.

The film's warped version of former fishing town Grimsby is a place of grayish houses and shipping cranes

full of people who are on the dole and equally addicted to soccer and alcohol. It's a vision of the working class out of an alarmist scold's fondest dreams where people there name their many children things like "Django Unchained" and "Skeletor" and have home kebab machines. Once they're reunited, Nobby — with his misspelled, patriotic tattoos; his Liam Gallagher haircut; his equally cartoonish girlfriend (Rebel Wilson); and his inability to maintain any kind of filter — clings insistently to Sebastian like a recurring rash.

Columbia Pictures

If Sebastian

— with his tasteful clothing, velvet voice, and workplace flirtation with the Moneypennyish Jodie Figgs (Isla Fisher) — recalls the iconic Bond who gallantly devoted his life to awesome adventures and international seductions for queen and country, then Nobby is a reminder that no one really conveniently springs fully formed from a national imagination.

The Brothers Grimsby, which was directed by The Transporter's Louis Leterrier, doesn't just obliterate Sebastian's dignity again and again with gross-out set pieces involving elephant uteruses (elaborately, idiotically hilarious) and the sucking of poison out of body parts (gay panicky until it fully commits). It's about how the only difference between the patrician secret agent and his forever drink-clutching football hooligan sibling are the advantages the former got when he was adopted by a London couple, and that "suave" and "rough" are designations as arbitrary as chance.

Midnight Special.

Ben Rothstein / Warner Bros.

Here's a list of just some of the wonderfully strange, evocative images offered up in the first half of Jeff Nichols' sci-fi thriller Midnight Special:

• A man standing in a motel room in which the windows have been blacked out with cardboard peels tape off the peephole in order to peer outside.

• A boy wearing goggles and safety headphones uses a flashlight to read a comic book under a sheet.

• A congregation in conservative dresses and work clothes recites a list of numbers in unison during a sermon in a florescent-lit room with no windows.

• A driver puts on night-vision goggles to drive without headlights on a road in the dark, all the better to remain undetected.

• A man crouches over a child at night, the two linked by a beam of light emanating from the child's glowing eyes.
  

If there was an award for the movie whose still images were most likely to be used as inspirational jumping-off points in a creative writing exercise, Nichols' mildly disappointing latest would win it, easily.

Midnight Special is a film that sweats and strives to evoke the wonder of vintage Spielberg without the sentimental side. When its mundane settings — the road-worn cars and humble houses in which so much of the film takes place — rumble with the activation of otherworldly forces, it feels like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. When 8-year-old Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), the boy everyone is after, is pursued by government agents, it recalls E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, with the kid serving as a mixture of Elliott and E.T. And it's at least as solid a tribute to Steven Spielberg as J.J. Abrams' uneven simulacrum Super 8, which reached for the same childlike combination of awe and uncertainty and had the advantage of the participation of Spielberg himself as a producer.

Ben Rothstein / Paramount Pictures

But Midnight Special is better matched up with another recent release, 10 Cloverfield Lane — they're both movies that suggest a larger warped universe while practicing economy of scale and relying on directorial deftness over effects. These are movies that are both made on the relative cheap — 10 Cloverfield Lane for $15 million, Midnight Special for $18 — and that are more ambitious in world-building than in what they actually show. Like 10 Cloverfield Lane, Midnight Special gets a lot less intriguing when it reveals what's really going on, though for the former, that's a forgivable issue related only to the final act. Midnight Special, on the other hand, reveals all sorts of marvelous, enigmatic imagery, only for all the eerie resonance of those early scenes to snap together into a story that's curiously unengaging for one about a kid with powers and his dad out on the run from fanatics and the NSA.

Midnight Special is the fourth film from Nichols, a director whose career contrasts the grand with the workaday. Family feud drama Shotgun Stories led to the tremendous Take Shelter, in which a family man's anxiety expressed itself in apocalyptic dreams, and then on to Mud, in which two kids stumble across a drifter who promises adventure but who's actually fleeing more prosaic problems. Like his past films, Midnight Special stars Nichols' trusty muse Michael Shannon as Roy, a man who fled the cult in which he and his ex-wife Sarah (Kirsten Dunst) used to live, only to return to take back his son, Alton. Shannon, alternating between tender and desperate, is mostly paired with Joel Edgerton, who plays Lucas, the childhood friend he's recruited for help.

Warner Bros.

It's the sort of cast that can do a lot with very little, and Midnight Special throws the audience into the story when Roy is already on the run, Alton sick and also capable of inexplicable things. There's a sympathetic NSA analyst, played by Adam Driver, on the side of the men in black, while the cult, "the ranch," is under the leadership of Sam Shepard. In limited screen time, they all turn their characters into figures who feel like they have full lives stretching out behind them, even if they're not the sort you feel all that inclined to be invested in emotionally.

For a movie that doesn't exactly fess up in its ending, it might seem like a strange complaint to say that there's not enough mystery in Midnight Special, but that's its problem — its broad motivations are all put in the open. It's not a metaphor for anything. 10 Cloverfield Lane was a paranoid drama embedded in the promise of a sci-fi premise. Midnight Special is a chase movie in which everything and everyone is as they seem, even if what they are is possessed with inexplicable capabilities. It summons a shrug more than it does astonishment, but at least it looks good on the way.

Glen Powell, Wyatt Russell, Blake Jenner, James Quinton Johnson, and Temple Baker in Everybody Wants Some.

Van Redin / Paramount Pictures

The best player on the 1980 Texas college baseball team lovingly depicted in Everybody Wants Some is a senior named Glen McReynolds, a guy who looks like he walked right off a faded Topps card and into a keg party. Played by former Teen Wolf star Tyler Hoechlin, Glen has the bulgiest muscles, the most luxuriant mustache, and the shit-eating grin of a guy who's sure he's going to go on as a pro athlete, that his life is going to become even more sweet than it already is. He's introduced by almost caving in a kitchen ceiling with the waterbed he's been setting up in the room above. He grinds every newcomer — including freshman main character Jake (Blake Jenner) — into the dirt to establish his dominance, and he handles losing very, very poorly. He's the distilled essence of sporty douchebaggery.

Paramount Pictures

But during a lazy afternoon hang-out around the baseball team houses (a pair of much-abused buildings donated by the city to house its players), Glen proposes a bet: wielding an axe as a baseball bat, he can cut a baseball in half midair. The teammate who takes up his wager tosses the ball, and as Glen hefts the axe above his shoulder and whirls it around, the movie slows down as if — like everyone else there — it can't help but admire the easy certainty with which he pulls of this feat of strength and accuracy. Glen may be a asshole, but he's enthralling in his physical magnificence, and in that moment, you can't help but like him, even as he smirkingly offers to go two out of three.

The same could be said for most of the characters in Richard Linklater's resplendently baggy comedy, who are a collection of unapologetic bros from an era before that term was quite so loaded. They're the big men on campus, on the sports team with the best record at school; the film takes place in the three days before class starts, when they have nothing to do but spend time together before heading out to get laid. In between talking about athletics and talking about sex, they haze one another and turn everything — from knuckles to Ping-Pong — into a competition. They drift through the three rambly, story-light days over which the film exists in a cloud of booze and testosterone and, despite all of this, the end product is somehow still an experience you want to crawl inside.

Paramount Pictures

Jake, Glen, the wisecracking Finnegan (Glen Powell), the tie-dyed Willoughby (Wyatt Russell), the tightly wound weirdo Jay (Juston Street), and other teammates like Roper (Ryan Guzman), and Dale (J. Quinton Johnson) are, in 2016, an almost unfathomably unfashionable slice of the student population to make a movie about. They joke about "cockgobblers" and how emasculated the only dude with a girlfriend is as they scramble to find rooms in which to bed the night's conquests. Their lives are pretty much ongoing dick-measuring contests. Only one of the characters, Finnegan, a roguish charmer, appears to have given any thought to life after baseball. They throw the kind of rowdy parties that might be incredibly fun, but at which you'd keep a really close eye on your drink.

Paramount Pictures

Everybody Wants Some has been billed as a spiritual sequel to Linklater's 1993 Dazed and Confused, one of the greatest high school movies ever made. But that 1976-set comedy laid out a whole ecosystem of queen bees and coffee shop philosophers, rebellious football players and twentysomething holdouts trolling for teenage girls. Everybody Wants Some feels, at least at first, like a follow-up centered only on the equivalent of Affleck's preening Fred O'Bannion and his pals, high-fiving over the beatings they hand out to 14-year-olds — not the misfits and the losers, but the alphas and the bullies. And then, gradually, it reveals itself to be a sort of bro reclamation project. It doesn't soften the hyper-macho atmosphere of the baseball houses, but it does drain it of toxicity by affirming the bonds underneath, built by the constant ragging.

Everybody Wants Some's Jake is the successor of Mitch, the babyfaced, half-formed hero of Dazed and Confused; he arrives at college (and the '80s) broad-shouldered and confident after what was clearly a stint as a high school A-lister. It takes a few beats to see that underneath the swagger, he's another Linklater philosopher prince, a seeker of meaning and haver of long, pot-fueled conversations. Jake's open to people, and through his eyes we see the baseball players go from a brawny blur of jocks to a group of differentiated characters shoving and elbowing their way toward being a team. Over subsequent evenings, they sample different subcultures — the disco club, the country bar, a punk show, and a theater kid party — and if their motivation is to pick up chicks, the result is a buffet of possibilities, this feeling of worlds being open to visitors, whether for a jubilant line dance to "Cotton-Eyed Joe" or a minute in a mosh pit. It suggests identity is ultimately to be tried on and possibly discarded during the self-discovery of college: Everything isn't beautiful, precisely, but nothing hurts.

