‘The Royal Hotel’ (2023)
Kitty Green’s follow-up to the taut drama “The Assistant” is a feminist riff on the ’70s classic “Wake in Fright,” in which two Canadian tourists who have run out of money in Australia take on a gig as bartenders at a grimy watering hole in the middle of nowhere. “It’s a large mining area,” they’re told, so “you’re going to have to be OK with a little male attention.” For 90 tightly-wound minutes, Green mixes bleary naturalism and baked-in dread, as these modern women are exposed to the handsy, winking Neanderthal clientele, and the bar turns into a ticking time bomb. Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick are empathetic in the leads, while Daniel Henshall is all quiet menace as the establishment’s most boorish regular.
‘When You Finish Saving the World’ (2023)
The actor-turned-filmmaker Jesse Eisenberg recently received raves (and an Oscar-friendly fall release date) for his sophomore feature “A Real Pain,” so it’s a fine opportunity to check out his debut film. The “Stranger Things” star Finn Wolfhard is terrific (in, essentially, the Eisenberg role) as a self-important teenage singer-songwriter who tries to get political to impress a girl. Julianne Moore is his mother, a humorless scold whose coldness and impatience are seemingly understandable, as her son is such an insufferable boor. But the more Eisenberg mines the complexity of this toxic relationship, the more we understand and even sympathize with these two difficult people, and lock in on Eisenberg’s exploration of the moral stickiness of trying to do good in a narcissistic world.
The subscription streamers had a bit of a “Deep Impact”/“Armageddon” situation on their hands in 2020 — both Max and Hulu released comedy-dramas about female teen friends on road trips because of draconian laws related to bodily autonomy. Max’s entry was “Unpregnant” (discussed here); Hulu gave us this candid, thorny and funny comic odyssey from the actor-director Natalie Morales. The type-A Sunny (Kuhoo Verma) has her first sexual encounter and worries that she’s pregnant afterward, so her best friend, the freewheeling Lupe (Victoria Moroles), joins her on a multistate journey for the titular pill. The portraiture of teen intimacy is admirably honest, while the central friendship is a fully believable and often moving snapshot of the intensity and immediacy of teenage bonds.
‘Signature Move’ (2017)
Zaynab (Fawzia Mirza) is a Pakistani American attorney who still lives at home, taking care of a traditional mother (Shabana Azmi) whose frequent mutterings about finding her a husband are a lie, and they both know it; Zaynab is gay, and not particularly subtle about it. She meets a bookstore owner, Alma (Sari Sanchez), and what begins as a drunken one-night stand — challenged by Alma to remember her name after, Zaynab replies, “Give me five to choose from?” — develops into a tricky but satisfying romantic entanglement. Jennifer Reeder directs Mirza and Lisa Donato’s admittedly formulaic script with freshness and good cheer, and the leads generate considerable chemistry.
We’ve seen movies based on books, plays and television shows, but “Zola” appears to be the first film adapted from a Twitter thread. It took the platform by storm in 2015, when A’Ziah “Zola” King told the harrowing, hilarious, stranger-than-fiction, 148-tweet tale of how a trip to Florida with an exotic dancer, her boyfriend and her pimp went sideways. The director Janicza Bravo wrote the screenplay with the Tony-nominated “Slave Play” author Jeremy O. Harris, keeping it faithful to the original true story — if, in fact, you believe it all to be true. And that’s one of the fascinating wrinkles of Bravo’s film, which is both a furiously funny story of crime and sex, and a thoughtful meditation on the subjective nature of storytelling itself.
‘Things to Come’ (2016)
This 2016 drama provides one of the greatest gifts that contemporary movies can give: the opportunity to watch Isabelle Huppert act. And as this is a slice-of-life situation, the story of a middle-aged woman whose seemingly smooth life and career fall into disarray, “Things to Come” lets us spend much of its running time simply watching Ms. Huppert exist. She’s simply incapable of a false note, seemingly refusing to ever let the viewer catch her “acting,” and the writer and director Mia Hansen-Love builds a quietly powerful reminder that we never stop “coming of age,” even as we begin to imagine the end of our lives.
‘Four Daughters’ (2023)
In 2015, two of Olfa Hamrouni’s four daughters disappeared into the world of Islamic extremism. The director Kaouther Ben Hania could have told their story as a standard documentary, intermingling talking-head footage with archival footage and the like. Instead, she stages recreations and dramatizations of central moments in these splintering relationships, casting actors as the departed daughters to act alongside the two daughters who remain, and with Hamrouni involved in some scenes and directing an actor playing her in others. It sounds gimmicky, but Hania’s approach becomes a powerful method of grappling with the mistakes of the past.
‘Life Itself’ (2014)
The documentarian Steve James felt he owed a debt to Roger Ebert, one of the champions of James’s 1994 sensation “Hoop Dreams,” so he set about to make, essentially, an adaptation of Ebert’s 2011 memoir. Instead, he captured the last few months of the film critic’s life, turning what was intended as an affectionate biographical profile into a portrait of a man grappling with his own mortality. The biographical material is marvelous, frequently funny and always insightful, of interest not only to film geeks, but to anyone who was ever influenced by the words, “Two thumbs up.” But “Life Itself” is ultimately a eulogy for one of the giants of his field — and an enormously affecting one.