Paramount Pictures

There's plenty of entitlement in assuming you'll be welcome wherever you go, but Everybody Wants Some is disarmingly forthright about how good its characters have it, with regard to their popularity, their desirability, and their privileged treatment by the school. And there's only one, lone moment that suggests there is any negative associations to being a jock: Beverly (Zoey Deutch), the winsome performing arts major who catches Jake's eye, is surprised to learn that Jake's on the baseball team, and he asks if her shock is because she expects athletes to be stupid... and that minor ding comes because she's already impressed by him. These characters are freed from present-day concerns about crippling college loans and, for that matter, the conversation about consent — the sex they have is portrayed with an idealistic enthusiasm on the part of all parties involved. College, as one character notes, is a place for equal opportunity sluttiness.

Has anyone ever loved college as much as Richard Linklater? In Dazed and Confused, it's the promiscuous paradise Don and Slater are holding out for, and it's where the last scene in Boyhood takes place, Mason going for a hike on mushrooms with his new roommate and two pretty girls, independent life sprawling out in front of him like the view. Everybody Wants Some, for all its careful vintage details — the short shorts and the soundtrack, the arcade games and the hairstyles (both head and facial) — isn't nostalgic for a era so much as it is for that particular moment in life when everything seems possible, and when classes are the least important part of school. It's a time so idyllic that at least one character overstays his welcome trying to hide in it a little longer. It's hard to fault him when the film itself has an ease that's addictively cozy, whether its characters feel familiar or far removed. They're an endearing bunch of — well, bros. In Linklater's dexterous hands, it doesn't feel like such a bad word.

Henry Cavill in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

Warner Bros.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice turns Lex Luthor into a tech bro. Played by Jesse Eisenberg, this new version of Superman's archenemy is a twitchy fast-talker in a graphic tee and blazer, with shoulder-length hair (yes, they're some luxuriant locks), shooting hoops in LexCorp's in-office basketball court while plotting how to disrupt superheroics using the scraps of Kryptonite he's been buying up. He's positioned (at least at first) to be Mark Zuckerberg as a supervillain: He treats government regulations as a jumping-off point for negotiations rather than as rules to be followed, making grand pronouncements about superpower humans as "the basis for our myths" while he bargains for special access to Kryptonian tech under the table.

This take on Lex is — like the placement of Gotham and Metropolis as Oakland–San Francisco sibling cities — provocative...or it would be, were it better developed, if it didn't turn out to be a surface-level reworking of your standard-issue megalomaniac. Eisenberg's performance has the trappings of a techno libertarian tweaked into exaggerated comic book nastiness, with none of the follow-through. Lex ultimately plots to take down Superman due to daddy issues and something-or-other about God, but mostly because taking down Superman is what Lex Luthor is supposed to do.

Jesse Eisenberg

Warner Bros.

Like so much of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which was directed by Man of Steel's Zack Snyder, the blatant millennial-fication of Lex Luthor is an intriguing tease to some grander reading that simply isn't there. The film is a lumbering, glum, cool-toned behemoth that labors to lay groundwork for a DC cinematic universe while setting up two famous characters on a collision course, and lobs out big ideas like an underprepared undergrad sweatily pitching off-the-cuff thesis topics. Superman (Henry Cavill), the movie submits, is a messianic figure, a giver of hope, floating beatifically midair with his cape flapping around him while supplicants reach out in tears, more important as a symbol than as a man of individual actions. Superman is also a little like America in terms of international intervention: He requires you to trust that his actions are all in the interest of the greater good — because what are you going to do, fight the guy? It's fine when he's saving people from a flaming building, but when he crashes (in what Deadpool has dubbed the "superhero landing") into a tense situation in Africa involving Lois (Amy Adams, given a gratifying amount to do), his interference sparks unforeseen consequences.

Ben Affleck

Warner Bros.

Batman (Ben Affleck), on the other hand, takes the micro to Superman's macro, as a self-appointed answer to Gotham's governmental failings, policing the streets in a way that doesn't have to reckon with inconvenient rights and processes. He's rage disguised as righteousness, a one-man militia in bulky Bat-armor, righting the wrongs that the cops can't manage to keep up with. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice begins by running us through young Bruce Wayne's oft-documented parental trauma once more before catching up with him as an embittered, incredibly ripped fortysomething who's maybe losing his grip a little, living down the road from the burned remains of Wayne Manor with his butler-turned-co-conspirator Alfred (Jeremy Irons). This road-worn version of Batman is vengeful and exacting, unafraid to kill, and inclined to literally brand the criminals he catches with his logo, a mark that (we're told) dooms them when they go to prison.

Batman's a vigilante and Superman's a god, which is the basis of their disagreement, though, lord almighty, does the movie take a long time laying that out. In the hour-and-a-half lead-up to the promised showdown, disagreements between the two simmer and build and are partially articulated during a cocktail party encounter between Bruce and Clark Kent in which they politely snipe at each other about superhero puff pieces and "civil liberties being trampled." What neither arrive at (though they should) is that Batman and Superman actually both do what they want and answer to no one, and that they should stop talking since, incredibly, they both lack self-awareness. The film doesn't find space to fill their characters out in more than broad swaths, but manages to make them both unappealing, having a superheroic pissing match that turns into literal grappling over the moral high ground. It's an unusual achievement in a superhero, if not the one that Snyder and writers Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer were likely aiming for: making two iconic characters look like political candidates in a race in which there's no desirable winner.

Ben Affleck

Warner Bros.

In an early sequence — one of the best in the movie and definitely the most evocative — we see the World Engine battle from the finale of Man of Steel from the ground, as Bruce races through the streets of Metropolis just in time to see his own building crumble, with some employees still trapped inside. From Superman's perspective, it was a fight to save humanity from extinction. From Bruce's point of view, it was a melee unfolding with no concern for collateral damage, one that costs people's lives for whom he feels directly responsible. The mid-city, havoc-wreaking brawl seems like it would tee the movie up to grapple with the notions of "the greater good" versus innocent lives lost versus "Why couldn't you have fought over the goddamn ocean or something?" But it doesn't: Instead, the scene is used in order to get Batman thinking that, if there is even the slightest chance of Superman breaking bad, he's got to go.

Gal Gadot

Warner Bros.

It's a false opposition, these two points of view that have been placed counter to each other. They're just guys scrimmaging over whose version of saving the world is better, when, natch, their goals are compatible. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is grimly self-serious; at one point, it even summons Superman for a congressional hearing. But the film is not morally complex, especially when it comes to the idea of self-appointed heroes — it's all for the rights and the responsibilities of the superheroic class to help out as they see fit, no matter how many panic dreams (or are they visions?) Batman has of a scary Supes gone rogue. If the two superheroes want to have a fight in the middle of an urban center, well, that's what's going to happen, and that's how Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice brings the action back around without any apparent irony. This time the battle's in Gotham, where the urban decay works in the combatants' favor by giving them unpopulated acreage to destroy. And this time, Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) is there to help the whole movie, and she steals it just by virtue of looking like she's having a good time, whether she's trading barbs with Bruce at a posh party or grinning at a lumpy monster inserted into the final act of the movie to enable a big, calamitous finish.

In 2005, Christopher Nolan, who's an executive producer on this film, made Batman Begins — a very good superhero movie! And in 2008, he made The Dark Knight — a very good movie, period, which changed old-fashioned perceptions of what could be achieved in the genre. But it created a model of what an "important" superhero pic looks like, with which Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is hopelessly enamored, despite the fact it doesn't come close to pulling off the same tricks in trying to pass off dourness as intelligence. Talking heads debate evolution and myth on television; the public turns on a dime, from venerating Superman as though he liberated a nation to burning him in effigy. And Bruce, having devoted his life to punishing wrongdoers, decides his best legacy might as well be a murderous one. None of it adds up to anything except a world in which superheroes are unavoidable — smashing through buildings and setting up sequels by watching sneak previews of future Justice League colleagues. Why pose big questions when no one wants to hear the answer?

Time to see whose real or pretend instrument-playing was most impressive.

Ethan Hawke in Born to Be Blue, Don Cheadle in Miles Ahead, Tom Hiddleston in I Saw the Light.

IFC Films; Sony Pictures Classics; Sony Pictures Classics

As the anger and distress over the upcoming Nina Simone biopic have affirmed, once again, just because a person has had a movieworthy existence does not guarantee they'll get the movie they deserve.

But somehow, sometime during the century-plus in which films have existed, biopics have become shorthand for important cinema, and everyone who's anyone eventually finds their life being reshaped into a sometimes good, sometimes horrendously cliché-ridden movie. This is especially true in the fall, when Hollywood lightly turns to thoughts of Oscar, and a bunch of biographical flicks come out in hopes of scooping up award nominations. (Reliably, they do — of the 2016 Best Actor nominees, four of the five, including winner Leonardo DiCaprio, were playing people who really existed.)

Well, it's spring now, comfortably clear of awards season, which means that the three biopics arriving in theaters this March and April — all stories of musicians who battled substance abuse — weren't deemed worthy of an Oscar push. That doesn't mean they're not worth the time, but they are a mixed bag, each trying to go against the grain of the Walk the Line tradition.

Here's a look at Ethan Hawke's Born to Be Blue (now in theaters), Tom Hiddleston's I Saw the Light (now in theaters), and Don Cheadle's Miles Ahead (in theaters April 1), placed in order from weakest to best.

3. I Saw the Light

Sony Pictures Classics

The performance: Tom Hiddleston, despite protests from certain parties who would have preferred an American in the role of country legend Hank Williams, puts on a presentable Southern accent and does his own singing.

The person responsible: This one is on Marc Abraham, who's better known as the producer of films like Children of Men and Bring It On, but who's gone for staid biopics in his two turns behind the camera as a director. After making his debut with 2008's Flash of Genius, about intermittent windshield wiper inventor Robert Kearns, he started developing Williams' life into his second directorial effort and wrote the script as well. Talking about why he was interested in making the film, he said, "I love sad stories. I always say, 'You can't get sad enough for me.'"

The skinny: Tall, angular Hiddleston looks great in Hank Williams' double-breasted suits and rolled-up shirtsleeves. He's even better with a hat perched at a jaunty angle or pulled down low over his eyes while sleeping off a hangover on the way to a gig. I Saw the Light has all the makings of an A+ photo shoot, one that could come packaged with an accompanying soundtrack, in which Hiddleston does some convincing yodeling on tunes like "Lovesick Blues."

View Entire List ›

Not every movie gets a superhero-level massive release. Here’s what’s worth seeking out in limited release, rent, or home video right now.

1. April and the Extraordinary World

GKIDS

Twin Eiffel Towers stand above the sooty skyline of the alt-history version of 1941 Paris in which April and the Extraordinary World takes place. A Staten Island Ferry–sized cable car runs through the towers and it will get you from the French capital to Berlin in a mere 82 hours, a steampunk version of high-speed travel.

In this retro-futuristic animated epic, the planet has become an environmentally devastated place that's permanently at war and runs on charcoal, the important scientists having all mysteriously disappeared before they could help usher in helpful developments like oil-fueled engines and electricity.

April and the Extraordinary World, directed by Christian Desmares and Franck Ekinci and adapted from a Jacques Tardi graphic novel, is a sci-fi adventure with an divinely Gallic slant. It zooms in on a family of chemists, some of the few left, who are in hiding, working on a serum with the potential to save, or maybe destroy, the Earth. When the police pound down their door, they get scattered, leaving daughter April to fend for herself, with only the company of her talking cat, Darwin, and a determination to continue the work that her parents started.

While the film, which is composed of appropriately old-school cel animation, tells a rollicking, sometimes barbed story about oppressive governments, secret labs, selfishness, and the point where science meets ethics, it's the world-building that really delights. April and the Extraordinary World is set in a universe in which a house can roll down armor and walk into the Seine, and rats can be loaded up with cameras and used as spies. While the English-language dub of the film features the voice talents of Susan Sarandon, J.K. Simmons, Paul Giamatti, and Tony Hale, if you opt for the original French (both versions are being released), you'll get Marion Cotillard voicing April and Jean Rochefort as her grandfather.

Where to see it: April and the Extraordinary World is now playing in select theaters.

2. Baskin

IFC Films

Part art film slow burn and part extreme splatterfest, Baskin is best enjoyed as a movie that features the memorable image of a man gouging out someone's eyeball with a knife and then French-kissing the bloody socket. Even though it does not, perhaps, add up to a coherent whole, Baskin, the feature debut of filmmaker Can Evrenol, certainly operates according to its own rhythms.

In the opening scene of this rare horror movie from Turkey, a group of cops sit around an otherwise empty restaurant betting on football and exchanging anecdotes about encountering unanticipated penises on the sex workers they've hired. Meanwhile, the owner of the place and his son prepare a meal from mystery meat delivered, ominously, in a bucket. Long takes and moody lighting stoke dread long before anything spooky happens in Baskin — they're just five swinging dicks telling dirty stories and menacing the waitstaff. It's like the opening scene in Reservoir Dogs, if you felt like the characters could be hacked to death by a mysterious hooded figure at any time during their monologues on Madonna or tipping.

And then the policemen go off to answer a call in the middle of nowhere and find themselves in a nightmarish scenario involving dark rituals, dismemberment, and frogs, and all their swagger quickly dissolves.

Evrenol digs his gore, which arrives with a real Silent Hill vibe, but it's the skillfulness of his filmmaking that sets Baskin apart, especially in the way the youngest of the cops, Arda (Gorkem Kasal), keeps slipping back into memories of a recurring nightmare he's had since childhood. The expressionist weirdness of the dream seems to slowly infect everything that follows, until the tenuous reality of the movie trembles and collapses.

Where to see it: Baskin is now playing in New York and Los Angeles. It's also available on VOD.

View Entire List ›

The tense, terrific debut Krisha is no Home for the Holidays.

Like most movies set at Thanksgiving, Trey Edward Shults's directorial debut Krisha is about a dysfunctional family gathering to eat and air out past grievances over the holiday. Unlike most movies set at Thanksgiving, Krisha, which is now playing in limited release, is suffused with dread from the moment its main character — an addict who is trying hard to hold on to her sobriety — shows up at the door. It's the rare drama with all the sickening suspense of a horror movie, sustained by an exceptional lead performance and a director who puts us in the head of a woman who desperately wants to hold things together for one evening. Here's a look at some of the ways Krisha melds genres.

1. Krisha opens with a woman staring at the camera. Staring down the camera, really, looking right at the audience with a combination of challenge and fear, while the score screeches balefully. She's the title character, and, like most of the people who appear in the movie, she's played by one of writer-director Trey Edward Shults's relatives — his aunt, Krisha Fairchild.

In the next scene, in the bright light of a Texas day, we get to see Krisha in a less abstract fashion: a sixtysomething in flowing, hippie-ish garb, the black sheep of a family nervously reunited after a decade-long absence during which she was dealing with addiction. But floating context-free against the dark in that first scene, with the lighting emphasizing her haunted eyes and every hard-won line on her face, she's totally unsettling, a witch in the night.

This may be a movie about a fractured family coming together for a holiday, the setup of just about every Thanksgiving feature ever made, but Krisha makes clear in that first shot that its characters aren't going to simply hug things out over helpings of green bean casserole.

A24

2. Krisha's missing half a finger. It's an injury that's never explained, though it happened recently enough for her to wear a bandage, which she at one point removes in order to rub cream onto the nub. The missing digit itself is not nearly as ominous as the fact that no one in the family asks what happened — whether it was due to an accident or illness, or if she's in pain. Either they all know what happened and it's too uncomfortable for anybody to bring up, or the wound is so in line with what they'd expect out of Krisha that it's not even worth comment.

Either possible scenario illuminates Krisha's past in ways that require no dialogue, in ways that are just as eloquent as the box of prescription meds (labeled "KEEP OUT") that she plunks in the bathroom. They allow scenes in which she dices ingredients for the stuffing for the turkey — the sounds amped up, the slices made percussive by the editing — to become something totally nerve-racking. Krisha isn't careful, with herself or with other people, but she is trying, trying so hard.

A24

3. The camera stalks Krisha through the house. The house, spacious and suburban, is the only location in which Krisha takes place, over one unbearably claustrophobic day. Everything about the filmmaking reflects its main character's turbulent interior. Krisha is so twitchy that someone grabbing Tupperware from nearby plays like a jump scare. The sound of a blender and the shouts emitting from family members watching a ball game on TV blare like alarms, like chaos threatening the cool Krisha insists she's embraced. The bickering of a couple and some good-natured arm wrestling are cut together to feel like the start of a fight that never happens.

The movie creates a sense of agitated anxiety to match Krisha's own. She yearns so badly for things to go smoothly that she basically wills disaster into existence. And the camerawork from cinematographer Drew Daniels is relentless, hunting her down like the doom she suspects is inevitable, tracking down dark hallways and traveling low against the ground like a restless animal, closing in on her like the eyes she imagines are always on her. In the conversation she has with Trey (played by Shults himself), above, the camera slowly closes in on her as she tries to create a bond with him; she seriously miscalculates, and she's left alone in the frame, devastated.

youtube.com

View Entire List ›

Michiel Huisman in Tammy Blanchard in The Invitation.

Drafthouse Films

Two years before The Invitation begins, Will's (Logan Marshall-Green) life, as he knew it, ended.

His marriage imploded after the death of his son. He moved out of the Hollywood Hills house that he used to share with Eden (Tammy Blanchard), grew a dramatic beard, and fell out of touch with their friends. He's still picking up the pieces with the help of new girlfriend Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi) when he's summoned back to his former home by his now ex-wife for a dinner party. Will is ragged and grieving, but Eden, who's since remarried a handsome record exec named David (Michiel Huisman), appears serene and resplendent in her long white dress, pouring expensive wine for her guests and talking about the visit she and David made to Mexico. She seems to have won a race toward recovery Will wasn't aware they were running.

Logan Marshall-Green

Drafthouse Films

The mysteries of grief form the emotional core of director Karyn Kusama's unsettling thriller. The Invitation takes place almost entirely in the spacious mid-century modern house in which it eventually paints itself into a corner. While Will's staggering under the weight of his pain, Eden, who's been off the radar for over a year, seems miraculously and perhaps eerily tranquil, thanks in part to the new age movement she and David have joined ("We're not in a cult," David insists, worryingly). Will has growing suspicions that something strange is happening at this party, but everyone else at the party is so eager for things to be OK — doling out hugs and earnestly insisting that they're going to be better about staying in touch — that his concerns are brushed off as resentment over his ex's ability to put the past behind her.

Maybe it is resentment. While The Invitation unfolds from Will's perspective, tracking his gaze and letting conversations fade into the background when he stops focusing on them, it doesn't establish him as any more trustworthy a figure than his hosts. His attention drifts, he slips in and out of memories, and he seems overwhelmed by the sight of so many old friends, among them couple Miguel (Jordi Vilasuso) and Tommy (Mike Doyle), Will's former business partner Ben (Jay Larson), Claire (Marieh Delfino), and Gina (Michelle Krusiec). There's paranoia and presumption in the way he digs through Eden's personal spaces and questions the house's new security features, though it's hard to blame him for being suspicious of the two unpredictable strangers also present, Sadie (Lindsay Burdge) and Pruitt (John Carroll Lynch). They're members of the group David and Eden have joined, called The Invitation. When everyone's made to sit and watch an informational video about the collective, David and Eden show macabre footage of a woman on her deathbed to the group. So is it Will who's unstable, or are David and Eden?

Emayatzy Corinealdi

Drafthouse Films

The Invitation, which was written by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, is the fourth feature from Kusama, who made her debut in 2000 with the exhilarating Girlfight, a film that introduced Michelle Rodriguez as a Brooklyn teenager who channels her rage into boxing and embarks on a spiky romance with a fellow fighter she eventually faces in the ring. Kusama's big-budget follow-up Aeon Flux tanked, and underrated horror comedy Jennifer's Body also managed to underperform. The Invitation is in the perfect position to be her indie comeback, the film that reboots her career, though it doesn't share the same sense of sonorant sincerity that made the raw Girlfight so electric. The closer The Invitation gets to its turning point, the more manipulated it feels, not because it commits to being a horror movie, but because its characters’ choices seem flimsier and their motivations harder to swallow. The film's ultimate premise is the kind that sounds better on paper than it feels in practice, when there's a gap to be bridged between the drama of the first half and the dread of the final act.

Kusama uses the limited physical space to its fullest, bathing it in yellowy light that's sometimes welcoming and sometimes stifling, and making the layout of the house disorienting, with its nooks, sliding doors, and a dining room that's, for some reason, upstairs from the living room. At times, it's like we've gotten lost in Will's head, which is territory just as unknowable. Played by the impassive Marshall-Green, Will is someone who dares you to project more depth onto him, to make sense of the timeline and his relationship with Kira, who's so underwritten that Corinealdi, a strong actor, seems to have been hired only to occasionally suggest she and Will leave.

Jay Larson, John Carroll Lynch, Jordi Vilasuso, Mike Doyle, Marieh Delfino, Blanchard, Huisman, Marshall-Green, Corinealdi, Krusiec.

Drafthouse Films

The Invitation doesn't pull off its balancing act, but in the storied subcategory of dinner-party-gone-wrong movies (Rope! The Celebration!) its buildup is particularly good, melding Los Angeles hippie-dippieism with therapy-readied sensitivity in a group of characters who think of themselves as too sophisticated and too accepting to blink at growing weirdness. The gathering slowly loses its calibration, going from the death video to a party game called "I Want," which is like a darker, wish-fulfilling "I Never," and on to a disturbing story Pruitt shares about his wife. And everyone keeps gamely playing along — because David and Eden have gone through so much trouble, and the house looks so good, and the wine is excellent. As one of them says, "We're all consenting adults," though he has no idea what he might be consenting to. The warm glow of that posh living room offers a hypnotic ease, but so do the good intentions and lingering guilt of a group of people who can’t bring themselves to break through the convivial surface. What makes the movie scary is that they don’t want to see the dark things underneath, and to admit that something is very wrong.

Baloo (voiced by Bill Murray) and Mowgli (Neel Sethi).

Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Visual effects get used for everything from the creation of identical troll-like baddies to the adding of pubic hair to keeping actors forever young and digitally slenderized these days. But the new Jungle Book proves movie technology still has the power to create a sense of wonder.

When the wolves and tigers and bears speak in the movie, their lips (snouts, whatever) move. It should look creepy or silly, like Mister Ed, those beastly mouths flapping and contorting into an approximation of human speech. But instead, it's weirdly magical, like the talking animals of countless animated classics have finally been hauled into the real world without losing their capacity to communicate across species.

Which is exactly what Disney is aiming for in revamping its 1967 animated musical for a 2016 audience that's looking for nostalgia and something new. Director Jon Favreau, working from a screenplay Justin Marks adapted from the works of Rudyard Kipling, has called forth a jungle out of a blue-screened Los Angeles soundstage and a carefully chosen voice cast. The lush vividness of it and its inhabitants is an impressive technical achievement. But the best recommendation for what Favreau and presumably many behind-the-scenes artists and technicians have pulled off is how quickly you stop thinking of the overclocked render farms on which it all came together and accept the world in which it takes places as humid, verdant fact.

Walt Disney Motion Pictures

The lone human character for most of the movie is Mowgli (10-year-old Neel Sethi), the orphan raised by wolves and by Bagheera the panther (Ben Kingsley) in the wild. But he's never alone. He's been, not always seamlessly, integrated into a thriving ecosystem of predator and prey with its own rules and rulers.

And the members of it look fantastic, down to the disarray of fur on easygoing Baloo the bear (voiced by Bill Murray) as he surveys his honey trove, to the not-quite-coordination of the wolf cubs heeding the call of their parents Akela (Giancarlo Esposito) and Raksha (Lupita Nyong'o), to the sinewy slink of menacing tiger Shere Khan (Idris Elba) up to the watering hole, to the slither of Kaa the snake's (Scarlett Johansson) coils through the shadows.

There's not a trace of uncanny valley in The Jungle Book's visuals, that eeriness when an artificial creation is so close to real life that you can only see the flaws, maybe because digital animals are easier to give warmth to than computer-created people. But, as if to make up for the fact, the movie figures out a whole other sort of awkward in-between space to occupy by getting close enough to an adventure movie of a more grown-up variety to make its children's fable remnants all the more strange.

Walt Disney Motion Pictures

The Jungle Book is the latest in a line of live-action remakes of Disney stalwarts, an enterprise that's become a big part of the Mouse House's movie game, including both revisionist retellings like Maleficent and straightforward ones like Cinderella. The Jungle Book falls somewhere in between the two, never really reworking the take on the story Disney made as its own, but not parroting it back either. It dutifully nods to its animated predecessor with two song-and-dance sequences (Baloo's "The Bare Necessities" and King Louie's "I Wan'na Be Like You") but no more than that, making it a kind of half-musical. The tunes feel like a familiar but obtrusive gesture toward the past instead of falling in line with the rest of the tone. Favreau's take on the Kipling tales includes mentions of death — directly, with a character getting killed, but also indirectly, with an acknowledgment that offscreen, some of these delightful characters eat other ones.

Well, all those adorable little wolves are going to grow up to nosh on something.

There's nothing wrong with a darker Jungle Book that acknowledges nature isn't all about getting along, and when it's really humming along, Favreau's film feels like the kind of movie that both enchants and freaks out a kid in equal measure, a future kindertrauma classic of the best kind. But the overall direction The Jungle Book takes doesn't jell with the occasional aspects of the narrative that treat Mowgli's upbringing as a kind of Peter Pan escape from the tedium of human society. Humanity is the bogeyman the animals all fear in The Jungle Book — humanity and the fire (the "red flower") we wield — and it's a desire to join humanity that infects and undoes King Louie (voiced by Christopher Walken), the most jarringly interpreted character, a 10-foot Gigantopithecus looming out of the darkness, the ape equivalent of Aragog. The problem is not how frightening he is when he chases Mowgli through the crumbling palace he and his monkey minions have taken over; it's that before then, the movie attempts to present him as comic relief, speaking in the distinctive Walken rhythms and segueing him into a musical number.

Walt Disney Motion Pictures

Photorealism all but demands a, well, grittier take on source material like this. The Jungle Book's characters look like real animals, and act more like them as well, while Mowgli is believably childlike — petulant, still learning, and inclined, in a wonderful scene with the elephants, to acts of unforced grace. But there's an unavoidable bit of realism that the movie pulls back on, and that's the idea that a human boy can never just be one of the animals, no matter how hard he tries. There's a scene toward the movie's climax in which all of the creatures of the jungle suddenly see Mowgli, not as an adoptee, but as an interloper — not one of them at all, but the man he's always been. It's a surprisingly upsetting moment, the most provocative in the movie, introducing the idea that Mowgli can't help but disrupt this delicate balance with his very nature.

In the animated version, this issue is resolved with a bittersweet ending that sends Mowgli back to his own kind. But this new Jungle Book opts for something else, making the already-in-the-works sequel that much more easy to segue into, but chipping away at its own otherwise mostly captivating vision in the process. When you've realized a world so gorgeously, a reluctance to let it go is understandable, but The Jungle Book suggests its main character's desire to stay is more important than the animals it brings to such incredible life.

Green Room

A24

Director Jeremy Saulnier has a way with characters who are utterly unprepared for the carnage they find themselves in the middle of. He's made two gripping, low-fi action movies about people who, when it comes to violence, are uncertain — they're very obviously amateurs. Their encounters with bloodshed have mostly come from watching movies, until they find themselves shakily clutching a knife or a gun. It makes for thrillers that are darkly funny and live-wire unpredictable.

There's an early scene in Saulnier's 2013 revenge drama Blue Ruin in which the tattered wreck of a protagonist messily botches an attempt to slit a guy's throat, then slices his own hand open trying to slash the tires on the man's ride, then realizes he dropped his own car keys and actually needs the other guys' car in order to make his getaway. It's like a physical comedy bit run through a bleak filter, its perpetrator is left shellshocked, bloody, and clammy with trauma-induced sweat.

The characters in Green Room, Saulnier's new skull-rattling, brutally wry follow-up film, are just as unready for their fraught circumstances: barricaded inside a music venue in rural Oregon while a collection of malicious white supremacists circle outside. To be fair, it's not a scenario you can ever really rehearse for. One minute you're a band on tour, taking a last-minute gig to patch together enough money to get to your next stop, and the next you're running afoul of a neo-Nazi gang led by Darcy Banker (Patrick Stewart, playing a kind of menacing, racist grandfather figure who uses live music as a recruitment tool).

A24

This band, the Ain't Rights, are a four-piece punk group whose brand of rebellion is born from ideology. They're so opposed to marketing they don't have any social media presence, and they're fueling their way around the country by siphoning gas out of parked cars. When they crash at the house of a local, one member surveys his host's album collection before admiringly pronouncing him "true." When they book the gig to play at a skinhead venue to a boots and braces crowd — not their usual audience — they kick their set off with a bird-flipping cover of the Dead Kennedys' "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" despite getting a few bottles lobbed their way. (One of the movie's nice touches is how, after that rough start, the crowd still launches enthusiastically into a mosh pit — hard music as momentary common ground.)

It's when the group is ready to leave the venue when trouble starts, because it's then that they stumble on the body of a young woman who's been killed in the green room, a situation the owner of the joint would prefer to go unreported to the police. Bad for them, for the dead girl, and for her skinhead pal Amber (Imogen Poots, an awesomely cool customer), but a setup that becomes a tremendously good time for us.

A24

Bassist Pat (Anton Yelchin, who's become such an Elijah Wood doppelgänger it's a little eerie), guitarist Sam (Alia Shawkat), and singer Tiger (Callum Turner) are skinny kids in torn T-shirts who talk with bravado about dying young but who aren't ready for a life-or-death showdown. Drummer Reece (Joe Cole, American accent sometimes slipping into British) practices MMA on the side but, as he points out, his matches usually end with everyone getting drunk together — not in casualties. It's the cynical Amber, who witnessed her friend's murder (knife to the skull, a death Blue Ruin also features), who understands immediately what these strangers are reluctant to accept: that the police aren't going to come and set things right, and that they're going to be fighting for their survival if they want to escape the windowless room in which they've holed up.

Saulnier clearly has some safety pin and homemade patches days in his own past, because Green Room's filled with lived-in details about the punk circuit and its varied substrata. The mohawked youth who sets the Ain't Rights up with their ill-fated show describes the rough crowd, noting they're "right wing," but then, with amusing specificity, corrects himself that they're "technically ultra left." When the band settles in at their crashpad to drink for a night, Tiger queues up Fear's "Legalize Drugs," a record that counts off with a loud "ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR," and then rather than reveal the hard-partying to follow, the film cuts directly to its aftermath, the needle in the locked groove and Sharpie drawings all over the face of the first person who fell asleep.

What makes Green Room's premise so thrilling is how much it lets these characters lead the action — sometimes into dangerous dead ends. The group tries to escape the green room only to end up retreating back to it at least once. They feel palpably real, the Ain't Rights, as does Amber; and while they don't all survive when the body count starts rising, they're not easy cannon fodder. They're neatly individualized, but they, and the violent gang they're up against, have one thing in common: They're all dedicated members of a punk rock scene calling foul on each other's right to the identity, only this time for keeps. Sam sneeringly refers to Amber "Ilsa," as in "She Wolf of the SS." When one of the skinheads attacks, his battle cry is "dipshit fashion punk clown motherfuckers."

A24

And Green Room doesn't wear these assaults or its gore lightly, even when its action builds, deftly, from a simmer to a full boil. A graphic vivisection is all the more disturbing thanks to the distressed reaction of the person holding the victim down. Somebody else's gaping wound is patched together with duct tape in a memorable bit of DIY triage. One of the red-laced-boot neo-Nazis (played by Eric Edelstein, Kai Lennox, Mark Webber, and Blue Ruin star Macon Blair) trains pit bulls to be used as gruesomely effective weapons, but the dogs are also, as a bittersweet late scene attests, beloved by their owner as pets. People aspire to all sorts of hard-boiled badassery in Green Room, either in spirit or as a whole hate-filled way of life, but the movie never lets you forget that — punks or skinheads — everyone bleeds.

Demetri Martin in Dean.

Nate Harrison

The hero of Dean specializes in funny drawings. That's actually the title of his first book, Funny Drawings, a collection of the sort of droll, childlike line illustrations for which Dean's writer-director-star Demetri Martin is known. Since the death of his mother, Dean has struggled to finish his second book, which has become infected with darker themes, an adorable grim reaper sneaking into each piece.

Like Martin, Dean has an air of boyishness that has nothing to do with his actual age, one that manifests in a preference for bowl cuts and backpacks, but that's also related to how he still seems only half-formed emotionally, nebulous when it comes to big decisions or confronting how he feels. The movie follows this grieving Brooklyn guy as he heads to Los Angeles for a few days, falls in love with a girl, and patches things up with his father (Kevin Kline) who, like Dean, has been trying to move on.

Mild-mannered dramedies like Dean, which is also Martin's filmmaking debut, are a staple of the film festival circuit, where small-scale stories are given more (sometimes too much) room to breathe than they tend to be allotted in the cutthroat world of theatrical releases. There are plenty of other movies about half-started or half-finished romances, family dysfunctions, and professional angst at the Tribeca Film Festival, where Dean made its world premiere. But this year, Dean has unusually like-minded company. It's part of a trio of films directed by comedians that all aim for a strikingly similar mix of funny-sad by delving into the contrast between dealing with personal pain and trying to make others laugh — the tears of the alt comedy clown.

Wyatt Russell, Meredith Hagner, and Alex Karpovsky in Folk Hero & Funny Guy.

Nancy Schreiber

Screening alongside Dean is Folk Hero & Funny Guy, the first film from stand-up and Second City alum Jeff Grace, starring Girls actor Alex Karpovsky as a Boston comic named Paul. Like Grace, Paul gave up an advertising job to pursue his comedy dreams, and, like Grace, Paul ends up on tour opening for a friend who's become a famousish musician, Jason (Wyatt Russell, who between this and Everybody Wants Some has proven himself a delightful hippie). Paul is good at crowd work, but with his main act's audience, he sticks stubbornly to an outdated, rigid brand of observational humor ("What's the deal with Evites," pretty much) that goes over like a lead balloon, making him more and more defensive and disgruntled as the trip goes along and making the chances of him having a future as a full-time stand-up seem increasingly unlikely.

There's a whole improv troupe worth of characters grappling with similar questions about their careers in comedy in Mike Birbiglia's Don't Think Twice. The Commune, the club they work at that's been sold, is the kind of scrappy institution that can incubate talent for more prominent gigs elsewhere that, you know, actually pay. But the current lineup — Miles (Birbiglia), Jack (Keegan-Michael Key), Samantha (Gillian Jacobs), Bill (Chris Gethard), Allison (Kate Micucci), and Lindsay (Tami Sagher) — has started to really sweat now that that group's days might be numbered. Then Jack gets a part on Weekend Live, the movie's everything-but-the-name equivalent to Saturday Night Live complete with a terrifying, uninflected Lorne Michaels–style boss, and The Commune starts to implode as its other members realize that they're not all going to make it big, and might not all want to.

Other recent indies before Dean, Folk Hero & Funny Guy, and Don't Think Twice have started to stake out the space between melancholy and comedy-industry inside baseball. This year's Sundance Film Festival opened with SNL scribe Chris Kelly's unsteady directorial debut Other People, a movie about a comedy writer who retreats to his hometown to lick his wounds after his mother is diagnosed with cancer, his attempt at a TV series fails, and his relationship ends. Lorene Scafaria's warm The Meddler, which is about to open in theaters, is also about a heartbroken writer (who's working on a pilot for an semi-autobiographical sitcom) and her mother, who's adrift after the death of her husband. These movies aren't consistently solid, but they're consistently nice. Dean and Folk Hero & Funny Guy are pleasant, but Birbiglia's movie is better than that — it's dexterous at distilling that nauseating mix of happiness, enviousness, and fear of losing contact that can accompany a friend's sudden success.

Keegan-Michael Key, Gillian Jacobs, Chris Gethard, Kate Micucci, Mike Birbiglia, and Tami Sagher in Don't Think Twice.

Jon Pack

Their sameness only becomes un-ignorable when you watch them in a row. There are rhymes aplenty to be found in just the Tribeca trio. Folk Hero & Funny Guy's Paul and Dean's Dean are both getting over broken engagements to sensible brunettes (New Girl's Hannah Simone and Hello Ladies' Christine Woods). Like Don't Think Twice, Folk Hero & Funny Guy dwells on how friendships can get strained by disparities in success, with both movies featuring scenes in which their famous characters (Jack and Jason) play for adoring crowds who've shown no interest in their friends' performances. Dean starts at the grave of Dean's mother and deals with the aftermath of her death while Don't Think Twice ends at the funeral of one of its character's fathers and deals with what it's like to have an ailing parent. There are even stylistic resemblances — Dean and Folk Hero & Funny Guy both favor split screens to show what two characters are up to in parallel.

And two of these movies, Dean and Don't Think Twice, share a star: Gillian Jacobs, who's been paired with enough comedians onscreen to risk being seen as a manic pixie dream girl — or she would if she weren't so good at differentiating characters inevitably seen through the filter of a rocky romance. In Dean, she's Nicky, a woman the title character meets at a party and takes to a little too quickly, getting off a flight and wheeling his suitcase along a beach in order to spend time with her after one conversation. It's not the richest role, but Jacobs infuses Nicky with savvy, whereas in Don't Think Twice, she's poignantly uncertain as Sam, the Commune member convinced her only value is as part of the group. She's just as talented as her boyfriend Jack, but she sabotages her chances at more, though the movie allows that being happy with improv is just as valid a choice as being stressed in the SNL spotlight.

Neither of these ladies is a disaster like Mickey, the character Jacobs plays in the Netflix series Love, but they're of a kind: quirky-smart women who live either in New York or Los Angeles, and whose flaws get placed up front like a counterbalance to their prettiness, a way to make them more accessible. Love is also co-created by a comedian, and on top of that is executive produced by Judd Apatow, the king of this subgenre of semi-personal sad comedy that's blossomed as stand-up has leaned more and more toward the confessional. But while Apatow (whose Funny People remains his messiest, most ambitious work) and the likes of Louis C.K. and Chris Rock have spun gold out of a similar approach with Louie and Top Five respectively, films like the ones at Tribeca show the limitations as well as the benefits of writing what you know.

Dean's Demetri Martin, Folk Hero & Funny Guy's Jeff Grace, and Don't Think Twice's Mike Birbiglia.

Honora / Curtis Bonds Baker / Evan Sung

If Dean, Folk Hero & Funny Guy, and Don't Think Twice have a lot of overlap, well, they're about things that tend to be on the minds of creative-class thirtysomethings and fortysomethings, like the health of one's aging parents and whether it's essential for one's passion and one's job to be the same thing. And there's a raw honesty to aspects of them that clearly comes from their creators' lives — whether as directly as Grace basing his main characters on him and his friend and composer Adam Ezra, or as sideways as Martin channeling the death of his father when he was 20 into Dean's experiences. But the commonalities also highlight how narrow and uniform this particular slice of the comedy scene can be, especially in combination with the indie film world, which has the same tendencies.

It's like when the host of one of your favorite podcasts ends up a guest on another one, and "alt comedy" feels like it could be entirely the product of a few dozen frenemies living in the same two-mile area of Los Feliz. Like Hollywood as a whole, the comedy world has been the subject of ongoing conversations about diversity, and while that world is wider than the hipster-inflected segment that these films represent, nothing quite reinforces a sense of insularity like three comedians opening up with work that, through no planned design, comes across as very matchy-matchy.

It's no coincidence that Don't Look Twice, the best of the Tribeca bunch, is the least obviously personal and the one that spreads itself over its ensemble members, who each get their own narratives within the industry they love. It's tender and believable while maintaining enough distance on its material to give it form, telling a story rather than a series of anecdotes. It's a step forward from Birbiglia's 2012 debut Sleepwalk With Me, an adaptation of his one-man show that, hey, dealt with a stand-up who has to learn how to loosen up onstage and who breaks an engagement. The personal can start to feel oppressive when it comes across as a substitute for thinking about what it's like in the heads of people other than your own. Writing what you know remains solid advice, but there's something to be said for applying that knowledge to characters other than your thinly veiled self.

Emily Blunt and Charlize Theron in The Hunstman: Winter's War.

Universal Pictures

Kristen Stewart has left the building — the castle, the kingdom, the whole damn fantasy world.

The actor was one of the two stars of 2012's Snow White and the Huntsman, but she doesn't appear in The Huntsman: Winter's War. Nor does her character, Snow White, save for a single scene in which another actor with hands over her face appears as a wordless stand-in. Neither Stewart nor Snow White and the Huntsman director Rupert Sanders was brought back for the combination prequel/sequel opening, a decision that, when initially announced, was seen as an attempt to distance the movie from the pair's extracurricular scandal.

But now that The Huntsman: Winter's War, which is centered on the first film's male lead Chris Hemsworth, is hitting theaters, the decision to dump Stewart aligns all too neatly with TV's recent, similar shucking off of "troublesome" female leads while retaining the men. That's how discardable women continue to be regarded as — a gal can get booted from her own goddamn fairy tale. Or maybe "interchangeable" is the better word, since Jessica Chastain steps into the requisite formfitting body armor to be the movie's replacement warrior chick.

Well, weep not for K. Stew, who's gone on to far more interesting (if less profitable) roles in the years since Snow White and the Huntsman. Maybe spare a tear for screenwriters Evan Spiliotopoulos and Craig Mazin, who've crafted an awkward write-around in which Snow White gives out orders while being "too sick" to show up onscreen in anything but that aforementioned momentary flashback. The Huntsman: Winter's War is the directorial debut of Snow White and the Huntsman's VFX supervisor Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, and it marries the first movie's dark twist on Snow White with a loose twist on The Snow Queen. It's a move so nakedly calculating that it's kind of endearing, because what follows is effectively a gritty take on Frozen in which the sisters are the villains. In addition to Charlize Theron, back as Queen Ravenna, Emily Blunt is introduced as her sibling Freya, whose wintry powers manifest after she loses her paramour and child in one night and, as all magical ice queens must, heads north to spread snow everywhere and build a crystalline spire in the mountains. She, unfortunately, doesn't get to enjoy a musical number in which she literally lets her hair down, but she does have a spy-owl.

Chris Hemsworth and Jessica Chastain.

Universal Pictures

Freya, in her chilly retreat, also kidnaps — or, in her words, saves — children from their families and forces them to be part of her army, which is where Hemsworth's Huntsman, who's been given a name (Eric), has his forbidden romance with Sara (Chastain), who's his equal on the battlefield. Then there's a tragic death — or is there? — and the movie skips ahead to after Snow White and the Huntsman's happy ending, when Eric is told that Ravenna's malevolent magic mirror has gone missing and must be retrieved and disposed of, One Ring-style. He's accompanied on the mission by a pair of male dwarves (Nick Frost and Rob Brydon), and then a pair of female dwarves (Alexandra Roach and Sheridan Smith) join up, and they fight a bunch of goblins who look like gorillas with horns. Multiple characters come back from the dead, and Freya shows up riding some sort of snow leopard–polar bear hybrid and makes the whole mission pointless.

But none of that really matters, because the great delight of The Huntsman: Winter's War is Charlize Theron, who as Ravenna seems damn near ready to eat the entire movie as an amuse-bouche before devouring the world. Ravenna, in her golden finery and gilded makeup, appears to have wandered out of the most evil Dior perfume ad ever. She throws her head back when she cackles, wears finger claws around the house, and plays games of chess in which the penalty for losing is death. She later goes full-on T-1000, except she forms herself out of liquid gold — no cool-toned metal for her. She and Freya seem to go around acquiring kingdoms out of compulsive habit, because what else are wicked queens supposed to do with their time?

Also, her backstory has been hand-waved away. In Snow White and the Huntsman, like Maleficent, there were traces of a rape-revenge history to Ravenna, who used her magically enhanced vampiric beauty as a weapon against the type of powerful men who "ruined" her and killed her mother. In The Huntsman: Winter's War, those traces of intriguing, if warped, psychology have been traded in for a distasteful suggestion that these women have both been driven mad by the absence of lovers and children in their lives, two sorceress spinsters embittered by envy or grief.

Emily Blunt and her snow leopard–polar bear hybrid.

Universal Pictures

The sourness of that characterization is still more compelling than the romance between Eric and Sara, which it's contrasted with. The impediments to the two Huntspeople getting together seem like they could be resolved by a 30-second conversation but instead are stretched over an interminable, Charlize-less middle section filled with much trekking through fields and forests.

Hemsworth is brawnily charismatic, and Chastain makes for a tersely no-nonsense action heroine, but theirs is no star-crossed love story — their characters are too boring, too trapped into exasperating choices. Eric and Sara's stretches of bickery flirting have nothing on the delicious campiness of the moment in which Freya and Ravenna tiff over whose territory they're currently occupying ("This is my kingdom!" Freya snaps). If everyone's expendable in this franchise, but also no one stays dead, here's hoping that any future installment ditches the Huntsman the way that Snow White was shunted aside, because the evil queens are where it's at.

Susan Sarandon and Rose Byrne in The Meddler.

Sony Pictures Classics

The Meddler is a mash note to compulsive nurturers — to, in particular, women who've devoted their lives to figuring out what other people need. Its heroine, Marnie, is a New Jersey woman played, with generous openness, by Susan Sarandon. Marnie moved to Los Angeles after the death of her husband in order to be closer to her daughter, Lori (Rose Byrne), a television writer who has two dogs, a broken heart from a recent breakup with an actor (Jason Ritter), and a desire for more space than her mother is giving her.

Marnie calls her daughter throughout the day to leave voicemails about her new apartment, or the nice young man who helped her at the Apple Store, or how being near The Grove is just like living on Main Street in Disneyland. Sometimes she texts Lori, and when she doesn't get an answer, she just lets herself into Lori's house. She only wants to help, but she's doing the opposite of what her daughter needs.

The Meddler is the second feature from writer-director Lorene Scafaria (Seeking a Friend for the End of the World), and it pulls from Scafaria's own experiences when her widowed mother moved to California after years of the two living on opposite coasts. With material so personal, some filmmakers have trouble establishing enough distance between themselves and their characters — to make them work as part of a movie and not just the stuff of a confessional anecdote — but Scafaria has no such issues in this deeply affectionate, ruefully warm film.

Sony Pictures Classics

Despite the setup, this isn't a story about a frazzled showbiz thirtysomething trying to escape her invasive parent, though at one point Lori even invents a safeword ("cantaloupe") for when she needs her mom to step back. Marnie isn't the punchline of the movie — she's the focus.

And Marnie, with her wrap sweaters and soft curls and love for Crate and Barrel, is evidence of the gentle but unequivocal superpowers of a softhearted housewife who, shooed away by her daughter, focuses her advice and concern (and a considerable amount of money, left to her by her late husband) on the people around her. For example, there's Jillian (Cecily Strong), a friend of Lori's whom Lori has been too busy to see, and who got married without having the wedding she wanted: Marnie is thrown only for a second by the fact that Jillian is married to a woman, before she gladly takes on the task of organizing the event of her new friend's dreams. Then there's Freddy (Jerrod Carmichael), the Genius Bar worker whom she starts driving to night school; and then there's the elderly lady who can't speak, and whom Marnie spends time with as a volunteer at the hospital, filling the air with enough conversation for the both of them.

Despite its title, no one in The Meddler besides Lori finds Marnie all that intrusive, though some of that credit goes to Sarandon's wide-eyed vulnerability as a woman who's much more comfortable coming to the aid of others than she is pursuing her own desires. There's a touch of Alexander Payne to Marnie's chatty voicemail voiceovers, which showcase a naïveté that doesn't match with the sharp perceptiveness of the film itself. They make it clear that Marnie's trying to drown out her own loneliness and lingering sense of loss.

J.K. Simmons

Sony Pictures Classics

But Scafaria isn't interested in cutting Marnie down, even at her most ridiculous, even as the film reveals how she engages in self-care by way of caring for others. She creates a substitute family of strangers to dote on and essentially buys her way into being needed. It's a coping mechanism that slowly shifts to Marnie learning to take pleasure in the things around her: in the California sun shining on her in her husband's convertible; in cooking up a fresh egg for breakfast; in stumbling into work as a film extra; and in the absolutely adorable romance that develops between her and a courtly, Harley-riding retired cop played by J.K. Simmons.

It's the kind of film that can make you want to call your mother, but also hopes your mom doesn't pick up — because she's busy having a good time herself.

Julia Roberts and Jennifer Aniston in Mother's Day.

Ron Batzdorff / Open Road Films

1. Julia Roberts sits in an Atlanta cafe staring pensively out the window at a train going by. She's playing Miranda Collins, a HSN host who, somehow, is so famous that people shout out her name when they see her on TV and enter contests in order to have a picture taken with her.

She is in Atlanta hawking a line of mood pendants for Mother's Day, and — because this is the latest star-stuffed Garry Marshall holiday pileup — so she can cross paths with some of the ensemble's other characters, including Kristin (Britt Robertson), who she placed for adoption as a baby.

Miranda's server comes by, and, like it's a totally normal question to put to a total stranger sitting by herself, asks if Miranda's a mom. Her eyes brim with regret over what might have been, and this movie will have her suggest more than once that what she's about to say is a one-or-the-other proposition for women.

No, she says, she has a career.

Aniston.

Open Road Films

2. Sandy (Jennifer Aniston), a divorced interior designer and mother of two, is running late to a job interview with Miranda. She's so tardy that Miranda's already moved on to a meet and greet, and security keeps blocking Sandy's path. While others might accept that they fucked up, not Sandy — Sandy is Having A Day. In rom-com pratfall fashion, she's ripped her blouse so that her bra is showing, and she chooses to explode into a rant about how she was late because she had to take some time out for a meltdown over her ex (Timothy Olyphant) remarrying a twentysomething (Shay Mitchell), and because her mom's car for some reason can't go very fast.

Sandy, who has crazy eyes and seems to forever be on her way to or from a workout, literally declares to a room, in this feature-length ode to the maternal experience, that she can't be held to normal standards because she's a mother. Miranda, that other half of the movie's argument that motherhood and serious careers are incompatible, is charmed and gives Sandy the gig, telling her the qualities that lead her to rant about her personal life to a room full of randos are ones that she shouldn't lose, because they get her attention.

Sarah Chalke, Kate Hudson, and Margo Martindale.

Ron Batzdorff / Open Road Films

3. Russell (Aasif Mandvi) is married to Jess (Kate Hudson), but he's staying with her sister, Gabi (Sarah Chalke), because he's upset about having learned that all this time, his wife has been lying about her parents. They don't have dementia, as she claimed, they're actually racist homophobes who've driven up from Texas in their RV, waving fried chicken and wearing patriotic T-shirts, to surprise their children, only to discover to their distress that Jess is married to an Indian man and Gabi is married to a woman (Cameron Esposito).

Because this is meant to be a cuddly movie, the way the parents (played merrily by Margo Martindale and Robert Pine) call Russell "houseboy" and "towelhead" is presented with shockingly little bite, like it's all just a bump in the road before the allure of grandchildren smooths things over. But the act that finally unites the clan is the moment when, after some hijinks result in the cops being called, Russell emerges from the RV to officers reacting like they're going to tase or shoot him, either due to the color of his skin or the women's robe he's borrowing. His in-laws come to his defense, and it's all laughed off, because there's nothing like a lighthearted act of unprovoked and potentially deadly police violence to pull a family together.

Britt Robertson.

Open Road Films

4. Miranda's biological daughter Kristin has a daughter of her own with Zack (Jack Whitehall), a bartender and aspiring comedian she's been with for five years but refuses to marry. She can't do it, she tells her friend Jesse (they met at Mommy and Me!), because until she gets up the nerve to contact her biological mother to find out why she was placed for adoption, she just doesn't feel like she knows who she is. Also, she has to think about the impact that a possible future divorce might have on her kid, though why she believes her child would have an easier time with her parents breaking up if they aren't wed is unclear.

Then, as if she weren't following in a stubborn movie tradition that draws a direct line between adoption and damage, she declares with the ponderous solemnity only the most unnecessary lines deserve, "I have abandonment issues."

Jessi Case and Jason Sudeikis.

Ron Batzdorff / Open Road Films

5. Jason Sudeikis is Bradley, a widower and father of two who's still mourning his late wife (Jennifer Garner). He watches her old karaoke videos, communes with her car, and focuses the rest of his energies on coaching their older daughter's (Jessi Case) soccer team and spying on her burgeoning relationship in a way of avoiding getting back out there himself.

He's positioned as a love interest for Sandy, but, in the name of being relatably frazzled, she comes off as unbalanced, and Sudeikis's performance is so disengaged that Sandy's meet-cutes with Bradley leave him looking more like a man darting through hostile territory than one coming around to a new romance. It's hard to blame Bradley when, immediately after their first encounter, he witnesses Sandy having a steering wheel–pounding freakout in her car. (These qualities really do get her attention.) At the lowest ebb of this coupling, he actually hides, ducking behind the Lycra-clad form of a lady on a stair-climber, when he spots her headed to yoga class at his gym, like he's trying to reject his destiny entirely.

Loni Love.

Open Road Films

6. Kimberly (Loni Love) is, unbelievably, the only black character of any significance in Mother's Day, despite the movie being set in Atlanta. She's still minor, there to provide commentary on Bradley's life and to serve as the sort of comic relief that gets assigned to the fuller bodied — she, for instance, has trouble getting out of her lawn chair, which is the kind of visual gag that comes across as meaner in a movie that makes a point of being overstuffed with lithe blondes in athleisure wear calling each other about pilates class.

Kimberly is a fellow soccer parent of Bradley, and is part of a chorus of women who want to set him up and who nag him about what his Mother's Day plans are. And, without Bradley's permission, she brings his daughters to their mother's grave on the day in question, an act that's even more grossly inappropriate than needling a guy whose spouse is dead about how he and his daughters are going to mourn her while everyone else is out having brunch.

It's one of the many moments in which Mother's Day, which arrives in the wake of Marshall's Valentine's Day and New Year's Eve, reveals itself to be, not a movie celebration of motherhood, but one that plucks at the anxieties surrounding it like stitches being undone. Its total clunkiness aside, it never once manages to highlight a moment of triumph in its collection of characters, who are all certain they're doing things wrong — whether due to fears of their children preferring their spritely new stepmom, or because they've carried on a years-long campaign of avoiding their mother, or thanks to the way friends step in to take their children to the cemetery without asking them.

No one's asking Mother's Day to be a masterpiece, but it doesn't even manage the hokey "aw" that's the reason a movie like this exists. It's about parenting without a hint of pleasure, save for the film's insistence that opting out of it will leave you, like Miranda, sitting successful and alone, wondering what if.

Anthony Mackie, Paul Rudd, Jeremy Renner, Chris Evans, Elizabeth Olsen, and Sebastian Stan make up Team Cap in Captain America: Civil War.

Marvel Studios

2016 is the year that superhero movies confront their collateral damage.

It’s an idea that’s already crept into Netflix’s expanding suite of Marvel series, all of them taking place in a battered New York still in recovery after the first Avengers film, where superhero worship exists alongside distrust over how Manhattan was made to serve as a battleground. That was also the point of the best scene in the grim jumble that was Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which presented a street-level view of Superman and General Zod’s brawl through Metropolis from Man of Steel. One of those two godlike beings means well, but from there on the ground, they look the same — indifferent to the humans scurrying for their lives far below.

Captain America: Civil War features its own script-flipping depiction of innocents dying as a side effect of its characters’ actions. The movie, which was directed by Winter Soldier’s Anthony and Joe Russo, picks up in Lagos, where Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson), Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), and a still-in-training Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) are trying to stop the theft of a biological weapon.

Johansson

Marvel Studios

It’s all going smoothly, with chases through busy byways and some bruisingly satisfying Black Widow fight sequences, until it isn’t: A last-ditch bomb gets set off in the middle of a crowded marketplace. In her efforts to contain the explosion, Wanda ends up letting it take out a floor of a nearby building instead — and the record scratches, all the high-impact heroics ending in a flinch. The superheroes leave a scene in which bodies are being pulled out on stretchers, day saved at an unexpected and unwanted cost.

Among the dead and wounded are some visitors from Wakanda, which allows for the introduction of the royal T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman), also known as the Black Panther, but also ignites an international debate over whether the Avengers need to be regulated, whether those casualties were a fuck-up that could have been avoided, why they don’t care about international borders and sovereignty, and whether it was their business being there in Nigeria the first place. The Avengers are fresh off kinda-sorta being responsible for the creation of an artificial intelligence that tried to cause the extinction of mankind by dropping a chunk of the Sokovian capital from the sky, so they weren’t in the best standing to begin with. A reel of their recent exploits is played back to them as they cringe, all those de rigueur building-crushing big finales repositioned not as hard-won triumphs but as incidents of mass destruction.

Chadwick Boseman, Paul Bettany, Robert Downey Jr., Johansson, and Don Cheadle as Team Iron Man in Captain America: Civil War.

Marvel Studios

Sinister shadow organizations, malevolent masterminds, figures from the past intent on revenge, and power-hungry siblings — turns out there’s no foe as quietly formidable as accountability. Accountability isn’t a theme that screams “escapist fun,” but it is a nagging issue underlying almost every story about superheroes who’ve taken it upon themselves to fight crime and evil, and it's the source of the conflict in the improbably good Civil War. It’s easier to deal with the sacrifices that heroes might have to make to save the city and/or the world than to suggest that not everyone they leave behind is tearily grateful. But as the genre has expanded and matured and demanded to be taken seriously on screen, it’s a theme that becomes unavoidable, especially in a series that’s made a point of having consequences carry over after each fade to black and credits roll.

Tom Holland.

Marvel Studios

Spider-Man, who is reintroduced in Civil War as a squeaky-voiced teenage chatterbox played by Tom Holland, paraphrases a version of his “With great power comes great responsibility" motto. But believing that because you can help, you should doesn't make you immune from the question of who gave you the right to play savior, especially when you're a red, white, and blue–clad patriotic symbol who's decided to go global. And then there’s the point Vision (Paul Bettany) raises, which is that by demonstrating their power, the Avengers seem to be luring more antagonists out than ever before: “Our very strength incites challenge.”

Captain America: Civil War isn’t the best film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the world’s largest-scale, slowest-released television show masquerading as a series of films; I’d still give the edge to the unfettered, geeky joy of Guardians of the Galaxy and the tense paranoia of Winter Soldier (and who would have guessed that sad, square Steve Rogers would be at the center of two of the franchise’s most interesting movies?).

But Civil War is the MCU's most thematically ambitious installment, setting up the decision of whether the Avengers are going to allow themselves to be governed by a U.N. panel seriously and allowing the accrued history of the 12 previous films to weigh on it. On one side you’ve got Captain America, who’s got a post-Hydra libertarianish distrust of large organizations, but a greater faith in individuals, including poor brainwashed Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), who’s once again made into a pawn of the unfolding plot. And on the other side you’ve got Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), whose life story has basically been that of a nose-thumbing capitalist longing for regulations to bump up against, forever going too far and then being confronted, as he is in the movie, with the ramifications of what he’s done.

Downey Jr. and Evans.

Marvel Studios

It’s a disagreement the movie treats with regretful inevitability, like a family dinner that’s about to dissolve into a fight because no one can keep the conversation from veering toward politics. There’s a villain in Civil War, an undramatic but highly motivated man named Zemo (Daniel Brühl), but all he really does is force confrontations that were brewing or bound to happen eventually. He prods at the right cracks, and the superhero supergroup ends up splitting right down the middle, with newcomers and recent additions like the aforementioned Black Panther (to whom Boseman brings gravitas and welcome frankness about looking out for his own), Ant-Man (Paul Rudd), and Spider-Man getting divvied up over the two teams.

It all escalates into a group showdown that’s gloriously fun (despite some of the characters feeling spliced in from a much more chipper movie) and genuinely sad, because if you’ve made it through eight years of Marvel features, you care about these quippy oddballs and their imperfect alliance. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice had its costumed duo try to punch each other to death over their ideological differences before declaring themselves inexplicable friends. Civil War is all about friends coming to blows over fundamental disagreements they don’t really settle (though the movie tilts sympathy to one side), with all sorts of personal resentments and loyalties and surfacing secrets mixed in. For once, fittingly, the fallout isn’t on a large scale, with a city to be half-demolished and civilians to be sheltered, but that doesn’t make it feel any less potent. It’s like watching a breakup in which both parties land punches, only most of them are literal.

There’s more to movies than massive franchises. Here are some attention-worthy, under-the-radar films you should totally look out for in theaters and on streaming.

1. Eva Hesse

Barbara Brown / Zeitgeist Films

Artist Eva Hesse was born in Germany in 1936, two years before her family fled the Holocaust and found their way to New York, where she grew up. More than three decades later, she traveled back there in the company of her husband, sculptor Tom Doyle, who'd gotten a yearlong artist residency in her home country. She didn't want to go. "It was very hard for her. But Eva wouldn't let an opportunity go by," Hesse's sister, Helen Hesse Charash, says in one of Eva Hesse's many interviews with its subject's friends, family, and admirers. "Eva was a little more of a wife at that point. But all that would change."

Marcie Begleiter's doc about Hesse is a celebration of her work, in particular the stunning post-minimalist sculptures she created out of industrial materials like latex and fiberglass. It was work that made her a major, if difficult to categorize, figure in modern and feminist art. And Eva Hesse makes its way informatively and a touch staidly through Hesse's life, adding Hesse's own voice (through her journals, read by Selma Blair) to the chorus of others describing her development as an artist, her marriage and its end, and her death, of brain cancer, at the age of 34. But it's in tracing how a woman finds her own distinctive voice in an art world full of men so assured they'd be taken seriously that the film really comes into its own, reverberantly depicting how Hesse went from the side room and the supportive role to being the one who was in the spotlight, however briefly.

How to see it: Eva Hesse's now playing in New York and will be making its way around the country — you can find a list of dates and locations here.

2. The First Monday in May

Magnolia Pictures

If you watched the parade of strange and marvelous red carpet looks from the Met Gala on Monday and wondered what the hell the Met Gala even is and why Zayn Malik put on robot arms to attend it, well, this is the film for you.

Page One: Inside the New York Times director Andrew Rossi chronicles the Met's yearlong preparations for its 2015 China: Through the Looking Glass show and the star-studded themed party that accompanies every year's spring exhibit, efforts overseen by curator Andrew Bolton and Vogue commandant Anna Wintour. It's an access-y look at one of the biggest events of the year in fashion, ending with a peek into the Gala itself, where the likes of Justin Bieber and Chloë Sevigny frolic, ambitiously dressed and intriguingly unguarded, and where Rihanna performs "Bitch Better Have My Money" to an audience of finery-clad, awkwardly dancing celebs and other rich people.

If you don't care about fashion — Rossi doesn't push terribly hard to make the behind-the-scenes stuff relevant or compelling to non-fans — there is another issue that unfolds fascinatingly over the course of the film: whether the theme of "the impact of Chinese aesthetics on Western fashion" is actually a celebration of Orientalism. Again and again in the doc, in conversations with the Asian art department and with Chinese dignitaries and journalists, the question is raised of what it means to highlight how the West sees China rather than focusing on China itself. It's a question that's averted or fumbled again and again — for example, Wintour at one point asks a Chinese reporter where fashion would be without fantasy, as if "fantasy" is an excuse from all criticism. But eventually, Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, who's serving as the exhibit's artistic director, steps in to provide a considered answer. Not only does he manage to out-sunglass Wintour, never once taking his off, he provides understated evidence of how a tightly controlled industry like that of fashion benefits when it's loosed from the iron grip of an exclusive, like-minded few.

How to see it: The First Monday in May is now playing in limited release — check out a list of locations here. It's also available for digital rental.

View Entire List ›

Ralph Fiennes and Tilda Swinton in A Bigger Splash.

Fox Searchlight

Luca Guadagnino makes movies that feel like they're on ecstasy. They have a stick-your-head-in-a-speaker-and-insist-you-can-feel-the-music buzz to them, sensory details cranked up until they all but leap off the screen. When a character casually tosses the contents of his pockets on a chair before going for a swim, the action's captured in a jittery burst of snap zooms — WALLET! PHONE! — and the moment might be important, or it might just be emphasis for emphasis's sake. The camera's attention catches the sun-bronzed curve of a neck or the quivering blue of a swimming pool or the plunge of a spoon into still-warm ricotta like it's documenting a world so entrancingly alive that it hardly knows what to focus on.

And then it focuses on Tilda Swinton, and there's no doubt at all. Guadagnino is an unmatched adherent of Swinton's long-limbed, extraterrestrial looks and her incredible emotional translucence, relying on her to transmit the overflowing inner lives of characters who don't or can't always talk about what they're going through. In the director's voluptuous last film, 2009's I Am Love, Swinton played the buttoned-down matriarch of a wealthy Milanese family. She's lured out of her gorgeous gilded cage of a life (and her luxe Raf Simons wardrobe) by her son's chef friend Antonio, who awakens her with a dish of perfectly cooked prawns at his restaurant, sensualist recognizing sensualist in a way no societal restrictions can hold back. In Guadagnino's equally sultry but much more disorderly latest, A Bigger Splash, Swinton plays a very different sort of aristocrat, a rock star named Marianne Lane who has none of the same issues with repression, but who has also found herself muted.

Matthias Schoenaerts and Swinton in A Bigger Splash.

Fox Searchlight

Marianne's in recovery from vocal cord surgery and has retreated to an island off the coast of Italy with her boyfriend and babysitter Paul, a documentarian played by Matthias Schoenaerts, who's very good at playing these sorts of sad-eyed sides of meat. But their Edenic idyll of sunbathing and sex in a borrowed villa gets interrupted by unexpected guests. Harry (Ralph Fiennes, fantastically free and frequently naked), Marianne's record producer ex and a class 5 tornado of a human being, blows into town with Penelope (Dakota Johnson), the daughter he only recently learned he had, and invites himself to stay. Harry's terrific fun, the life of the party, and if there isn't a party, he'll start one — loading the fridge with booze, flirting with everyone, and wriggling to the Rolling Stones with uninhibited, joyous rhythmlessness.

But Harry's also trouble — trouble as a general practice and with specific intent, poking at Marianne's relationship with Paul like someone testing to see if a piece of fruit is overripe. Once upon a time, he handed Marianne off to Paul, unable to deal with the commitment, but he's back and ready to, in his mind, rescue her from her younger, sober, doting Paul, who he dismisses as a "square." "He's put a bell on you," he sniffs to Marianne. Harry's daughter, a mercurial sex kitten in Doc Martens who watches the rest of them, especially Paul, with a knowing gaze, makes the same dig into Marianne when no one else is around. "You're pretty domesticated for a rock star," she drawls. Marianne can only whisper back, "Have I done something to upset you?"

Fiennes and Dakota Johnson.

Jack English / Fox Searchlight

A Bigger Splash is, eventually, a thriller, and maybe an escalation can be detected amid the hedonistic overload, the promise that a showdown or an explosion of some sort is inevitable. But the sexual tension is so much more entrancing than the dramatic kind, especially when it's linked with such charged power dynamics, especially when the climax is easy to see coming. Paul knows he's not Marianne's equal — he's an observer rather than a doer, and he's been taking maybe a little too much enjoyment in having his lover depend on him. And Marianne exudes rueful affection and pleasure when she's around Harry's exuberant energy, and also, maybe, misses the large living he represents. But we get plenty of signs that she's also weary, putting on smiles for the fans that recognize her and revealing a pained expression as soon as she's out of sight. At an outdoor restaurant set back in the hills, Harry uses Marianne's fame to get them a table, and her reluctant embarrassment doesn't need to be spoken to be felt.

In Marianne, Swinton presents us with a woman being faced with the fact that she might not be able to return to her career as it was, and that she might not be sorry. A Bigger Splash's occasional flashbacks to these characters' hard-living pasts are the least necessary part of the movie, not just because they look like unconvincing re-enactments, but because they make explicit what's already clear. Even when she's been rendered speechless and dressed down, Marianne feels outsized, standing between two men who are each sure they're the one who can give her what she needs. The movie's lustiness is heady, but it also leaves you as ready for a break at the end as its famous musician seems to be. Rock 'n' roll may be forever, but as lifestyle choice, it can get old.